Johnson, in the second edition of Darwin on Trial, wrote an epilogue on the subject of the response to his book.  He cites the fact that the book indeed was a force to be reckoned with in the scientific community as it was a subject of conversation and debate for another two years after its initial publication, which is quite rare for a book of this nature.  The responses were varied.

Johnson received overall positive support from the Christian community for accurately presenting the debate over origins as a debate of ideas that oftentimes only presents one side of the argument.  The book has been a tool in the hands of many people who now understand that terminology and definition are foundational to understanding and critiquing Darwinism in the public forum in ways that are constructive.  Calling names and pronouncing divine judgments is never useful in the debate.  Especially helpful is the need to dismiss errant perception of proponents on both sides of the debate such that accurate judgment of ideas can be rendered.

The response to Johnson’s book from the scientific community was both hopeful and critical – critical on grounds largely irrelevant to the basic premise of his book.  Stephen Jay Gould, Johnson admits, was a person he both expected to be a formidable opponent responding to his view and one who would respond immediately.  This, sadly, did not happen.  A full year after the book’s publication, a scanty four-page article by Gould appeared in Scientific American, in which he blindly criticized Johnson for not understanding the essentials of evolutionary science and also appeared to ignore Johnson’s basic argument.

Michael Ruse, on the other hand, provides the hopeful response for which Johnson is thankful.  Ruse is a Darwinist who sees in Johnson’s argument valid concerns over philosophical presumptions inherent to Darwinism and concedes that much introspection is needed within his  science.  The debate continues and Johnson has provided a robust tool such that a better view of science, compatible with some sense of divine authorship in creation, is conceivable.  Science and religion are not mutually exclusive, a view held strongly by the scholastics.  Indeed, if God created the universe and we have the privilege of examining its laws, this is science of the highest form.

Author’s Note:

I hope you’ve found these posts useful for understanding the origins debate.  My hope in presenting this content is that Christians will recognize there are answers to the tough questions regarding our origins and we need not fear the difficulties of apparent incongruity between science and the Biblical claims concerning the origin of life.  The questions are real and substantive.  One incorrect response is to dismiss them altogether as meaningless.  This is an avenue of engagement with a lost world intent on “exchanging the truth for a lie”.  This is our battle ground – the realm of ideas.

Another incorrect response is to simply speak louder and denounce scientific claims outright without hearing them.  The scientific observations collected by Darwinists are no less real because we simply see them as false.  They are real because it is all they see through the lens of their materialistic worldview.  Part of our task as believers is to engage these ideas with truth, with the hope of painting a picture of a worldview that not only corresponds with reality but one that also allows for true science to take place – a science in which its proponents do not fear a reordering of their preconceptions.  I believe Johnson has provided an immensely useful tool for Christians to see through assumptions, hasty conclusions, and hostility toward any theistic involvement in life.

Is evolutionary theory science or is it a pseudoscience?  In the final chapter of the book, Johnson points out how evolutionary theory has been evaluated by leading philosophers of science who claim that Darwinism is riddled with incongruities that signify its eventual downfall.  Karl Popper, a philosopher noted earlier, compares Darwinism with Marxism and Freudianism.

Like these two systems, Darwinism seeks to explain everything.  When scientists find evidence to support their claims, albeit predetermined evidence, this is seen as confirmation of their theory and rightfully so if the evidence is conclusive.  But like these two systems Darwinism has the tendency to shift its position slightly when negative evidence is presented such that their altered theory makes accommodations for the new evidence.  Popper astutely observes that “a theory that appears to explain everything actually explains nothing.”  (In fact, this behavior is remarkably reminiscent of young boys who all-to-eagerly change the rules of a game just to suit their advantage.)

Popper provides examples wherein a theory that has viability will also have the potential for failure – this is the mark of true science, and the scientific method.  This potential for failure is a distinct characteristic of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.  It was a bold, specific prediction and was open to falsification because of its fundamental precision, not ambiguity.  Einstein submitted his proofs and thus opened himself up to not only analysis by the best minds in physics but also with the test of whether his theory corresponded with reality.  Freud and the Marxists only ever looked for confirming examples for their theories and thus never had the chance of failure.  Darwinism fits this mold exactly.  This mold is what Johnson and others assure is the wrong view of science.  This wrong view of science demonstrates its nature in its “craving to be right”.

In that light, Darwinism is less a science and more a pseudoscience.  Darwinism’s classification as a pseudoscience is evident in the bare reality that its proponents dismiss the lack of empirical evidence to support their claims, while also ignoring the fact that the process by which they claim life developed on the planet has no observable verification.  Assumptions abound.  Unconfirmed inferences spill over from the pages of science textbooks.  And much of society is already dressed up with the lingo that presupposes the source’s veridicality.

In chapter 11, Johnson brings his readers to the means by which Darwinists hope to indoctrinate the masses with their view of the world.  Museums present exhibits that have the effect of cementing the ideas of evolutionary origins of life into the minds of the general public without question.  In this, science serves as an authority whose view the public must accept.  Science once enjoyed the vaulted position of questioning the authority of religion; scientists now expect people to accept the claims of Darwinism without empirical evidence but instead based purely on their authority.    How ironic.

Leaders in education systems write policy statements that make distinctions between believing and understanding and necessarily that draws a line between science and religion that effectively communicates a distinction between reality and fantasy.  When religious claims are not within the realm of verifiability they are irrelevant and deemed inappropriate for consideration in classrooms and textbooks.  Educators continue by distinguishing knowledge from belief as though they are two separate and unrelated concepts.  If one does not accept the claims of evolution then this is due to ignorance of the facts.  An individual in such a position must be educated and, in effect, must be persuaded to “believe”.  Johnson believes this strategy of Darwinists to place the content of evolutionary theory in public classrooms to be a misstep.  When knowledge is presented in the public forum it can be debated, questioned, even opposed.  Johnson believes that an attempt at forced indoctrination at the public level is not enough to corrupt a thinking public.

It seems, however, that Johnson’s contention depends on the willingness of the public to engage these supposed scientific ideas.  In the nineteen years since the first edition of his book such engagement has occurred too infrequently and in largely unconstructive ways.  The “misstep” as Johnson sees it is only such when one assumes the public cares a great deal about the information that is passively delivered to it in newspapers, textbooks, museum exhibits, movies, television programs and even in the classrooms of their first graders.  The misstep is no such thing when one remembers the vivid fact that the public is largely apathetic to ideas about which it knows very little, and the implications of which it cannot see.

While Darwinists like to make statements accommodating religion, and perhaps equivocally allaying the fears of those who accept a mingling of theistic involvement and evolution by natural processes, the logical implications of their “findings” tell another tale.  Johnson cites William Provine, a historian of science, who insists that the conflict between science and religion is inescapable.

According to Provine’s understanding, the claims of evolutionary science have direct implications on the basic beliefs of religion.  Some of these implications include: 1) the world is organized according to mechanistic principles excluding the possibility of supernatural involvement, 2) there is no purpose inherent in nature, 3) there are no gods or designing forces, 4) the world has no inherent ethical or moral laws, 5) humans are complex machines whose ethical persuasions are based on heredity and environment, 6) death is the end for all, and 7) human beings are not free to make choices.

Again, Darwinists insist that the realms of science and religion are separate and have no intermingling, but they either cannot see the illogical nature of that assessment or they are simply content with glossing over the reality of which they are quite aware.  Any attempts to harmonize science and religion are met with harsh condemnation since any movement in that direction denies a principle tenet of evolutionary theory in that it is a purely materialistic process void of any divine involvement.

More central to the issue at hand though is that this conflict arises most emphatically only when it is the wrong religion whose harmonization with science is supported.  Some Darwinists see no problem with harmonizing science and religion when it suits their views, when man can decide how such harmonization works.  For example, Julian Huxley, Theodore Dobzhansky and Pierre Tielhard de Chardin insist that human beings, the discoverers of their own origins, are now faced with the mandate of realizing their own potential.  These men argue that man now stands with the opportunity to control the processes that brought him into existence.  Indeed this mandate is of an ethical nature as he can now pursue man-directed selection and determine how man ought to live and determine what should be valued.

Under this model, man is now the highest authority to which he must answer; in fact, it is the scientist who now wields this authority.  People must be taught to accept this view and banish any idea that there is a power above mankind who imposes its will in the form of moral or ethical laws.  In this sense, Darwinism is just as much a religious force as the traditional religions they oppose.  By all accounts, Darwinism is a religion, and of the kind they despise.

This leads us to the chapter in Johnson’s book wherein he demonstrates that evolutionists have the benefit of established rules of science that are tilted in their favor.  For example, a judge in a case in Arkansas declared five essential characteristics of science, which are essentially the principles held to by Darwinists in their stance against creationism:

1. It is guided by natural law.
2. It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law.
3. It is testable against the empirical world.
4. Its conclusions are tentative; not necessarily the final word
5. It is falsifiable.

This judge also declared that creation science does not meet this criteria because it appeals to the supernatural.  This criteria came under intense scrutiny from philosophers of science who charged the judge with making assertions that were simply not true, and by the rules of logic, some of the rules are invalid.  First, they claimed that scientists many times over have not been in the slightest bit tentative about their claims.  Second, history is full of examples in which scientists made observations they could not explain by natural law.  Gravity is one feature of the natural world that continues to baffle physicists.  Third, the claims of creation science, to some, are provably false; how can they be both provably false and, according to the fifth rule, unfalsifiable.  Fourth, many biologists do not consider the claims of religion and science to be mutually exclusive; however, most evolutionary biologists who insist on materialistic explanations for the diversity of life also deny any involvement by a supernatural designer.

Johnson, at this point in the book, begins to highlight a naturalism that is both antagonistic to supernatural ideas as well as its conflict with empiricism.  Naturalism as a framework for scientific thinking, for almost any scientist, is the only reliable path to knowledge.  Naturalism insists that the development of life proceeded by means of evolution yet this process is not observable nor verifiable.  The idea that natural selection is responsible for the development of new species cannot be verified with evidence.  Darwinism, at best, is an inference from an incomplete body of evidence.  The fossil record paints a bleak picture for proponents of evolution since it bears no conclusive record of evolution’s fingerprints.  As stated earlier, Johnson assures his readers that naturalism is content with defining its own rules whereby it can ignore opposing viewpoints to prevent its failure.  Here we see a tenacious grip to ideas even in the face of opposing evidence – a tendency for which evolutionists cry foul when they consider some of the unscientific claims of fundamentalists.  Herein is the religion of Darwinism exposed.

How did life actually originate?  Where did the “stuff” come from on which natural selection could begin its work?  Prebiological evolution is the subject of chapter 8.  Evolution is the study of how life changes after it already exists and natural selection can only begin its work when it has something living to work on.  The problem faced in this chapter is discovering how life began in the first place.  What were the necessary chemical compounds that made life possible?  What external force (perhaps electricity) combined with those compounds to produce self-sustaining life?  A few theories have been proposed.

One theory is that Earth’s early atmosphere was conducive to the development of essential amino acids thought to be the precursors for life.  Experiments were conducted hoping to replicate this atmosphere, in which a spark was sent through a mixture of gases that led to the production of two amino acids.  Related to this theory is the contention that these early chemical compounds were produced to such an extent that it resulted in the “pre-biotic” soup from which life emerged.  Geochemists have been quick to oppose this theory claiming that the “soup” could never have existed and therefore cannot be used as the model for the origins of life.  The experiments themselves have also continually failed in producing “living organisms” that could themselves form amino acids and reproduce.  The formation of these chemical compounds in an early earth atmosphere, whether a valid theory or not, according to Johnson, amounts to a level of chance that is another way of saying “miracle”.

Another theory proposed is the idea that an RNA molecule was developed that carried with it the necessary information for protein synthesis and reproduction.  However, various scientists claim that RNA would not have been produced in significant enough quantities to account for life as we know it and RNA must have developed from some earlier “genetic system that no longer exists.”

Lastly, molecular biologist Francis Crick, half of the team that discovered the DNA molecule, proposed a wild solution to the origin of life on the planet.  Although this solution was delivered in the face of great uncertainty over life’s origins and likely was never intended as concrete scientific model, he proposed that the development of life from complex molecules may have been a rare event in the universe but could have been used by highly advanced civilizations on distant planets in a process he called “directed panspermia”.  Under this model an alien civilization could have spread molecular life to other planets using some form of space travel.  He was ridiculed by hardcore evolutionists for this proposition for it amounts to nothing less than some form of intelligent design and it does not escape the problem of answering the initial question in the first place.  Where did life itself originate?  Crick’s speculation only moved the target of examination from Earth to another planet and demonstrates the length to which some scientists will go in speculating about the origins of life when clear evidence for its sudden appearance on the level of miracle is indeed plausible.

Johnson next considers in chapter 7 the molecular evidence for evolution.  Classification among species has traditionally been accomplished through observation of various visible characteristics.  Biochemists have discovered the viability of classifying species at the molecular level by their degree of similarity.  Johnson brings attention to the fact that this subject is highly controversial.  For instance, molecular studies have led some scientists to classifications that differ greatly from classifications based on visible characteristics.  Some scientists ignore this obvious disparity as only an apparent problem and claim this level of classification is more objective.  However, when examining frogs at the molecular level, for example, some groups bear more similarity with mammals than with their own species.  Additionally, while molecular studies have proven a great degree of similarity between chimps and humans, it does nothing to explain their even greater degree of visible dissimilarity. The study of the molecular evidence has also shed light on a certain chemical called cytochrome c.  Based on the study of the levels of this chemical compound found in organisms attempts have been made to measure the degree of divergence between species thought to be in the same ancestral line.  Unfortunately, it has been discovered that some plant species differ from bacteria as much as humans do, based on cytochrome c comparisons, rendering comparison of this kind unreliable at best.  Other problems faced by biochemists are the questions of the order of appearance of compounds like DNA and RNA that direct the synthesis of proteins essential to the development of life.

Johnson concludes his coverage of the molecular evidence by claiming that, far from proving evolution, it actually adds to the difficulty of explaining evolution by natural selection because it reveals even greater degrees of complexity.  Molecular systems are made up of complex parts, many of which rely on other complex parts to carry out their functions.  More complexity necessitates an even greater need for empirical evidence for the assertions of the Darwinists.  These studies, like others, fail to provide the much needed proofs that a) cumulative micromutational change actually occurs, and b) that common ancestral links actually exist.

Johnson tackles the subject of pre-biological evolution in chapter 8, analyzing how Darwinists account for the appearance of life to begin with.

The vertebrate sequence is the subject Johnson deals with in chapter 6 of his book.  Regarding the vertebrate sequence, evolutionists make the following general claims: amphibians developed from a common fish-like ancestor; reptiles developed from an amphibian ancestor; birds and mammals developed from a reptile ancestor.  Included in the last claim is the assertion that humans and apes share a common simian ancestor.  To support the first claim, that amphibians and fish descended from a common ancestor, some evolutionists point to the rhipidistians, a form of fish that Darwinists claim have certain important features bearing similarities to early amphibians.  This claim, however, was refuted by Barbara J. Stahl when she asserted that those species thought to be the common ancestor of amphibians lived after the first amphibians appeared and therefore cannot be an ancestor of amphibians.  Secondly, Stahl claims that the species that existed before amphibians do not demonstrate any characteristics likened to the first four-limbed creatures that walked on land.  Thus, this first claim of the evolutionists has no conclusive evidence.  The second claim, that reptiles descended from amphibians, also has no candidates to serve as evidence.  One significant difficulty faced by evolutionists is the fact that the reproductive systems of the two classes are very different.  In order to prove that the transition occurred, soft tissue from supposed ancestral links would need to be examined to show divergence in the direction of the differentiation we see in the two classes.

Lastly, Darwinists claim that mammals descended from reptiles.  As a reminder, this is one of the conclusive proofs Stephen Jay Gould offered as proof of micromutational speciation.  As evidence to support the claim, scientists point to the class of species known as Therapsida. The fossils placed in this category bear resemblance to both reptiles and mammals and thus, for evolutionists, provide the necessary link between the two.  However, due to important structural differences in the fossils in the group, taxonomists have failed to successfully identify a single species that might serve as the single ancestral point from which all mammals descended – a crucial argument for Darwinists since mammals are strongly considered to be a “monophyletic” group.  Some paleontologists developed a theory that mammals might be a polyphyletic group, that is that several mammalian groups developed separately from different lines of the therapsid category.  It is important to point out here that if mammals are a monophyletic group with its own difficulties brought by the lack of evidence in the fossil record, then the problem is made exponentially worse if mammals are considered to be a polyphyletic group.

Within this last claim is the popular argument that reptiles were the predecessors to birds.  Archaeopteryx, the reptile-like bird (or bird-like reptile), is cited as clear evidence of a transitional link.  However, while some might concede that this could be some measure of proof, it too is not conclusive.  One exception to the consistent pattern of the fossil record depicting sudden appearance of life is not enough to prove the opposite.  Archaeopteryx indeed might be one distinct species among many distinct species that simply share certain characteristics.  This does not immediately point to speciation through accumulation of micromutations, adaptation, microevolution, or even macroevolution.  The fossil record and present-day life consists of specimens containing bewildering examples of both diversity and commonality and that simply points to the difficulties inherent in the process of classification.

The fact is that evolutionists approach the study of origins with preconceived assumptions and examine the apparent evidence in that light.  For them, evolution occurred.  Ancestors to present day organisms are often simply labeled as such because the evolutionists “know” they are there.  However, this is far from a confirmation of the theory.  Evidence must be evaluated independent of the assumptions made in the theory being tested.  This is a basic premise of science that evolutionists dismiss in their work repeatedly.

Johnson turns to the so-called molecular evidence for evolution in chapter 7 of Darwin on Trial.

Note that the article has no direct bearing on the viability of evolution as a scientific theory, but since Phillip Johnson’s book is targeted at the structure of the argumentation in evolutionary theory, this article should be useful in helping you see that framework on display. 

Read the article here.