One of the SCP editors works part time in the Bay Area but lives up in the wilds of Northern California at the top of the great Central Valley. As part of his personal ministry he has a talk show on secular radio and has been able to induce some top authors and cultural critics to appear (via telephone) for extended conversations.

One recent guest was Phillip E. Johnson, Professor of Law at the University of California's prestigious Boalt Hall School of Law, who recently wrote Darwin on Trial, a book greeted with loud acclaim from Christian circles (such as Richard John Neuhaus of First Things magazine, an upcoming guest), and with utter disdain from entrenched Evolutionist "claques."

When asked, Prof. Johnson graciously offered to appear on the show; he returned a call on a Saturday while he was vacationing in Lake Tahoe. He and the editor reached quick rapport upon discovering that they both reveled in committing lèse majesté, and that they both thought the underlying motivation behind Materialistic Evolution was that some very intelligent thinkers smarted from being told, via the Bible or other sources, that they should submit to a Higher Authority's rules and regulations.

Although the talk show is scheduled for an hour, or at the most, ninety minutes early Saturday mornings, Johnson's show lasted almost two hours. The editor sent him a tape of the show and several weeks later received a letter from Prof. Johnson, who said that although he didn't normally listen to his own interviews, his wife had induced him to try this one.

Once listening, he got "hooked" and followed it to the end. He said he thought that of his many interviews, this was one of the best. He meant it as a compliment to us, but we think, instead, it is a tribute to this man and his important work, and to how well he expresses himself. (Indeed, his expertise in law is in dealing with the logic of legal arguments.)

Prof. Johnson and his wife, Kathie, have lived in Berkeley for many years. They attend the popular First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, which has a reputation as a Bible-expositing church and supports Christian outreaches such as the well-known Berkeley Crisis Pregnancy Center. They have long been supportive of the work of SCP.

Within the last year, Prof. Johnson has had a very busy schedule of interviews and book promotions. He's done over 50 lectures — and twice that number of talk shows. He did a tour during March, 1993, that included a law faculty colloquium at SMU [Southern Methodist U.] entitled "Is God Unconstitutional." (We're not as sure of the colloquium's human answer to this question as we are of God's divine answer. . . .)

Johnson had a luncheon debate with 1979 Nobel prizewinning physicist Steven Weinberg before a select audience of senior faculty at the U. of Texas-Austin Law School, and he spoke to the U. of Oklahoma under joint sponsorship of the Geology Department and the Law School. On May 10, 1993, he had an Op-Ed piece in The Wall St. Journal, where he reviewed Weinberg's book, Dreams of a Final Theory. [See sidebar further down.] He also has an exchange with Calvin College Physics Professor Howard J. Van Till in the June/July, 1993, issue of First Things magazine.

What follows is an edited version of Prof. Johnson's interview with us on KBLF Radio 1490 AM, "The Voice of Tehama County" in Red Bluff, California (200 miles north of Berkeley).

SCP: (Program Introduction) "His book hardly deserves to be called a book at all. It is at best a long magazine article promoted to hard cover, a clumsy, repetitious abstract argument with no weighing of evidence, no careful reading of literature of all sides, no full citations of sources, and occasional use of scientific literature only to score rhetorical points. The book, in short, is full of errors, badly argued, based on false criteria, and abysmally written." Thus sayeth Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, the most celebrated evolutionary spokesman today, in a review written for the July issue of the Scientific American.

What is this book that so upset Professor Gould that he sees red? (Which, by the way, is not an unusual political perception for him.) The book is called Darwin on Trial, and its author, University of California Law Professor Phillip E. Johnson, is with us today to discuss his critique of the logical, and perhaps factual, problems with Darwinism and the Theory of Evolution. Theory! That's the word that drives the Evolutionists crazy; theory and not fact. So stay tuned so you can, as Hercule Poirot might say, "evolve your little gray cells." However, as we'll see later on, that's probably only micro-evolution.

Good Morning, Tehama County, on Saturday, August 15, 1992, anno domini, and welcome to Conversations, a KBLF talk show featuring outspoken people from both here in Tehama County and from the uncivilized world outside. Our topics are sure to pique your interest, and maybe even get your dander up. You may not always agree with me or my guests. I won't always agree with them or with you. But you will hear some points of view that aren't often presented by North Valley media.

We'll explore the presuppositions of my guests, and, by extension, of myself and of you, the listeners. Presuppositions, of course, are those preconceived notions about reality, about knowledge and how we acquire it, and about what we think is truth. They are the biases, sometimes subconscious, that we all have — biases that color the way we view and interpret the world.

Today our guest is a man who is at the center of a storm, but this storm is not just about evolution. It seems that way only on the surface. If we look at what's fueling that storm, we see the age-old battle for who controls the culture — and thus men's minds. Modern biologists would probably like to burn his DNA at the stake or boil him in organic chemical soup. U. C. Berkeley Professor Phillip E. Johnson is the bane of the Evolutionary Fundamentalists. His ivory-tower-shaking book, Darwin on Trial, has stood much of academic biology on its ear — or, I should say, on its rudimentary auditory organ.

Phillip E. Johnson is the Jefferson E. Peyser Professor of Law at Boalt Hall at U. C. Berkeley, the very prestigious law school at the University of California. He got his Bachelor's at Harvard College, and he took his Doctor of Jurisprudence, his law degree, at the University of Chicago, where he was first in his class. He was admitted to the California Bar in 1966; he clerked for Chief Justice Traynor of the California Supreme Court; and finally, he clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren in the U. S. Supreme Court. Then he came to Cal Berkeley, where he's remained until the present day.

He's had two stints as a Deputy District Attorney (a criminal trial prosecutor) in Ventura County, California. He has been an Associate Dean at Berkeley and a visiting professor at both Emory University School of Law in Georgia and University College in London. His areas of expertise include criminal law, criminal procedure, professional responsibility, torts, and contemporary legal theory. But perhaps his main expertise is in logic, especially the analysis of arguments.

Prof. Johnson is the author of Darwin on Trial, a book recently co-published by Regnery Gateway and InterVarsity Press (with a paperback due out in late 1993), and of many papers and lectures that criticize Darwinian evolutionary theory. Let me read again part of what Stephen Jay Gould said about him in the Scientific American: "His book hardly deserves to be called a book at all. It is at best a long magazine article promoted to hard cover, a clumsy, repetitious abstract argument with no weighing of evidence, no careful reading of literature of all sides, no full citations of sources, and occasional use of scientific literature only to score rhetorical points. The book, in short, is full of errors, badly argued, based on false criteria, and abysmally written."

Prof. Phillip E. Johnson, welcome to Tehama County, where sheep outnumber cows who outnumber people, where the rattlesnakes are not the human kind, and where the spotted owl is more likely to appear on the menu than on the endangered species list. How come Stephen Jay Gould is so riled up he even missed the point of your book — or else didn't want to admit it?

JOHNSON: It's really an issue of cultural power. Gould is what you might call a great cultural guru. He is one of a small number of people who define Darwinian evolutionary theory for the culture, which means they tell us our creation story. They tell us where we came from, and what they tell us is that we came from a blind, purposeless, material process, and that our existence is an accident. That's the whole theme of his book Wonderful Life, where he concludes with a statement that this universe allows us to chart our own course, make up our own values as we like, and find whatever meaning in it we want. We can do this because there is no Creator, no purpose behind the whole enterprise, which is just an accident from a purely material process.

SCP: So man is the measure of all things.

JOHNSON: Yes, this means that man is effectively God because there's nothing higher in the whole scheme of things.

SCP: How did you come to write this book? What prompted you?

JOHNSON: I was on sabbatical leave in London for a year in 1987-88. I was a visiting professor and had very good arrangements with respect to duties: I had no duties at all. I had a lot of time available to write. It just so happens that my offices there were practically next to London's premier scientific book store. And just at that time a new book had come out called The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, who is England's answer to Stephen Jay Gould. He is the chief spokesman for and popularizer of Darwinian Evolution in Britain. He's an Oxford professor and originally an Assistant Professor at Berkeley, by the way.

His book fascinated me because the whole thesis of it is a denial of the Creator. He says that if you look at biology, it seems obvious at first glance that biological structures — complex plants and animals and even bacterial cells — are things so complicated and intricate that they must have been created by a higher intelligence for a purpose. But, he says, this is misleading. That isn't what they are at all. In fact, they're made by the Blind Watchmaker, which is random mutation and natural selection — Darwinian Evolution, which is purposeless. He proceeds to argue that thesis throughout the book. So the book is only superficially about biology. It's really a book-length argument for atheism.

SCP: But even when you talk about a Blind Watchmaker, you're personifying, and when you read other evolutionary arguments, they're personifying, too. Evolution often comes across as a personal force: Evolution causes this, or structures change because of Evolution. It's like a purposeful purposelessness, or a blind force that has foresight.

JOHNSON: If you think about it, the Blind Watchmaker is a bad metaphor. Dawkins says what makes the watchmaker blind is that nature has no purposes and no consciousness. But blind people have both purposes and consciousness. A Blind Watchmaker is just as purposeful as a Sighted Watchmaker. Dawkins is really talking about an Unconscious Watchmaker, or a watchmaker in a terminal coma, which is an absurdity.

SCP: And if we use the term unconscious from a psychological point of view, that has all sorts of purposes involved with it. Let's go back to when I was talking earlier about the Scientific American. Here's a magazine that chooses Gould to write a review, a very scathing review, of your book which I think totally misses the point . . .

JOHNSON: He didn't miss the point, but he wanted to make sure his readers did.

SCP: So he's being disingenuous.

JOHNSON: It's just a hatchet job from beginning to end.

SCP: The Scientific American is a magazine, if some people remember, that refused to hire a man to write their Amateur Scientist column because he was a Christian, a religious man. They thought that because scientists might know he was a Believer, it therefore meant he was not trustworthy to the scientific community.

JOHNSON: The kind of science they represent is essentially the use of purportedly scientific evidence in furthering Atheistic Materialism. They're very strongly ideological in that sense, just as Gould is, and they believe that anyone who doesn't agree with that should be forced out of science because they don't think as properly as a scientist should.

SCP: So science is defined by those people who do not believe in a Higher Power, and, of course, in the process of defining, they assume power for themselves. In your case, you said in your book, right up front, that you are a theistic Christian, meaning that God is alive and well and working in the universe.

JOHNSON: Yes, but I should say that this [disbelief in a Higher Power] is a particular form, a particular ideology within science, within the greater scientific world. There are a whole lot of people who work with computers, with electricity and things like that, whose science has nothing to do with this ideology. In fact, they're often studying things like computer circuits that are the works of human intelligence. So they use the idea of purposeful intelligence all the time. Evolution theory is a branch of science that purports to tell the creation story, how life arose and how humans came into existence. So it's not science at all, if one defines science as being based on experiment. It's a particular philosophical position that has taken over the culture in our educational institutions.

SCP: When you read magazines such as Scientific American or Discover, or if you look at documentaries on PBS or the Discovery Channel, especially ones about animals, you get a litany of evolution, evolution, evolution. It's like a buzz word you can't escape. One wonders if they're trying to convince themselves by saying it so much.

JOHNSON: They're trying to cure people of what they regard as a superstition: that there is a Creator up there who is responsible for our existence and has a purpose for us.

SCP: One of the things I've often thought is that evolutionary theory, per se, is like an overlay that really doesn't add much to the pragmatics of science and technology. What does the truth or falsity of evolution have to do with a heart transplant, with what kind of crops you grow, or with what sort of circuits are in your computer?

JOHNSON: In some respects evolution is dead against true scientific understanding. For example, if you notice the way molecular biologists talk and write when they are speaking of cellular protein synthesis — the DNA and RNA and all — they speak about libraries of genetic information which are translated, coded, decoded, and read by components in the cell. It's all the language of intelligence and intelligent communication. And then, if you ask how this came about, the Evolutionists will say this came about through blind, materialistic processes with no intelligence at all involved. It's really contrary to the true science of what they're doing.

SCP: Please define Materialism.

JOHNSON: I don't mean it in the vulgar sense, where it means greedy, but in the philosophical sense, as the doctrine that the only reality, the only thing that really exists, is matter. For example, the thoughts in your mind would be fundamentally some kind of emanation from the matter in your brain. Materialism is often used in connection with a concept called reductionism, that everything can be reduced to matter. This means we can reduce your thoughts, understand them completely, in terms of the electrons or other particles inside your brain. So if we knew everything about the matter in your brain, we'd know everything about your thoughts.

SCP: But that's a problem, for we're going from the phenomenal, from the Greek work "to appear," to the noumenal, from the Greek word for "mind." You can empirically grasp that someone is dreaming from observing rapid eye movements and certain brain wave patterns that appear; those are phenomena. But a dream, which occurs noumenally in the mind, is not the same thing as certain patterns of neurons firing in your brain. There's a big difference. Here we get away from Materialism into the realm of Vitalism, meaning there's a vital (or life) force outside of the material universe.

JOHNSON: Darwinian ideologists, like the Nobel prizewinner Francis Crick, who along with Gould and Dawkins is another major spokesman for this whole movement, are absolutely determined, as Crick puts it, "to exorcise the ghost of Vitalism from biology." That's Crick's whole life project. Vitalism refers to the idea that there's something in the life process other than the material. It could be God, as Christians or Jews would speak of that, or perhaps some other spiritual life force inherent in matter. The point is, it denies that the mindless motions of material particles can explain everything.

SCP: Vitalism also encompasses the idea of the soul. When the material body dies, the soul goes out of it. And you can't measure a soul on scientific instruments.

JOHNSON: Yes, anything like that would be totally unacceptable to a materialist. But this also has to do with power, with cultural power. If you say, "We are natural scientists, and we study only that which is material," does that encompass everything? If not, if there's something else that's very important that's outside of the material, then natural science does not understand and control everything, even in principle. But if matter is all that exists, then natural scientists are the ones we should look to for authority about everything, including morals, values, et cetera.

SCP: So if we're talking about power and authority, this whole argument seems, in religious terms, to boil down to Genesis 3, the story of Adam and Eve, the story of trying to "be as gods." We were talking about Francis Crick, the man who discovered DNA. Even though he puts down Vitalism, didn't Francis Crick say that perhaps our life, earth's life, came from somewhere in outer space? Though I suppose he's still being materialistic; one doesn't need an élan vital, a vitalistic life force, to presuppose mechanistic, materialistic life anywhere in the universe.

JOHNSON: His thesis is the materialist version of supernatural creation. Crick is a good enough scientist to know that when he studied the origin-of-life field — that's the first origin of the first simple cell — he saw he couldn't solve it, that in fact even the simplest biological organisms are extremely complicated and there's no evidence for step-by-step development from non-living chemicals to that first cell. The simplest things you see are already in separate groups which are quite different from each other.

So Crick essentially gave up on the problem of what's called chemical evolution, which is how chemicals became living. So he said something like, "You know how this must have happened? It must have happened somewhere on the other side of the universe where conditions are totally different from those on earth at any time in its history. Then life evolved into advanced beings, who saw that their solar system was going to be destroyed and there was nothing they could do about it. So they put some of their bacteria on a space ship and sent it off to the farthest ends of the universe. It happened to land on Earth, and that's how the first living things got here."

SCP: It sounds like a certain comic book, the one about the planet Krypton.

JOHNSON: It's just supernatural creation in materialist guise. That civilization on the other side of the universe is something we'd never be able to observe. It's as invisible as the supernatural. That was what Crick was reduced to.

SCP: Professor Johnson, let's define some terms. What is meant by "Darwinian Evolution"?

JOHNSON: Darwinian Evolution doesn't just mean that things developed by some gradual process over a long period of time. What it means is that all living things developed from non-living things more distantly, and from simpler living things more immediately, through a process of change which is the same thing as the natural reproduction we see today. Grandparents give birth to parents, who give birth to children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

The idea is, if you just extend this natural process of reproduction back in time over millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, and billions of years, you see that it all goes back to a single parental organism, a bacterium, which gives birth to all these distant children. Nothing is involved except purely random variations and natural selection, which just means that some things are better at surviving and leave more offspring than other things. And that's all that's involved in it.

SCP: Perhaps to put it in more layman-like terms, if my wife and I have taller kids, they'll play basketball better, get more money, have more kids, survive better, et cetera.

JOHNSON: But of course it doesn't always work that way, because the shorter and thus poorer may have more children. Darwinian Evolutionists talk about natural selection being a guiding force and the opposite of chance; it plays the role of God in the system. But in fact, there's no way to tell in Darwinian terms which organism is more fit than another one, other than to see if it left more offspring.

SCP: Isn't that the argument from tautology that you talk about?

JOHNSON: Yes, in almost all of its uses natural selection is a tautology. It's just a way of saying something meaningless: that the organisms which leave the most offspring are the ones which leave the most offspring. In very specialized ways you can state natural selection so that it can actually be tested, but it has no ideological importance then since it's not a great Creator.

SCP: Yes, natural selection seems to imply that Someone, or Something, is doing the selecting. How would it be tested?

JOHNSON: The most famous example, which is often cited as evidence to prove the whole Darwinian creation story, is the peppered-moth phenomenon in the midlands of England. Some of them were light and some dark. When the trees were dark with industrial smoke, there were more dark moths, and when the trees got cleaned up, there were more white ones again.

SCP: The idea being that a dark moth against a dark tree would have more protection from a predator . . .

JOHNSON: From the birds that eat them. Actually, by the way, the observation is very doubtful. It's been criticized in its own terms, but there's no need to worry about that. The main point is, it doesn't prove very much, even on the assumption that it was the coloring's protection that created the population shift. But to the Darwinist mentality, a little thing like that is enough to prove natural selection can make birds, orchids, and human beings.

SCP: How about breeding dogs? Isn't that an example of evolution? Getting better and better dogs?

JOHNSON: There are two things to know about the breeding of domestic animals. In the first place, it only brings out the variation already present in the gene pool. That is, dogs happen to be an unusually plastic species in the sense that you can get more change out of dogs than, for example, cats. Look at the difference between Chihuahuas, all sizes of Poodles, and Great Danes. There's a lot of variation, but they're all dogs. And what that means essentially is that they're all inter-fertile and can reproduce with one another. If people went away, what you'd get is one type of dog. The specialized breeds would all vanish, and you'd get back to one simpler breed.

SCP: I saw a documentary on that. The generic breed is usually the one you find in the slum areas of the great cities of the world, the sort of non-descript yellow dog somewhat like a Labrador Retriever.

JOHNSON: The other thing to understand about domestic animal breeding or plant cultivation or any of those things that bring out variation — like getting new types of orchids — is that this is an activity that achieves a limited change because a purposeful human intelligence is directing it. You see, it's really an example of a limited form of creation, because it requires the human breeder to have a purpose to pursue a goal. [See sidebar below.] Nonetheless, such purposeful breeding is claimed to prove the Blind Watchmaker thesis, which is an example of the totally bad thinking that just permeates Darwinian biology. This is the major reason why I took up the fight to expose them, for I could tell these people do not think logically.

SCP: Don't they really start with a foregone conclusion and work backwards?

JOHNSON: That's it in a nutshell. I can explain the whole system to you in just a couple of minutes.

SCP: Please do!

JOHNSON: Darwinian Evolution depends upon two philosophical assumptions, one about the nature of reality [ontology, or metaphysics] and the other about the rules of scientific investigation [epistemology]. The first assumption is Materialism, which means that matter is all that there is; there's no God, no Creator, so Nature had to do its own creating. That means the Blind Watchmaker thesis is true by definition — that is, Purposeless Nature had to do the creating, because there isn't anything else.

SCP: So, if there is no god, there must be no purpose.

JOHNSON: There must be no purpose until purpose evolves from matter in the form of human beings. There can't be any pre-existing purpose or intelligence. Matter has to do its own creating. That's the first assumption. The second assumption, which is just as important, is that Science always has to have the answer to how we were created. You can't say, "We just don't know." That's not allowed. As soon as you have an idea that has a certain plausibility and is generally accepted by the investigators, then that is true, that's fact. And it can be improved, but it can never be just discarded so you'd have to go back to scratch.

This is tremendously important because the Darwinian scientists, themselves, like Steven J. Gould, for example, are perfectly aware that there isn't really any persuasive evidence that mutation and selection can make complex organs. Gould, himself, has written — this is one reason he's so angry at me, for he knows I've figured out what he's really saying — that neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is effectively dead, despite it's persistence as textbook orthodoxy. Many people know it isn't consistent with the evidence.

SCP: And this hasn't hit the textbooks, for there's a seven to ten year lag between current wisdom and wide publication. Our high school and grade school students — probably even college and graduate students — are now learning the old arguments, not the new ones like you present, assuming your ideas would even get published.

JOHNSON: Yes, it's much more than a seven to ten year lag. If the Goulds and the Darwinians have their way, it'll be a lag that goes on forever, for their rule is: You cannot just say Darwinian theory is wrong, that natural selection cannot do that creating because the evidence doesn't support the idea; what you have to do is supply a better idea, which means another material, and thus purposeless, creating mechanism. You see, there must always be one of these mechanisms in place at any given time. Otherwise, you would have a vacuum, and you know what would come into that vacuum . . .

SCP: The G-word.

JOHNSON: Yes, God. The Creator. Then you would have people considering the possibility that God exists, that there might be a Creator responsible for our existence. And the whole point of the Darwinian system is to get rid of that idea, which people like Gould hate very much.

SCP: Why do they hate it?

JOHNSON: That's always a major part of the human project, to get rid of God so we can be utterly self-sufficient and on our own. Darwinian Evolution did a better job of getting rid of the Creator than any other system. It's really the foundation for everything that's happened since. Remember Richard Dawkins, the British Darwinist I was quoting before, the author of The Blind Watchmaker? Well, he says in his book that the great thing about Darwin is that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually-fulfilled atheist. And Gould says exactly the same thing. He says that before Darwin, we thought we were created by a Benevolent Creator, but now we know better.

SCP: Yes, this goes along with the argument there cannot be a creator, because there is evil in the world. I think Einstein thought this way.

JOHNSON: The point is, the universe is purposeless, and our existence is an accident — and that's a good thing. The Darwinists welcome this conclusion because it means we're on our own. It means we can do whatever we like and invent our own values. It also means that everything is over at death. There's nothing beyond death. They like to say, "You can't say we want to believe that," but, of course, they do want to believe it because they don't like the idea they might be held to account after death. So we have just this life, but we own it completely and are responsible to no one but ourselves.

SCP: Let me change tack for awhile. When was it that Darwin took his voyage and wrote his book? Wasn't this just before the time of Marx and Freud?

JOHNSON: He published The Origin of Species in 1859. Marx was greatly inspired by Darwin. He thought Darwin had made the great contribution to establish the metaphysical basis to his own system, Marxism, which, of course, has the same basis as Darwinism — Materialism.

SCP: By the way, Stephen J. Gould has been on public record for a long time as being a Marxist, hasn't he?

JOHNSON: Yes, one of the interesting things about Evolutionary Biology is that two of its most famous proponents, Gould and his colleague at Harvard, Richard Lewontin, have both proudly proclaimed Marxist inspiration for their biology. But if somebody said, "I got an inspiration from biblical theism for my biology," they'd be out of the profession. It would be professional suicide.

SCP: The kiss of death, or perhaps more to the point, an evolutionary blind alley.

JOHNSON: But Marxism is still fashionable in those circles. That's the only place you find anyone who believes in Marxism any more — at places like Harvard, where they're a little out of touch with reality.

SCP: Or at Berkeley, should I say?

JOHNSON: The Berkeley faculty is not what everyone imagines it to be. There are, of course, people in the Hard Left, but there's a good mix of opinion with a lot of people in the Center and a lot of different kinds of views. It's not the single-mindedly ideologically Left place that one would imagine — among either faculty or students.

SCP: I have a feel for some of the students, because I've spent time "hanging out" around the campus, at both a church I used to attend next to campus and at SCP, which is over in the old American Baptist seminary right across from People's Park. I've sure noticed the difference, that there seems to be a lot more students interested in academia today than, say, the 60s and 70s. But of course, certain professors now complain that the students are losing their vision, meaning that they're not blindly following that professor's ideology.

JOHNSON: Unfortunately, a very small number of people among both students and faculty have had the ability to capture the agenda of the media. You really don't hear from the sensible people nearly as often as from the crazies.

SCP: I read several years ago, in the magazine Chronicles, that people such as Captain Cook were sent to the South Seas partly to find places that were utopias, much like Tahiti or the Trobriand Islands have had the reputation of being. Finding utopias would have given impetus to undermine institutions like the Church of England, which, at that time, at least, was based on Original Sin. Do you think any such motivation underlay Darwin's voyage?

JOHNSON: I don't know anything to support that. Darwin went under the leadership of Captain Fitzroy, whose predominant mission was to map the coastline of South America. Darwin was taken along on the voyage because Fitzroy wanted a gentleman, someone of his own social standing, to be his companion because it's rather lonely being the captain of a ship. So Darwin was really there to keep Fitzroy company.

One of the interesting things about this — and by the way, Gould has written a rather nice essay about it — is that Fitzroy was a very domineering kind of person, brilliant but mentally unstable (he committed suicide later on). He was a Fundamentalist and inclined to dominate the conversation. Gould thought that it was resentment from having to listen to Fitzroy for five years, confined in the cabin of that little ship, that lead Darwin to take such a strongly materialistic line in his theory of evolution. That's the human element in what they call science.

SCP: That's interesting. You know, as much as I slam Gould for some of his thinking and his politics, the man is a gifted writer. I love reading his stuff, but it is very seductive.

JOHNSON: I agree, and when he's dealing with subjects where he feels safe, he can even be quite generous in his judgments. But if you push his ideological button, then he goes crazy. That's what happened with my book, for he feels tremendously threatened.

SCP: Yes, you drew blood.

JOHNSON: That was clear. One eminent biochemist wrote to me and said, "You must have struck a vital organ because he [Gould] was so obviously out of control and upset." What he's upset about is that somebody outside this elite circle of Scientific Materialists will start examining the philosophical assumptions of the Darwinian system and will expose it.

What Gould has to say is, "We know all these things we're telling you are true because we know more biology than you do. Not because we have a different philosophy than you do." He knows that as biologists, they have no authority to impose their philosophy on the world, so they call it biology, instead. That's why he's so sensitive on this point and just got out of control when he wrote his review about my book.

SCP: If you look at people who teach science, very few have had much more than a course or two in evolution and evolutionary theory, if they've had that at all. And the course has probably not been a critical course, meaning that it looked at both sides of the issue.

JOHNSON: No, certainly not!

SCP: I've been guilty of teaching evolution for years, back when I taught in college. It was just part of the whole psychology curriculum. "Evolution is reality; here's what it is; no questions, are there? Good! Now, on to the next subject."

JOHNSON: That's it.

SCP: How about another presupposition? This may be a bit esoteric for our listening audience, but I assume you're familiar with Plato's Theory of Plenitude. I got this from a book you may well have read, I forget the title right now, but it was by Lovejoy. The Great . . .

JOHNSON: The Great Chain of Being! A very famous book.

SCP: It was one of the William James Memorial Lectures at Harvard in the 1930s, and it was a series of lectures given to undergraduates, graduates, and faculty. If you read that book, you realize what sort of education those people had to have in those days. He's quoting different classics; he's giving phrases in different languages. People were expected to know that and follow along. It's just amazing. Talk about de-evolution of education . . .

JOHNSON: Oh yes, educational standards are a whole lot lower today.

SCP: It's my understanding that Plato's Theory of Plenitude meant that the Creator, or First Cause, had to have created everything possible that could have been created. Anything that could be imagined as an Ideal or Platonic Form had to have been created, so there could have been no gaps. Therefore, it is illogical, using this chain of reasoning, to think that there might be gaps. When you study evolution, you're forced to think that A begets B begets C begets D, with no way to leave any gap at all.

JOHNSON: That's a good point. If you look at the actual observational evidence of the world, you see gaps everywhere. Things are organized in types. Every mammal is a mammal, and nothing else. And there's a huge gap between mammals and reptiles. There's a huge gap between plants and animals. But you do find some creatures who have characteristics of more than one thing, like the platypus. However, when you look at them in a more profound way, they fit within one type and not in between types. You just have to understand what all of the types are.

One of the things the Darwinian ideology says is that all this is an illusion, for you're seeing only one snapshot in time, whereas if you saw the time dimension, all of the gaps would be filled with all of these intermediate creatures which existed and are the links between the separate types that we see today in the living world.

SCP: Professor Johnson, let's look at some of the evidence you've mustered to show that we cannot call Darwinian theory anything else but a theory.

JOHNSON: I would put it stronger. It's just not a viable theory at all. It's a theory that's been disconfirmed by all independent investigation.

SCP: That's quite a mouthful! Say more!

JOHNSON: I've already mentioned that there is no experimental confirmation for the claim that random mutations and natural selection can create complex organs, such as eyes and wings, or even something like a bacterial cell, which is extremely complicated in its own right.

SCP: Say more about the problem of evolving an eye or an arm.

JOHNSON: Imagine evolving a computer with not only its hardware, but also all the software, all of the complex instructions. Or trying to evolve a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The information content in even a single cell is much greater than in the entire set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Try to imagine how, by stirring together a big pot of chemicals — all the ingredients of ink and paper — that you could get the Encyclopedia Britannica out the other end. Now you begin to see what the problem of Evolutionary Biology is. Things are enormously more complicated than Darwin recognized.

SCP: But don't they usually say, for instance, that a certain organism might have two or three cells that act somewhat like a rudimentary eye?

JOHNSON: In fact, there are many different types of eyes. There are over forty different types of eyes, and some of them are much simpler than others, much more rudimentary. However, the Evolutionary Biologists, themselves, concede that these are all different types of structures, so that they don't form any kind of sequence where one could have developed out of the other. The dean of Evolutionary Biology, Ernst Mayr, who's Gould's senior colleague at Harvard, says that the eye must have evolved independently at least forty times. "So therefore," he says, "it's not as difficult as it appears, because it's happened so often."

SCP: That's Evolutionary Fundamentalism. They believe and use only their own scriptures. But they ought to believe in Biblical miracles, as well, because they happened so often, too . . .

JOHNSON: Well, Progressive Evolution is essentially a miracle, because the only real evidence of natural selection is in its conservative sense. That is, what natural selection does is to prevent evolution, in the sense that when there are mutations, they are almost always harmful and hence get weeded out. The mutant babies die because they're incapable of surviving. So what natural selection does is to keep things within the type. But the big problem with Darwinian theory is on the mutation side. They have to imagine mutations can produce this new information, that mutations can write the Encyclopedia Britannica, as it were . . .

SCP: So if we don't have eyes, then somehow an organism in the next generation gets one or two eye cells, which are somehow advantageous to living. And miraculously, this organism meets another organism with the same mutation, or else the new mutation is dominant . . .

JOHNSON: That's how Dawkins does it. He says you can sort of imagine — it's always easy for him to imagine whatever he wants to — that a cell might somehow develop that was light sensitive so the organism could move to or away from the light, which would be an advantage. What this kind of speculation — and that's all it is — neglects is that you have to have not only the ability to perceive something, light or whatever, but also the brain equipment to act on that. The brain has to be able to read it and then direct the organism to do something. So you're already dealing with several levels of complexity that have to occur all at once.

SCP: Isn't that why Gould formulated his saltational theory, postulating evolutionary leaps and jumps because he couldn't explain it by gradual, continual change?

JOHNSON: Gould recognizes the problem. He's said the same things scientifically that I say. For vision, which includes brain parts as well as eye parts, he says you have to have this vast, complex system that's all in place. All the parts have to be there at least in rudimentary form for it to make any sense, and an organism having only five percent of those parts just doesn't make any sense. So you have to imagine some system where they all appear at once.

SCP: And "saltational" comes from the Latin verb "to jump" . . .

JOHNSON: A jump into something new, all at once. That's what we might call a Darwinian miracle.

SCP: And Gould talked about something like the "serendipitous monster"? . . .

JOHNSON: The Hopeful Monster.

SCP: So somehow there would be this jump, instead of the slow, gradual change over eons of time that characterizes classical Darwinism.

JOHNSON: That's right. Remember what I said earlier in the program. The basic idea of Darwinism is that it's just natural reproduction writ over long periods of time. That means that any change — like from an ape to a human, or from a rat to a whale — has to be by tiny, tiny steps, each of which has to be not only capable of surviving, but actually more capable of surviving and reproducing than its predecessor. These are the assumptions of natural selection.

SCP: Let's talk about two lines of proof or disproof for this. One would be the fossil record, and the other would be physiological, like the Cytochrome C progression. Let's talk about the fossil record first.

JOHNSON: The fossil record has always been the bane of Darwinists. In Darwin's own time, his great opponents were not clergymen, for the Church of England accepted the whole thing very readily. And most of the intellectual clergy did, even very conservative ones, oddly enough, because they didn't have the stomach for a war against science. Their critical faculties were somewhat dimmed, and they were intimidated.

The great opponents of Darwin were the fossil experts, who said, "We just don't see any evidence of step-by-step progression anywhere in the fossil record. New things seem to appear in rocks which are dated in different ages, but whenever they appear, they're just like they are today. They don't change. Or if they appeared closer to the beginning of time and later go out of the fossil record as extinct, they still remain unchanged."

So Darwin said, "The explanation for this must be that the fossil record is so incomplete that you've missed all the step-by-step links that really existed." So he appealed to the invisible to support his theory.

SCP: And I've heard that even today. I heard Professor Vincent Sarich at your own university talk, and he said, "Just give us more money, and we'll find all those fossils that are missing."

JOHNSON: Well, they've been trying to do that for a hundred and thirty years, and in fact they will no doubt find something. Scientists will tend to say they found what they want to find. That's how one get grants and promotions.

SCP: How about archaeopteryx, meaning "ancient bird," the fossil thought to show a missing link between reptiles and birds?

JOHNSON: Archaeopteryx was discovered right after the publication of Darwin's Origins. It was an ancient bird with very reptile-like features. Some people are still claiming it's a fraud, but I don't have an opinion on that. I assume it's genuine, in which case it is one item that could, conceivably, be a link between reptiles and birds if you have good enough reason, on other grounds, to believe that such a transition occurred. Recently, a scientist has said that he found a true bird which is much older than archaeopteryx, which would take it out of any possible line of succession. But that's disputed, too.

You see, the will to believe was so strong that this one instance of a possible confirmation of one step out of millions that would have had to occurred — this one instance was regarded as proof of the whole theory. Then the theory became a fact, and then everybody said, "Well, Darwin explained the fossil record is incomplete, so the fossil record is just what Darwin said it should be." So, even the incompleteness proves the theory!

SCP: I'd like to call attention to a lecture you gave to the Southwestern Anthropological Association. You talk about how one can take the fossil data, what's really there, and how one can put a few twists and turns on it to make it into a presentation of evidence. It's of special interest to me, since I work part of the week in San Francisco and my office is just south of Golden Gate Park, about one city block away from the California Academy of Sciences, where there is a huge exhibit called "Life through Time, the Evidence for Evolution."

JOHNSON: I love to take people there and show them how the facts are distorted in order to make Darwinian theory convincing.

SCP: Can you give us a verbal picture?

JOHNSON: The greatest example is something that they call the "Hard Facts Wall." This relates to the origins of the basic animal groups, the phyla, the largest groupings in the animal (and plant) kingdoms. Like Echinodermata or Arthropoda. And Chordata, of which we Vertebrates are a part. The point is, if you look at the animal phyla, they were always fixed. The earliest specimens come up in the Cambrian or immediately Pre-Cambrian rocks, dated 500-600 million years ago. That's when the phyla begin, and they are always completely separate. There is no fossil evidence, whatever, linking them by any kind of Darwinian process to the simple one-celled forms that came before. It's called the Cambrian Explosion, and it's been conceded since Darwin's day to be a great mystery in terms of evolution.

SCP: So there were many different species and phyla in that era without any precursors?

JOHNSON: Yes, many phyla with an uncountable number of species. How did they arise? Well, if there were a step-by-tiny-step process from single-celled predecessors, then Nature went to a whole lot of trouble to conceal that, because the evidence that anything like that occurred is just completely lacking. Now, what they do in this museum exhibit is to show you the fossils of the phyla, but if you look closely, they're all on parallel lines. They never meet. There's nothing connecting the lines to each other. Then they draw in the connections, they draw in the common ancestors, and where the lines cross, they put a magnifying glass right over the intersection.

What this is clearly designed to do is to give you the impression that if you'd look through that magnifying glass carefully enough, you'd see an ancestor! In short, they don't tell you what is purely reconstruction via the imagination of the museum curators, and what is actually fact. They want to keep you confused on that difference.

SCP: So they're forcing the evidence.

JOHNSON: Oh yes! Because the purpose of the exhibit is to get you to believe so you'll have the proper scientific outlook to understand that what the Stephen Jay Goulds of the world tell you is true, and so that you won't listen to those people who tell you something different.

SCP: Such as Professor Phillip E. Johnson! Well, the priests have evolved from centuries ago, where those telling us how to live did it from the pulpit. Now, the bully pulpit has shifted to Biology and even to my own profession — and I cringe — of Psychology. Most so-called "Life Scientists" and "Social Scientists" are firm believers in evolution.

We are doing our own saltational radio show today, jumping around from topic to topic, so let's leap to the Piltdown Man. People today often seem to say, "Scientists just couldn't be wrong," but hundreds, perhaps thousands, of doctoral dissertations were written about what turned out to be a hoax.

JOHNSON: It was used for over forty years to show people how Darwinian Evolution occurred. Then, when they had some other fossils and decided to change the theory, then it became inconvenient, so they belatedly discovered that it had been a fraud all along.

SCP: In capsule form, what was the Piltdown Man?

JOHNSON: The Piltdown Man purported to show a large brain with an ape jaw. It was consistent with a version of human evolution from apes that said the big brain evolved first, and then the upright posture and other body features later. The Piltdown Man was a fraud. It was a putting together of different fossils to make a fraudulent structure. It was "found" in the Piltdown area of England. Three senior researchers of the British Museum received knighthoods for their work on this! Also involved with it was Fr. Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest who tried to change the Catholic religion into a worship of Evolution.

Nobody really knows for sure which of these people were guilty of fraud and which were duped. But they all got their rewards, and as long as it was convenient, this was a perfectly genuine fossil. Then, when the people who got the credit for the discovery had passed from the scene, except for Teilhard, more tests were done, and it was discovered to be a fraud. It was a welcome conclusion to the physical anthropologists of that time because they had shifted their theory on the basis of some fossils from China, which Fr. Teilhard de Chardin had also been involved with, and which were presented showing the upright posture evolved first while the brain was still small. So you see, there was a contradiction with the Piltdown Man, who was now inconvenient.

The whole chronology of this will show you how biased the field has been. There were suspicions all along that Piltdown Man was a fraud, and they could have been checked out. But the thing was locked away in a safe in the British Natural History Museum, and hardly anybody was allowed to examine it.

SCP: So the plot does thicken . . .

JOHNSON: Oh yes! The real scandal of Piltdown Man is not the original fraud, that's scandal enough. The real scandal is that the officials of the British Natural History Museum kept it from any independent investigation until it became inconvenient.

SCP: So you're saying the fossil record is not really good evidence for the theory of evolution.

JOHNSON: In some ways. But it depends on what you mean by evolution. The fossil record seems consistent with a picture that very simple things, the bacteria, existed before the more complex things. But what it's inconsistent with is any step-by-step process of development between the two.

SCP: How about the genetic and chemical ideas presented to supposedly reinforce the theory of evolution? Michael Denton, in his book, Evolution, a Theory in Crisis, spoke of Cytochrome C, a chemical in our bodies that helps convert glucose, simple sugar, into bodily energy stored as ATP in the process called oxidative phosphorylation. Somehow, the chemical structures of the various Cytochrome Cs of different animals give a way of plotting how close together, or how far apart, those respective animals are in terms of their chemical, and perhaps genetic, make-up.

JOHNSON: Let me paint a broader picture. When Darwin wrote Origins in 1859, he said that the most important argument he had, the one that would convince him that his theory was true, no matter what the other evidence showed, was the argument from classification.

Now this means that living things are arranged in categories, like mammals, plants, reptiles, and so forth. There's a whole system of classification so that you can put everything in its particular group. Some things are much more like other things than they are like some third thing. Humans, for example, are much more like apes than they are like rabbits, and yet they're more like rabbits, which are also mammals, than they are like snakes, and yet they're more like snakes than they are like trees.

So, the Darwinian theory was that the way you accounted for this arrangement of groups within groups was that the groups which were relatively similar had descended from a common ancestor relatively recently, which might still be millions of years ago, and the more distant groups, like plants and animals, had a common ancestor much further back in history. So, the common ancestry thesis, if it's true, explained classification.

What the Cytochrome C evidence shows is that you can do classification studies not only on the whole animal, but on individual proteins and enzymes, or on DNA — on molecules, that is to say, within those animals. And by analyzing the chemical composition of these proteins, you can discover that some proteins from two different animals are more like each other than they are those of a third creature.

SCP: So my Cytochrome C is closer to an ape's than it would be to my Poodle or to the rattlesnakes down my road.

JOHNSON: Exactly. And what you get out of the newer classification by proteins is roughly the same system as the older classification by grosser bodily characteristics. It's not identical. Different molecules give you different systems, and the molecular people get into arguments with the physical classifiers. But those are over the relatively detailed questions. In rough outline, they're comparable. This gives you some confidence that the classification system is real; that is, it reflects the real property of the biological world rather than just something in our imaginations.

SCP: But what the Cytochrome C classification doesn't show is the expected orderly progression up the so-called evolutionary ladder.

JOHNSON: And it doesn't, in itself, answer the question of how this all came about. Darwinian Evolution, descent with modification, the common ancestry thesis — however you want to put it — is a theory about how you get these groups into existence. And it's an interesting theory, but to say that it's interesting, that it's important, isn't to say that things necessarily really happened that way.

What the Darwinians do, you see, is to use words to trick themselves, and then other people. They'll say, "This group arrangement of nature is what we mean by evolution." They call them "evolutionary groups." They call the relationships between them "evolutionary relationships." And then the word "evolution" means "Darwinism" in their minds. Simply out of the semantic identification they get a whole theory of causation. The theory is true just by definition; it doesn't require any evidence. So the fact, for example, that the fossil evidence just doesn't fit with it shows something's wrong with those fossils.

SCP: So the theory itself is sacrosanct. It's Truth.

JOHNSON: One of the things I found early on in my research, which just fascinated me, is that with people who've been thoroughly indoctrinated in Darwinist ways of thinking, which includes almost any professor of Evolutionary Biology, the indoctrination is so complete that they're unable even to frame in their minds the kinds of questions I'm asking. So if you ask where Darwinism is true. . .

SCP: It just doesn't compute. Nolo computare.

JOHNSON: Yes, they don't understand what you could possibly mean. Of course it's true, it's Science, and that's better than Truth! If you're asking if Darwinism is true, you're asking if Science is true, and that's like asking if Truth is true. It just doesn't make any sense to them.

SCP: Now, you don't necessarily subscribe to that point of view called Creation Science. And, of course, Evolutionists would say Creation Science is an oxymoron, a redundancy in terms, the work of the hated Biblical Fundamentalists who believe in a literal six-day creation. I should say I've had some of them on this show, people from the Institute for Creation Research, and they've acquitted themselves well. But that's not what you believe, is it?

JOHNSON: That's right. You see, I felt it was tremendously necessary, in order to clarify this whole issue, to get the Bible vs. Science conflict out of it because the Darwinists use this as propaganda to maintain their own system. What they want you to believe is that the only real problem here is that some people insist in believing the Bible rather than Scientific Evidence, and that these are all people who hold to that six-day, young-earth theory, and that if you have any doubts about that — if you think it might be older than six thousand years, or that the six days might have been metaphorical — then you're really an Evolutionist and really in the camp of the Darwinists. And then you get into their system, their vocabulary, their philosophical concepts, only to have them tell you later what those really mean.

SCP: So, you're being a real outlaw just by saying, "Hey, I might not fall right into the Strict Creationist camp, but I'm not falling into your camp." That puts you into a classification that doesn't fit into their system.

JOHNSON: From the Darwinist point of view, anyone who does not buy into the materialist philosophy is a Creationist.

SCP: I'm not sure exactly what I believe in all of this, either, other than there is a Transcendent, Immanent Creator — God. As I said before, I've spoken with Creation Scientists, and they have some interesting things to say. For instance, they have a fascinating video tape about Mt. St. Helens which shows its eruption created a flood condition that in several weeks carved out valleys and gullies that we used to think took millions of years. And though you don't hear about it much, I do know that in geology, theories of catastrophe are gaining prominence.

JOHNSON: It is now becoming fashionable to attribute extinctions to asteroid impacts. This is a major break with Darwinian tradition.

SCP: Another interesting question people could raise to wild-eyed Evolutionary Fundamentalists is this: why, if there is no purpose, did we evolve upward? Why didn't we stay as blue-green algae, where we had a perfect "ecological niche."

JOHNSON: That's right. In fact, one Evolutionary Biologist who was making fun of his own system said that if reproductive success were all that evolution is about, then certainly the process ought to have stopped with the rabbit . . .

SCP: Or the insects, who rule the earth in terms of weight . . .

JOHNSON: Or the bacteria! It all makes no sense at all. It's a series of circular statements. Part of the reason the system is kept going is that it's identified with Science, and everything that opposes it is said to be Religion. And in scientific discourse that means it's myth, fairy tale, superstition. To be realistic and rational is to believe in Darwinism.

SCP: Actually, what you've done — your committing lèse majesté, injuring the dignity of the king, so to speak — was to question Darwinism, no matter how innocently. That's treason!

JOHNSON: I wanted to get at the main issue. The age of the earth and how you should interpret the Bible — all these are interesting and important questions, and I'm not going to ridicule people who take different views on this. I don't know what I think about it all, either. But to me, the main question is: "Is there a purposeful, intelligent Creator, or is it true that we are the results of this blind, materialistic process?" And is it true that these experts actually know what they're talking about when they say that their science has proved Materialism. It occurred to me that they don't know what they're talking about, and that they aren't telling the truth.

SCP: Stephen Jay Gould has intimated in some of his writings that if some different roads were taken in evolution, we might have turned out much differently than we did.

JOHNSON: That's just the philosophical side of Gould. There's nothing in the fossil evidence that he examines, or any other scientific evidence, that supports these philosophical ideas.

SCP: Let's talk about evolution in education. How is evolutionary theory transmitted, given, lectured, or handed down to our school children?

JOHNSON: Darwinian Fundamentalists are making a tremendous push to turn the science curricula of the public schools into a straightforward indoctrination in their philosophical system. And they've been tremendously successful. That is what the new California Science Framework is all about. It's being adopted now in Texas. It's the directions from the state educational authorities to the curriculum planners, and especially the textbook publishers, as to how they should present things in their textbooks. The message is very clear. The main purpose is to indoctrinate students so that they believe in the Darwinian system.

SCP: It's also interesting to see how much Darwinian thought has filtered into other professions — especially law, an area in which you might have a bit of expertise. . . .

JOHNSON: I was traveling a few months ago when Clarence Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court was getting all that publicity. And I was fascinated by the talk about Natural Law, and whether there is such a thing as Natural Law. And I happened to have a book of jurisprudence with me, a book on judicial philosophy by one of the most famous judges and law professors in America, Richard Posner of the University of Chicago and the U. S. Court of Appeals. I looked up what Posner had to say. He said, "Of course there's no such thing as Natural Law," by which he means any objective standard of right and wrong outside of human experience.

Posner goes on to say that "educated" people today know that Nature is a Darwinian system of ruthless competition; therefore, you can't derive any morality from Nature. This view that the Darwinians have established as fact — the Materialist Creation Story — is the basis of philosophies of all kinds, including legal philosophy, throughout our universities. Everybody just takes it for granted. They've never heard that there's any problems about it.

SCP: Aren't there arguments that the Constitution is evolving?

JOHNSON: Yes. What has happened is that Scientific Materialism, or Naturalism — the philosophical ideology behind Darwinism — has become the established religion of America. It's being established in the educational system in the sense that students are being taught that Scientific Materialism is what rational thinking is. So, the Constitution, which was set up to prevent an establishment of religion, is essentially being used to establish a religious position, a position that Nature did its own creating. [See sidebar below.]

SCP: What do you mean when you use the word "religious"?

JOHNSON: In some ways, I'd like to get away from the term "religion" because, like so many terms in common use, it's become vague and undefined. The Supreme Court doesn't have any idea what religion is, for example, and they admit that.

SCP: Amen!

JOHNSON: And what we're talking about would be better expressed by saying we're talking about origins, where we came from. Did we come from a Purposeful Creator or from a blind, materialistic process?

SCP: And if we came from a Purposeful Creator, then perhaps we owe allegiance to this Person, this Entity, and we may have to follow His rules or take the consequences.

JOHNSON: What our educational system is now dedicated to doing, particularly in California, is persuading students that the second alternative, the blind, materialistic process, is true. But they don't use the word "true." The second alternative is Science, but Science means Truth. What is outside of Science is outside of reality. This ideology is known as Scientism or Scientific Naturalism, and it is the implicit creed of the State Department of Education.

[Former California State Superintendent of Instruction Bill Honig, recently deposed by a felony conflict-of-interest charge involving his wife's non-profit educational corporation, was (in)famous for trying to prevent the Institute for Creation Research, the bastion of Creationism (what they call Creation Science), from awarding a Masters of Science degree. Honig lost this crusade in the courts, and with perhaps some justification blamed his conviction and fall from grace on "right-wing religious fundamentalists" and Creationists. Joseph Farah, former editor of the family-oriented (and thus lesser circulation) Sacramento Union, was instrumental in getting the scoop and staying with it when no other big newspapers would report it — until Honig's indictment, of course. Honig is still lionized by the state educational establishment. Ed.]

SCP: In my own field of Psychology, evolution is just assumed to be true. Again, it's more than Truth, it's Science. And psychologists just love to be called scientists. I remember a young woman psychiatrist I knew years ago who was just ga-ga and starry-eyed over a professor who was lecturing to her class about how human beings were evolving, and about where our species might end up in who knows how many years. I was polite, but I was thinking that her teacher was thinking that he would be at the top of the evolutionary heap, at the top of the intellectual food chain, if you will. This seems to be what Social Darwinism is all about.

JOHNSON: That came from the philosopher Herbert Spencer. He greatly influenced Biological Evolution, too. I think one thing that's really important to get across to people is how tricky the word "evolution" is. I wish we could abolish it, because it's used in so many different senses. Evolution is what happened to those Peppered Moths, where you got more dark ones or more light ones. Evolution is what happens in dog breeding. Evolution just means things change. Whenever you put the spotlight on it, the Darwinists will change the definition so that it's something you can't possibly deny.

SCP: Some people, like the Creation Scientists, talk about macroevolution versus microevolution . . .

JOHNSON: Stephen Jay Gould talks about that, too. The paleontologists have to, for they can tell that there's more than one thing going on.

SCP: When Peppered Moths change their color, they're still just moths. It's like having Poodles, which I'm fond of, changing from black to white to black again.

JOHNSON: The moths don't change color. There's always dark and light moths in the population. It's just the ratios that change. But here's the point. The word "evolution" is tremendously deceptive, and it's maintained because it is.

I was just attending a lecture by a human geneticist who was talking about the future evolution of the human race, just like that professor you referred to. The examples he was using all had to do with genetic diseases, Tay-Sachs Disease and so on. These are the mutations, and natural selection is what's killing people. This was the evolution that was going on.

So I said, "Why do you use the word 'evolution' to describe this process of deterioration? We're also told that evolution is the great creative process that supposedly made us out of bacteria." And he replied quick and short, "That's just the way we use the term. It means the same thing."

So you see, if you believe there are genetic diseases, as of course you must, then you believe in Evolution, and therefore you believe we're the result of a purposeless, material process in which God played no part. This is how they think.

SCP: Or people say, "If there is a god, it couldn't be the type of god we'd want."

JOHNSON: The review of my book in Nature, which is the world's premier scientific journal, said that the problem with me is that I didn't know Biology has finished off God, gotten rid of Him. Because if there were a god, it would be a god of cruelty and waste, since evolution is a process of cruelty and waste.

SCP: This was the review by David Hull, the professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, right?

JOHNSON: Yes, and you see, he attacked me just as strongly as Gould did, but on opposite grounds. Gould said the trouble with me was I didn't know these scientists aren't saying anything about religion, and Hull said the problem with me was I didn't know they were saying a lot about it and had settled all the questions.

SCP: Gould talks about, was it Dobzhansky?

JOHNSON: Yes, Dobzhansky.

SCP: . . . who was a famous evolutionist and a Christian . . .

JOHNSON: They say that all the time because he was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church and never quit. But Dobzhansky worshipped Evolution. Like Teilhard de Chardin, he made a religion out of evolution.

SCP: It seems that Gould is talking about religion and really doesn't know much of what he's talking about . . .

JOHNSON: I think he does know.

SCP: I have read that Gould has said sotto voce, or to the side, as an apostrophe, that he has a religion, but he's never said what it is.

JOHNSON: If he does, I'm sure it's like Dobzhansky's. If you believe that blind, naturalistic Material Evolution is what created us, you worship the creator. And what that means is that you end up worshipping mankind, because in human beings Evolution has finally become conscious of itself, and we, the Scientific Elite, can take control of it and start programming it and can become the creator.

SCP: And Evolution is even personified and talked about as if it were God. "Evolution does this, Evolution does that . . ."

JOHNSON: Darwin did that, and so do they all. It is their god! It's their creator!

SCP: And people talk about themselves being like this god. "I am evolving." It's a personal force within oneself that is seemingly under ones control, or perhaps not under conscious control because it is cellular. Wilson from Harvard, the Sociobiologist, talks about our genes wanting to reproduce themselves, "selfish genes" that only care about their progeny. In this case, God is DNA.

JOHNSON: It's nature worship.

SCP: And that gets us back to the New Age, to Hindu India, and to old Babylon with Nimrod and that crowd. Let me just read what David Hull said in his review in Nature, where he raises the question of theodicy, which asks how one accounts for the fact that a supposedly loving, creating God allows evil in the world. Hull says:

"Whatever the god implied by evolutionary theory and the data of natural history may be like, He is not the Protestant God of 'waste not, want not.' He is also not a loving God who cares about His productions. He is not even the awful God portrayed in the Book of Job."

I didn't know that God was awful, but I guess to Hull He is — or was. . . .

JOHNSON: I don't know if he's ever really read the Book of Job, but at least he's heard of it.

SCP: Hull continues: "The God of the Galapagos Islands is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray."

This is by David Hull, who's teaching philosophy at Northwestern University. Jerk your kid out of there folks — no, on second thought, let your kid go there, but give him some inoculation with the other side.

JOHNSON: What our public education is going to be aiming at is preparing students to believe that. Hull is giving the advanced form. They won't hear about that in the lower grades. They'll just learn about evolution being a fact, but later on, they will be taught what Evolution means, which is what David Hull says it means — blind, cruel Nature and no god.

SCP: We're going to have to wind this up, for we've gone way past our allotted time and pre-empted the 10 O'clock News — though I prefer to think we've brought you Good News, instead. I didn't want to stop the train of how — and I just hate to keep saying this — our conversation was evolving.

JOHNSON: With Purposeful Intelligence, I hope!

SCP: Well, at least on your part. Let's end this up talking about the last chapter of your book, Darwin on Trial. What a great book to give to one of your biology teachers or paleoanthropologist friends who promises that he or she will read it all. I remember interviewing for a job at a secular college in the Midwest, and at least one of the reasons I was turned down was because of some of my ideas, such as this. I kept saying, "Well, I don't think there's any real proof for evolution."

JOHNSON: That'll do it!

SCP: And I even asked the head of the Science Division, supposedly a religious man, whether he'd read Michael Denton's book, Evolution, A Theory in Crisis, which was rather new at that time. It's a very good book, one that you discuss favorably in your own book. He looked at me and said, quite frankly, "I don't read things like that." My mouth dropped, along with my hopes — though now I'm just as glad they did.

JOHNSON: You were naive. This is enforced as orthodoxy throughout the academic world, even in the Christian colleges.

SCP: I was very naive. I thought I could just go there and be honest about my beliefs. If we're in an evolutionary model, somehow Blind Force has kept me in California and at SCP. However, because I'm a religious man I prefer to think that it was Providence, that God has a purpose for me. But that's me speaking, folks, and not the views of this secular radio station.

Your last chapter is called "Science and Pseudoscience." In it, you talk some about the Philosophy of Science. Just imagine those people out there traveling the Interstate and tuning in to what they think is Redneck Radio. They're going to hear you talking about the Philosophy of Science, and they'll probably be so surprised they'll just drive off the side of the road. Hopefully, they'll just slow down, or maybe come visit.

JOHNSON: There's plenty of intelligence up there among country people. I grew up in Aurora, Illinois, myself, and I know small town and country folks.

SCP: So let's end up talking about science, pseudo-science, and the philosophy of science — mainly via Karl Popper.

JOHNSON: One of the things that scientific people take pride in is that their theories are falsifiable, that is to say, they don't hold them as dogmas no matter what the evidence is. Instead, they propose tests and will abandon their theory if it fails the test. That's one definition for genuine science. Another kind of science is where you start out with a preconceived idea and just look for examples of it. This is pseudoscience. Marxism is a good example. The Marxist would say, "Look, wages are going down. So that proves our theory is true, because the Capitalists are exploiting the Workers." And then if wages go up, he'd say, "Well, wages are going up. So that proves our theory is true, because the Capitalists are trying to bribe the Workers to save their rotten system."

SCP: So you always have an explanation. Freudianism is the same way, and so is Behaviorism. At their core, both systems of psychology deny Free Will. You might call their advocates Deterministic Fundamentalists.

JOHNSON: Yes, and after you've spent five years on the couch and $50,000 you're willing to say you wanted to murder your father and marry your mother because you've got an Oedipus Complex, and that proves the theory is true.

SCP: Now, I have to give at least another side because of my own profession. Occasionally, Freud or other theorists do shed some light and can give theoretical explanations that can help some people.

JOHNSON: Of course. You can have insights in a system that is not fundamentally scientific.

SCP: The heavy-duty psychoanalysts will tell you that they're not primarily aiming to cure people via psychoanalysis. Rather, it's a way of trying to understand human beings. And even Freud himself said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," not a phallus but just a cigar.

JOHNSON: That was his cigar!

SCP: And like with so many so-called masters, the people following, the disciples, are sometimes more intense and hold the theory more tightly than the originator.

JOHNSON: The point is, of course, that certain Freudian theories, like that of the Oedipus Complex, were not stated as falsifiable hypotheses. They were things that were sort of known by insight. And then you just go looking for examples of them.

That's what Darwinists do with the fossil record. They'll say, "Well, we found something like archaeopteryx, so that proves our theory is true. And it's also the case that in thousands of other incidents, we tried to go look to find something consistent with the theory, but we couldn't find anything. But that doesn't matter. That doesn't count. It's only the favorable evidence that counts. And if we find anything that's consistent with our theory, it proves that it's true."

SCP: So the way you would define a science is that the results are potentially falsifiable. You even talked about "risky predictions."

JOHNSON: Suppose Darwinism, for example, said, "If you go out looking for fossils, you're going to find all these intermediates, all these common ancestors. You're going to find these patterns of descent." And, if you went out and looked for them and were finding them all the time, that would tend to confirm the theory.

On the other hand, if what you find is a continual record of failure — and then once in a while you find something that with all help from Darwinian prejudices and preconceptions can be construed as fitting somewhere within the system so you can say, "Aha, now we've succeeded" ___that's not scientific investigation. That's just going out to confirm your prejudice.

SCP: Let me read a paragraph from the closing part of your book:

"Prejudice is a major problem, however, because the leaders of science see themselves as locked in a desperate battle against religious fundamentalists, a label which they tend to apply broadly to anyone who believes in a Creator who plays an active role in worldly affairs."

For those in our audience who might not know, such a person is philosophically a theist, not a deist. A deist can believe in a creator god, but this god would have wound up the world like a clock and have gone away, leaving it to tick and run down by itself. A theist is a person who believes that God not only created the world, but is immanent, is involved in running the world. This is the religious doctrine of Providence, that God is in His world.

I'll go on with your quote: "These fundamentalists are seen as a threat to liberal freedom, and especially as a threat to public support for scientific research. As a myth of Scientific Naturalism, Darwinism plays an indispensable ideological role in the war against Fundamentalism. For that reason, the scientific organizations are devoted to protecting Darwinism rather than testing it, and the rules of scientific investigation have been shaped to help them succeed."

So we're really back to who's going to call the shots, to who is going to control the culture.

JOHNSON: As you said earlier, this is the priesthood. There's a review that I've just written a reply to. It's going to come out in a Christian academic journal, The Christian Scholar's Review. The reviewer, who's the editor-in-chief of the journal, ends his review by saying that Johnson must be wrong, because we philosophers of science — and that's what he is, a philosophy professor — know that the only way to tell what good scientific practice is is to look at what good scientists actually do. And his example of the Good Scientist is Stephen Jay Gould. So you see, what in effect he's saying is that the mantle of infallibility, which some would give to Scripture and perhaps others to the Pope, goes to the Scientific Elite. They're infallible. Whatever they do defines what is Good Science, and Good Science is the equivalent of Truth.

SCP: And that brings us back to the Piltdown Man, who for who knows how many years was seen as the epitome of science.

JOHNSON: Science is just like any other human activity, including religion or politics. Whenever it begins to get successful in worldly terms, you get careerists. You get people who want money and prestige, and so you get corruption. That's the doctrine of Original Sin.

SCP: And boy, are these people ever wanting to be like God! By the way, one of my favorite quotes is from G. K. Chesterton, who said that Original Sin was the only religious doctrine that can be scientifically, empirically, verified. All you have to do is observe people.

JOHNSON: Just like the religious priesthood can be corrupted, the scientific enterprise is subject to all the same temptations.

SCP: As a matter of fact, in one of the recent issues of Discover magazine, there was an article about such scientists, who are even more these days fudging data, lying, backbiting, and what have you.

JOHNSON: I lecture all over the country to universities, and I speak to lots of graduate students who are working in the scientific labs. And one story that I often hear is the following —  some version of this:

"In our lab, we only do experiments that we think are likely to confirm the head of the lab's theory. And if they don't come out right, we do them again and again until they do."

SCP: And if then they don't, you drop them instead of publishing the bad results and saying that that's part of science, too. Negative evidence ought to be just as valuable. But instead you forget it.

JOHNSON: It's hard to publish negative results, even if you wanted to.

SCP: But let me give a gripe. If you do get good results, then you let your professor attach his name to the article, which makes it publishable and gives both him and you prestige. There are academics who have published literally hundreds of articles. How did they ever have time to read all their publications, let alone write them?

JOHNSON: You'll find that someone will sign his name to the paper, and he expects to get the credit and the Nobel Prize, if it's that good. But then if fraud is found in that paper, then he'll say he had nothing to do with it, that he didn't even know what they were doing.

SCP: That's like Nobel Prizewinner David Baltimore . . .

JOHNSON: He just had no involvement whatever with the research when it turned out to be fraudulent.

SCP: I think what happened was that he gave a hard time to a lab assistant who was trying to show some research was fraudulent, research to which he was somehow connected. But in any case, although I could talk with you all day, we have to end the program because of other scheduling. Thank you for your time, and do drop over to SCP sometime soon. As you know, we're only about four or five blocks away from Boalt Hall [the Law School].

JOHNSON: It's been my pleasure. My wife and I are now going to go out for our usual Saturday hike in the Berkeley hills.

Evolution gets good press. Not only are most PBS and Discovery Channel nature programs chock full of references to evolution as fact, but most science articles in the popular press also parrot the extensively uncritical acceptance of evolutionary theory worldwide. In the May 3, 1993, U.S. News & World Report an article was headlined "Computing the primordial ooze. Scientists are modeling the origins of life."

Countering the notion that evolution from inorganic chemicals is likened to the spontaneous creation of a jumbo jet from a junk pile, science writer Karen F. Schmidt says "students of chemical evolution are now coming to believe that the dawn of life on Earth wasn't so improbable after all. Scientists working with both laboratory flasks and computer simulations of primitive life are producing a clearer picture of how chemicals first stirred with vitality on ancient Earth and ultimately evolved into the biological complexity that includes every organism from microscopic parasites to humans."

What is necessary is to show how random chemicals merged together (1) to metabolize, to use outside energy for their own growth and maintenance, and (2) to reproduce, to produce more of themselves, probably changing for the better over time. Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute made a computer model to show that metabolism by cooperating chemicals could have happened when, as Schmidt writes, "the [chemical] soup became so complex that a self-sustaining and self-reproducing chemical network linked up in a sudden flash of order."

The study of reproduction now seems focused on RNA instead of DNA, for RNA not only is a template for making proteins, it can also act as an enzyme catalyst to cause and speed up reactions. Julius Rebek of M.I.T. "synthesized several new organic chemicals that can reproduce themselves." He showed that molecules with complementary pieces could replicate by "splitting and using each half as a template to rebuild the other," similar to DNA/RNA replication.

Dr. Thomas Ray of the U. of Delaware has a computer model called Tierra, which tests Darwinian theory. The "inhabitants" of Tierra are tiny computer programs of simple instructions, much like genetic material. "Tierrans that compete most successfully for computer time and memory space make the most copies of themselves. . . . Tierrans copy themselves with errors — the equivalent of mutations in genes — and this glitch in the system allows the computer creatures [sic] to evolve."

In 1990, Ray began with a single patriarch (or matriarch) with a length of 80 instructions. Evolution raced at breakneck speed, many millennia per hour. Quickly, mutated programs appeared, one being only one-fourth as long but able to replicate itself six times as fast as the patriarch.

Tierrans diversified, and some lost the ability to reproduce while still finding ways to survive: "[T]hese computer parasites borrowed instructions from their more complete cousins, much as viruses use their hosts to enable them to multiply. In fact, parasites may have played an indispensable role in spurring evolution and diversity in all living systems. As on Earth, the parasitic Tierrans usually provoke an arms race: The hosts devise ever more clever ways to hide their codes, while the parasites find wilier ways to get at them."

Massaging the program to give extremely radical mutations, Ray found that "an even richer variety of faster, fitter computer creatures evolved. 'The life force is so powerful,' says Ray. 'Life's clearly not the result of just a lucky shot'."

Now arguments are proceeding as to whether Tierrans are "alive." "A cadre of scientists contends that computer programs capable of 'metabolizing' computer energy to replicate, evolve, and even develop social interactions are as alive as the flora and fauna in a rain forest. Living things don't have to be wet and squishy, they argue; they must simply act like other living things. One wonders how love appears on their computer screens.

It's easy to be enthralled by the high intelligence of these creative individuals and their elegant formulations and designs. But as Phillip E. Johnson reminds us in Darwin on Trial, there is, of course, in all these situations and simulations a creator, a higher intelligence giving plans and directions. Kauffman wrote (created) his computer program showing that metabolism must have begun when enough (somehow pre-existing) organic molecules were already present. He also needs a sort of deus ex machina to achieve the necessary "sudden flash of order."

Rebek synthesized (created) the new chemicals that can reproduce themselves. Ray wrote (created) a computer program to give instructions about "life" and replication to his tiny programs. In his system, most mutations apparently don't seem to die out, as happens in nature. Ray, himself, says life is more than a "lucky shot." And his computer programs are still programs, not qualitatively changed to new "beings"; his would be microevolution, bringing out intra-species differences within an already-programmed design, rather than macroevolution, making brand new, "higher" species.

The Monday, May 10, 1993, edition of The Wall Street Journal published Phillip E. Johnson's review of 1979 Nobel prizewinner physicist Steven Weinberg's book, Dreams of a Final Theory. Following are a few selected paragraphs from that review, titled "Science Without God," which we encourage our readers to peruse:

"As science writing, Dreams of a Final Theory has many virtues, but for most readers the important thing will be its philosophical message. Although Mr. Weinberg professes to find philosophy useless in physics, he enthusiastically promotes his own philosophy, called reductionism. . . . [which states that everything in the universe] is reducible to the laws governing the physics and chemistry of lifeless matter . . . . Reductionism is understandably appealing to particle physicists, since it makes their discipline more fundamental than others . . . .

"Unfortunately, any biologist who invokes some mystical element in the life processes that is not derived from chemistry or physics is guilty of 'vitalism,' which in contemporary science is a thought-crime only marginally less reprehensible than outright creationism. The commitment of science to the faith that nature is a permanently closed system of material causes and effects allows no coherent alternative to reductionism . . . ."

Johnson goes on to ask how tolerant the scientific community is to those who think there is an Intelligence, a Planner behind the universe, and whether such people might get a fair hearing of their views.

"The answer seems to be no, they may not. Mr. Weinberg, like many of his colleagues, regards dissent from naturalism as a repudiation of rationality. He concedes that one of the effects of reductionist science — indeed, one of its aims — is to discredit theistic religion." Johnson shows how this attitude, magnified throughout the orthodox scientific community, means that they "claim the sole right to decide for the nation that God is a product of the human imagination rather than the ultimate reality behind the cosmos," and that tolerance for alternative views disappears into a black hole of Scientific Fundamentalism.

Showing that naturalistic metaphysics leads to moral and ethical relativism (what historian Paul Johnson, in his book Modern Times calls the curse of the Twentieth Century), Phil Johnson draws a striking parallel between the scientific-led discarding of a "sacred common ground" of belief and the rending of the fabric of great universities by ideological splinter groups, each with their axes to grind. As he says, "the 20th Century has taught us . . . that fanaticism can as easily be founded in scientific atheism as in some twisted understanding of the will of God."

During the 1993 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS], at a symposium on Saturday, February 13, entitled "The New Antievolutionism," Professor Michael Ruse gave an invited address. A philosopher at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Ruse claimed to have been misquoted in Phillip E. Johnson's Darwin on Trial, where a footnote from page 135 of the book states:

"2. Although Halstead's charge [of Marxist bias at the British Natural History Museum] was groundless, it is a fact that political ideology and biological ideology are often closely related. Prominent Darwinists such as Harvard's Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould have proudly claimed Marxist inspiration for their biological theories. Darwinists of the right have frequently related their biological theories to notions of economic or racial competition. At a scientific meeting in East Germany in 1981, the Darwinist philosopher of science Michael Ruse observed (with approval) that 'Biology drips with as many wishes/wants/desires/urges, as many exhortations towards right actions, as a sermon by Luther or Wesley'."

Johnson's Response

In a self-published reply to the transcript of the speech, Johnson says that the quote is accurate, and he gives references. He goes on to say that "I assume Ruse's complaint is based on the mistaken impression that he is referred to as a 'Darwinist of the right' in the third sentence of the footnote. No such reference was intended, nor to my knowledge has anyone else read the note in such a strained way. The concluding quotation [in the footnote] is meant to illustrate the theme of the note as a whole and the theme of Ruse's 1981 lecture — that Darwinism has always been closely linked to political and moral philosophies in the minds of its proponents, from Darwin's day to the present. Ruse is certainly correct that he did not offend his hosts by advocating Social Darwinism. On the contrary, his lecture made favorable references to the Marxist inspiration claimed by Lewontin and Gould in support of his theme that 'value and ideological commitments lead not to bad science or non-science, but to the very best science'. (p. 250)"

In Ruse's speech transcription, he said he'd met Johnson face-to-face and "found — I must confess — I found Phillip Johnson to be a very congenial person with a fund of very funny stories about Supreme Court justices, some of which may even be true, unlike his scientific claims." He also said his debate with Johnson was "a really quite constructive interchange. Because basically we didn't talk so much about creationism. We certainly didn't so much talk about his particular arguments in his book, or arguments that I've put forward in [my book] Darwinism Defended . . . ."

"[Ruse's transcript continues.] But we did talk much more about the whole question of metaphysics, the whole question of philosophical bases. And what Johnson was arguing was that, at a certain level, the kind of position of a person like myself, an evolutionist, is metaphysically based at some level just as much as the kind of position of . . . someone like [Duane] Gish [of the Institute for Creation Research] or somebody like that. And to a certain extent, I must confess, in the ten years since I performed — or I appeared — in the creationism trial in Arkansas, I must say that I've been coming to this kind of position myself.

"And, in fact, when I first thought of putting together my collection, But Is It Science? . . . I was inclined to say . . . creationism is not science and evolution is, and that's the end of it . . . just trying to prove that. Now I'm starting to feel — I'm no more of a creationist now that I ever was, and I'm no less of an evolutionist now than I ever was — but I'm inclined to think we should move our debate now onto another level, or move on.

The Point Conceded

"And instead of just sort of, just — I mean I realize that when one is dealing with people, say, at the school level, or these sorts of things, certain sorts of arguments are appropriate. But those of us who are academics, or for other reasons pulling back and trying to think about these things, I think that we should recognize, both historically and perhaps philosophically, certainly that the science side has certain metaphysical assumptions built into doing science, which — it may not be a good thing to admit in a court of law — but I think that in honesty we should recognize, and that we should be thinking about some of these sorts of things." (emphasis supplied)

In his reply, Johnson reminds us that at the beginning of Chapter Nine of Darwin on Trial he severely criticized Ruse's testimony at the Arkansas creationism trial in 1981. "He makes no protest about this [in the AAAS speech] and no wonder — since that testimony was entirely at odds with the 'Darwinism is permeated by ideology' theme of the lecture he gave at about the same time in East Germany, and the similar acknowledgment which was the main theme of his talk at the AAAS. [As shown in the paragraph just above, h]e even states frankly that it is appropriate to say different things about this subject to different audiences," that is, one thing to people at the school level, another to academics, perhaps another to the general public, another to Marxists, and still another to a court of law. [This is the same phenomenon of secrecy and misrepresentation that SCP referred to as the "esoteric gap" in the case of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Transcendental Meditation back in the 70s.]

Here, at the minimum, is the worth of Johnson's work: he makes the leopard show his spots, or perhaps more appropriately, he forces the architects and builders to publicly admit their tower at Pisa is not straight and true, and to remove the camouflage of the surrounding landscape so that the deviance can easily be seen. Johnson is so strong an intellectual and academic presence that he cannot be dismissed by the academy the way most of us would, dare we take on such a well-armed and -funded foe.

A Secular Religion

As Johnson pointed out, the main theme of Ruse's presentation was "Darwinism is permeated by ideology." Following are several salient sections from that speech:

"Certainly, historically . . . it's certainly been the case that evolution has functioned, if not as a religion as such, certainly with elements akin to a secular religion. . . . And certainly, there's no doubt about it, that in the past, and I think also in the present, for many evolutionists, evolution has functioned as something with elements which are, let us say, akin to being a secular religion.

"I think, for instance, of the most famous family in the history of evolution, namely, the Huxleys . . . Thomas Henry Huxley, the grandfather, and of Julian Huxley, the grandson. Certainly, if you read Thomas Henry Huxley, when he's in full flight there's no question but that for Huxley at some very important level, evolution and science generally, but evolution in particular, is functioning a bit as a kind of secular religion.

"And there's no question whatsoever that for Julian Huxley, when you read Evolution, the Modern Synthesis, that [he] saw evolution as a kind of progressive thing upwards. I think Julian Huxley was certainly an atheist, but he was at the same time a kind of neo-vitalist, and he bound this up with his science. If you look both at his printed stuff, and if you go down to Rice University which got all his private papers, again and again in the letters it comes through very strongly that for Julian Huxley evolution was functioning as a kind of secular religion.

"I think . . . that today also, for more than one eminent evolutionist, evolution in a way functions as a kind of secular religion. And let me just mention my friend Edward O. Wilson . . . if you look, for instance, in On Human Nature, Wilson is quite categorical about wanting to see evolution as the new myth, and all sorts of language like this. That for him, at some level, it's functioning as a kind of metaphysical system. . . .

"And it seems to me very clear that at some very basic level, evolution as a scientific theory makes a commitment to a kind of naturalism, namely, that at some level one is going to exclude miracles and these sorts of things, come what may. Now, you might say, does this mean it's just a religious assumption, does this mean it's irrational to do something like this? [Note how religion is equated with irrationality. Ed.] I would argue very strongly that it's not. At a certain pragmatic level, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And that if certain things do work, you keep going with this, and that you don't change in midstream, and so on and so forth. I think that one can in fact defend a scientific and naturalistic approach, even if one recognizes that this does include a metaphysical assumption to the regularity of nature, or something of this nature.

"So as I say, I think that one can defend it as reasonable, but I don't think it helps matters by denying that one is making it. And I think that once one has made such an assumption, one has perfect powers to turn to, say, creation science, which claims to be naturalistic, also, and point out that it's wrong. I think one has every right to show that evolutionary theory in various forms certainly seems to be the most reasonable position, once one has taken a naturalistic position. [emphasis supplied] So I'm not coming here and saying, give up evolution, or anything like that.

"But I am coming here and saying, I think that philosophically that one should be sensitive to what I think history shows: namely, that evolution, just as much as religion — or at least, leave [out] 'just as much,' let me leave [out] that phrase — evolution, akin to religion, involves making certain a priori or metaphysical assumptions, which at some level cannot be proven empirically. I guess we all knew that, but I think that we're all much more sensitive to these facts now. [Mainly because of Johnson. Ed.] And I think that the way to deal with creationism, but the way to deal with evolution, also, is not to deny these facts, but to recognize them, and to see where we can go as we move on from there. . . ."

Insight magazine of May 10, 1993, reported on a Washington conference where a slough of environmentalists dialoged to find ways to defend against the Wise Use movement, a group of sportsmen and natural resource pragmatists now winning Constitutional arguments against "takings," a formerly potent legal weapon of environmentalists whereby governmental regulations prevent certain land use without (just) compensation to owners.

A speaker receiving thunderous applause was Stephen Jay Gould, who seemed to believe in, if not outright worship, Gaia: "We are one of a million species. We are stewards of nothing. Nature had no idea we were coming and doesn't give a damn about us. [But] we have a legitimate parochial interest in our own lives. The planet holds all the cards. . . . I think we better sign the papers while she's still willing to make a deal. If we treat her right, the Earth will keep us around for a while."