P Johnson essay

From: Keith B Miller (kbmill@ksu.edu)
Date: Mon Jan 14 2002 - 10:56:50 EST

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     An article by Phil Johnson can be found at

     http://www.touchstonemag.com/docs/issues/14.10docs/14-10pg11.html

    Below are two paragraphs from that article of interest.

    >Disenchantment with Freud turned Crews towards Darwin, and then to Richard
    >Dawkins-style aggressive atheism. Many Darwinists try to avoid tying
    >Darwinism too explicitly to atheism, for fear that the Christians will
    >make serious trouble if they are not offered a fig leaf to cover their
    >cognitive nakedness. Hence the patently insincere "compatibilism" of the
    >PBS Evolution series (scoffingly dubbed "the neutered Darwin" by the
    >Internet magazine Slate), which insists that Darwinism, including even
    >such blatantly ideological branches as evolutionary psychology, is opposed
    >only by Genesis literalists. The series shows biology professor Kenneth
    >Miller taking Roman Catholic Communion to convey the impression that
    >Darwinism is compatible even with the most traditional forms of
    >Christianity.
    >
    >Fred Crews will have none of this prevarication. He dismisses Stephen Jay
    >Gould's lofty concept that science and religion are "non-overlapping
    >magisteria" (with science policing the boundary) by remarking that "As
    >Phillip Johnson has understandably complained, 'This is "separate but
    >equal" of the apartheid variety." Crews told me that I would hate his
    >pro-Darwinist essays, but of course I loved them. My goal has been to
    >carry the case against Darwinism into the intellectual mainstream, and
    >that effort has spectacularly succeeded when the editors of The New York
    >Review of Books feel that they have to devote most of two issues to a
    >defense of the endangered orthodoxy. Besides, my strategy requires driving
    >a wedge between the atheistical Darwinists and their dupes in the
    >religious world. Now it looks as if the most uncompromising Darwinists are
    >going to wield the hammer for me.

    Keith

    Keith B. Miller
    Department of Geology
    Kansas State University
    Manhattan, KS 66506
    kbmill@ksu.edu
    http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~kbmill/



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