Reason In the Balance by Phillip Johnson
Scambray, Terry
SEZ WHO? Reason In the Balance The Case against Naturalism in Science, Law & Education Phillip Johnson InterVarsity Press, $19.95, 245 pp. Terry Scambray Hike God in medieval theology,...
...But Johnson, logician and philosopher of science, wonders how such a theory would be tested...
...In addition to the investigation of historical figures like Holmes, this book offers a remarkable trip through topics like abortion, taxes, teleology, and particle physics, and the ideas of cognoscenti like Steven Weinberg, Francis Crick, and Richard Rorty...
...This ideological graft produced many of the fruits of our present legal system and its often unpredictable concepts of justice and legal procedure...
...parody...
...Yet Darwin's powerful creation story underwrites the ideology of modernism which assumes that science has, or soon will have, a natural explanation for everything...
...Phillip Johnson, University of California professor of law, in his brilliant Darwin on Trial (InterVarsity) demonstrated that Darwin's theory rests more on the assumption of its truth than the rigor of its proofs...
...Various books of late encourage more serious consideration of theology in public debate...
...Since as a species we are survivors, Hawking believes, "...we might expect that the reasoning abilities that natural selection has given us would be valid in our search for a complete unified theory...
...This radical sense of individual autonomy mitigates the idea of responsibilities and blankets everyone with immunity for his actions...
...How is one to factor for any self-referencing fallacy...
...Johnson surely scores here, for America's problems will not be solved by following the directives of the Right or Left, one promoting free-market anarchy, the other the anarchy of designer lifestyles, all paid for by the taxpayer in what Johnson calls a system of "libertarian socialism...
...A master of the plain style, Johnson incorporates both a feathery irony and a relentless fairness in his work, always confident enough to permit himself to be vulnerable...
...The late Yale law professor, Arthur Leff, called the response now offered to all assertions of authority, "The grand sez who...
...Hawking, recognizing the conundrum, attempts an escape by placing his faith in Darwin's principle of natural selection...
...Among the best are Richard Neuhaus's The Naked Public Square and more recently Stephen Carter's The Culture of Disbelief...
...In Reason in the Balance, Johnson splendidly argues that esteemed representatives of science, such as Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, while cloaking themselves in white-coated neutrality, often attempt to bully us into accepting a reductionist world view, neutered of all religious and ethical values...
...Cosmological speculation is one thing, its own genre more akin to myth...
...Terry Scambray teaches English at Fresno State University in California...
...Johnson does seem to slight other philosophic positions besides those based on theism or Platonism...
...Influenced by the prevailing Darwinism of the 1890s, Oliver Wendell Holmes, our most influential jurist, saw the law in a pragmatic way as a Hobbesian source of order in a world free of any restrictive moral code...
...But in this hope Hawking has only replaced faith in one man-made theory with faith in another...
...Echoing Dostoevski, Johnson asks, "If God does not exist, and if there is no Platonic metaphysical realm of divine essences, then there may be no absolute reference point from which to judge competing interpretations of reality...
...Nonetheless, for Johnson, the abandonment of an external reference point-and Darwin accelerated the defection-had a damaging effect on the intellectual framers of twentieth-century America...
...And the story, as usually recounted by influential advocates of scientific naturalism and their acolytes, is that life was a chance event, has no purpose and is a struggle for physical survival, devoid of higher purpose...
...Suppose that the rules which explain the universe also explain or, indeed, limit the minds and the investigations of the scientists themselves...
...And as Johnson reminds us, "Once we try to explain the mind as a product of its own discoveries, we are in a hall of mirrors with no exit...
...But Johnson recognizes that religion has only been invited back into the house of intellect because its place is merely decorative, thereby permitting important disciplines like science, especially physics and microbiology, to control the discussion by telling the world what is real...
...Hawking, for example, has made an ambitious claim for a "final theory of everything," a speculative theory of a self-generating universe which would have no need for anything outside of itself, including a deist Prime Mover or an intervening Judaic-Christian God...
...But what distinguishes Johnson is his penetrating understanding of science and its limits...
...Kant, for example, stood on man's rationality as the ground for his arguments, admittedly a rationalism respectful of heritage and tradition...
...Johnson suggests that theology and philosophy not be intimidated into surrendering their pictures of reality...
...The law, therefore, need not be a bearer of any cultural template, since citizens are independent agents in a predatory world...
...All of these issues and icons are measured by Johnson's logical and composed mind...
...Precisely the terrifying fun-house of modernity that Kafka et al...
...Except, of course, to the force of the increasingly powerful state...
...but when these speculations take on the imprimatur of science, they begin to tell a compelling story that has consequences...
...Since there exists no independent moral order, "Who says I should bow to any convention or command...
...Terry Scambray Hike God in medieval theology, everything is known about evolution except whether it is true...
...For that reason, he stands in the great tradition of Blake and Swift, companion skeptics of Enlightenment hype, who clearly saw the arriving butchery of their time as it was being validated by a doctrinaire science which marginalized traditional wisdom...
...As a polemicist, Johnson has been subject to a variety of counterattacks, one group claiming that he is destroying the uneasy reconciliation forged between science and religion since the divisive Galileo incident in the seventeenth century...
...What more can be asked for...
Vol. 122 • November 1995 • No. 20
