Here is Phil Johnson's reply to the Darwin Day Open Letter (which called on the NABT not
to delete the words "unsupervised" and "impersonal" from their definition of "evolution". The
web page is http://fp.bio.utk.edu/darwin/replyletter.html:
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Phillip E. Johnson's Response to Massimo Pigliucci's Open Letter
In December 1997 I participated in a televised debate on creation and
evolution, on William F. Buckley's "Firing Line." Throughout the debate,
the members of the Evolution team insisted that "evolution" in no way
denies that God is our creator. The team leader, Barry Lynn, went so far
as to quote John 1:1: "In the beginning was the Word" in order to suggest
that the Word may well have been "EVOLVE!" Other members of the
evolutionist team [Eugenie Scott, Kenneth Miller, and Michael Ruse] either
furthered the impression that divine supervision is an acceptable concept
in evolutionary science, or did nothing to dispel it.
This tactic made it difficult for our opposing team to clarify the issues,
and so may have been successful in the short run. I knew that it would
eventually backfire, however, because all the leading Darwinists (Gould,
Dawkins, Maynard Smith, Lewontin, Futuyma, Ayala, Provine -- the whole
bunch) insist that evolution is an undirected, purposeless process. As the
Open Letter puts it, the only God consistent with neo-Darwinism is one who
perfectly mimics an unsupervised, impersonal process. When the textbooks
say that "evolution is a fact," that is what they mean.
The New York Times story on the Firing Line debate started the backfire by
reporting that the NABT had removed the words "unsupervised" and
"impersonal" from its definition of evolution, describing the deletion as a
"startling about-face" which was "clearly designed to allow for the
possibility that a Master Hand was at the helm." The bulk of the story
concerned a group of "new creationists" specifically Firing Line debaters
Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, and David Berlinski who were portrayed as
making headway in moving the debate over creation and evolution into the
intellectual mainstream. The Times cited the NABT reversal as tangible
proof of their success: "This surprising change in creed for the nation's
biology teachers is only one of many signs that the proponents of
creationism, long stereotyped as anti-intellectual Bible- thumpers, have
new allies and the hope of new credibility." [Laurie Goodstein, "Christians
and Scientists; New Light for Creationism," The New York Times, December
21, 1997, Week in Review Section, p. 1.]
Eugenie Scott had reassured the readers of her NCSE Web page that the
revision of the NABT Statement had changed nothing of substance, because
"Evolution is still described as a natural process' (the only phenomena
science can study), and a later [sentence] states that natural selection
has no specific direction or goal, including survival of a species.'"
The Times story gave a very different impression. According to the Denver
Post, NABT President Dick Storey and Joseph McInerney, Executive Director
of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, protested to the Times that
it had given "the impression that the NABT had capitulated to
creationists." The Times editor responded sternly to these complaints by
email, saying that "The revision of your platform, whatever discussions you
may have had about it, clearly allows for the possibility that evolution
was guided by some omniscient power. And that, not the Times article, is
what may give creationists comfort, wrongheaded though that may seem to
you." Storey gamely insisted that "there was no backing down," but
admitted that "We knew hard-core creationists would regard this as a
victory, and they have." [Cate Terwilliger, "Changes in Biology Teachers'
Platform Rekindles Creationism Fire, Denver Post, January 29, 1998, P. E1,
http://www.denverpost.com/life/con0129.htm]
The NABT/Firing Line fiasco warns science educators that, if they say they
are open to God-guided evolution, people may take them seriously. Honesty
really is the best policy. Hence I salute the Open Letter's candid
statement that the American public correctly perceives a direct conflict
between neo-Darwinian evolution and the Judeo-Christian concept of a
personal God who is our creator. The Open Letter is also correct that
"fundamentalists as well as the American public at large are smarter than
most scientists give them credit for," and they are learning more all the
time. A strategy based on evasion and double-talk just won't work any more.
So I find much to praise in the Open Letter. Unfortunately, the Letter
contains a logical flaw that is common among scientific materialists: the
writers do not understand the difference between what they *assume* and
what they *test.* They say that
Science is based on a fundamental assumption: that the world
can be explained by recurring only to natural, mechanistic
forces. [Phillip] Johnson is right that this is a philosophical
position. He is wrong when he suggests that it is an
unreasonable and unproven one. In fact, every single
experiment conducted by any laboratory in any place on earth
represents a daily test of that assumption.
It is contradictory to say both that (1) materialism (or naturalism) is a
fundamental assumption on which all science is based; and that (2)
scientists daily subject that same assumption to experimental testing. No,
scientific materialists don't test materialism. They treat it as an
unfalsifiable premise, and promote as "scientific knowledge" whatever
materialistic theory of evolution is least implausible. That is why they
are so easily convinced that the Darwinian blind watchmaker mechanism can
design highly complex organisms, when the evidence (e.g. peppered moth and
finch-beak variation) seems so unconvincing to the rest of us. That is
also why they dismiss out of hand as "religion" any suggestion that
unintelligent material forces were *not* adequate to do the work of
biological creation. Richard Lewontin gets this point right:
We take the side of science *in spite of* the patent absurdity
of some of its constructs, ...*in spite of* the tolerance of the
scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories,
because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to
materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of
science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation
of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are
forced by our *a priori* adherence to material causes to
create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts
that produce material explanations, no matter how
counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.
Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a
Divine Foot in the door. [Lewontin, "Billions and Billions of
Demons," The New York Review of Books, Jan. 9, 1997.
http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?1997010928R
See my article, "The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism,
First Things, November, 1997,
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9711/johnson.html]
William Provine has said that biologists should welcome a public discussion
of the great questions of evolutionary biology, with everyone invited to
participate. When such a discussion occurs, biologists will not be
persuasive if they insist that philosophical materialism is a dogma which
no one may question, or if they misrepresent materialism as a "fact" which
has been discovered by impartial investigation.
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Steve
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Stephen E (Steve) Jones ,--_|\ sejones@ibm.net
3 Hawker Avenue / Oz \ Steve.Jones@health.wa.gov.au
Warwick 6024 ->*_,--\_/ Phone +61 8 9448 7439
Perth, West Australia v "Test everything." (1Thess 5:21)
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