Staring Down Darwinism

by    Thomas E. Woodward                                                                                                                  Vol. VI, No. 7, September 1993

[Thomas E. Woodward is professor of missions. evangelism, and science at Trinity College of Florida/Tampa Bay Theological Seminary. This is reprinted from the Christian Life Commission journal, Light, January-February 1992.]

Book review of Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, Regnery Gateway and Intervarsity Press, 1991.

The future course of America's spiritual and ethical life will be powerfully influenced by the education (or indoctrination) of our future leaders and citizens on the question of our origin. Is humankind the product of an Intelligence – created with a purpose – or are we the product of "purposeless and mindless processes" that did not have us in mind? The latter view is taught in key biology textbooks in our universities. Now, the former view (that we were designed with a purpose in mind) has found an unusually powerful new exponent – a law professor at Berkeley named Phillip E. Johnson, and his book Darwin on Trial.

Let me issue a three-part prophecy about Johnson and his feisty new book: (1) During the coming year, Johnson's name will become a "household word" to millions of Americans. (2) Dogmatic Darwinists will come to regard the Berkeley professor as the chief enemy because of the painful intellectual blows that Darwin on Trial deals to their cherished evolutionary world view. (3) Evangelical Christians of all stripes will welcome his critique, and some will sense the rise of a new C.S. Lewis in our time.

Some sort of national furor over Johnson's book seems inevitable, given the publicity he is receiving. The media seem to be enjoying the spectacle of a Berkeley professor challenging his faculty colleagues to come up with any solid evidence that humans are descended from simpler life forms.

In a faculty seminar in 1988, Johnson presented a lengthy technical paper on the subject. The scientists in attendance had no new evidence with which to counter. Rather, they argued the philosophical necessity of excluding the "creation possibility."

Johnson's critique can be described by a single word that is appropriate for Berkeley: radical. Simply put, he contends that the claims of Darwinism (that mindless processes have produced all the life forms of our world, including people) are based not on scientific evidence but rather on powerful philosophical assumptions, rhetorical tricks, and manipulations of terminology. In other words, Johnson has employed his skills at analyzing arguments and evidence and has found Darwinism to be fatally flawed.

Johnson surveys the related areas of natural selection and mutation and shows that science has yet to uncover laboratory evidence showing any mechanism for large-scale changes or "macro-evolution." He also explores the chief embarrassment for Darwinists: the fossil record. The two great facts about fossils (sudden appearance of new life forms followed by stasis or lack of evolutionary change) are precisely the opposite of what Darwinism predicts. The greatest scientific problem of all is: Where did the first cell come from? Johnson says that the more scientists study the cell and its intricate DNA and other molecular machinery, the more frustrated they grow in trying to explain how all of this could have originated by chance.

How then does molecules-to-man evolution remain the official dogma of our public educational system? A crucial philosophical doctrine, called "naturalism," has commandeered the thinking and teaching about origins. Naturalism holds to a view of the universe as a closed system that is not open to any creative activity by a "pre-existing intelligence." Thus Darwinists effectively exclude God from His universe.

Darwin on Trial makes strong statements in ethics. First, the Darwinist claim to religious neutrality is false, since many leading evolutionists have extended Darwinism into a full-fledged naturalistic religion. Since man is the "high point" of evolution, he must now take control of evolution and genetically engineer "better people."

Second, Darwinism preaches its own "gospel" of the liberation of humankind from the illusion that it was created for a purpose. Thus, any religion that teaches the accountability of man to a Creator is automatically the enemy of true Darwinism.

Third, teaching the fact of Darwinism (that we and all living things share a common ancestry) is gross miseducation in light of the state of the evidence. Johnson insists on a total revamping of the teaching of evolution at all levels, so the theory's severe problems are made known, and the role of naturalism in Darwinism is candidly faced.

For parents who want to penetrate beyond the superficialities of the origins debate, for students or pastors or Christian workers who want an insider's analysis of the status of Darwinism in 1991, one cannot find a better book than Darwin on Trial.