This is a rather clear statement by Johnson that evolution must be
disproved in order to be able to accept a creator God.
Keith
>Here's a quote from an interview at:
>http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/commsp99.htm
>
>CJ: Let's shift the discussion just a bit. At the bare bones level, what
>essentials do you believe the Christian must maintain in the question of human
>origins in order to remain essentially Christian?
>
>Phil: Well, the first thing, I guess, is the role of God as our Creator. The
>evolutionary naturalists have been telling us that you don't need God in the
>system, you don't need a creator in the system because these purposeless forces
>can do it all. If they are right on that, then I would tend to think that
>probably Christianity should be given up as a bad show, considering most of the
>people that come to believe that that's what they conclude too. If God is an
>illusion and the Bible's just been wrong about everything, and religious belief
>is just believing what you want to believe and the facts show you that it
>didn't happen that way, well then the logical conclusion it seems to me would
>be not to try to save Christianity but to give it up as a mistake. Now, that's
>one reason I was so interested in this field. Because, now, on the other hand,
>if it turns out that the evolutionary theory is what's mistaken, and natural
>selection has no creative power, and you have this whole scientific culture
>that has been believing something dead against the evidence because that's
>something they want to believe, then even without knowing any more about it, I
>would say that the theistic and Biblical worldview has been tremendously
>validated. That is to say it's been validated in the sense that you do need a
>creator after all, but even more, what's been validated is the biblical view
>that it's a major part of the human project to get rid of the creator; because
>their deeds were evil, they did not want to honor god as God, and so instead
>they imagined various forms of idolatry and nature worship of which Darwinian
>evolution is just the most prevalent modern form. So, at this point, you say
>that not only has it been revealed that science points to the reality of a
>creator after all, but the enormously bad and self-deceptive thinking of the
>Darwinian evolutionist is something straight out of Romans 1. Without going any
>further than that, I'd say that the biblical worldview has been enormously
>affirmed. When it comes to questions like "Is it really important that the
>Genesis chronology be upheld?" or whatever, I'm more inclined to "hang loose"
>on that. For one thing, I'm very much opposed to restrictions on considering
>the evidence, and so it might be very convenient for us theologically if the
>Genesis chronology is true, and so, for that reason we might want to believe
>it, but that doesn't mean that the evidence necessarily supports it. If the
>evidence overwhelmingly says that that chronology is not true, then we can't
>make it true by wishful thinking. So, my basic inclination is to follow the
>evidence wherever it leads, and then live with the consequences of that. What
>has happened so far when we've done that is that the materialistic and
>naturalistic view that dominates our culture has been shown to be
>self-deceptive in every way. So I'm inclined to think we can afford to follow
>that program forward courageously without being afraid of what the facts will
>show.
Keith B. Miller
Department of Geology
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506
kbmill@ksu.edu
http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~kbmill/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Apr 26 2001 - 15:18:13 EDT