Editor’s note: Phillip E. Johnson, Berkeley law professor and author of Darwin on Trial and other books, died on November 2. Evolution News is sharing remembrances from staff, friends, and Fellows of Discovery Institute. Mr. McLaughlin is Senior Director of Advancement for Ratio Christi. The weekend before last saw the passing of Phillip E. Johnson, best known for his seminal book Darwin On Trial and for being the godfather of the modern intelligent design movement. Other who knew Johnson personally have offered their heartfelt tributes to the man as both a friend and mentor. I only met Johnson a few times myself. We had some short and pleasant conversations, but I cannot claim to have known him well. Still, he had a profound impact on my life. My career was greatly …
Over the past week we have been commemorating the man called the “godfather” of the intelligent design movement, Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson, who passed away last Saturday, November 2. Now, on an episode of ID the Future, Phil Johnson himself discusses the impact of his seminal book Darwin on Trial. He spoke at a 2011 Discovery Institute event commemorating the book’s 20th anniversary. Download the podcast or listen to it here. Johnson challenged mainstream beliefs about Darwinian evolution and inspired many scientists and scholars of the modern ID movement. Listen in to learn why, according to the self-effacing scholar, he was always “puzzled when someone describes me as courageous,” and how he got involved in the debate over Darwinism and intelligent …
Editor’s note: Phillip E. Johnson, Berkeley law professor and author of Darwin on Trial and other books, died on November 2. Evolution News is sharing remembrances from Fellows of Discovery Institute. John Mark Reynolds blogs at Patheos where this was originally published. A philosopher, administrator, and Platonist, Dr. Reynolds is president of The Saint Constantine School in Houston, Texas. I have known Socrates and Gandalf, or at least men in this life who modeled the virtues of these heroes, historical and mythical, in the 21st century. Saturday I learned the man I called Gandalf had gone into the West. Phillip E. Johnson was a man who lived by words: watch an interview when he was healthy and you will see a man who swam in English like a dolphin loved …
On an episode of ID The Future, Stephen Meyer, director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, honors Phillip Johnson, the U.C. Berkeley law professor who helped ignite the modern intelligent design movement with the publication of his highly successful book Darwin on Trial. Meyer says Johnson had the courage to speak up when others wouldn’t. Download the podcast or listen to it here. “The overweening dynamic of this debate is fear,” Meyer says. “There are many many many people who have come up to the water’s edge, who have seen the problems with Darwinian evolution, have counted the cost, and recoiled.” But one Berkeley law professor did not recoil. As Meyer put it, “Johnson had the guts.” Photo: Phillip E. Johnson, debating evolutionist …
Christianity Today published an obituary remembering Phillip Johnson that tells many interesting details of his life. Unfortunately it also contains some misstatements about the law and legislative history regarding evolution education, and for that reason it significantly understates the long-lasting legacy of Johnson’s work in the area of science education. The article states: A few states started requiring schools to teach the intelligent design critiques of Darwinian evolution in the late 1990s and early 2000s, until it was stopped by a federal court ruling. An Important Distinction That isn’t quite right. The law distinguishes between teaching critiques of Darwinian evolution and teaching intelligent design (ID). The former (critiquing Darwin) has never been …
Editor’s note: Phillip E. Johnson, Berkeley law professor and author of Darwin on Trial and other books, died on November 2. Dr. Dembski's many books include Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information. A mathematician and philosopher, he serves on the Board of Directors of Discovery Institute. My friend and colleague Phil Johnson died this past Saturday, November 2, 2019. It was with sadness that I learned the news. I’d like in this post to reflect on his life and work, as well as to relate some more personal interactions that I had with him. I was privileged to organize the festschrift volume in Phil’s honor, titled Darwin’s Nemesis, which came out in 2006. Let me start this reflection with my introductory remarks about Phil from that volume. I’ll then add …
Hard to believe, but collected at the Darwin on Trial website is a wonderful, yes wonderful, Washington Post profile of intelligent design “godfather” Phillip E. Johnson, who died on November 2. Of course, the article isn’t recent. The Washington Post of today wouldn’t be so fair or, indeed, sympathetic. Their more recent commentary compared Johnson and ID proponents, absurdly, with conspiracy theorists. A Softer View But a 2005 profile by feature writer Michael Powell, “Doubting Rationalist,” paints a rounded portrait and is very charmingly written. Powell begins by half-apologetically acknowledging that his newspaper has, in the editorial pages, taken a harsher view of ID than he evidently does: BERKELEY, Calif. “The Washington Post is not one of my biggest fans, …
Editor’s note: Phillip E. Johnson, Berkeley law professor and author of Darwin on Trial and other books, died on November 2. Reproduced below, his Foreword to John West’s collection, The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society, was among his last writings. C.S. Lewis’s many admirers will be eager to read this collection of articles, collected and edited by Discovery Institute’s John West, concerning Lewis’s views of science, which he respected, and scientism, against which he warned. The book contains a timely and well-reasoned chapter about Lewis and intelligent design, which seems to have replaced creationism as the alternative most feared and reviled by Darwinists. Another chapter describes the subtle interconnection between That Hideous …
Editor’s note: Phillip E. Johnson, Berkeley law professor and author of Darwin on Trial and other books, died on November 2. Evolution News is sharing remembrances from Fellows of Discovery Institute. Dr. Denton’s latest book is Children of Light: The Astonishing Properties of Sunlight that Make Us Possible. I was so sad to hear that Phil Johnson is no longer with us. I first met Phil after he invited me to stay with him in San Fran in the late 1980s after he had read Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. When I asked him on the phone from Sydney how I would recognize him in the arrival hall he said, “I’ll be holding up a copy of Evolution.” As I was travelling from Sydney to the U.S. several times a year in those days, working on retinal genetics with colleagues at the …
Editor’s note: Phillip E. Johnson, Berkeley law professor and author of Darwin on Trial and other books, died on November 2. Evolution News is sharing remembrances from Fellows of Discovery Institute. Dr. Behe’s most recent book is Darwin Devolves. The following essay appeared originally as the Foreword to the 20th Anniversary edition of Darwin on Trial. Twenty years can be a virtual eternity in modern science, so rapidly do new discoveries accumulate. Twenty years ago the idea of determining the entire DNA sequence of even a tiny living organism such as a bacterium, let alone the genetic endowment of a large animal such as a mammal, seemed a dream. Yet shortly before I wrote this foreword, the 1000th kind of bacterial genome was sequenced. The DNA code of humans was …
Editor’s note: Phillip E. Johnson, Berkeley law professor and author of Darwin on Trial and other books, died on November 2. Evolution News is sharing remembrances from staff, friends, and Fellows of Discovery Institute. Phil Johnson (1940-2019) is the “godfather” of the intelligent design movement. But on a new episode of ID the Future, biologist Jonathan Wells contributes another moniker: the Indian honorific title Mahatma, or “great soul.” Phil operated partly in the background, as far as the public is concerned, yet contributed many of the ideas and strategies that define ID advocacy today. Dr. Wells discusses Johnson’s impact with host Rob Crowther. Listen to the podcast or download it here. ID’s Chief Counsel Much of his influence was felt in his bringing …
Editor’s note: Phillip E. Johnson, Berkeley law professor and author of Darwin on Trial and other books, died on November 2. Evolution News is sharing remembrances from staff, friends, and Fellows of Discovery Institute. Dr. Miller is Research Coordinator for the Center for Science & Culture. Phillip Johnson was instrumental in my involvement with the intelligent design movement. During my early years of graduate school, I was wrestling with the question of whether I was an unintended accident of nature or the product of a Creator. I first explored this question through reading the books The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, by Richard Dawkins, and Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, by Michael Denton. Denton’s book …
Editor’s note: Phillip E. Johnson, Berkeley law professor and author of Darwin on Trial and other books, died on November 2. Evolution News is sharing remembrances from Fellows of Discovery Institute. The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already. George Orwell, describing Winston Smith reading, in 1984 When I first met Phil Johnson, it was not Phil Johnson whom I met. It was his …
Editor’s note: Phillip E. Johnson, Berkeley law professor and author of Darwin on Trial and other books, died on November 2. Evolution News is sharing remembrances from Fellows of Discovery Institute. Dr. Berlinski’s essay is drawn from his new book, out on November 11, Human Nature, currently available for pre-ordering. Richard Dawkins published The Blind Watchmaker in 1986.1 The appearance of design in nature, Dawkins argued, is an illusion. Complex biological structures may be entirely explained by random variations and natural selection. Why biology should be quite so vested in illusions, Dawkins did not say. The Blind Watchmaker captured the public’s imagination, but in securing the public’s allegiance, very little was left to chance. Those critics who believed …
Editor’s note: Phillip E. Johnson, Berkeley law professor and author of Darwin on Trial and other books, died on November 2. Evolution News is sharing remembrances from Fellows of Discovery Institute. Dr. Meyer's forthcoming book is The Return of the God Hypothesis. The following essay is drawn from the Festschrift Darwin's Nemesis: Phillip Johnson and the Intelligent Design Movement. I first met Phillip Johnson at a small Greek restaurant on Free School Lane next to the old Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in the fall of 1987. The meeting had been arranged by a fellow graduate student who knew Phil from Berkeley. My friend had told me only that his friend was “a quirky but brilliant law professor” who “was on sabbatical studying torts,” and that he “had become …
Editor’s note: Phillip E. Johnson, Berkeley law professor and author of Darwin on Trial and other books, died on November 2. Evolution News is sharing remembrances from Fellows of Discovery Institute. John Mark Reynolds blogs at Patheos where this was originally published. See also, “Phillip E. Johnson: Men Must Endure Their Going Hence,” by Dr. Reynolds. The AOL discs came. You threw them out. AOL sent more. You let your kids play with them: iridescent frisbees. AOL mailed more. You made jokes. AOL put them in the newspaper: high tech with Victorian tech. Finally, if you were me, you gave into the madness and signed up. This was the time when you picked waggish names and I chose “MerryTook.” The proper names were taken by the time I gave up and I thought I would …
Editor’s note: Phillip E. Johnson, Berkeley law professor and author of Darwin on Trial and other books, died on November 2. Evolution News is currently sharing remembrances from Fellows of Discovery Institute. Dr. Wells is the author most recently of Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution. In 1991 I was a graduate student in molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley when I heard that a Berkeley law professor had just published a book critical of Darwinism. Although I was quietly a critic of Darwinism, I resisted reading the book because most of the critiques of Darwinian evolution I had already seen were either focused on the age of the Earth or they were embarrassingly shoddy. It seemed unlikely that a law professor could do any better. A …
Editor’s note: Phillip E. Johnson, Berkeley law professor and author of Darwin on Trial and other books, died on November 2. Evolution News is currently sharing remembrances from Fellows of Discovery Institute. Dr. Richards’s current book is The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines. My fondest memory of Phil is from a few days we spent together in the early 2000s. He and I were the speakers for a conference in Salem, Oregon. It was during the winter, the region was hit with an ice storm, and the airports were closed. So Phil and his wife Kathie flew to Seattle. My wife Ginny, our daughter Gillian (then a toddler), and I met up with them and we travelled together by train to the conference, and then took the train back to Seattle two …
Editor’s note: Phillip E. Johnson, Berkeley law professor and author of Darwin on Trial and other books, died on November 2. Evolution News is currently sharing remembrances from Fellows of Discovery Institute. Professor Flannery’s most recent book is Nature’s Prophet: Alfred Russel Wallace and His Evolution from Natural Selection to Natural Theology. Phil Johnson is indeed the father of the modern intelligent design movement in many respects. Michael Denton in some ways preceded Johnson, influencing Michael Behe to seriously question the Darwinian paradigm. But Johnson became the catalyst who brought it all together. I only met him once, and briefly. But the meeting was memorable for me because he took me aside and told me how important he thought my exposure of …
Editor’s note: Phillip E. Johnson, Berkeley law professor and author of Darwin on Trial and other books, died on November 2. In days to come, Evolution News will share remembrances from Fellows of Discovery Institute. John Mark Reynolds blogs at Patheos where this was originally published. Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither; Ripeness is all.* So says the noble Edgar in King Lear about the death of great men, and how we must endure. About this he is right. Yet the enduring is hard, even when the time is ripe. Sometimes, at the moment of parting, the going seems unendurable. My grandmother once said in my hearing that she would endure any amount of pain, work, and difficulty for five more minutes with Papaw. So it is with me today. An …
