csua.org/u/c2t -> www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/14/AR2005051401222_pf.html
com Doubting Rationalist 'Intelligent Design' Proponent Phillip Johnson, and How He Came to Be By Michael Powell Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, May 15, 2005; "The Washington Post is not one of my biggest fans, you know that." The Washington Post reporter has just walked out of a spray of Pacific-bo rne rain into the living room of a modest bungalow west of downtown. The re's a shag rug, an inspirational painting or two and Phillip Johnson, d ressed in tan slacks and a sweater and sitting on a couch. He pulls a do g-eared copy of a Post editorial out of his shirt pocket and reads aloud : "With their slick Web sites, pseudo-academic conferences and savvy public relations, the proponents of 'intelligent design' -- a 'theory' that ch allenges the validity of Darwinian evolution -- are far more sophisticat ed than the creationists of yore. The 65-year-old Johnson swivels his formidable and balding head -- with t hat even more formidable brain inside -- and gazes over his reading glas ses at the reporter (who doesn't labor for the people who write the edit orials). "I suppose you think creation is all about unguided material processes, d on't you? Well, I don't have the slightest trouble accepting microevolut ion as the cause behind the adaptation of the peppered moth and the grow th of finches' beaks. But I don't see that evolutionists have any cause for jubilation there. "It doesn't tell you how the moths and birds and trees got there in the f irst place. The human body is packed with marvels, eyes and lungs and ce lls, and evolutionary gradualism can't account for that." He's not big on small talk, this professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley's law school. For centuries, scriptural literalists have insisted that God created Heav en and Earth in seven days, that the world is about 6,000 years old and fossils are figments of the paleontological imagination. Their grasp on popular opinion was strong, but they have suffered a half-century's wort h of defeats in the courts and lampooning by the intelligentsia. Now comes Johnson, a devout Presbyterian and accomplished legal theorist, and he doesn't dance on the head of biblical pins. He agrees the world is billions of years old and that dinosaurs walked the earth. This man, whose life has touched every sta tion of the rationalist cross from Harvard to the University of Chicago to clerk at the Supreme Court, is the founding father of the "intelligen t design" movement. Intelligent design holds that the machinery of life is so complex as to r equire the hand -- perhaps subtle, perhaps not -- of an intelligent crea tor. "Evolution is the most plausible explanation for life if you're using nat uralistic terms, I'll agree with that." Johnson folds his hands over his belly, a professorial Buddha, as his words fly rat-a-tat-tat. "That's only," he continues, "because science puts forward evolution and says any other logical explanation is outside of reality." Johnson and his followers, microbiologists and geologists and philosopher s, debate in the language of science rather than Scripture. They point t o the complexity of the human cell, with its natural motors and miles of coding. They document the scant physical evidence for the large-scale m utations needed to make the long journey from primitive prokaryote to mo dern man. They've inspired a political movement -- at least 19 states are consideri ng challenges to the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution. None of which amuses evolutionary biologists, for whom intelligent-design theory inhabits the remotest exurb of polite scientific discourse. It explains the proliferation of spe cies and the interaction of DNA and RNA, not to mention the evolution of humankind. The evidence, they insist, is all around: Fruit flies branch into new species; studies of the mouse genome reveal that 99 percent of its 30,000 genes have counterparts in humans. There are fossilized rema ins of a dinosaur "bird," and DNA tests suggest that whales descended fr om ancient hippos and antelopes. Does it make any more sense to challenge Darwin than to contest Newton's theory of gravity? You haven't seen Phillip Johnson floating into the st ratosphere recently, have you? William Provine, a prominent evolutionary biology professor at Cornell Un iversity, enjoys the law professor's company and has invited Johnson to his classroom. The men love the rhetorical thrust and parry and often sh are beers afterward. Provine, an atheist, also dismisses his friend as a Christian creationist and intelligent design as discredited science. "Phillip is absolutely right that the evidence for the big transformation s in evolution are not there in the fossil record -- it's always good to point this out," Provine says. "It's difficult to explore a billion-yea r-old fossil record. Provine's faith, if one may call it that, rests on Darwinism, which he de scribes as the greatest engine of atheism devised by man. The English sc ientist's insights registered as a powerful blow -- perhaps the decisive one -- in the long run of battles, from Copernicus to Descartes, that r emoved God from the center of the Western world. But science and religion are not inv ariable antagonists. More than a few theoretical physicists and astronom ers note that their research into the cosmos deposits them at God's door step. Is it irrational to inquire if intelligent life is seeded with inevitabil ities? "Give Johnson and the intelligent-design movement their due -- they are a sking terribly important questions," says Stuart A Kauffman, director o f the Institute for Biocomplexity at the University of Calgary. "To ques tion whether patterns and complexity, at the level of the cell or the un iverse, bespeak intelligent design is not stupid in the least. "I simply believe they've come up with the wrong answers." Faith From Doubt Johnson's early life was, by his own accounting, a rationalist lad's prog ress. "I attended chu rch in high school, but it was just part of the culture, like the Boy Sc outs," he says. "We'd drop my father off at the golf course on the way t o church." He finished Harvard and then law school at the University of Chicago, whe re he graduated first in his class. "I found it mind-stretching but I remember thinkin g: It's a real shame it's not true." Johnson became a clerk to Chief Jus tice Earl Warren at the Supreme Court. In 1967, with a wife and two youn g children, he went west to Berkeley, where he would gain international renown as a teacher of criminal law and legal theory. "I was a typical half-educated careerist intellectual with co nventional liberal politics." Johnson possesses a tenured professor's inability to hold his tongue, whe ther assaying a reporter's dumb question or his own life's arc. Johnson opposed the Vietnam War but grew dis illusioned and turned right. His wife, an artist, found feminism and wan dered another way. "I was shaken to my cor e" Johnson's daughter, Emily, remains close with each parent. "Men of my father's generation really expected that i f they did their job, and provided, how could their marriage fall apart? "They didn't know what to make of the new questions and new demands." The night his wife decided to leave in 1977, Johnson attended a church su pper with Emily, who was 11. The pastor spoke passionately of Christ and the Gospels. The professor doesn't remember a Lord-sundered-the-heavens moment; He just heard the words, perhaps for the first time in his life. If this was to be his epiphany, he would experience it with his rat ionalist lights on. "I was concerned that I could be just throwing my brain away," he says. " I needed to know if I was adopting a myth to satisfy my personal hunger. " He was nudged along by his interest in "critical legal studies," a left-w ing movement that holds that the law is prejudice masquerading as object ive truth. Asked to contribute a conservative critique for the Stanford Law Review, Johnson embraced the movement -- sort of. "I disliked intensely their infantile politics," he says. "But their crit ique of liberal rationalism and the sham neutrality of rationalism helpe d me become a Christian....
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