He encountered him at a debate:
As it happens (but unknown to my friend) I’d heard about Michael Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box in 1998 through the Christian grapevine, and found it intriguing. I was subsequently slightly surprised that the review by the Christian Medical Fellowship journal slammed it, basically on naturalistic grounds. It may be significant that the same reviewer was also noted for taking a skeptical and cessationist position on contemporary miraculous healing. So I suspended judgement on Behe, being at that time only peripherally concerned with origins stuff, compared to my busy medical practice…
He saw that the primary issue was not about evidence, but about metaphysical commitments wrongly substituted for inadequate evidence. He has a superb grasp not only of the then-current state of both evolutionary and origin-of-life science, but of the philosophical and historical background behind the science. And not only behind the science, but behind the various existing Christian responses to the science, from Creation Science (with which he radically, if respectfully, disagrees) to theistic Evolution of the semi-deist type that so frustrated me in my years interacting at BioLogos.
Respect for his opponents is evident in the whole book, which makes later accusations that he misused his sources entirely unjust: he is at pains to point out when the conclusions he draws from others’ work differs from their own convictions.
Jon Garvey, “On Phillip Johnson” at The Hump of the Camel
His critique of Peaceful Science, BioLogos, etc., is worth attending to,.
“Theistic evolution” is a church-closer because the whole point of it is to limit what God did by divine power and increase what would “just happen naturally.” In other words, a slow road to naturalist atheism.
There is no excuse for it in the Christian tradition because, for example, at one point, Jesus rebukes people who are sure that they are right with God by saying “And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.”
Of course, if we are theists, we must believe that that is true. God can create ex nihilo. Claims like “God wouldn’t do it that way” are mere opinion. The question for a scientist who is a Christian is, what did he do?
And once we are forced back on the evidence, the theistic evolutionists’ darling, Darwinism, comes more and more to be seen as the toad who is not turning into a prince when we finally get the princess to kiss him.
That would actually make a good skit, you know. She kisses the frog several times and he remains a stone cold, stupid amphibian.
And then she grabs a broom and starts whacking her theistic evolution advisors out of the room—sparing the stupid frog, of course. Him she dumps into the lily pond and thereafter goes on with her life, wiser.
See also: Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse says farewell to the late Phillip Johnson He jokes that the way his life intersected with Johnson’s was one of the best proofs of the existence of God.
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