(Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998. ISBN: 0-8308-1941-X, Hardcover, 188 pages, $16.00. (Paperback, 2000. ISBN: 0-8308-2288-7, $11.00)
Reviewed by John Peterson
Law professor and author Phillip Johnson gained his national reputation in 1993 with Darwin on Trial, a highly original attack on Darwinism and Darwinists. He renewed his attack in Reason in the Balance (1995) and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds (1997). As a writer, Johnson has the gifts of clarity, logic, and enthusiasm. His remarkable grasp of the scientific literature lends credibility to his arguments.
The present volume is collection of twenty-two essays, mostly book reviews, in two sections. The essays in section one deal directly with Darwinism, and the essays in section two treat the ill effects the acceptance of this theory has had on society.
Johnson's writings are most useful in three areas. First, he is without peer in exposing the weaknesses in the evidence supporting evolutionary theories. Second, he is relentless in illuminating the illogic and deception practiced by Evolution's leading propagandists. Third, he is a master at tracing the influence of Darwinism on our culture and institutions and most especially our legal system. To anyone interested in the subject of Evolution, Johnson's books are indispensable.
It must be said that Johnson's refutation of Darwin and Evolution has a major flaw. Johnson is a Presbyterian and a Creationist, although his books never argue the case for Creationism. His writings make the negative case by showing the fallacies of Darwinism and the duplicity of Darwinists. But like his fellow Creationists, Johnson's thinking is based on the supposed disagreement between Darwin and the Bible.
The Bible asserts that God separately created the grass, trees, birds, fish, beasts of the earth, and every living creature that moves, after his kind. If the bible can be used to critique science, then Evolution (with its transitional forms) is untenable. The acceptability of using the Bible in this way is an unproved assumption hiding just under the surface of Johnson's writings.
The fallacy of this sort of Biblical argument is that it jumps from what revelation tells us God has done to an interpretation in human terms of what God cannot do. It denies that God would be free to work through evolution if He so chose. Nothing in the Book of Genesis warrants this interpretation. We don't exactly know what is meant when Genesis tells us that God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass.” As Chesterton put it, “a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time.”
Once we give up the idea of the Bible as a source of scientific information, the need to defend the Bible from Darwinism is no longer an imperative for Christians. We can take or leave Evolution on the evidence. As for the evidence, Johnson is a reliable and readable source of information on the weaknesses of the case for Evolution. The new paperback edition of Objections Sustained makes an excellent and affordable introduction to his work.
(John Peterson writes courtesy of Gilbert!, The Magazine of G.K. Chesterton.)
