November 30, 1989

To: Campion Center participants

From: Phillip Johnson

The August 1988 draft of my paper which was distributed to you only a few days ago is a bit lengthy and dense, and it has also been superseded by later drafts in its progress toward publication in book form. I therefore thought it might be helpful to prepare this informal summary of my views for our discussion. I have numbered the paragraphs to facilitate identification of specific controversial points.

1.0 The important issue is not the relationship of science and creationism, but the relationship of science and materialist philosophy.

1.1 The provisional agenda defines our topic as "Science and Creationism in Public Schools." "Creationism" to most people means Biblical literalism, and specifically the doctrine that all "basic kinds" of living organisms were separately created by God within the space of a single week about 6000 years ago. I have no interest in promoting or even discussing creationism in that sense.

1.2 If I could define our topic I would call it "Science and Scientific Materialism in the Schools, the Universities, and the public Broadcasting System." The question I raise is not whether science should be forced to share the stage with some Biblically based rival known as creationism, but whether we ought to be distinguishing between the doctrines of scientific materialist philosophy and the conclusions that can legitimately be drawn from the empirical research methods employed in the natural sciences.

1.3 Scientific materialism (or naturalism, as in my 1988 draft) is the philosophical doctrine that everything real has a material basis, that the path to objective knowledge (as distinguished from subject belief) is exclusively through the methods of investigation accepted by the natural sciences, and that teleological conceptions of nature ("we are here for a purpose") are invalid. To a scientific materialist there can be no "ghost in the machine," no non-material intelligence which created the first life or guided its development into complex form, and no reality which is in principle inaccessible to scientific investigation, i.e. supernatural.

1.4 The metaphysical assumptions of scientific materialism are not themselves established by scientific investigation, but rather are held a priori as unchallengeable and usually unexamined components of the "scientific" woridview. Materialist science therefore does not investigate whether the first living organisms evolved from nonliving chemicals without the intervention of any preexisting intelligence; likewise, it does not investigate whether the emergence of complex plants and animals, human consciousness, and so on was the product of purely natural (i.e. mindless, non-teleological) processes. The naturalistic evolution of life from prebiotic chemicals and its subsequent naturalistic evolution into complexity and humanity is assumed as a matter of first principle, and the only question open to investigation is how this naturalistic process occurred.

1.5 The question is whether this refusal to consider any but naturalistic explanations has led to distortions in the interpretation of empirical evidence, and especially to claims of knowledge with respect to matters about which natural science is in fact profoundly ignorant.

2.0 The continued dominance of neo-Darwinism is the most important example of distortion and overconfidence resulting from the influence of scientific materialist philosophy upon the interpretation of the empirical evidence.

2.1 Claims that natural selection is a force of stupendous creative power, which is capable of crafting the immensely complex biological structures which living creatures possess in such abundance, are not supported by experimental evidence or observation. The analogy to artificial selection (where conscious intelligence strives to produce greater variety) is faulty. In any case artificial selection does not continue to produce change in a particular direction indefinitely. Observational evidence (e.g. the famous peppered moth study) shows mainly cyclical changes in the relative frequency of characteristics already present in the population. There is circumstantial evidence pointing to somewhat more impressive changes (e.g. circumpolar gulls, Hawaiian fruitfly species), but the empirical evidence gives no reason for confidence that natural selection has the creative power, regardless of the amount of time available, to build up complex organs from scratch or to change one body plan into another.

2.2 Darwinists deny that natural selection is a tautology when the issue surfaces explicitly. The concept is in fact not inherently tautological, and it is capable of being stated in testable form. It is also capable of being formulated and used as a tautology, however, and in practice Darwinists continually employ it as the invisible cause of whatever change or lack of change seems to have occurred. If new life forms appear it is due to creative natural selection; if old forms fail to change the credit goes to stabilizing selection; and the survival of some groups during mass extinctions is explained by their greater "resistance to extinction."

2.3 The claim that selection in combination with random micromutations can craft new forms and complex organs by gradual steps is disconfirmed by the impossibility of proposing plausible advantageous intermediate forms in many cases. This difficulty can be met with various ad hoc speculations, such as hypothetical mutations in rate genes affecting embryonic development, but experimental confirmation that such processes can create complex organs and new body plans is unavailable. Whether the Darwinistic evolution of wings, eyes and so on is conceivably possible is not the question here. The question is whether it is more than a speculative possibility.

2.4 The decisive disconfirmation of neo-Darwinism comes from the fossil record. Even if we generously grant the assumption that neo-Darwinist macroevolution is capable of producing basic changes, it does not appear to have done so.

2.4.1 Darwin's hypothesis requires the existence of an immense quantity of transitional forms that became extinct as they were gradually replaced by better adapted descendants. That the fossil record shows a consistent pattern of sudden appearance of new forms followed by stasis -- i.e. the pervasive absence of the indispensable transitional intermediates -- was a problem in 1859, but it is a far more serious problem when the condition persists after 130 years of determined search for the missing transitional intermediates. [See David Raup's paper contrasting Darwinist expectations for the discovery of intermediates with what has actually occurred.)

2.4.2 The "Cambrian explosion" of the animal phyla in a world previously composed of algae and bacteria (excepting the Ediacara fauna, which do not fill the gap as transitional intermediates) and the failure of life to diversify into new phyla thereafter, can be reconciled with Darwinism only by the strenuous application of ad hoc hypotheses. [See S.J. Gould's critique of the "artifact theory" of the Precambrian fossil record -- and its distorting effect in inducing the "Burgess shoehorn" -- in Wonderful Life, pp. 271-277.)

2.4.3 The importance of mass extinctions -- practically invisible for many decades due to the influence of Darwinist prejudice -- further disconfirms Darwinist claims that continuous natural selection gradually weeds out the unfit and accounts for the absence of surviving transitional intermediates.

2.4.4 Again, the question is not whether ad hoc hypotheses can be invented to save Darwinism in the teeth of all this unfavorable evidence. The question is whether the evidence, fairly considered in its entirety, gives us cause for confidence that Darwinist evolution took life all the way from the hypothetical first living microorganism to where we find it today.

3.0 The refusal (or inability) of the scientific establishment to acknowledge that Darwinism is in serious evidential difficulties and probably false as a general theory is due to the influence of scientific materialist philosophy and certain arbitrary modes of thought that have become associated with the scientific method.

3.1 Science requires a paradigm or organizing set of principles and Darwinism has fulfilled this function for more than a century. It is the grand organizing theoretical principle for biology -- a statement which does not imply that it is true.

3.2 Once established as orthodox, a paradigm customarily is not discarded until it is can be replaced with a new and better paradigm which is acceptable to the scientific community.disconfirming evidence (anomalies) can always be classified as"unsolved problems," and the situation remains satisfactory for researchers because even an inadequate paradigm can generate an agenda for research.

3.3 To be acceptable a paradigm must conform to the philosophical tenets of scientific materialism. For example, the hypothesis that biological complexity is the product of some preexisting creative intelligence or vital force is not acceptable to scientific materialists. They do not fairly consider this hypothesis and then reject it as contrary to the evidence; rather they disregard it as inherently ineligible for consideration.

3.4 Given the above premises, something very much like Darwinism simply must be accepted as a matter of logical deduction, regardless of the state of the evidence. Random mutation and natural selection must be credited with shaping biological complexity, because nothing else could have been available to do the job. Hence even those evolutionary biologists who are most frank in acknowledging that Darwinism is in trouble frequently end up saying in the next sentence that no reputable biologist seriously doubts the importance of (creative) natural selection in evolution. Because the escape from Darwinism seems to lead nowhere, Darwinism for scientific materialists is inescapable.

3.5 What makes this situation particularly misleading is a confusion (at times convenient for Darwinists) about how the category "science" relates to the category "truth." Outside critics who point out the disconfirming evidence are frequently put off with the rejoinder that they do not understand "how science works," or with the disclaimer that Darwinists are noticing that theistic or teleological interpretations are false but merely that they "should not be taught in science class. "Having put aside certain important possibilities as inherently unworthy of consideration, however, Darwinists do not hesitate to assert that their conclusions are objectively true: e.g. evolution (i.e. naturalistic evolution) is a fact: natural selection really has the powers claimed for it. These statements carry the implication that the philosophical premises on which they are based are also objectively true, and therefore that competing philosophical premises are false. To put this somewhat abstract point in the vernacular: If God was around and capable of creating, there is no reason to assume that those Cambrian phyla must have evolved through purely naturalistic mechanisms.

4.0 The difficulties of Darwinism cannot be avoided by retreating to some supposedly unchallengeable "fact" of evolution, or by proposing "alternatives to phyletic gradualism" that attempt to occupy a middle ground between Darwinism and saltationism.

4.1 Some Darwinists have attempted to distinguish a purportedly indisputable "fact" of evolution from the concededly debatable theory of evolution by gradualistic natural selection. But what, precisely, is the fact to which they refer? The occurrence of microevolution is a fact, and that life has a common biochemical basis (the DNA code, etc.) is also a fact. The existence of natural relationships of greater and lesser similarity (classification) is also a fact. If "evolution" is merely a shorthand expression for "microevolution" and "relationship," then its use tells us nothing about how those relationships came into being.

4.2 In practice, the "fact of evolution" turns out to be Darwinism. Thus Gould's essay "Evolution as Fact and Theory," distinguishes the fact of evolution from a hyper-Darwinism (pan-selectionism) that Darwin himself repudiated, not from Darwinism properly understood. This reservation is unavoidable because the important claim of "evolution" is not that fish and man have certain common features, but that it is possible for a fish ancestor to produce a descendant human being given sufficient time and the right conditions, without intelligent intervention. Absent the supposed creative power of natural selection, the transformation of fish to man would be nearly as miraculous as the instantaneous creation of man from the dust of the earth.

4.3 Non-materialistic theories of evolution (e.g. that God or a life force takes an active supervisory role) are nearly as unacceptable to scientific materialists as outright creationism. Saltationism likewise is not really evolution at all, but a meaningless halfway point between creation and evolution. As Dawkins put it, you can call the creation of man from the dust of the earth a saltation.

4.4 Semi-saltationist "alternatives to phyletic gradualism" are not genuine alternatives to Darwinism. To the extent that "punctuationalists" are merely saying that Darwinist evolution occurs rapidly (in geological terms), and in populations so small as to escape preservation in the fossil record, they are playing a variation on the usual theme that the fossil record is incomplete. As such they assume the whole point at issue, which is whether Darwinist macroevolution actually happened. To the extent that the punctuationalists are saying that the missing intermediates never existed as living creatures, they incur the disadvantages that led to the discrediting of Goldschmidt. The former option seems to be the lesser evil, and so we are now being assured that punctuated equilibrium is within the Darwinist framework, and really just an elaboration of the implications for paleontology of Ernst Mayr's theory of speciation.

4.5 Retreat to the fact of evolution therefore inevitably brings Darwinism in again through the back door, without the need for defending its vulnerable aspects. The person who accepts the fact of evolution, thinking that he is acknowledging only that living things are related, will quickly learn that he is deemed to have accepted also that the relationships are based upon common ancestry.[1] If fish and man are descended from a common ancestor, then the immense differences that distinguish fish from men must be the product of an accumulation of the minor variations that differentiate offspring from their parents. From this acceptance of gradualism it is only a tiny step to full-fledged Darwinism, since something (i.e. natural selection) must guide the process of descent with modification. The fact of evolution turns out to be gradual change through decent with modification from common ancestors, guided where necessary by natural selection, and this is Darwinism.

5.0. The important debate is not between "evolutionists" and "creationists," but between Darwinists (i.e. scientific materialists) and persons who believe that purely naturalistic or materialistic processes may not be adequate to account for the origin and development of life.

5.1 Once separated from its materialistic-mechanistic basis in Darwinism, "evolution" is too vague a concept to be either true or false. If I am told that the phyla of the Cambrian explosion evolved in some non-Darwinian sense from preexisting bacteria or algae, I do not know what the claim adds to the simple factual statement that the prokaryotes came first. It conveys no information about how the new forms came into existence, and the "evolution" in question could be something as metaphysical as the evolution of an idea in the mind of God.

5.2 Similarly, whether "creation" occurred over a greater or lesser period of time, or whether new forms were developed from older ones rather than from scratch, is not fundamental. The truly fundamental question is whether the natural world is the product of a preexisting intelligence, and whether we exist for a purpose which we did not invent ourselves. If Darwinists have not been overstating their case they have disproved the theistic alternative, or at least made consideration of it superfluous.

6.0 Whatever may be its utility as a paradigm within the restrictive conventions of scientific materialism, Darwinism has continually been presented to the public as the factual basis for a comprehensive worldview that excludes theism as a possibility.A few representative quotations will suffice to make the point:

6.1 George Gaylord Simpson: "Although many details remain to be worked out, it is already evident that all the objective phenomena of the history of life can be explained by purely naturalistic or, in a proper sense of the sometimes abused word, materialistic factors. They are readily explicable on the basis of differential reproduction in populations (the main factor in the modern conception of natural selection) and of the mainly random interplay of the known processes of heredity. ...Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind." (The Meaning of Evolution)

6.2 Douglas Futuyma: "By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism -- of much of science, in short -- that has since been the stage of most Western thought." (This is not from a popular polemic, but from Futuyma's college textbook.)

6.3 Richard Dawkins: "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." (The Blind Watchmaker)

6.4 William Provine: "The destructive assumptions of evolutionary biology extend far beyond the assumptions of organized religion to a much deeper and more pervasive belief, held by the vast majority of people, that non-mechanistic organizing designs or forces are somehow responsible for the visible order of the physical universe, biological organisms and human moral order." (Evolution and the Foundation of Ethics)

7.0 Whether the materialist-mechanist program has succeeded as the Darwinists have so vehemently claimed is a legitimate subject for intellectual exploration. Scientists rightly fight to protect their freedom from dogmas that others would impose upon them. They should also be willing to consider fairly the possibility that they have been seduced by a dogma which they found too attractive to resist.

7.1 With respect to the public schools, the providing of information about the evidence pertaining to Darwinism should be distinguished from efforts to indoctrinate students in "what scientists believe." Specifically, textbooks should be candid in acknowledging the origin of life problem, the fossil record problems, the limited results of selective breeding, and the inability to confirm experimentally the hypothesis that natural selection has creative power.

7.2 More importantly, the universities should be opened up to genuine intellectual inquiry into the fundamental assumptions of Darwinism and scientific materialism. The possibility that Darwinism is false, and that no replacement theory is currently available, should be put on the table for serious consideration.

[1] The logical jump described in this sentence is essentially a play upon the term "relationship." Human family relationships(siblings, cousins, etc.) are based on more and less recent common biological ancestry, and it is understandable but illogical to assume thatthe same must be true of the "relationship"between bats and whales, or mammals and birds Common ancestry as an explanation for natural classification is entirely reasonable as a hypothesis, but when enshrined as an irrebuttable presumption it is a projection of common-sense prejudice. As the physicists have been telling us, materialist common sense is not necessarily a reliable guide to scientific truth.