FROM: Phillip E Johnson, INTERNET:philjohn@uclink.berkeley.edu
TO: John W. Burgeson, 73531,1501
Phillip E. Johnson October 1, 1995
Grand Tour week two: A week in central Michigan
Sept. 23-24, Saturday/Sunday. After late morning arrival in
Lansing Saturday I used the day to catch up on sleep and football.
Sunday I attended the Trinity Community Church in Lansing with
hosts Charlie and Chrissie Mack, 20-year CLM veterans who exemplify
that combination of dedication and strong family life (3 daughters)
that I have liked so much in CLM people generally. More football
and correspondence in the afternoon, and then dinner with Mark
Whalon, a Professor of Entomology who is a world-renowned authority
on pest control and microevolution (and an elder in the Reformed
Church in America). We shared life stories and intellectual talk,
in which I learned something about the Colorado Potato Beetle,
which has an extraordinary capacity to adapt to insecticides. I
have become a subscriber to Mark's surprisingly readable newsletter
on "Resistant Pest Management." Mark also teaches a large
undergraduate course on biology and the scientific method, bringing
concepts such as "design" into the picture in a way that he thinks
might cause controversy if somebody made an issue of it.
Sept. 25, Monday. Charlie Mack drove me an hour and a half in one
direction or another to Central Michigan University. There was the
usual well-attended noon colloquium for faculty and students, with
about 50 attending, and then I was given the sumptuous office of
the director of the CMU Banking Institute for the afternoon, in
which I did a radio interview by phone. Then out to dinner at a
chain, where our ditzy waitress strongly recommended the meat loaf,
which I dutifully ordered. It was awful; I think this may have
been her idea of a joke. The evening lecture was pretty well
attended by about 300, with the usual question period. One
questioner thought to show me up by asking me what I knew about the
Colorado Potato Beetle. I responded with aplomb that I had just
been advising Michigan State's greatest expert on how to thwart the
criminal career of that crafty critter (hit it with a hammer!), not
thinking it necessary to mention that such knowledge as I had was
about 24 hours old.
Sept. 26, Tuesday. The noon colloquium this day was at MSU, with
an excellent attendance of over 50 MSU faculty who participated
actively with questions. Those who didn't have 1:00 classes stayed
almost until 2:00. I have come to think that these small-group
colloquia, whether with friendlies, neutrals, or hostiles, are my
real calling; I love to to try to figure out how to reach the other
minds rather than stick to a prepared outline. After a brief rest
Charlie and I left for Alma College (where is it? in the town of
Alma, silly). This extremely attractive 4-year college calls
itself "historically Presbyterian," which means of course that it
has become secularized. A couple of years ago the Christian
faculty group consisted of one or two, but now there is a
substantial group growing in both nupresented little more than a
religious veneer over the secular enlightenment values of freedom
of inquiry, political equality, and public service. Once the
Enlightenment values were fully established in the faculty culture
the religious veneer was easily discarded as superfluous. To the
extent Christianity is roughly the same thing as liberalism, with
all distinctively Christian doctrines abandoned and God relegated
to the human imagination, it remains acceptable in university life
but empty of inence of anything else to do in Alma). A student
told me that his biology prof had warned the class about me, saying
that (1) since I am a lawyer I care nothing for truth but only for
winning arguments; and (2) there couldn't be anything of merit in
what I say or he would have read about it in the biology journals.
This professor and others attended the lecture, but didn't ask any
questions. I understand that some of the more unfriendly student
questions were planted by faculty ("What qualifications do you as
a law professor have to address these scientific issues?", an easy
thrust to parry, even without invoking my encyclopedic knowledge of
the Colorado Potato Beetle). Most of the questions were friendly,
however, and the turnout was about 5 times the size of the last
previous public lecture in the series.
Wednesday, Sept. 27. The highlight of this day was a followup
lunch with 6 MSU men who had further questions growing out of the
Tuesday noon colloquium. All were in scientific disciplines
relating to biology; two were professors, one was a graduating Ph.D
on his way to an assistant professorship at another university,
three were advanced graduate students. One of the professors (who
teaches a class on scientific method and philosophy) I would
classify as a theistic evolutionist who is reconsidering his
position. The other professor teaches a large undergrad biology
class and goes so far as to call the class's attention to the
possibility that there may be an important difference between micro
and macro evolution, this being sufficient in itself to fill the
classroom with nervous tension. He was aware of the problems with
macroevolutionary claims, and wanted to explore how much farther he
could or should go without crossing that invisible line that
separates proper scientific criticism from "religion." In general
this was a very thoughtful group, extremely interested in what I
was saying but also careful to evaluate it against everything else
they know. This kind of small group discussion with present and
future faculty who have a career involvement with the subject is
particularly valuable -- and interesting for me.
After that the evening lecture was something of an anticlimax.
I had given the same lecture ("The Grand Metaphysical Story of
Science," sometimes titled "Did Mankind Create God?") twice before
this week, and the crowd in the cavernous (2000) seat University
Auditorium was small. Charlie counted it at 300, but it seemed
smaller than the similar-sized audience the night before at Alma
because of the setting. This did not reflect any failure to
publicize; innumerable flyers were passed out, etc. 10,000 people
attended the competing rock concert by "R.E.M.", about which I know
about as much as I knew about the Colorado Potato Beetle a week
ago). The attendance was a little smaller Thursday night, however,
so competition wasn't the problem. The good thing is that there
was a substantial faculty and grad student turnout, and the
question period was good both nights. But the MSU undergraduate
community just wasn't sufficiently excited by the concept to turn
out in great numbers.
Thursday, Sept. 28. I did a noon colloquium at the Thomas Cooley
Law School -- not a part of MSU but a free-standing school with
night classes and modest admissions standards. (MSU is starting a
law school by incorporating the U of Detroit law school, which has
to get out of downtown Detroit due to the intolerable crime
situation.) The turnout was about 40, including Bobbi Jo Heyboer
from IV Press. The presiding professor, Steve Sheppard, went out
for lunch with us, and that turned out to be a treat. Steve is
working on a Ph.D in philosophy from Oxford under John Finnis, the
natural law philosopher I met last week at Notre Dame. So we had
a conference on his dissertation problems, he told me he intends to
quote RITB copiously in his future writings, and I was able to give
him encouragement (EVERYBODY gets discouraged about dissertation
progress) by telling him about the dauntless John Mark Reynolds,
who had just successfully defended his philosophy dissertation the
day before at the University of Rochester.
I've already mentioned the crowd size at the evening lecture,
on "The Death of God and The Culture Wars." I was able to make
effective use of quotations supplied by the invaluable Paul Nelson,
and of a passage from a superb lecture on relativism by Gonzaga
University President Bernard Coughlin S.J., emailed to me the
previous day by Gonzaga law professor David De Wolf. These quotes
and some other modifications improved this second lecture over the
similar one I gave last week in Indiana. The best thing about the
evening was the final question, a perfect setup which asked me
"Could the key point here be that "the fear (right understanding)
of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom?" I told how "The Beginning
of Reason" is the title of the last chapter and my own preferred
title for RITB, although I went along with the publisher's
preference; IVP representative Bobbi Jo Heyboer was grinning ear-
to-ear in front of me.
Friday/Saturday, Sept. 29-30. I had been staying in a motel the
first 5 nights in Lansing, but for the last two I was a guest of
soils science professor Al Smucker and his wife Betty (related to
the people who make the jam). Friday morning Chrissie Mack brought
over a 20-yr old female undergrad who was determined to have a
private session with me and arrived with a notebook full of
questions. We spent an hour and a half going over her scientific
and spiritual perplexities, and Chrissie had an opportunity for a
further serious talk with her on the drive back to campus. That's
a lot of time to invest in one student, but one never knows what is
going to turn out to be important. My wife Kathie arrived from
California in the afternoon, and we went together to a dessert
evening with 30 or so contributors to the Mack Ministry, where I
spoke, answered more questions, and autographed books. Saturday
morning Kathie and I left early for Niagara Falls, and enjoyed a
drive along Lake Erie through the beautiful fall colors. Next week:
Grove City College (PA), Houghton College (NY) and Cornell
University.
Phil Johnson
P.S. - Addendum to Notre Dame Trip: Notre Dame Law School
Professor John Robinson sent me the Sept 21 issue of the *Notre
Dame Observer* with 3 opinion pieces related to my visit:
1. History grad student Kevorkian Korner, who apparently did
not attend the lecture or read anything I have written, wrote with
unrestrained bombast: "To invite someone as disengenous [as to
challenge Darwinism] does enormous discredit to us. What was GSU
[Grad Student Union Intellectual Life Committtee] thinking? What
was the Law School thinking? And how could the Maritain center,
named for one of the great religious thinkers of the twentieth
century, help to support the spread of such closed-minded, half-
rational, ill-informed, and dishonest crap?"
2. Philip Sloan, Professor of History and Philosophy of
Science, attended my lecture and spoke to me, but his piece
responds not to me but to previously published letters from Alvin
Plantinga and Pieder Beeli. Sloan wrote that the virtue of
Darwin's theory is "consilience" (it unites a lot of disciplines
under a common framework), and that skeptical arguments can be made
against other historical sciences also. [The good news about
Darwinism is that it ties a lot of things together, and the bad
news is that it isn't true.]
3. Ernan McMullin, emeritus professor of History and
Philosophy of Science and a prominent theistic evolutionist, wrote
that, although Darwinists sometimes exaggerate, their's is still
the best scientific theory available, and that "natural selection
is no longer blind when it is recognized as God's means of bringing
about His purposes." McMullin seems to have attended my lecture,
but he seems to be in a state of denial as to what Darwinism is
really about.
It seems the pot is being well stirred at Notre Dame.
Robinson has promised to send me future issues with further debate.
P.P.S.: The Sept/Oct issue of *Academe* (journal of the AAUP) is
out with my article "What (if anything) Hath God Wrought?: Academic
Freedom and the Religious Professor. See also the related essay by
Evelyn Fox Keller in the same issue. It come from a more
conventional sociology-of-science viewpoint and makes some very
good points that fit in well with my own argument.