Reflectorites
On Fri, 28 Jul 2000 11:20:29 -0500 (CDT), Wesley R. Elsberry wrote:
[...]
WE>Phil Johnson was on Nightline last night, and I found his performance
>interesting in several places. Two of those stood out, though.
>
>Questioned by Koppel on whether his "intelligent design theory" was
>actually fifty years older than Darwin's "Origin of Species",
>Johnson stated that the idea of divine creation was much older than
>that.
What Johnson actually said in context of a debate about "God and Evolution
in Kansas Classrooms" was:
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http://abcnews.go.com/onair/nightline/transcripts/nl000727_trans.html
ABCNEWS
[...]
God and Evolution
in Kansas Classrooms
Nightline
Thursday, July 27, 2000
[...]
TED KOPPEL Let's take a short break. And when we come back, I would
like you to address the-the point that Mr. Neas made that actually you are
talking about a 200-year-old theory and not some new, modern science.
We'll be back in a moment.
(Commercial Break)
TED KOPPEL And we're back once again with Phillip Johnson and Ralph
Neas. Mr. Johnson, as I suggested before the break, Mr. Neas was making
the point that the-the theory you are citing, far from being more modern
than the Darwinian theory, actually pre-dates it by about 50 years.
PHILLIP JOHNSON Well, you could say this is a 2,000-year-old
controversy because the theory of evolution and its philosophical roots
goes back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. This is a longstanding
controversy. Do you need a creator to do the creating...
TED KOPPEL Help-help-help...
PHILLIP JOHNSON ...or can nature do it on its own?
TED KOPPEL ...help me out here, Mr. Johnson, by being a little more
specific in your response. I'm asking you whether this modern theory that
you were citing to me is in fact 50 years older than the Darwinian theory?
PHILLIP JOHNSON The idea of divine creation, which is what I'm talking
about, that there is an intelligence behind life and necessary in creating it is
a lot older than 2,000 years.
[...]
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WE>So now we have even Phil Johnson confusing the theological
>concept of divine creation with IDT. If Johnson finds the two
>concepts so similar, why should ID critics be castigated for making
>the same conceptual association?
Johnson makes it clear that he is talking about "divine creation" in an
gneeralised Intelligent Designer sense, i.e. one whose "philosophical roots
goes back to the ancient Greeks and Romans".
But even if Johnson does make "the same conceptual association" of "the
theological concept of divine creation with IDT", and "finds the two
concepts so similar", the reason is simple. Johnson in Darwin on Trial
states up front that he is *both* "a philosophical theist and a Christian".
"I am a philosophical theist and a Christian. I believe that a God
exists who could create out of nothing if He wanted to do so, but
who might have chosen to work through a natural evolutionary
process instead. I am not a defender of creation-science..."
(Johnson P.E., "Darwin on Trial," 1993, p.14)
So Johnson can honestly defend *both* "intelligent design theory" and
"divine creation" (as I do).
Christian theology has always included two strands: Special Revelation
(what may be known of God from the Bible) and General Revelation (what
may be known of God from nature). Indeed, the Bible itself has arguments
based on General Revelation (e.g. Psalm 19 & 104, and Acts 17, etc).
So there is no reason why a Christian cannot restrict his argument only to
General Revelation (i.e. the argument from design), trying to first establish
from nature that there *is* a Designer before attempting to then show
*who* the Designer is. This was the Natural Theology approach of Paley
and others.
Indeed, this is in fact how I became a Christian 30+ years ago. I was an
atheist who knew virtually nothing about Christianity who first came to
believe in a Designer from nature, and then later I became a Christian. If
Christianity was proved false, I could still go back to believing in a
Designer.
Just because Johnson is a Christian, and thinks the Designer is the Christian
God, that does not invalidate his argument from design. After all, design
might be true, even if Christianity isn't. There are in fact members of the ID
movement (e.g. the agnostic Todd Moody, and the Jews David Berlinski
and Lee Spetner) who believe just that!
Those members of the ID movement who are Christians like Johnson,
Dembski and Behe have made no secret of the fact they are Christians and
that they believe the Designer to be the Christian God, and that their
attempt to establish that there is a Designer is motivated by their belief that
Christianity is true.
But they all accept that there are two separate arguments: 1) there is a
Designer; and 2) the Designer is the Christian God. The first is a purely
scientific argument from nature, and is not based on the Bible or the
teachings of any religion. It is therefore not proscribed by the
Constitutional doctrine of the separation of Church and State. There is no
reason therefore why the first argument should not be made in schools and
even science classes.
The second is clearly based on the Christian Bible and it is rightly
proscribed by the Constitutional doctrine of the separation of Church and
State.
What "ID critics" are "castigated for" is refusing to acknowledge there are
*two* separate questions and trying to *force* "the same conceptual
association".
WE>Given the last word, Johnson cast opponents of ID as being
>uninterested in civil liberties, and in fact being like an Un-American
>Activities Investigating Committee. This contrasts with Dembski's
>analogy reported by Stephen Goode last year in which anti-ID
>biologists were supposedly like the former Soviet regime. Perhaps any
>analogy will do, so long as biologists become the villains.
[...]
Again what Johnson actually said was:
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TED KOPPEL Mr. Johnson, we've only got about 20 seconds left, but
take-take the last word.
PHILLIP JOHNSON Well, why is this a great international controversy?
It's on national television. There's a media panic all over the world with
editors pounding the table and denouncing the Kansas Board. It's not
because they're worried about the details of the curriculum of Kansas high
schools. It's because they're worried that a public movement is beginning
to question the dominant religious philosophy of our time-effectively, the
established religion of our culture, which is scientific naturalism,
materialism, and which is supported by this claim that nature can do its
own creating so you don't need God. We want to challenge that and we're
beginning to do so. And you know the group I really want to talk to is the
American Civil Liberties Union, which is being used by people who are not
in favor of civil liberties who are acting like a kind of un-American
activities investigating committee.
[...]
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The fact is that most of the "opponents of ID" *are* "uninterested in civil
liberties" when they continually try to deny the "civil liberties" of the vast
majority of the public who believe in some form of design. All the ACLU
seems to be interested in is the "civil liberties" of the minority who believe
what they do.
When was the last time the ACLU threatened an atheist with a lawsuit for
teaching atheism in his/her Biology class? Yet some do it quite openly-like
William Provine of Cornell University who brags publicly how many
Christian kids he has converted to atheism in his classes.
Steve
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"Another possible model assumes that a population develops in a relatively
isolated part of the available area, undergoes a demographic explosion, and
invades the rest of the area, mixing with the local inhabitants or supplanting
them. This may have happened repeatedly, at different times and places...
People who like to think that man originated at a single place (the garden
of Eden") would find their viewpoint expressed by [this] the second
model... It seems more plausible to assume, however, that the
concentration of finds in East Africa is the result of the area's having
conditions favorable to early human life or to preservation of fossil
specimens, rather than evidence of the location of Eden. In any case, the
statistically very small sample of fossil specimens makes it impossible to
choose between these models at the present time." (Cavalli-Sforza L.L. &
Bodmer W.F., "The Genetics of human Populations," [1971], Dover:
Mineola NY, 1999, reprint, p.694-695).
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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