Phillip E. Johnson, the law professor who helped launch the intelligent design movement, passed away at home in Berkeley, California, on November 2nd. He was 79.
Johnson was born in Aurora, Illinois, on June 18, 1940. He received a B.A. in English literature from Harvard University in 1961, and a J.D. from the University of Chicago in 1965. After serving as a law clerk for California Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Traynor, and then U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, Johnson in 1967 joined the faculty of Boalt Hall, the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, where he was to stay throughout his academic career, retiring in 2000. He was a specialist in criminal law and criminal procedure, editing casebooks on those topics.
Following a divorce, Johnson became a born again Christian, later becoming an elder at a Presbyterian Church in Berkeley. While on Sabbatical in England, wanting to do something more meaningful with his life, Johnson read Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, recognizing in it the type of argumentation that lawyers use when they’re trying to cover up a problem with their case. "Something about the Darwinists' rhetorical style made me think they had something to hide."
Johnson began preparing the manuscript that became Darwin on Trial. He approached the creation/evolution dispute as an academic lawyer with a specialty in analyzing the logic of arguments and identifying the assumptions that lie behind those arguments. Darwin on Trial, published in 1991, convinced many thinking people that the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution was buttressed more by the philosophy of naturalism than by actual scientific evidence. Johnson’s book became a magnet to pull together scholars from a variety of fields — biology, chemistry, physics, philosophy, theology, and law — to forge the Intelligent Design movement. Many scientists and scholars who were interested in Intelligent Design became acquainted with each other through Johnson.
Looking back on the phenomenon that Darwin on Trial became, Johnson wrote:
“Fifteen years ago I published a book that I thought might add a few ounces of balance to the debate over Darwin’s theory of evolution. The main thrust of that book, Darwin on Trial, was that evolution is propped up more by naturalistic philosophy than by the scientific evidence. Much to my pleasant surprise, this book turned out to be the match that lit the tinder beneath a stockpile of dry logs. This is not to my credit; the logs had been piled high, and the tinder gathered. Darwinian naturalists had accumulated a large stock of public discontent.”
His life was characterized by consistency and integrity. Wrote John Mark Reynolds,
“Phillip Johnson is one of those rare individuals who is always the same person. He asks the same hard questions in Sunday School as he does in the Berkeley classroom. He has a unified personality. I have seen him in hundreds of different situations, and there is no split in his soul.”
Although Johnson was often the target of intemperate attacks by Darwinists, he did not respond in kind. Reynolds wrote, “He is not a hater, not even of his enemies. This is why so many who disagree with him can still respect him. . . . He suffers fools gladly.”
Ironically, the attacks on him often ended up drawing people to him. Biochemist Michael Behe, author of the influential work Darwin’s Black Box, read a biased review of Johnson’s book in the journal Science that made him so mad that he wrote a letter to the editor, which Science published. About a week later, “I received a letter with a return address of Boalt Hall,” Behe wrote, “I was now in the loop—I was within the circle of Phil Johnson’s acquaintances and useful contacts.”
Although Intelligent Design advocates have sometimes urged that ID be taught in the public schools, or at least that such schools should “teach the controversy,” Johnson did not see politics as the answer:
“I regard the idea of a Christian political party with a combination of horror and amusement, because Christian denominations are themselves so confused and internally divided. Naturalistic thinking is nearly as prevalent in the religious world as in the secular culture. I belong to the mainline Presbyterian denomination (PC-USA) and we are having quite enough trouble trying to get our own denomination back on the right road without trying to govern the world in general.”
Which could as easily be said of today’s SDA denomination.
Biola University established the Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth; Johnson himself received the inaugural award in 2004.
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