Darwin on Trial

Darwin on Trial
Phillip E. Johnson
Inter-Varsity Press 1993

This book is an interesting critique of Darwinism written by a professor of law in the early 1990s.

Johnson does not attempt to put forward any particular view of the origin of life - certainly not overtly - and he appears to have little love for Youth Earth Creationism in particular. If anything he appears to argue for a form of theistic evolution and an old earth.

But rather than outlining what he thinks is a better explanation than scientific naturalistic Darwinism, he concentrates on why Darwinism (or rather neo-Darwinism) fails as an acceptable scientific and logical explanation for the origin of life on earth. Johnson takes the philosopher Karl Popper's thoughts - himself no Christian theologian - who pointed out that a theory that purports to "explain everything" actually by definition explains nothing - and applies it to Darwinism.

The trouble is that for so long Darwinism has been accepted as the orthodox scientific view that evidence contradicting or not fitting the theory is ignored or explained away (because the theory must be kept sacrosanct), while evidence in support of evolution - however tenuous, is treated as if it confirms everything the theory claims. Time after time Johnson documents examples of this kind of thing in scientific writings in books and journals like Science in the USA and Nature in Britain.

Johnson notes that, as Popper suggested, one key aspect of any claim that something is scientific truth is it is falsifiable. Indeed this is constantly used by scientists to dismiss creation science as mere "pseudo-science" since the claims of Young Earth Creationism are not falsifiable. Yet, as Johnson shows time and time again, Darwinism itself fails this test, since its proponents start out with a philosophical commitment to naturalism and the theory itself as the only acceptable explanation for how nature works and how life came to exist, including human life. By definition, and by philosophical bias, anything supernatural or theistic is excluded. When proceeding from this basis, nothing is really allowed to challenge the basic foundational presumptions on which the Darwinian edifice is constructed. In this way, Darwinism has more in common with pseudo-sciences like Marxism and Freudianism than it has with sciences like physics or chemistry.

In a succession of chapters that form the heart of the book and Johnson's argument he deals with how each of the following areas contain problems for Darwinism that cannot properly be ignored:

- The key concept of natural selection
- The fact of mutation
- Fossils
- Vertebrate sequence
- Molecular evidence
- Prebiological evolution

He then comes to the conclusion that Darwinism is a philosophy and even a faith itself that comes to conclusions based on its naturalistic assumption rather than on observable facts which would be accepted by the majority of theists too. To give just one example, Johnson accepts that microevolution is an observable fact - that there is descent with change in nature - the famous light and dark moths observations in Victorian England being a documented instance - but he does not accept that such observations prove macroevolution - that all life comes from a common ancestor, that the whale and the bat for example come from a common rodent-like mammalian ancestor. Instead, such a claim is a philosophical belief arrived at because there is no other possible explanation in a naturalistic universe. While such a belief is reasonable given the philosophical underpinnings on which it is made, yet it is no more reasonable than a theistic or even creationist conclusion from the same facts given theism's or creationism's underpinnings.

As someone who has grappled with many of these issues for a long time as a Christian, I found Johnson's book very challenging and interesting reading. Anyone who thinks he can be dismissed as a "fundamentalist" or "young earth creationist" had better read the book - he is neither of these. Those most frequently quoted in the book are Darwinians like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. There is practically no theology or biblical material in the book at all.

In the concluding sentence of the book Johnson says of the battle of philosophies between Darwinism and Creationism (in its widest sense embracing intelligent design or theistic evolution) "in the end reality will win". To me the challenge of the book is to those who unthinkingly accept Darwinism as "the truth" to subject the theory to criticism and see where that takes you. After all, if it is true, what is there to fear from criticism and examination? Or could it be that in reality the atheistic/agnostic cart is before the evolutionary horse and the tail wags the dog?