Phillip E. Johnson reviews the background and recent developments in Darwinian efforts to prevent open discussion of their evolutionary hypothesis.
Phillip E. Johnson’s Darwin on Trial was one of the first works to lay bare the absence of conclusive scientific evidence to support Darwin’s hypothesis: that life originated by chance and that all living things evolved, by random chance, from a single, elemental form of life.
Professor Johnson is a graduate of Harvard and the University of Chicago, who served as law clerk for Chief Justice Earl Warren and taught law at the University of California at Berkley for more than twenty years. In Darwin on Trial he wrote:
I approach the creation-evolution dispute not as a scientist but as a professor of law, which means among other things that I know something about the ways that words are used in arguments. What first drew my attention to the question was the way the rules of argument seemed to be structured to make it impossible to question whether what we are being told about evolution is really true....It is as if a criminal defendant were not allowed to present an alibi unless he could also show who did commit the crime.
This comes about, he notes, by employing a circular argument. Evolution is defined as science by it adherents; anything not supporting evolution is therefore not science; intelligent design, however factually based, does not support evolution, therefore it is religion, not science.
Professor Johnson continued: A second point that caught my attention was that the very persons who insist upon keeping religion and science separate are eager to use science as a basis for pronouncements about religion....Another factor that makes evolutionary science seem a lot like religion is the evident zeal of Darwinists to evangelize the world, by insisting that even non-scientists accept the truth of their theory as a matter of moral obligation....[Richard Dawkins, for example] can scarcely restrain his fury. “It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that)."
Now, in an article posted on the Discovery Institute website, professor Johnson bring us up to date on the efforts of Darwinians to stifle discussion of the manifold inconsistencies and gaps in their quasi-religious hypothesis of atheistic materialism.
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