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.

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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.

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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.

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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.