lpetrich
August 7, 2005, 06:01 AM
It's here (http://www.eastbayexpress.com/Issues/2005-07-27/news/feature_print.html), and it seems to me that Phillip Johnson got more sympathy in the article than he deserves.
For instance, where his book addressed the notion that amphibians evolved into reptiles, Johnson wrote, "No satisfactory candidates exist to document this transition."I checked the Tree of Life page on "terrestrial vertebrates" (http://tolweb.org/tree?group=Terrestrial_Vertebrates), and the answer is:
The anthracosaurs, some Carboniferous to Triassic early amphibians with reptile-like features.
And just because the human eyeball is similar to that of a squid, Johnson is unwilling to imagine an evolutionary link between the species, absent other evidence of common genetic inheritance.
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
Vertebrate and squid camera eyes are a classic example of convergent evolution. Though their overall architecture is very similar, there are numerous differences in detail, like which embryonic tissues they grow out of, how the retina is connected to the brain, etc.
This is also evident from what sort of eyes their closest relatives have -- most other chordates and mollusks have much simpler eyes.
But I think that such an analysis would be lost on Phillip Johnson.
Back to the article. He calls "Darwinism" the "creation myth of scientific naturalism", and claims that it "plays an indispensable ideological role in the war against fundamentalism." He has it backwards; it's fundies' championing of creationism that makes them fought against. I wonder if he's next going to weep for geocentrists or flat-earthers.
When he got a teaching job at Berkeley, it was during the days of the Vietnam War protests, and he says: "Part of what bothered me about the left ... was quite consistent with what bothered me later about Darwinism. It's the dogmatism, the insistence that everybody believe as they did." Consider that he believes in a religion that teaches exactly that sort of thing, he does not have much right to complain.
His conversion was provoked by home-life turmoil during the 1970's, during which his first wife went leftward; when she left, he "became skeptical of the utilitarian and rationalist philosophy" he had picked up during his career, and he eventually joined the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley.
He claims that he wanted to test his faith, so he took on Darwinism; he concluded that it was an effort to make "the Creator" look like an unnecessary hypothesis. When he decided that Asimov's Guide to Science has more pages opposing creationism than trying to demonstrate evolution, he decided that this seems like an agenda rather than serious advocacy of evolution.
But the same can be said of creationists, who are obsessed with debunking evolution. While evolutionary biologists are mainly preoccupied with improving their understanding of evolution. Asimov had been writing for a general audience rather than for professional biologists.
He claims that he doesn't want to talk about religion or the Bible, but he gets evasive when asked about details of his "designer". He retorts that being evasive is no different from the evasiveness that evolution advocates allegedly show when asked where is the evidence that random mutations and natural selection had produced what we see in the Earth's biota.
As to religion, he once had this curious complaint about the Old Testament creation stories and various religious groups:
The Jewish people don't see it as their issue. "They say, 'Well, we don't read the Torah quite that way,' The Catholic people say, 'Well, that's a Protestant issue. We're not worried about the details of Genesis. We're worried about the teaching authority of the Church.' The Eastern Orthodox people say something similar. The Protestants are divided between liberals and conservatives, and the conservatives are divided between Old Earthers and Young Earthers. In short, it's a very divided situation. So when the people of God are divided, the way is open for agnostics to say, 'We should put all of this aside and say that we don't deal with any of those God questions. We explain the world without regard to God. '
It is revealing that he thought that they'd automatically be on his side.
He seems to think that intelligent design will cause people to convert to Xianity:
The objective is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the nonexistence of God. From there, people are introduced to 'the truth' of the Bible and then 'the question of sin' and finally 'introduced to Jesus.'
We don't have to fear freedom of thought, because good thinking done in the right way will eventually lead back to the church, to the truth -- the truth that sets people free, even if it goes through a couple of detours on the way. And so we're the ones that stand for good science, objective reasoning, assumptions on the table, a high level of education, and freedom of conscience to think as we are capable of thinking. That's what America stands for, and that's something we stand for, and that's something the Christian Church and the Christian Gospel stand for -- the truth that makes you free. Let's recapture that, while we're recapturing America.
Which makes hash out of some IDers' claim that their "designer" is unspecified.
Also, I don't see how ID necessarily supports his theology instead of some other theology. I doubt that he has much taste for Raelianism, for instance.
For instance, where his book addressed the notion that amphibians evolved into reptiles, Johnson wrote, "No satisfactory candidates exist to document this transition."I checked the Tree of Life page on "terrestrial vertebrates" (http://tolweb.org/tree?group=Terrestrial_Vertebrates), and the answer is:
The anthracosaurs, some Carboniferous to Triassic early amphibians with reptile-like features.
And just because the human eyeball is similar to that of a squid, Johnson is unwilling to imagine an evolutionary link between the species, absent other evidence of common genetic inheritance.
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
Vertebrate and squid camera eyes are a classic example of convergent evolution. Though their overall architecture is very similar, there are numerous differences in detail, like which embryonic tissues they grow out of, how the retina is connected to the brain, etc.
This is also evident from what sort of eyes their closest relatives have -- most other chordates and mollusks have much simpler eyes.
But I think that such an analysis would be lost on Phillip Johnson.
Back to the article. He calls "Darwinism" the "creation myth of scientific naturalism", and claims that it "plays an indispensable ideological role in the war against fundamentalism." He has it backwards; it's fundies' championing of creationism that makes them fought against. I wonder if he's next going to weep for geocentrists or flat-earthers.
When he got a teaching job at Berkeley, it was during the days of the Vietnam War protests, and he says: "Part of what bothered me about the left ... was quite consistent with what bothered me later about Darwinism. It's the dogmatism, the insistence that everybody believe as they did." Consider that he believes in a religion that teaches exactly that sort of thing, he does not have much right to complain.
His conversion was provoked by home-life turmoil during the 1970's, during which his first wife went leftward; when she left, he "became skeptical of the utilitarian and rationalist philosophy" he had picked up during his career, and he eventually joined the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley.
He claims that he wanted to test his faith, so he took on Darwinism; he concluded that it was an effort to make "the Creator" look like an unnecessary hypothesis. When he decided that Asimov's Guide to Science has more pages opposing creationism than trying to demonstrate evolution, he decided that this seems like an agenda rather than serious advocacy of evolution.
But the same can be said of creationists, who are obsessed with debunking evolution. While evolutionary biologists are mainly preoccupied with improving their understanding of evolution. Asimov had been writing for a general audience rather than for professional biologists.
He claims that he doesn't want to talk about religion or the Bible, but he gets evasive when asked about details of his "designer". He retorts that being evasive is no different from the evasiveness that evolution advocates allegedly show when asked where is the evidence that random mutations and natural selection had produced what we see in the Earth's biota.
As to religion, he once had this curious complaint about the Old Testament creation stories and various religious groups:
The Jewish people don't see it as their issue. "They say, 'Well, we don't read the Torah quite that way,' The Catholic people say, 'Well, that's a Protestant issue. We're not worried about the details of Genesis. We're worried about the teaching authority of the Church.' The Eastern Orthodox people say something similar. The Protestants are divided between liberals and conservatives, and the conservatives are divided between Old Earthers and Young Earthers. In short, it's a very divided situation. So when the people of God are divided, the way is open for agnostics to say, 'We should put all of this aside and say that we don't deal with any of those God questions. We explain the world without regard to God. '
It is revealing that he thought that they'd automatically be on his side.
He seems to think that intelligent design will cause people to convert to Xianity:
The objective is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the nonexistence of God. From there, people are introduced to 'the truth' of the Bible and then 'the question of sin' and finally 'introduced to Jesus.'
We don't have to fear freedom of thought, because good thinking done in the right way will eventually lead back to the church, to the truth -- the truth that sets people free, even if it goes through a couple of detours on the way. And so we're the ones that stand for good science, objective reasoning, assumptions on the table, a high level of education, and freedom of conscience to think as we are capable of thinking. That's what America stands for, and that's something we stand for, and that's something the Christian Church and the Christian Gospel stand for -- the truth that makes you free. Let's recapture that, while we're recapturing America.
Which makes hash out of some IDers' claim that their "designer" is unspecified.
Also, I don't see how ID necessarily supports his theology instead of some other theology. I doubt that he has much taste for Raelianism, for instance.