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From: philjohn@garnet.berkeley.edu (Phillip Johnson)
Subject: SWAA Lecture
Date: 18 Jan 1993 16:25:42 GMT
)


     There is a political and religious dimension to the issues
Grasse and Dobzhansky were debating which must also be
considered.  To say as Grasse did that, in the domain of
creation, "biology, impotent, yields the floor to metaphysics" is
to imply something important about the relative cultural
authority of biologists and metaphysicians.  Whatever that might
mean in France, in the United States the scientific establishment
has been in conflict over evolution for generations with the
advocates of creationism.  Although the scientists have won all
the legal battles, there are still a lot of creationists around
who are very much unconvinced with what the Darwinists are
telling them.  
     How many there are depends upon how "creationism" is
defined.  The most visible creationists are the Biblical
fundamentalists who believe in a young earth and a creation in
six 24-hour days, and Darwinists like to give the impression that
opposition to what they call "evolution" is confined to this
group.  In a broader sense, however, a creationist is any person
who believes that there is a Creator who brought about the
existence of humans for a purpose.  In this broad sense, the vast
majority of Americans are creationists.  According to a 1991
Gallup poll, 47 per cent of a national sample agreed with the
following statement: "God created mankind in pretty much our
present form sometime within the last 10,000 years."  Another 40
per cent think that "Man has developed over millions of years
from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process,
including man's creation."  Only 9 per cent of the sample said
that they believed in biological evolution as a purposeless
process not guided by God.
     The evolutionary theory endorsed by the American scientific
and educational establishment is of course the creed of the 9 per
cent, not the God-guided gradual creation of the 40 per cent. 
Persons who endorse a God-guided process of evolution may think
that they have reconciled religion and science, but this is an
illusion produced by vague terminology.  A representative
Darwinist statement of "the meaning of evolution" may be found in
George Gaylord Simpson's book bearing that title.  In the words
of 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." 

     "Evolution" is a vague term which can be used in a variety
of senses.  When it means only that a certain amount of natural
change occurs in nature, it has no great philosophical
consequences.  What Simpson was describing was something much
more specific, which I prefer to call the "blind watchmaker
hypothesis," after the famous book by Richard Dawkins.  According
to Dawkins, ""Biology is the study of complicated things that
give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." 
Dawkins wrote his book to convince the public of something that
Darwinians take for granted: The appearance of purposeful design
in biology is misleading, because all living organisms, including
ourselves, are the products of a natural evolutionary process
employing random variation and natural selection.  As Dawkins
explains,

     Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind
     because it does not see ahead, does not plan
     consequences, has no purpose in view.  Yet the living
     results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us     
     with the appearance of design as if by a master
     watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and     
     planning.

But blind people doe plan ahead, and pursue purposeful action. 
What Dawkins is described is a watchmaker that is not merely
blind, but unconscious.
     The really important meaning of "evolution" is not that
creation was a gradual process that required billions of years. 
It is that the process was supposedly undirected and purposeless. 
The prestige of the scientific establishment, and of the
intellectual class in general, is heavily committed to the
proposition that evolution -- in the blind watchmaker sense -- is
either a fact, or a theory so well supported by evidence that
only ignorant or thoroughly unreasonable people refuse to believe
it.  If the scientists ever had to retreat on this issue, the
cultural consequences could be significant.  Persons who now have
a prestigious status as cultural authorities would be
discredited, and the political and moral positions they have
advocated might be discredited with them.  That is the fear of
Michael Ruse, author of "Darwinism Defended."  Ruse proclaims
proudly that Darwinism reflects "a strong ideology," and "one to
be proud of."  According to Ruse, most contemporary Darwinians
"show a strong liberal commitment" in both their politics and
their sexual morality.  Advocates of creation, on the other hand,
want to restore a "morality based on narrow Biblical lines" with
respect to marriage and sexual behavior.  Ironically
Darwinism, which has at so often been associated with ideologies
of racial superiority, eugenics, and unrestrained competition, is
currently enlisted in the fight against that trinity of political
incorrectness: racism, sexism, and homophobia.  Ruse concludes
his book with these stirring lines "Darwinism has a great past. 
Let us work to see that it has an even greater future."
     Such statements are equivalent to the claims of creation-
science advocates that to doubt the Genesis account is to open
the floodgates for all kinds of immorality.  I think that Michael
Ruse and Henry Morris are both right to insist that cultural
acceptance of Darwinism has had important consequences for
politics and morality.  Recognition of this factor, however, also
has important implications for how we should regard Darwinism's
rules of reasoning.  Are those rules designed to protect a
cherished doctrine from scientific criticism -- criticism that
might, wittingly or unwittingly, give aid and comfort to persons
who want to deprive the Darwinist establishment of its cultural
authority?  If physicists were to start to proclaim that belief
in the Big Bang has had wonderful political and moral
consequences, and we must all work to see that the Big Bang has a
wonderful future, surely we would begin to wonder about their
objectivity.

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