The Honor Of God

Phillip Johnson is known as the father of intelligent design. The idea in its current form appeared in the 1980s, and Johnson adopted and developed it after Darwinian evolution came up short, in his view, in explaining how all organisms, including humans, came into being. Johnson taught law for over 30 years at the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of the book Darwin on Trial, in which he argues that empirical evidence in support of Darwin’s theory is lacking. In this interview, hear why he feels that such evidence is “somewhere between weak and nonexistent,” why he feels intelligent design is a testable science, and why he thought the Dover trial was a train wreck waiting to happen.

The naturalism paradigm

Q: What is intelligent design?

Phillip Johnson: I would like to put a basic explanation of the intelligent-design concept as I understand it this way. There are two hypotheses to consider scientifically. One is you need a creative intelligence to do all the creating that has been done in the history of life; the other is you don’t, because we can show that unintelligent, purposeless, natural processes are capable of doing and actually did do the whole job. Now, that is what is taught as fact in our textbooks. And to me it’s a hypothesis, which needs to be tested by evidence and experiment. If it can’t be confirmed by experiment, then you’re left with the same two possibilities, and neither one should be said to be something like a scientific fact.

Q: Why do you think some people do not accept evolution?

Johnson: I think they see a problem. I don’t think it’s that they’re ignorant. I think that they see that what’s being given to them as evolution is less than science in that it hasn’t really been proved, and yet it’s presented as if it were proved. And on the other hand, it’s more than science, in that it contains the whole philosophy behind it, metaphysics as it were.

Q: As I understand it from reading your books and critiques, you see “materialism” as a very destructive thing in society. Can you tell me about this?

Johnson: Well, by materialism I don’t mean consumerism. I’m not talking about people who are greedy for material things. I’m talking about a philosophical system that explains what is real and what is not. A philosophical materialist believes that everything is, at the bottom, material composition. You start with the fundamental particles that compose matter and energy.

Another word for essentially the same thing is naturalism. It’s stated a little bit differently. Naturalism says nature is all there is, and nature is made of those particles. (Don’t let the distinction between matter and energy confuse you on this, because energy, like matter, is composed of particles according to the naturalistic viewpoint.)

Now, naturalism was most flamboyantly stated in the Cosmos series by Carl Sagan, which I remember watching many years ago. Sagan began that series with the pronouncement that the cosmos is all there ever was and all there ever will be. Nature is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be, with nature being these substances that make up the stars and the particles that make up the different kinds of radiation that come from them. But that’s all that there is.

A philosophy of naturalism or materialism is what generates the Darwinian theory. It’s what generates the certainty that only unintelligent natural forces were involved in evolution, which is to say in the creative process that brought our kind into existence as well as all the animals and all the plants. That is all a non-negotiable claim on their part. And why is it a non-negotiable claim? Because if the naturalistic starting point isn’t valid—if it isn’t completely correct—then something else must have happened. What is that something else? It’s something that they don’t like that might get a foothold in science itself.

“Maybe the creator is something more than an imaginary projection of people’s minds. Maybe a creator is a necessary part of reality.”

Q: Are there social consequences to this philosophy of naturalism or materialism that you describe?

Johnson: Yes, absolutely. Now, these consequences may be good or they may be bad. And they are attractive to some people and unattractive to others. For example, the naturalistic viewpoint is praised by those who like it for its tendency to liberate us from religious authority.

Q: But what’s the negative side? My understanding is you see not the positive side of materialism but the negative side.

Johnson: I’m happy to concede that there is a positive way of looking at something and a negative way of looking at something. The negative side is that the naturalistic viewpoint leaves the way open for a kind of freedom from divine authority, a kind of moral anarchy.

God or nature

Q: Is this a motivation for what you do?

Johnson: It is a motivation, and I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with that. I was an agnostic from the time I was a junior high school student up until my very late 30s. I had the kind of upbringing that is most likely to produce agnostics, a conventional kind of church-going requirement that never became real to me. I went to Sunday School because in those days mothers thought that was a good thing for their children on Sunday morning, and [on the way my mother] dropped my father off at the golf course. I grew up from that learning that when you got old enough so that your mother couldn’t tell you what to do anymore, what you did was you played golf on Sunday morning.

So I was an agnostic, and then when I went away to Harvard as a college student, that tendency was very much encouraged. I grew up thinking that to be intelligent or well-educated was to be agnostic and to be liberal in politics. I went through various things in life and found that the agnostic pattern in which I had become socialized was not adequate for me. I became a Christian, and I found a kind of structure for my life that seemed to be a very good thing and to this day has enabled me to get through crises like two strokes.

Q: And how did you come to view evolution?

Johnson: One thing that fascinated me about the study of evolution was that it seemed to me to give a window into a very fundamental question that was bothering me: Is God real or imaginary?

As I read all of the evolutionary literature written for the general public, I saw that some of the proponents of Darwinian evolution were hard-core atheists like Richard Dawkins, and others were not. Some of them took a view that religion or belief in God is alright if you want that sort of a thing, but they assumed that it was an imaginary thing. I could see that this is why there was so much insistence upon the Darwinian story.

Believing in Darwinian evolution doesn’t prove that there’s no God. What it proves is that there’s no need for God’s participation to get all the creating done. Now, is that true? I was fascinated with that question of what’s fundamentally true. If this Darwinian story is true, then nature does have all the creative power it needs to produce plants and animals and people. But if the story isn’t true, if it doesn’t fit the evidence, then maybe the creator is something more than an imaginary projection of people’s minds. Maybe a creator is a necessary part of reality.

That to me was a fascinating issue. It certainly motivated me to think that this was an important subject, not just for biologists or even scientists but for people at large. So it was legitimate for a law professor to address it and for the public to make up their own minds about it rather than to take the word of the experts. That’s what makes it important.

Evidence for evolution

Q: As we’ve gone about making this documentary, we’ve met professors in the natural sciences who’ll say, “Let me just show you this mountain of evidence,” and they show us fossil after fossil. Are these things not evidence of evolution?

Johnson: They all exist. The question is what are they evidence of? Are they evidence of a mindless and purposeless evolutionary process? It may that there was a slow development of one kind of thing into something else. But the important question to me is: Could this all occur solely by unintelligent, purposeless, material processes? Can we say that that has been confirmed? The theory of evolution may be true in a sense, but it may require the participation of an intelligent cause. That is the basic intelligent-design proposition—that unintelligent causes by themselves can’t do the whole job. That doesn’t say that everything was created all at once.

Q: So what does intelligent design say about how life was created and how we ended up with the diversity of life we see today?

Johnson: Well, the alternative is not well developed, so I would prefer to say that, as far as I’m concerned, the alternative is we don’t really know what happened. But if non-intelligence couldn’t do the whole job, then intelligence had to be involved in some way. Then it’s a big research job to figure out the consequences of that starting point.

Q: How would you go about testing for the existence of a designer? What is the research program?

Johnson: I’d like to start with the first question. It is sometimes said that the hypothesis that there is a designer is untestable. This is false. It is testable, and the test is Darwinian evolution. The claim of the evolutionary biologists is that unintelligent causes did the whole job. If they can prove it, then the counter-hypothesis that you need intelligence has been tested, and it has been shown to be false.

But what I concluded after reading the literature was that the claim that unintelligent processes have been shown to be capable of doing all the work of creation, from the simplest creatures to the more complex ones, is unsupported. The evidence for it lies somewhere between very weak and nonexistent. When you try to get proof, you get stories about microevolution.

“Instead of getting evidence of a creation story, what we’re getting is evidence of temporary variation in the size of finch beaks.”

Q: But they’re not talking about great transformations taking place all at once. They’re talking about something happening very gradually over a huge amount of time. Why couldn’t that be the case?

Johnson: Well, why couldn’t it? Often when one asks for a demonstration of the evolutionary changes that Darwinians claim, the answer that they always give is, “Well, it’s done very gradually” and “This takes an enormous amount of time, millions of years, whereas we only live to be 100 if we’re very long-lived, so it is quite impossible for the evolutionary change to occur in our time limits. That’s why we don’t see it.”

My logical reaction to that is that’s perfectly accurate if you assume that the evolutionary change of this enormous amount actually occurs. Then you can give a satisfactory explanation for why we don’t see it. But there is another possible explanation for why we don’t see it. The other possibility is that it doesn’t happen. I think maybe that’s what the truth is.

Q: If it doesn’t happen, then where do you go from there?

Johnson: Well, if it doesn’t happen, something else must have happened. The problem became clear to me as I read further and further that the one thing that evolutionary biologists are absolutely determined to support is their starting premise that all of the changes that brought about all of the different species and kinds of life on Earth happened by purely natural causes like random mutation and natural selection. So while there can be arguments over the details, there can be no argument or discussion over the fundamental principle that only natural—which is to say unintelligent—causes were involved.

The reason why that premise of natural causes has to be so inviolate and so ferociously defended is that what if something other than purely natural causes was involved? What would it be? Well, the most obvious answer to that question is it would be God. And they regard this possibility with horror, because it seems to unseat all of their science. It seems to take them back to the beginning or to the Dark Ages, as they would tend to say. You get God in there and that’s the end of science, they think, so that can’t be. But I wondered, maybe it could be.

I viewed myself as much more unprejudiced in that matter. I was willing to believe in a biological creation by Darwinian mechanism if it could actually be proved. But if it couldn’t be proved, I thought it was quite legitimate to think of something else.

Read the rest of the interview at Nova >>> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/defense-id.html

Interview conducted on April 6, 2007 by Joe McMaster, producer of “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial,” and edited by Lauren Aguirre and Peter Tyson, executive editor and editor in chief of NOVA online