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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Jon Harvey here, from The Gump of the Camel (my mother’s maiden name was Harvey, so maybe it’s not an error…).
I’ve made much criticism of BioLogos over the last 9 years, and as you observe I note how many of the skeptics from there have strayed to Peaceful Science. Yet both forums have been very productive and stimulating for me.
From BioLogos came the discussion that led me to conclude the ongoing goodness of the natural creation, the invitation to write about it and, ultimately, the book deal for God’s Good Earth – which uses standard Darwinian theory itself to disarm scientific “red in tooth and claw” ideas, but has a robust theology of nature that gives God a more active role than even many ID people admit. (What – no review on Uncommon Descent yet?? It’s nearly a year old now! Plug).
At Peaceful Science I got to know both Ann Gauger and Paul Nelson, as well as some of the RTB folk, and worked with Josh Swamidass on the genealogical science that enables a recent, historical Adam to be compatible with the secular historical sciences. His book on the science comes out in December, but I’ve been able as a result to develop a whole biblical theology of Adam, which comes out in the New Year as The Generations of Heaven and Earth.
As it happens Josh and I met up here in England this summer to pitch the Genealogical Adam paradigm at the very academic institution where Paul Nelson, Steve Meyer and Doug Axe (I believe) met to formulate the Intelligent Design project way back. The old barriers are breaking down, and I’ve no doubt whatsoever that Phillip Johnson would be pleased at that turn of events, whilst holding his corner as ideas competed for space, instead of being suppressed or, as bad, ghettoized.
As to:
Indeed, I first naively thought, when I first started debating Darwinists, that science was about the impartial weighing of the evidence and accepting the hypothesis that most adequately explained the evidence. Boy was I mistaken. Evidence simply takes a back seat for Darwinists (if evidence is even allowed in the car at all). The Darwinists’ metaphysical commitment to Atheistic Naturalism, at least in their thinking, is simply never allowed to be questioned no matter what the evidence says to the contrary.
And the evidence does indeed have much to say to the contrary:
Verse:
The primary metaphysical commitment that Darwinists hold, in spite of the evidence, is, of course, Atheistic Naturalism. In science this metaphysical commitment to Atheistic Naturalism plays out with their supposed ‘ground rule’ for doing science of ‘methodological naturalism’.
Yet, methodological naturalism, (i.e. only ‘natural’ causes are allowed to be invoked to explain any given effect), never has been, nor is it now, the supposed ‘ground rule’ for doing science. In fact, the Christian founders of modern science would have found the artificial limitation of methodological naturalism, prior to any investigation mind you, to be quite absurd:
Quite to the contrary of what atheists want to falsely believe beforehand, the quote/unquote ‘ground rule’ for doing science, in so far as science can even be said to follow a strict ‘ground rule’ in the first place, is not whether a theory may adhere to methodological naturalism or not but is if a given theory in science may be falsifiable or not. As Karl Popper stated, “In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.”
In fact, Karl Popper explicitly rejected the ‘naturalistic view’ precisely because it was a convention that was liable to turn into an unfalsifiable dogma.
And it is easy to see why Darwinists would shun falsification as the ground rule for doing science and adopt methodological naturalism. Darwinian evolution, as was already shown above, has been falsified by numerous lines of scientific evidence,,, and yet, despite being falsified by numerous lines of evidence, Darwinists simply refuse to ever accept any of those scientific evidences as falsifications of their theory. Darwinists, as far as the science is concerned, are very much akin to Monty Python’s black knight who keeps fighting despite having all his limbs cut off.
Since Darwinists simply refuse to accept falsification of their theory no matter what the evidence says to the contrary, then obviously Darwinian evolution does not even qualify as a real and testable science in the first place. As Denis Nobel stated, “it is then incumbent on modern neo-Darwinists to specify what would now falsify the theory. If nothing can do this then it is not a scientific theory.”
Besides Darwinists refusing to adhere to the criteria of falsification for their supposed scientific theory, by any other reasonable measure that one may wish to judge whether Darwinian evolution even qualifies as a science, as is shown in the following video, Darwinian evolution fails to meet those criteria as well:
Simply put, Darwinian evolution simply fails to qualify as a rigorous and testable science by any reasonable measure one may wish to invoke and is therefore more properly classified as a pseudoscience, even as a religion for atheists, rather than being classified as a real and testable science.
Moreover, contrary to what many people have been falsely led to believe by Darwinian atheists, the fact of the matter is that all of science, every nook and cranny of it, is based on the presupposition of intelligent design and is certainly not based on the presupposition of methodological naturalism.
From the essential Christian presuppositions that undergird the founding of modern science itself, (namely that the universe is rational and that the minds of men, being made in the ‘image of God’, can dare understand that rationality),
,,, to the intelligent design of the scientific instruments and experiments themselves, to the logical and mathematical analysis of experimental results themselves, from top to bottom, science itself is certainly not to be considered a ‘natural’ endeavor of man.
Not one scientific instrument would ever exist if men did not first intelligently design that scientific instrument. Not one test tube, microscope, telescope, spectroscope, or etc.. etc.., was ever found just laying around on a beach somewhere which was ‘naturally’ constructed by nature. Not one experimental result would ever be rationally analyzed since there would be no immaterial minds to rationally analyze the immaterial logic and immaterial mathematics that lay behind the intelligently designed experiments in the first place.
Moreover, following the atheist’s artificial restriction of methodological naturalism on science, (that is to say, following the false presumption that only natural, material, and/or physical causes are allowed to be given in order to explain any effect in science), leads to catastrophic epistemological failure of science itself and even to the catastrophic failure of all human knowledge.
Thus, although the Darwinian Atheist firmly believes he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to.
It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.