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Phillip E. Johnson [1940-0] American

Rank: 103
Educator, Law professor

Phillip E. Johnson is a retired UC Berkeley law professor and author who is considered the father of the intelligent design movement. He became a Christian while a tenured professor. He is a critic of what he calls "Darwinism". By "Darwinism", he means "fully naturalistic evolution, involving chance mechanisms and natural selection".

Science, Religion

Quote	Tags	Rank
Truth as such is not a particularly important concept in naturalistic philosophy.		101
No doubt it is true that science cannot study God, but it hardly follows that God had to keep a safe distance from everything that scientists want to study.	Science	102
The restriction of religion to private life therefore does not necessarily threaten the vital interests of the majority religion, if there is one, and it protects minority religions from tyranny of the majority.	Religion	103
The assumption that nature is all there is, and that nature has been governed by the same rules at all times and places, makes it possible for natural science to be confident that it can explain such things as how life began.	Science	104
According to the scientific naturalist version of cosmic history, nature is a permanently closed system of material effects that can never be influenced by something from outside - like God, for example.		105
A constitutional democracy is in serious trouble if its citizenry does not have a certain degree of education and civic virtue.		106
First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence.		107
Modernism is typically defined as the condition that begins when people realize God is truly dead, and we are therefore on our own.		108
So one reason the science educators panic at the first sign of public rebellion is that they fear exposure of the implicit religious content in what they are teaching.		109
Although I insist that God has always had the power to intervene directly in nature to create new forms, I am willing to be per-suaded that He chose not to do so and instead employed secondary natural causes like random mutation and natural selection.		110
Darwinism is not merely a support for naturalistic philosophy: it is a product of naturalistic philosophy.		111
In short, it is not that evolutionary naturalists have been less brazen than the scientific creationists in holding science hostage, but rather that they have been infinitely more effective in getting away with it.		112
Evolutionary naturalism takes the inherent limitations of science and turns them into a devastating philosophical weapon: because science is our only real way of knowing anything, what science cannot know cannot be real.		113
If modernist naturalism were true, there would be no objective truth outside of science. In that case right and wrong would be a matter of cultural preference, or political power, and the power already available to modernists ideologies would be overwhelming.		114
Evolutionary biologists are not content merely to explain how variation occurs within limits, however. They aspire to answer a much broader question-which is how complex organisms like birds, and flowers, and human beings came into existence in the first place.		115
All the most prominent Darwinists proclaim naturalistic philosophy when they think it safe to do so.		116
In the most important sense a creationist is a person who believes in creation, and that includes people who believe that Genesis is a myth and that creation involved a process called evolution and consumed billions of years.		117
As a theist I believe that God exists and that God creates.		118
The second advantage claimed for naturalism is that it is equivalent to rationality, because it assumes a model of reality in which all events are in principle accessible to scientific investigation.		119
The problem with allowing God a role in the history of life is not that science would cease, but rather that scientists would have to acknowledge the existence of something important which is outside the boundaries of natural science.		120
The monopoly of science in the realm of knowledge explains why evolutionary biologists do not find it meaningful to address the question whether the Darwinian theory is true.		121
Most importantly, I agree that the truth of these matters should be determined by interpretation of scientific evidence - experiments, fossil studies and the like.		122
To philosophical materialists God is no more than an idea in the human mind, and not a very important idea.		123
Some theists in evolutionary science acquiesce to these tacit rules and retain a personal faith while accepting a thoroughly naturalistic picture of physical reality.		124
In short, the proposition that God was in any way involved in our creation is effectively outlawed, and implicitly negated.		125

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