Free Republic

Phillip E. Johnson (1940-2019) was a unifying figure, but not a compromiser. A unique and wise influencer, his strategy will continue.Op-ed by David CoppedgeWhen I heard yesterday that Dr Phillip Johnson had passed away November 2, I was saddened, but I knew that his influence was alive and well. As “godfather” of the intelligent design movement (not “father” since design arguments go back to antiquity, and the phrase “intelligent design” predates him1), Johnson’s influence was indubitably profound for ID. But how about for creationism? There have been a few creationists who have been critical of his approach, thinking he...

Phillip Johnson's major work seems to have been made available to the public as a free ebook in html format. My advice would be to save a copy in case anybody changes their mind... Johnson was a law professor at Cal Berkeley who got involved in the evolution debate and investigated the question of how close evolutionists could come to meeting the normal standards of evidence in an American courtroom. "Darwin on Trial" is his most major work.

Moral conservatives were shocked to read a thinly veiled defense of infanticide in the New York Times a few years ago by MIT [now of Harvard] professor Steven Pinker. But they would be even more disturbed if they saw Pinker’s justification for his views in a book that appeared about the same time. In How the Mind Works, Pinker argues that the fundamental premise of ethics has been disproved by science. “Ethical theory,” he writes, “requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused.” Yet, “the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events.”...

Charles Darwin, the 19th century geologist who wrote the treatise 'The Origin of Species, by means of Natural Selection' defined evolution as "descent with modification". Darwin hypothesized that all forms of life descended from a common ancestor, branching out over time into various unique life forms, due primarily to a process called natural selection. However, the fossil record shows that all of the major animal groups (phyla) appeared fully formed about 540 million years ago, and virtually no transitional life forms have been discovered which suggest that they evolved from earlier forms. This sudden eruption of multiple, complex organisms is...

When my fiftieth birthday arrived in 1990, just before the publication of Darwin on Trial, my wife Kathie organized two surprise birthday parties, one in the morning for our Presbyterian church Bible study fellowship, and the other in the afternoon for my University of California law school faculty colleagues. Each party had its own specially decorated birthday cake. For the church group, the cartoon on the frosting was of the young David (me) slaying the giant Goliath (Darwinism). Kathie thought that a more ironic theme would be appropriate for the secular professors, most of whom weren’t sure what to make...