Reflectorites
Here is an article in a Ventura County (California) newspaper with a
reasonably fair account of Johnson's Wedge strategy of separating
materialist philosophy from science. My comments are in square brackets.
Steve
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http://www.insidevc.com/archives/02182000/county/266176.shtml
Ventura County Star
[...]
Law professor tackles debate over creation
WESTLAKE VILLAGE: He'll argue at church that schools should present
both sides.
By Tom Kisken
Ventura County Star writer
Friday February 18, 2000
Phillip Johnson said he does not want to toss out the microscopes and
Bunsen burners in science classrooms.
He doesn't want to read students the book of Genesis.
[Johnson has always said this, but so powerful is what he calls the "Inherit
the Wind" stereotype that those trained in the rules of materialistic-
naturalistic science, including even some Christians, still interpret that what
he is intent on doing is tossing out "the microscopes and Bunsen burners in
science classrooms" and reading "students the book of Genesis"!]
But the criminal law professor from the University of California, Berkeley,
who has evolved into a pain for some in the science community, does want
schoolchildren to know what he considers gaping evidentiary holes in the
theory of evolution.
"What public schools should be doing is teaching the controversy," said
Johnson, who will spend Sunday speaking about evolution and creation to
teen-agers and other groups at Calvary Community Church in Westlake
Village. "But every time you propose honest teaching, it's
unconstitutional."
[A week ago I attended my first two Biology degree classes at university.
They were on the Origin of Life and Chemical Evolution. The lecturer
hinted that she was an atheist but she did a reasonable good job of trying to
convey the `part line', complete with primordial soup and Miller-Urey.
There were glaring weaknesses in her evidence but none of the students,
many of whom will become science teachers and some biologists, would
know that, because the difficulties are just suppressed. It was sobering to
think that this was probably all they would ever learn in their whole
careers, on the origin of life, and that this pattern has probably been
repeated countless times in universities all over the world for the last four
decades. The evidence presented just cried out for an Intelligent Designer,
and some of the lecturer's own comments were unwittingly arguments for
ID. Near the end of the second lecture when reviewing the steps needed to
move from abiotic polymers to protobionts, when discussed coacervates,
liposomes and microspheres, she said, "If we could combine these all into
one we might be able to get somewhere!". If the arguments against a
naturalistic origin of life were taught, then the inference for ID would be
irresistible for many, if not most, students.]
The discussion seems to be everywhere. Educational leaders in Kansas,
Oklahoma and Kentucky have challenged the current method of teaching
evolution in science classrooms. The debate has also emerged locally with
the Ventura County Board of Education set to discuss board member Ron
Matthews' desire to have creationism included in classroom discussion. The
board members expect to touch on the issue Feb. 28 and then have a full-
blown presentation as early as late March.
"I think we're on the verge of a revolutionary change in thinking," said
Johnson, explaining he accepts what he calls micro-evolution -- changes
within an organism that allow for, say, animal breeding. But he asserts
there is no concrete proof of science's conclusion that one species evolves
into another, that man evolved from ape.
He has written four books, with a fifth on the way. He's debated scientists
on the television show "Firing Line." His opponents at the National Center
for Science Education outside Berkeley know him so well they fax
passages from his own books and highlight areas of concern.
The pages are well-marked.
[This sounds the worried College of Cardinals in the Vatican in 1517
poring over Martin Luther's own writings and copying out sections with
their "areas of concern" to send to bishops to help them in a vain attempt to
turn back the tide.]
"When he presents science's case, he misrepresents it," said Molleen
Matsumura, network project director at the center, which defends the
instruction of evolution. She said there is proof in fossils and genetic
research of what Johnson calls macro-evolution.
"His real concerns are philosophical and religious, not scientific," she said.
[This is in fact one of Johnson's key points. It is a major part of the
scientific materialist strategy to separate "philosophical and religious"
questions in one category and "scientific" questions in another. That way
they can label any suggestion that God had any part to play in creating as
"religion", which is then mere "belief", not "knowledge":
"Suppose that a skeptic argues that evidence for biological creation by
natural selection is obviously lacking, and that in the circumstances we
ought to give serious consideration to the possibility that the development
of life required some input from a pre-existing, purposeful creator. To
scientific naturalists this suggestion is "creationist" and therefore
unacceptable in principle, because it invokes an entity unknown to science.
What is worse, it suggests the possibility that this creator may have
communicated in some way with humans. In that case there could be real
prophets-persons with a genuine knowledge of God who are neither frauds
nor dreamers. Such persons could conceivably be dangerous rivals for the
scientists as cultural authorities. Naturalistic philosophy has worked out a
strategy to prevent this problem from arising: it labels naturalism as science
and theism as religion. The former is then classified as knowledge, and the
latter as mere belief. The distinction is of critical importance, because only
knowledge can be objectively valid for everyone; belief is valid only for the
believer, and should never be passed off as knowledge. The student who
thinks that 2 and 2 make 5, or that water is not made up of hydrogen and
oxygen, or that the theory of evolution is not true, is not expressing a
minority viewpoint. He or she is ignorant, and the job of education is to
cure that ignorance and to replace it with knowledge. Students in the public
schools are thus to be taught at an early age that "evolution is a fact," and
as time goes by they will gradually learn that evolution means naturalism."
(Johnson P.E., "What is Darwinism?" Lecture at a symposium at Hillsdale
College, in November 1992. http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/wid.htm)]
But Johnson, who is Presbyterian, said he tries to take the argument out of
the Bible-vs.-science clashes that trigger walls of anger and superficial
rhetoric. Instead, he strives for a vocabulary that allows for serious
discussion of science and philosophy.
Similarly, he's not sure that evolution and creationism should be taught side
by side in science class. But he urges education leaders to explore what he
calls unbiased and honest teaching that addresses concerns he and others
have raised about Darwinism theory.
He acknowledged the proposal would probably include discussion of
different theories and represents a long, uphill battle.
"If it's a real possibility that a creator was necessary, then education should
not be dedicated to preventing people from thinking about the possibility,"
he said.
Matsumura's job includes working with parents who want to keep
creationism and religion out of science class. She said the big-picture
controversies to which Johnson alludes don't deal with science or with
evidence but with belief systems and don't belong in science classrooms.
Johnson may try to avoid us-vs-them confrontations, but his very name is a
hot button.
Kevin Padian, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and president
of the National Center for Science Education, said Johnson bases
arguments on false premises and redefines terms for his own use.
"Johnson's not qualified to talk about science," Padian said. "He's able to
do this only for the audience that doesn't know any better."
[This is why materialists want to keep separate "science" and "religion"
questions. Then they can adopt the `high-priestly' argument that only
scientists are "qualified to talk about science". Never mind that scientists
aren't qualified to talk about God or religion but they do it all the time:
"We [atheist Darwinist William Provine and Johnson] both scoff at such
noble lies as the National Academy of Science's 1981 pronouncement that
"religion and science are separate and mutually exclusive realms of human
thought whose presentation in the same context leads to a
misunderstanding of both scientific theory and religious belief." On the
contrary, cosmologists and evolutionary biologists write and speak
constantly about the implications of their work for religion, and it is right
that they should do so rather than pretend that they are unconcerned with
the subject in order to avoid controversy. The Christmas-week cover story
of Time magazine in 1992 posed the question "What does science tell us
about God?" and the editors had no difficulty finding eminent scientists
willing to offer answers. (Johnson P.E., "Reason in the Balance",
InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove Ill., 1995, pp191-192)
Accustomed to such criticism, Johnson said some scientists are unwilling to
address what he sees as the heart of the debate -- the definition of science.
"Evolutionary scientists have defined science as inherently dedicated to a
naturalistic understanding of creation," he said. "There is no room for
God in the system because nature could and did do it on its own."
[This is *the* great triumph of scientific materialism-the redefinition of
science. It isn't that the materialists proved there is no God. They just
redefined Him out of existence. Or so they thought!]
He challenges the premise and accuses scientists of the exact act they pin
on him -- basing theories on assumptions about religion and not hard
evidence.
[Good point. The scientific materialists cannot present what they call
"religion" fairly. Because they know that if they let the "Divine foot
in the door, their cultural power to define the terms of the debate is
finished:
"If eminent experts say that evolution according to Gould is too confused to
be worth bothering about, and others equally eminent say that evolution
according to Dawkins rests on unsubstantiated assertions and
counterfactual claims, the public can hardly be blamed for suspecting that
grand-scale evolution may rest on something less impressive than rock-
solid, unimpeachable fact. Lewontin confirms this suspicion by explaining
why "we" (that is, the kind of people who read The New York Review of
Books) reject out of hand the view of those who think they see the hand of
the Creator in the material world:
`We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its
constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises
of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for
unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a
commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of
science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the
phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori
adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a
set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how
counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to fee uninitiated. Moreover,
that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.'
(Lewontin R., "Billions and Billions of Demons," review of "The Demon-
Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark," by Carl Sagan, New
York Review, January 9, 1997, p.31.
http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19970109028R@p6)
(Johnson P.E., "The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism", in "Objections
Sustained: Subversive Essays on Evolution, Law & Culture", InterVarsity
Press: Downers Grove, IL, 1998, pp.71-72.
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9711/johnson.html)]
"If you had a world full of bacteria and nothing but the Darwinism
mechanism, there would still be nothing but bacteria," he said. "You need
a creator to get the creating done."
[This last is a good point. If Neo-Darwinism these days defines "fitness" as
differential reproduction, then it cannot explain evolution beyond bacteria!]
[...]
2000 (c) The E.W. Scripps Co. Ventura County Star subscription services
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Steve
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"The speculations of the Origin of Species turned out to be wrong, as we
have seen in this chapter. It is ironic that the scientific facts throw Darwin
out, but leave William Paley, a figure of fun to the scientific world for more
than a century, still in the tournament with a chance of being the ultimate
winner. It is ironic that the scientific facts throw Darwin out, but leave
William Paley, a figure of fun to the scientific world for more than a
century, still in the tournament with a chance of being the ultimate winner."
(Hoyle F. & Wickramasinghe C., "Evolution from Space", 1981, pp96-97)
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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