Interview with Phillip Johnson

Family North Carolina Magazine—Nov/Dec 2007

Talking With . . .
This transcript is taken from an extended interview with Professor Phillip Johnson in 2006 for the North Carolina Family Policy Council’s 12-part video series, “Family Policy Perspectives.”

Phillip Johnson is the Jefferson E. Peyser Professor of Law, Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a leader in the Intelligent Design movement and one of the world’s foremost critics of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Professor Johnson is the author of several books and articles critiquing Darwinian evolution, including: Darwin on Trial, Evolution as Dogma, and Defeating Darwinism By Opening Minds.  His “Leading Edge” column appears regularly in Touchstone Magazine.

In the following interview, Professor Johnson talks about the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, and explains why Darwinian Evolution is more of a philosophy than sound science.

FPP: What kinds of people are involved in the leadership of the Intelligent Design movement. Are they necessarily Christians or even religious people?

Phillip Johnson: Well, not necessarily. Predominantly, they are persons with doctorates from established and respected secular universities—often professorships. We have a professor of biochemistry, for example, from LeHigh University in Pennsylvania; a mathematician, William Dempsky, with doctorates in both mathematics and philosophy; and a professor of the philosophy of science, Stephen Meyer, with his doctoral degree from Cambridge University in England. These are the principal leaders in the Intelligent Design movement. There are others as well, including professors of science from various universities. The appeal is much wider than Christians, however. We have one important agnostic Jewish member, David Berlinski, a brilliant mathematician and philosopher who is quite an independent thinker, and who doesn’t belong to any community of belief. And the Intelligent Design movement is not a confessional faith movement—it’s a scientific, intellectual movement that accepts people who are asking the right questions, pursuing an inquiry into the adequacy of Darwinian evolution, regardless of their personal beliefs. We have a Muslim member, and people from a variety of views, some of which conservative Christians might not approve, but if they’re doing the right kind of scientific and intellectual work, they can participate in our movement. We have Protestants, we have Catholics, and we have persons of no particular religious definition.

FPP: Are there pitfalls for Christians who want to see Intelligent Design taught in public school classrooms?

PJ: There are pitfalls. In fact, we would encourage people not to bring up the question of Intelligent Design theory, as such, in proposals for shaping education in the public schools. The Intelligent Design theory is in its infancy, and is just now being developed into a scientific theory that can stand on its own; but there’s a lot of work yet to be done. So it’s really not ready to be introduced into the public schools and to create the kind of public media firestorm that seems to happen when that kind of suggestion is made. We would encourage people to leave the question on Intelligent Design, as such, out of public education for now and simply get boards to support teachers who want to go into some of the difficulties with Darwinism that are concealed in the textbooks, that are not brought out, so that students are getting a very misleading picture of just what the state of the evidence is, with respect to the Darwinian claims that we were all created by a blind, purposeless, unintelligent process so that we’re accidents of natural history, rather than the purposeful intended products of an intelligent, purposeful Creator. We would like to have teachers free to bring out the generally known but often concealed defects in evidence for that theory of blind, purposeless, unintelligent creation, which is presented so often in public school materials dogmatically...

We would suggest leaving it there. Teach evolution honestly, with an awareness and acknowledgement of its difficulties. And also stand for the freedom of teachers. I do not approve of measures like what was attempted in one Pennsylvania school recently and unsuccessfully to have a school board order the teachers to read or recite some kind of statement about evolution, which is drafted by a school board or some political or lawmaking source. That is not a good idea. It doesn’t work, and what I want to see is encouragement of intellectual freedom for the teachers, rather than telling them to take some particular position that they may not agree with. I think if we bring intellectual freedom to this area, that is what will accomplish good in our present situation. We should not be trying to promote some particular answer to the problems when [ID] is a theory that isn’t well enough developed yet to be presented as a complete explanation for the origin and development of living organisms.

FPP: You’ve argued that Darwinism actually is more of a philosophy of life or a religion than it is science. Explain what you mean by that, and talk about the link between Darwinism and naturalistic philosophy.

PJ: Yes…Darwinian true believers are opposed to any skepticism about their theory because it’s a worldview. See, it’s not just a scientific theory of interest to biologists—it’s a worldview based on a philosophical principal that’s called Naturalism, which is that you can explain anything in the world on the basis of natural causes only. Nature is either all there is, or at least nature is a completely self-enclosed, autonomous system that cannot be affected by anything on the outside, such as God. So all of the creating had to be done by natural, unintelligent forces. Intelligence is not allowed. This naturalistic worldview was perhaps most notoriously articulated by Carl Sagan in the heavily government-promoted television series, “Cosmos,” which began by saying the cosmos is all there is or ever was or ever will be. That’s a statement of philosophical naturalism, and many students around the world have heard that as if it is the voice of science saying that naturalism—nature—is all there is. That is a worldview, which affects a great deal more than just what scientists are doing in their laboratories.

The important question about the Darwinian theory of evolution is not whether it has bad consequences or good consequences. It’s whether it is true. Now, we have to understand what the most important part of Darwinian evolutionary theory is. It’s not that it says that the earth has existed for a very long time—billions of years, and the cosmos too—or that creation was a gradual process that happened over these long periods of time, rather than all at once. It does say that, but that’s not the most important thing that it says. What the Darwinian theory says is that all biological origins, all the origins of life and the development of life of human beings, the whole story involves only unintelligent material causes. No intelligence, no Creator was involved or could have been involved anywhere along the way. As one famous Darwinian authority has said, “mankind is the result of a purposeless natural process that did not have us in mind and doesn’t care what we do.” That’s the essential claim. It’s not that the Creator took a long time, [but] that there is no Creator—certainly no Creator that’s known to science. Because if the Creator did exist, existing is about the only thing he’s ever done. The Creator didn’t do any creating or didn’t need to do any creating, because the blind, purposeless material processes of random variation and survival of the fittest were capable of doing, and did do, all the creating that had to be done in the history of life, up to and including us… That’s what the principal of naturalism is, and the question we in the Intelligent Design movement address is this claim that only material and natural unintelligent, purposeless causes were involved in the history of life …

FPP: Is Darwinian Evolution supported by scientific evidence?

PJ: No, it is not. It is supported only by a definition of science that some powerful organizations, and now even some judges, have imposed on scientific inquiry. They’ve said that no matter what the evidence is you can’t acknowledge any intelligent cause being involved in the history of life, because that intelligent cause might be God, and we wouldn’t want to think that. That’s a definition. That’s not evidence. That’s a philosophical argument. So, when you ask for a demonstration of evolution that has actually been observed, all you ever get is something called microevolution, which really isn’t evolution at all. It’s just a shift of population frequencies. Sometimes there are more dark colored moths in the environment, and sometimes more light colored moths, but you never hear a description of a moth changing into something else…I can cite the same example in an ironic view. It’s sometimes apparent that the Darwinists and the philosophical Naturalists tend to be relatively uninterested in family life, and they have fewer offspring than the people who are skeptical of Darwinism and who credit God as their Creator. And thus we see around the world that people who credit God as being their Creator—Christians often but [also] Muslims for example—are having the most children. And whose children and perhaps their ideas are going to dominate the world in the future? It may be that Darwinism becomes extinct by Darwinian reasons because its adherents were out-competed in the only sense that matters in Darwinian theory—they left more offspring. They didn’t have the children who came to inherit the world in the succeeding generations….

And while there is observational evidence, for example, even with bacteria that are causing diseases, some of these are more susceptible to medicines like penicillin than others. So if you use penicillin—if you put bacteria in a dish and poison the population of bacteria with penicillin—some of them will survive, while most of the others die. This is what happened with wonder drugs like penicillin when they were first introduced, which makes them look so wonderful, makes them look like they are going to wipe out bacteria altogether. But what happens is that some of the bacteria that are causing the disease survive. These are the ones who just happen to be more resistant to the penicillin, which, from their point of view, is a poison. As this goes on over generations and generations, eventually the entire population of bacteria—all of them that are left—are resistant to the drug. And at this point penicillin doesn’t work very well anymore. That’s what happens. Then you have to introduce a new drug to have anywhere near the same effect. That’s why we have to be developing new drugs all the time. This is the kind of thing that evolutionists site, that evolution that can actually be observed can be proved to occur. But it isn’t really evolution at all in the significant sense, because bacteria have been doing this sort of thing as long as there have been bacteria. They are always varying in the population in this sense, but you never see a bacterium climbing out of the dish as an insect, let us say, or a lobster or a mouse. That will never be seen. We never see a significant change of that kind. We never see the bacteria become something different or developing new organs or new capabilities. They don’t learn to fly.

Scientific evidence viewed impartially does not illustrate the kind of creative evolution that the Darwinian textbooks tell us we must all believe in. So, we believe in something we don’t see. They have to admit that it’s never seen, but they just insist that it must have occurred because how else could the new kinds of things come into existence? The only other answer would be some kind of creative intelligence, and that is what they have determined to avoid. So suggesting that any kind of creative intelligence is involved will be claimed to be unconstitutional because it tends to undermine the belief in Darwinism and make people think of something like a Creator. The purpose of the whole system is to keep the Creator out of the real world. So the Darwinists will say, “Well you can believe in the Creator if you want, but that’s only a matter of faith, not evidence. All the evidence tells you that unintelligent, purposeless, godless evolution is the true explanation of how we and all other living things came to exist.” But it isn’t the evidence that says that—it’s the philosophy. The evidence actually says that the Darwinian mechanism doesn’t do any creating. So that’s the kind of skeptical argument we have to keep looking at.