Capitol Ideas/Darwin in the Dock
Bethell, Tom
Darwin in the Dock by Tom Bethell 4 4 f evolution did take place," Joe Tussman was saying, "God could have used that method for his own purposes." "How do we know that evolution did take place?"...
...The book makes the argument, familiar since Darwin, that random processes are sufficient to explain the existence of animals and plants, without having to invoke a creator...
...In 1967 he became a member of the faculty at Berkeley, published articles, earned tenure...
...These are professors and educators passionately committed to the evolutionist cause and to naturalism in general...
...I would much rather be debating Darwinists than listening to lawyers...
...The book makes the argument, familiar since Darwin, that random processes are sufficient to explain the existence of animals and plants, without having to invoke a creator...
...The conversation was taking place at Johnson's house in Berkeley at 8:00 a.m...
...Either way,we don't...
...Very much so," he said, adding that in the mid-1980s the White House had seriously considered him for a vacancy on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals...
...He went to the Presbyterian Church on College Avenue...
...He had gone to Harvard, then to the University of Chicago Law School...
...Roman Catholics looking into claims of miracles at Lourdes readily accept this...
...The group was holding its annual meeting at the Berkeley Marina Marriott Hotel, a five-minute drive from Johnson's house...
...It's assumed that the entire universe consists of nothing but atoms and molecules in motion...
...With Watchmaker excluded, the watches (creatures) that indubitably exist must therefore have come together by random means...
...The question is whether the evi- dence from rocks and labs supports the theory that the history of life has constituted an unbroken parent-offspring chain going back to the first (parentless) organism...
...It's derived logically, not observed physically...
...over breakfast...
...t's not every day that you meet with such sentiments from a tenured professor at Berkeley's law school...
...Johnson would be addressing a plenary session of the conference...
...But they could give no reason to believe in anything that was important...
...And this is a damnable doctrine...
...But nothing made any sense," he said...
...t's not every day that you meet with such sentiments from a tenured professor at Berkeley's law school...
...In 1967 he became a member of the faculty at Berkeley, published articles, earned tenure...
...They constitute a small but growing counterweight to people like Thomas Jukes, William Bennetta, and Kevin Padian, associated with Bay Area Skeptics...
...They made a complete hash of it, and I was one of them...
...Kathryn Shafer, National Invention Center, 80 West Bowery St., Akron, Ohio 44308...
...Galileo, anyone...
...During the nineteenth century, however, the will to discard theistic religion and substitute a naturalistic understanding of reality was very strong...
...In an earlier talk at the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois, Johnson said: "Before the triumph of Darwinism, atheism was a minority position among intellectuals, because atheistshad to posit a self-created universe, which seemingly violated common sense...
...But she made a good point when she said that science has to work within a naturalistic framework...
...At the hotel, Johnson had a small entourage of supporters...
...Clearly, they were far less disposed toward controversy than Johnson had anticipated...
...No one ever puts it the other way around: If God exists, what reason is there to believe in blind, naturalistic evolution in the first place...
...It gets you to accept the conclusion as an assumption and then carries you along with the brilliance of the argument...
...And for twenty years now, academic lawyers have been worrying about the problems of crime," he said...
...The evidence doesn't support that hypothesis, he thinks...
...Darwin himself was hostile to Christianity, incidentally...
...Johnson continued to study evolution for several years, and his book Darwin on Trial was published by Regnery Gateway in 1991...
...So Johnson had gone into criminal law...
...In 1987, when he was a visiting professor at University College, London, he came across some books about evolution...
...Patterson has said that he "believes" in evolution, adding, however, that it's not supposed to be a matter of faith...
...Listening to the minister, he thought: "You know, this guy really believes what he's saying...
...His first marriage broke up, and when he told his daughter, he found himself ready to rethink his whole life...
...This year's competition attracted 108 entries from students at 47 colleges throughout the country...
...The problem is that they deceive themselves and others by claiming that they have factual proof of evolution, when they don't...
...n his critique of evolution, Johnson's main point is that modern science embodies a materialist or naturalistic premise...
...About fifteen years ago, Johnson experienced a personal and an intellectual crisis...
...sn't it true, I said, that we can't accept miraculous explanations until we have checked out the natural ones...
...Surely we have to exhaust the more obvious possibilities first...
...She came across as brittle and sometimes condescending, saying that Johnson "does not present the facts accurately" and clearly was "out of his element...
...He lives it...
...And I could too...
...They write their journal articles about the joys of primitive living, sign on the dotted line against Christopher Columbus, grade their papers, and then they're home free...
...It gets you to accept the conclusion as an assumption and then carries you along with the brilliance of the argument...
...The conversation was taking place at Johnson's house in Berkeley at 8:00 a.m...
...What was needed to make the naturalistic program plausible was a thoroughly materialistic mechanism for evolution...
...And he mentioned some rhetorical tricks, such as defining "evolution" non-controversially as "change over time," or as a change in the ratio of existing varieties, and then claiming that evolution has been established as a "fact...
...But now he expected to meet some resistance from the anthropologists...
...His colleagues at the law school (Boalt Hall) have been tolerant, he said as he drove to the hotel...
...There was a reply from Eugenie Scott, Ph.D., executive director of the National Center for Science Education, a Carnegie-funded organization that patrols the science classrooms searching out deviationism...
...Invisible entities like "mind" and "God" are excluded at the outset...
...Johnson repeated...
...Like Johnson himself, they avoid the young-earth and Noah's Ark scenarios that have made Henry Morris and the Institute for Creation Research such an easy target...
...All was shallow and self-defeating...
...One thing bumped into another, lightning struck the primordial soup, and pretty soon organisms were ticking away merrily and getting more and more complicated...
...For years they have been trying to stamp out impure thoughts in areas where religion and science show signs of overlapping...
...She came across as brittle and sometimes condescending, saying that Johnson "does not present the facts accurately" and clearly was "out of his element...
...They made a complete hash of it, and I was one of them...
...During the nineteenth century, however, the will to discard theistic religion and substitute a naturalistic understanding of reality was very strong...
...The group was holding its annual meeting at the Berkeley Marina Marriott Hotel, a five-minute drive from Johnson's house...
...This means that only physical causes can be admitted into the realm of science...
...replied Phillip Johnson, seeming not to grasp the logic of the statement...
...Professors at Christian colleges, cowed by the culture into accepting the false equation of Darwinism and science, often don't get the point here, Johnson Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...Johnson continued to study evolution for several years, and his book Darwin on Trial was published by Regnery Gateway in 1991...
...There was a reply from Eugenie Scott, Ph.D., executive director of the National Center for Science Education, a Carnegie-funded organization that patrols the science classrooms searching out deviationism...
...Like Johnson himself, they avoid the young-earth and Noah's Ark scenarios that have made Henry Morris and the Institute for Creation Research such an easy target...
...By supplying the crucial blind watchmaker thesis, Darwin paved the way for a century and more of atheistic domination of intellectual life...
...And if you believe in God—which he does—there's no reason to settle for a passive deity who presides over but never interferes with the haphazard results of chance and mutation...
...His wife, Kathie, was pouring coffee, and several other people were sitting at the table...
...Recently, by the way, he wrote an introduction to a new edition of Anthony Lewis's book Gideon's Trumpet...
...BFGoodrich is a chemical and aerospace company headquartered in Akron, Ohio...
...In his talk, Johnson gave some of the reasons to believe that it has not...
...He went to the Presbyterian Church on College Avenue...
...When Johnson spoke to him in London in 1988 Patterson had not recanted, although there has been pressure on him to do so...
...Since then he has received many invitations to speak...
...The idealistic spirits had decried money-grubbing corporate law...
...Oh well,' they say, 'we believe in Darwinistic evolution and we're still Christian...
...She was sorry to see that "even the tired old Colin Patterson story" was in his book...
...Johnson would be addressing a plenary session of the conference...
...How did it happen...
...How do we know that evolution occurred...
...Colleagues in the academy "could give you a thousand reasons why no positive statement could be supported...
...This means that only physical causes can be admitted into the realm of science...
...Johnson himself doesn't believe in it...
...Robert Anderson, an anthropologist at Mills College, politely introduced Johnson to a dozy audience of maybe 150 anthropologists: foot-soldiers in the overstuffed American academy...
...Listening to the minister, he thought: "You know, this guy really believes what he's saying...
...Come question time, half of them walked out, no doubt en route to the sauna or the buffet...
...And he mentioned some rhetorical tricks, such as defining "evolution" non-controversially as "change over time," or as a change in the ratio of existing varieties, and then claiming that evolution has been established as a "fact...
...In the end John T. Noonan got the appointment...
...And for twenty years now, academic lawyers have been worrying about the problems of crime," he said...
...By now it was time to be moving along to the Marriott...
...In a passage that his family cut out of his published autobiography (his granddaughter first brought it to light in 1958), Darwin wrote: "I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true: for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished...
...0 16 The American Spectator June 1992 Darwin in the Dock by Tom Bethell 4 4 f evolution did take place," Joe Tussman was saying, "God could have used that method for his own purposes...
...The question is whether the evi- dence from rocks and labs supports the theory that the history of life has constituted an unbroken parent-offspring chain going back to the first (parentless) organism...
...Surely we have to exhaust the more obvious possibilities first...
...Robert Schilling — Purdue University James Versalovic — Baylor College of Medicine Mark Harper — Ohio State University Schilling, Versalovic, and Harper are the 1992 winners of The BFGoodrich Collegiate Inventors Program, the first national competition to stimulate creativity and inventiveness among college students throughout the United States...
...Evolution is then simply a deduction from these premises...
...So what's the problem?' " The problem is that their students realize there is no role for a creator in such a system, Johnson said, and they turn agnostic in droves...
...Johnson saw that actual evidence for evolution wasn't in the book, however...
...These are professors and educators passionately committed to the evolutionist cause and to naturalism in general...
...Now he was plainly refusing the conversational gambit...
...Invisible entities like "mind" and "God" are excluded at the outset...
...Roman Catholics looking into claims of miracles at Lourdes readily accept this...
...I asked Johnson if he was happy with the new direction his life has taken...
...In general, evolution is said to have occurred either too quickly (in punctuated equilibrium) or too slowly (over the aeons) for us to have seen it...
...I would much rather be debating Darwinists than listening to lawyers...
...It's assumed that the entire universe consists of nothing but atoms and molecules in motion...
...indirectly government-paid, to a large extent, and, judging by appearances, mentally on vacation for the duration of the conference...
...With Watchmaker excluded, the watches (creatures) that indubitably exist must therefore have come together by random means...
...He said 'If evolution took place,' " someone else said, perhaps thinking Johnson hadn't heard right...
...Evolution is then simply a deduction from these premises...
...Colin Patterson, a senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, thought in 1982 that there was no evidence at all for evolution, and challenged American evolutionists to produce some...
...Half-baked theories of evolution were in the air, and they were everywhere connected with revolt against religious and political traditions that were based upon a theistic worldview...
...They constitute a small but growing counterweight to people like Thomas Jukes, William Bennetta, and Kevin Padian, associated with Bay Area Skeptics...
...The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins, made a particular impression...
...The BFGoodrich Collegiate Inventors Program aims to rekindle this necessary interest in science and engineering by rewarding students for their creativity and inventiveness...
...In little over an hour Johnson would be speaking to the Southwestern Anthropological Association...
...Now he was plainly refusing the conversational gambit...
...Patterson has said that he "believes" in evolution, adding, however, that it's not supposed to be a matter of faith...
...Gertrude Himmelfarb has dryly remarked that Darwin "preferred a morality independent of religion and untainted by the moral defects of Christianity...
...Darwin himself was hostile to Christianity, incidentally...
...He's tactful—helps out with teaching loads and so on...
...Either way,we don't...
...But nothing made any sense," he said...
...About fifteen years ago, Johnson experienced a personal and an intellectual crisis...
...graduated top of his class, clerked for California Supreme Court Justice Roger Traynor, then for Chief Justice Earl Warren (1966-67 term...
...He's tactful—helps out with teaching loads and so on...
...In general, evolution is said to have occurred either too quickly (in punctuated equilibrium) or too slowly (over the aeons) for us to have seen it...
...In the end John T. Noonan got the appointment...
...Johnson pointed out that there were more phyla in existence 600 million years ago than there are today, in contrast to the "cone of increasing diversity" that Darwinism leads us to expect...
...indirectly government-paid, to a large extent, and, judging by appearances, mentally on vacation for the duration of the conference...
...n his critique of evolution, Johnson's main point is that modern science embodies a materialist or naturalistic premise...
...But they could give no reason to believe in anything that was important...
...Thank God," said Johnson, making a church steeple with his hands and gazing devoutly to the ceiling...
...In a passage that his family cut out of his published autobiography (his granddaughter first brought it to light in 1958), Darwin wrote: "I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true: for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished...
...By now it was time to be moving along to the Marriott...
...But now he expected to meet some resistance from the anthropologists...
...Science has to pretend that God doesn't exist," she said, and I brought this up with Johnson when we went out to have a bite to eat at a restaurant on San Pablo Avenue...
...All was shallow and self-defeating...
...Johnson said he had no problem with that, if only the evolutionists would be more "honest" about the ways in which the physical evidence unearthed has failed to fit the hypothesis of evolution...
...The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins, made a particular impression...
...In an earlier talk at the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois, Johnson said: "Before the triumph of Darwinism, atheism was a minority position among intellectuals, because atheistshad to posit a self-created universe, which seemingly violated common sense...
...Professors at Christian colleges, cowed by the culture into accepting the false equation of Darwinism and science, often don't get the point here, Johnson Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...In his book he gives more...
...Half-baked theories of evolution were in the air, and they were everywhere connected with revolt against religious and political traditions that were based upon a theistic worldview...
...over breakfast...
...And Their Careers Are Just Beginning...
...0 16 The American Spectator June 1992...
...formed about the lack of factual support for evolution, and in rejecting evolution they see no conflict with science...
...For more information on The BFGoodrich Collegiate Inventors Program, write Dr...
...These are evangelical Christians who are well in14 The American Spectator June 1992 formed about the lack of factual support for evolution, and in rejecting evolution they see no conflict with science...
...She was sorry to see that "even the tired old Colin Patterson story" was in his book...
...But she made a good point when she said that science has to work within a naturalistic framework...
...Their faculty advisors each received $2,500...
...By supplying the crucial blind watchmaker thesis, Darwin paved the way for a century and more of atheistic domination of intellectual life...
...said...
...And if you believe in God—which he does—there's no reason to settle for a passive deity who presides over but never interferes with the haphazard results of chance and mutation...
...Professionally, he had made the right moves...
...Science is "prejudiced" in favor of naturalism for that reason...
...The problem is that they deceive themselves and others by claiming that they have factual proof of evolution, when they don't...
...In his book he gives more...
...Professionally, he had made the right moves...
...Johnson pointed out that there were more phyla in existence 600 million years ago than there are today, in contrast to the "cone of increasing diversity" that Darwinism leads us to expect...
...The BFGoodrich Company, in cooperation with the National Invention Center, established The BFGoodrich Collegiate Inventors program in 1990...
...graduated top of his class, clerked for California Supreme Court Justice Roger Traynor, then for Chief Justice Earl Warren (1966-67 term...
...For years they have been trying to stamp out impure thoughts in areas where religion and science show signs of overlapping...
...Or call (216) 762-4463...
...Johnson is a professor of law, and Tussman an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of California in Berkeley...
...Johnson said he had no problem with that, if only the evolutionists would be more "honest" about the ways in which the physical evidence unearthed has failed to fit the hypothesis of evolution...
...Clearly, they were far less disposed toward controversy than Johnson had anticipated...
...What was needed to make the naturalistic program plausible was a thoroughly materialistic mechanism for evolution...
...He lives it...
...In little over an hour Johnson would be speaking to the Southwestern Anthropological Association...
...But if your question is, 'Can you reconcile some vague or weak Christianity with evolution?' " Johnson went on, "of course if you want to badly enough you can...
...But if your question is, 'Can you reconcile some vague or weak Christianity with evolution?' " Johnson went on, "of course if you want to badly enough you can...
...He said 'If evolution took place,' " someone else said, perhaps thinking Johnson hadn't heard right...
...sn't it true, I said, that we can't accept miraculous explanations until we have checked out the natural ones...
...Colin Patterson, a senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, thought in 1982 that there was no evidence at all for evolution, and challenged American evolutionists to produce some...
...At the hotel, Johnson had a small entourage of supporters...
...These are evangelical Christians who are well in14 The American Spectator June 1992 THREE OF THE MOST OUTSTAATDING INVENTORS IN THE UNITED STATES...
...He had gone to Harvard, then to the University of Chicago Law School...
...In 1987, when he was a visiting professor at University College, London, he came across some books about evolution...
...Come question time, half of them walked out, no doubt en route to the sauna or the buffet...
...This was papered over by rhetoric, "just the kind of stuff that lawyers do," he told Russell Schoch of the California Monthly...
...Recently, by the way, he wrote an introduction to a new edition of Anthony Lewis's book Gideon's Trumpet...
...Galileo, anyone...
...Since then he has received many invitations to speak...
...His first marriage broke up, and when he told his daughter, he found himself ready to rethink his whole life...
...Colleagues in the academy "could give you a thousand reasons why no positive statement could be supported...
...The idealistic spirits had decried money-grubbing corporate law...
...In his talk, Johnson gave some of the reasons to believe that it has not...
...When Johnson spoke to him in London in 1988 Patterson had not recanted, although there has been pressure on him to do so...
...Robert Anderson, an anthropologist at Mills College, politely introduced Johnson to a dozy audience of maybe 150 anthropologists: foot-soldiers in the overstuffed American academy...
...The winners each received $5,000...
...The evidence doesn't support that hypothesis, he thinks...
...Johnson himself doesn't believe in it...
...No one ever puts it the other way around: If God exists, what reason is there to believe in blind, naturalistic evolution in the first place...
...Science is "prejudiced" in favor of naturalism for that reason...
...Johnson saw that actual evidence for evolution wasn't in the book, however...
...It's derived logically, not observed physically...
...Science has to pretend that God doesn't exist," she said, and I brought this up with Johnson when we went out to have a bite to eat at a restaurant on San Pablo Avenue...
...How do we know that evolution occurred...
...John Wiester and Arthur Battson had come up from Santa Barbara, and there were one or two others from the Ad Hoc Committee on Origins—Walter Hearn from Berkeley, for example...
...Oh well,' they say, 'we believe in Darwinistic evolution and we're still Christian...
...And I could too...
...His wife, Kathie, was pouring coffee, and several other people were sitting at the table...
...John Wiester and Arthur Battson had come up from Santa Barbara, and there were one or two others from the Ad Hoc Committee on Origins—Walter Hearn from Berkeley, for example...
...I asked Johnson if he was happy with the new direction his life has taken...
...How did it happen...
...Very much so," he said, adding that in the mid-1980s the White House had seriously considered him for a vacancy on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals...
...This was papered over by rhetoric, "just the kind of stuff that lawyers do," he told Russell Schoch of the California Monthly...
...They write their journal articles about the joys of primitive living, sign on the dotted line against Christopher Columbus, grade their papers, and then they're home free...
...Gertrude Himmelfarb has dryly remarked that Darwin "preferred a morality independent of religion and untainted by the moral defects of Christianity...
...Johnson repeated...
...Johnson is a professor of law, and Tussman an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of California in Berkeley...
...And this is a damnable doctrine...
...So what's the problem?' " The problem is that their students realize there is no role for a creator in such a system, Johnson said, and they turn agnostic in droves...
...One thing bumped into another, lightning struck the primordial soup, and pretty soon organisms were ticking away merrily and getting more and more complicated...
...said...
...America's future economic vitality and competitiveness are at risk unless we can encourage students to pursue careers in science and engineering," says John D. Ong, BFGoodrich chairman and chief executive officer...
...His colleagues at the law school (Boalt Hall) have been tolerant, he said as he drove to the hotel...
...Thank God," said Johnson, making a church steeple with his hands and gazing devoutly to the ceiling...
...replied Phillip Johnson, seeming not to grasp the logic of the statement...
...So Johnson had gone into criminal law...
Vol. 25 • June 1992 • No. 6
