Authors: James Lippard (lippard@skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu), Bill Hamilton (hamilton@hydra.gm

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Authors: James Lippard (lippard@skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu),
         Bill Hamilton (hamilton@hydra.gmr.com),
  Title: Critiques of Creationist Phillip Johnson's Views
 Update: June 7, 1994
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By James Lippard:

Johnson sent me a copy of the paper of this title from the January
1993 issue of _First Things_, and I thought some portions to be
worth quoting:

p. 9:  "Those who regard Scripture as more authoritative than
scientific theories, and who are confident that they know the
correct way to interpret it, may choose to defend the Genesis
account as literally true and employ scientific argument to
discredit the alternatives.  Fundamentalist creationists of this
kind make up perhaps half of the 47 percent that the Gallup
poll described as creationist.  Unfortunately, the commitment of
this large group to a literal interpretation of Genesis has
confused and divided the Christian world, and even played into
the hands of the evolutionary naturalists.  Darwinists assiduously
promote the notion that the only possible alternatives are six-day
Genesis literalism on the one hand, and fully naturalistic,
neo-Darwinistic evolution on the other."

[Johnson suggests putting aside biblical issues, the age of the
earth, and the method of creation on the same page.  He seems to
suggest that he is unconcerned about whether or not evolution
has occurred or not.]

p. 10:  "The theistic naturalists seem to share this fervent faith
that a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life simply *must*
be there to be found.  To suppose that God may have played some
direct, active role in creating the first life on earth would
reduce God to the status of a creature, would posit an impossible
missing relation between the members of nature, and would deny the
functional integrity of the universe.  One might almost say that it
would constitute blasphemy."

[This is the view he is arguing against.]

p. 12:  "In any case, Darwinistic evolution would be a most peculiar
creative method for God to choose, given the Darwinistic insistence
that biological evolution was *undirected*.  That requirement means
that God neither programmed evolution in advance nor stepped in from
time to time to pull it in the right direction.  How then did God
ensure that humans would come into existence so that salvation
history would have a chance to occur?"

[This is his critique of "theistic naturalism," which holds that
God exists but that nature proceeds without supernatural influence.]

p. 12:  "Of course, God *could* make some use of random mutation and
natural selection in a fundamentally directed creative process.  God
can act freely as He chooses:  that is just the problem for those
who would constrain God by philosophy.  God could employ mutation
and natural selction or act supernaturally, whether or not His choice
causes inconvenience for scientists who want to be able to explain and
control everything.  Once we allow God to enter the picture at all,
there is no reason to be certain a priori that natural science has the
power to discover the entire mechanism of creation.  Maybe science can
discover how living things were made, and maybe it can't.  Consistent
theists will therefore accept Darwinist claims for the creative power
of mutation and selection only insofar as those claims can be supported
by evidence.  That isn't very far at all."

[This seems to me to be Johnson's central claim.  That there is no
a priori reason to suppose that God doesn't intervene, and that
the empirical evidence for such things as common ancestry is so weak
that we should be at best agnostic, and more likely reject it in
favor of divine intervention.  Further, he argues that the only
reason people have thought that the empirical evidence for common
ancestry is strong is because of their presupposition that God does
not or cannot intervene.  His argument about the a priori doesn't
seem half-bad, but I think he is wrong about the state of the
empirical evidence--and that his *own* presuppositions are biasing
his own examination of it.]

p. 13:  "When people ask whether Darwinism and theism are compatible,
they normally take the Darwinism for granted and ask whether the theism
has to be discarded.  It is far more illuminating, however, to approach
the question from the other side.  Is there any reason that a person
who believes in a real, personal God should believe that biological
creation has occurred by Darwinian evolution?  The answer is clearly
no.  The sufficiency of any process of chemical evolution to produce
life has certainly not been demonstrated, nor has the ability of
natural selection to produce new body plans, complex organs, or anything
else except variation within types that already exist.  The fossil
record notoriously does not evidence any continuous process of gradual
change.  Rather, it consistently shows that new forms appear suddenly
and fully formed in the rocks, and thereafter remain fundamentally
unchanged.  ...  If Darwinian evolution is the only allowable source
for life's diversity and complexity, then the shortage of evidence
doesn't matter.  The only question, to borrow Darwin's own words,
is why 'Nature may almost be said to have guarded against the
frequent discovery of her transitional or linking forms.'"

p. 14, continuing immediately:  "Atheists can leave the matter there,
but theists have to go farther.  If God exists, then Darwinian
evolution is not the only alternative, and there is no reason for
a theist to believe that God employed it beyond the relatively
trivial level where the effects of variation and selection can
actually be observed.
   "In short, the reason that Darwinism and theism are fundamentally
incompatible is not that God could not have used evolution by
natural selection to do his creating.  Darwinian evolution might seem
unbiblical to some, or too cruel and wasteful a method for a benevolent
Creator to choose, but it is always possible that God might do something
that confounds our expectations.  No, the contradiction between Darwinism
and theism goes much deeper.  To know that Darwinism is true (as a general
explanation for the history of life), one has to know that no alternative
to natural evolution is possible.  To know *that* is to assume that God
does not exist, or at least that God does not or cannot create.  To
infer that mutation and selection did the creating because nothing else
was available, and then to bring God back into the picture as the omnipotent
being who chose to create by mutation and selection, is to indulge
in self-contradiction."

[Here Johnson seems to contradict his earlier statements about what can
and cannot be established a priori.  His sentence "To know that Darwinism
is true ... one has to know that no alternative to naturalistic evolution
is possible" is false, whether he means "logically possible" or "physically
possible."  Either way, it leads to a radical skepticism, to a rejection
of virtually all knowledge.  Ruling out all alternative *possibilities*
is far too strong a condition for knowledge.  I would challenge Johnson
to specify what *relevant* *probabilities* (as in probable explanations,
not numeric probabilities) have *not* been ruled out as an alternative
to "naturalistic evolution."  If there are no highly probable alternatives
to naturalistic evolution, then we *do* know that naturalistic evolution
has taken place.  Johnson suggests that there are such possibilities, but
never actually specifies any.  This is surely a tactic to avoid having
to defend his own views, as I suspect that any possible alternative he
would be happy believing suffers from problems of internal incoherence.
(E.g., if God is good and doesn't want to deceive us, why plant all this
misleading evidence for evolution?  Johnson's only response to this will
be to deny that there is such evidence.)]
   [Added July 1, 1994:  Timothy Chow has suggested to me that what
Johnson means by his claim that "To know that Darwinism is true (as a general
explanation for the history of life), one has to know that no alternative
to natural evolution is possible" is that Darwinism rests on the
assumption that there are no possible alternatives, i.e., that's the
only argument for Darwinism.  If this is indeed what Johnson meant, then
my response above misses the point of his argument.  Instead, the proper
response is simply to deny the claim that Darwinism is predicated on
the assumption that no other alternatives are possible.]

Jim Lippard              Lippard@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU
Dept. of Philosophy      Lippard@ARIZVMS.BITNET
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721

[From part 3 of a review of Michael Bauman, editor, _Man and Creation:
Perspectives on Science and Theology_, 1993, Hillsdale College Press,
originally posted to talk.origins on February 2, 1994
in <2FEB199417113350@skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu>:]

Phillip E. Johnson, "What Is Darwinism?"
 
Johnson begins by describing what he thinks is uncontroversial about
Darwinism:
 
   Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life
   forms can develop once various types of complex living organisms are
   already in existence.  If a small population of birds happens to migrate
   to an isolated island, for example, a combination of inbreeding, mutation
   and natural selection may cause this isolated population to develop
   characteristics different from those possessed by the ancestral
   population on the mainland.  When the theory is understood in this
   limited sense, Darwinian evolution is uncontroversial and has no
   important philosophical or theological implications. (pp. 177-178)
 
He immediately goes on, however, to say that
 
   Evolutionary biologists are not content merely to explain how variation
   occurs within limits, however.  They aspire to answer a much broader
   question:  how complex organisms like birds, flowers and human beings
   came into existence in the first place.  The Darwinian answer to this
   second question is that the creative force that produced complex plants
   and animals from single-celled predecessors over long stretches of
   geological time is essentially the same as the mechanism that
   produces variations in flowers, insects and domestic animals before
   our very eyes. (p. 178)
 
Johnson claims that this latter view is "a philosophical doctrine so
lacking in empirical support that Mayr's successor at Harvard, Stephen
Jay Gould, once pronounced it in a reckless moment to be 'effectively
dead.'" (p. 178)
   He asks how so many people could hold such an unscientific theory,
and states that the answer requires definition of key terms:  creationism,
evolution, science, religion, and truth.
   Johnson begins with creationism, which he says "means simply a belief
in creation."  He chides Darwinists for using the term to refer to
young-earth creationists, which he takes to be an illegitimate way of
setting up a false dilemma.  (Here, I think the blame falls as much on
non-young-earth-creationists as it does on evolutionists.  By failing to
stand up to the young-earthers and make it known that belief in a creator
doesn't entail such views, the use of the term "creationist" has come
to mean "young-earth creationist" in the English language.  Old earth
creationist Davis Young concedes the term "creationist" to the young
earthers in his book _Christianity and the Age of the Earth_.)
   Johnson goes on to say that in the broadest sense, a creationist is
someone who believes that there is a creator who has created the world
and its inhabitants with a purpose.
   He then asks if creationism in his sense is compatible with evolution.
Of course it is, right?  Here's Johnson:
   The answer is "absolutely not," when "evolution" is understood in the
   Darwinian sense.  To Darwinists, evolution means *naturalistic*
   evolution, because they insist that science must assume the cosmos
   to be a closed system of material causes and effects that can never
   be influenced by anything outside of material nature--by God, for
   example. (pp. 179-180)
Johnson has just complained about illegitimate narrow definition of
"creationism," but then he immediately turns around and does exactly
what he was complaining about to "evolution"!  Further, even the definition
of evolution that Johnson gives here is, contrary to his claims, quite
consistent with the existence of a creator, at least a deistic one.
It is perfectly consistent for a theist to say that God created the universe
as "a closed system of material causes and effects that can never be
influenced by anything outside of material nature" AND that what is
produced in that closed system has meaning and purpose as a result of
God's design.  (BTW, it is a consequence of the commonly held evangelical
Christian view that God is "outside of time" and immutable that the
universe is such a system.  See the first few chapters of Richard M.
Gale's _On the Nature and Existence of God_, 1991, Cambridge Univ. Press,
for detailed argument.  Gale argues that theists should give up both
the "outside of time" notion of God's eternity and the immutability
doctrine.)
   Next, Johnson talks more about "materialistic evolution."  He says that
on this view, evolution is at bottom based on chance, "because that is what
is left when we have ruled out everything involving intelligence or
purpose" (p. 180).  He maintains that evolutionary speculation need not
be confirmed by any evidence (experimental or fossil), but that "To Darwinists
the ability to imagine the process is sufficient to confirm that something
like that must have happened" (p. 180).
   The next term to be defined is "science."  Johnson maintains that
Darwinists (all of them, apparently) assume "scientific naturalism"--that
(a) science is inherently limited to the natural and (b) science (potentially)
describes all there is.  This claim is falsified by Van Till, who accepts
evolution and (a) but rejects (b), by me (I accept evolution, reject (a), and
am agnostic about (b)).
   Johnson goes on to say that scientific naturalism has normative rules
which govern criticism and replacement of theories based on Kuhn's
notion of a paradigm--that acceptable explanations must fit the requirements
of the paradigm (in this case, evolution), no matter how wild and contorted
such explanations may be.  Unless a suitable replacement paradigm is
available, this process continues.  (Johnson explicitly says that the
contortions may involve deception:  "Supporting the paradigm may even
require what in other contexts would be called deception" (p. 182).)
   The last term to be defined is "truth," which Johnson claims "is not
a particularly important concept in naturalistic philosophy" (p. 186).
(This is completely at odds with the naturalism advocated by such persons
as Philip Kitcher (_The Advancement of Science_) and Alvin Goldman
(_Epistemology and Cognition_), for whom truth is central to their
epistemological views.)  Johnson's reason for his statement is that
scientific knowledge is dynamic rather than absolute--what was scientific
knowledge in the past is not so today.  This seems to take for granted
the Kuhn/Laudan critique of scientific progress, which I think is a major
mistake (chapters 4 and 5 of the above-mentioned Kitcher book give a
good account of genuine scientific progress and elucidate problems with
Kuhn's and Laudan's arguments).
   Johnson maintains that theism is a source of truth which competes
with science and gives a framework from which one can reject evolution
because of its weaknesses (which he claims the scientific naturalist
can't do unless another paradigm comes along).
   Near the end of his article, Johnson again argues for his claim
that creationism and evolution in his senses are contradictory (which
I disputed above).  Here's the core of his argument:
   Darwinian evolution is by definition unguided and purposeless, and
   such evolution cannot in any meaningful sense be theistic.  For
   evolution to be genuinely theistic it must be guided by God, whether
   this means that God programmed the process in advance or stepped in
   from time to time to give it a push in the right direction. (p. 188)
Here I think there is a possible confusion of levels of description.
One can consistently hold that the processes of evolution are inherently
"unguided and purposeless" at one level of description, while simultaneously
holding that the system in which the processes operate was "programmed in
advance" by God.  Johnson seems to hold that it is contradictory for
God's plan to have components that make use of randomness.

Jim Lippard              Lippard@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU
Dept. of Philosophy      Lippard@ARIZVMS.BITNET
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721



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By Bill Hamilton:

The following communication appeared in
Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith
(the Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation)
Vol 44 No 4, December 1992
pp253, 254

I thought the comments on the value of evolution as an explanatory
framework, the nature of science and the need for an alternative
model (i.e. a "Theory of Creation") if creationists expect creationism
to be considered science are especially appropriate to some of the
current discussions.

Note that Gingerich is a Christian, and he has concerns about the
potential for abuse of evolutionary theory to "support" atheistic
and social agendas. But he defends evolution as science because
of its explanatory power. 

Further Reflections on "Darwin on Trial"

By Owen Gingerich
Astronomy and History of Science
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Cambridge, MA 02138

For some of the ASA members attending the 1992 Annual Meeting in Kona,
Hawaii, a highlight was a spontaneously organized discussion session
following Phillip Johnson's paper. In the round-robin of
correspondence that has ensued since the meeting, I realize that some
of my own remarks at this session as well as my review of Johnson's
Darwin on Trial (PSCF, June 1992) were not understood as clearly as I
had hoped.

On one point there was unanimous agreement: the issue is not evolution
versus creation. The issue is design versus accident.

Phillip Johnson has impressively documented the extent to which much
evolutionary teaching comes with philosophical baggage claiming that
"accident" is a real feature of the world, "proven" by evolutionary
doctrine. In the time since Newton, science has used mechanistic
explanations that dispense with divine intervention (the "God of the
Gaps"), and with considerable success. To the extent that design
represents divine intervention and "accident" does not, the later
explanation can be invoked as part of a mechanistic explanation. All
too frequently teachers in their naivete, or because of a deliberate
atheistic orientation, present their material as if such a mechanism
describes the actual world rather than being simply a rule of science.

Johnson and I both agree that the teaching must become more nuanced in
its presentation, and we both reject evolutionism as a philosophy. But
in my reading of Johnson, his strategy appears to invoke a frontal
attack on evolution. I think this is misguided and ultimately
fruitless. My brief is to launch the attack against the atheists who
are using evolution to further their materialistic philosophies,
against those who raise a reasonable structure of scientific
explanation into a naturalistic ideology.

In an upcoming article ("Theistic Naturalism and The Blind
Watchmaker," scheduled for the March 1993 issue of First Things)
Johnson presents statistics to the effect that only a small minority
of Americans accept the seemingly accidental, zig-zag pathways of
evolution as being the wholly mechanistic way that brought intelligent
life into existence. Part and parcel of Johnson's strategy is to
define evolution in those terms, with the insinuation that anyone who
thinks of evolution otherwise (in fact, the majority) is being duped.
And, he maintains, the mechanisms that could build up the great chain
of being, from microorganisms to fishes to mammals, are so flimsily
and inadequately demonstrated that the whole structure should be
dumped.

My counterstrategy would be to accept evolution as a reasonable
theoretical structure for explaining a great many relationships in the
biological world. It gives a very sensible explanation of why the DNA
in yeast is so closely related to the DNA in human chromosomes, or why
the genetic content of chimpanzees is so similar to those of Homo
sapiens. It explains numerous morphological patterns from the
coelocanth to the gorilla. It provides an insight into the many
examples adduced by Darwin for imperfect adaptation. It helps us
understand why Hawaii has so few species compared to the older
continental areas, and why there would be flightless birds on the
islands (now, alas, extinct since the recent introduction of such
predators as the mongoose). Johnson's rejoinder is that distribution
of species is not evolution. Of course not, and I never claimed so;
but it is an excellent example of the sort of empirical evidence that
remains mysterious and even capricious in the absence of some sort of
explanatory structure, which the theory of evolution supplies.

The theory of evolution requires two basic elements: variation and
selection.  Darwin was greatly baffled as to how variation could
arise, and his theory was rejected in many scientific quarters until a
much greater understanding of genetics, and ultimately of the chemical
basis of genetics, was achieved. There still is no satisfactory
detailed mechanism for producing large enough, non-lethal variation of
the DNA to produce a new species in a single jump, and it remains an
act of faith on the part of evolutionists that there is some way for
it to have happened bit by bit. As a Christian theist, I believe that
this is part of God's design. Whether God designed the universe at the
outset so that the appropriate mechanisms could arise in the course of
time, or whether God gives an occasional timely input is something
that science, by its very nature, will probably never be able to
fathom. But as a scientist, I accept evolution as the appropriate
explanatory structure to guide research into the origins and
affinities of the kingdoms of living organisms.

In closing my review of Darwin on Trial, I expressed my frustration by
Johnson's apparent lack of appreciation about how science works, and
this seems to be the least understood statement in my review. In Kona
I tried to illustrate what I meant by mentioning Foucault's pendulum
experiment, carried out in Paris on the night of 7-8 January 1851. The
next morning there was not dancing in the streets because finally
experimental proof for the earth's rotation had been found and that
Copernicus was right. It was a marvelous demonstration, but Foucault's
pendulum hardly affected the status of Newtonian theory or
heliocentrism. It made no differenceQpeople were already convinced
about a rotating earth because Newtonian physics connected so many
observations together into a coherent structure. I firmly believe that
science concerns itself mostly with building coherent patterns of
explanation, and rather little with proof. Lawyers seek proofs, and
that's why I said that Phil Johnson was approaching science like a
lawyer, somehow supposing that if he could show that evolution has no
proofs, it would crumble. That, I think, is misguided.

In the discussion in Hawaii, John Wiester spoke well of the Science
paper by Alan Lightman and me, in which we analyzed anomalies in
science and the resistance of scientists to acknowledging them
(Science, 255, pp. 690-695). But the essential, underlying thesis of
the paper was that anomalies will generally pass unrecognized until
the availability of an alternate theory in which they suddenly make
sense. When I said above that Johnson's approach would probably be
fruitless, I did so in this precise context. Until or unless there is
another acceptable scientific explanation for the temporal and
geographical distribution of plants and animals and their structural
relationships, biological evolution will remain the working paradigm
among scientists. To invoke God's active agency as the explanation for
slow, long-term changes in the biological record will be no more
efficacious as a scientific theory than to say that the moon orbits
the earth or apples fall from trees because of God's sustaining
activity in the universe. While I believe both to be true, they do not
pass as scientific explanations. In reading Darwin on Trial, I am left
with the impression that Johnson wishes they would.