THE LEADING EDGE by Phillip E. Johnson
Prime Removers
As I write this installment of “The Leading Edge” just before Thanksgiving Day of 2006, I have many things to be thankful for. For one thing, I am making splendid progress in coming back from a second major stroke. Far from being confined to a wheel chair, I am walking at least a mile every morning when the weather permits, and working out regularly at a local gym.
Of course, a third stroke might finish me off at any time, but two strokes have made me very health-conscious, with the result that my weight and blood pressure are both down, and I am confident that my new self-discipline is a surer protection against arterial clogging than the carotid surgery I relied upon after the first stroke.
With Gloves Off
A second blessing I derive from my Internet reading. It tells me that the world’s most uncompromising scientific atheists, intoxicated by the unbroken record of success they think science has achieved in explaining the world without need of the God hypothesis, and by their own success in selling books and gathering publicity, but maddened by the persistence of creationism and the new challenge from the Intelligent Design movement, have decided to demolish what Dawkins calls “the God delusion” before it can damage their dream of bringing the whole world under the sway of scientific rationality.
To that end, they are entering the public arena with the gloves off, determined to complete the demolition by landing whatever blows, high or low, are needed for the purpose. I’ll describe briefly three articles that have told me this entertaining story.
1. Time magazine’s cover story in early November 2006, titled “Science vs. God,” featured a debate over God’s existence between Richard Dawkins, the aggressively articulate Oxford University scientific atheist and popularizer of the “selfish gene” version of Darwinism, and Francis Collins, the mild--mannered theistic evolutionist who fills the lofty position of Director of the US government’s Human Genome Project.
As is so often the case, the debate was interesting less for what was actually said than for how the issue was defined. Since Dawkins says that science and religion (that is, belief in God) are antithetical, and Collins says they are not, Time’s defining the subject as “God versus science” was virtually to award the victory to Dawkins in advance. Probably Time’s editors assumed that their readers would know, without having to be told, that “God versus science” means “religious belief versus reality.”
Moreover, Collins is a gentle and reflective man, not a verbal gladiator. Dawkins has told me that he loathes lawyers, but he has some of the personal traits of a trial lawyer himself. Despite Dawkins’s advantage, a jury might have found Collins more persuasive, because Dawkins, who relies heavily upon ex cathedra pronouncements and intimidation, tends to come across as a bully rather than a man of reason.
Agnostic Exorcism
2. Wired is a magazine for technophiles. The cover of its November issue featured a provocative article by Gary Wolf, “The Church of the Non-Believers,” about a handful of book-writing scientific materialists, led by Dawkins, who are mounting a crusade against belief in God. The target of this verbal jihad is not only the believers but even the lukewarm agnostics, like Gary Wolf, who are told that “we are called out, we fence sitters, and told to help exorcise this debilitating curse: the curse of faith.”
Phillip E. Johnson is Professor of Law (emeritus) at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Darwin on Trial, The Wedge of Truth, The Right Questions (InterVarsity Press), and other books challenging the naturalistic assumptions that dominate modern culture. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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