Phillip E. Johnson

Background

Phillip E. Johnson (1940–2019) was an American law professor at UC Berkeley and the founding polemicist and strategist of the Intelligent-Design movement, "whose reputation was made with the anti-evolutionary tract Darwin on Trial (1991)." A lawyer rather than a scientist, Johnson recast the evolution controversy as a dispute over the rules of evidence governing science, arguing that Darwinism owed its dominance less to data than to an unexamined philosophical constraint.

His central move was to distinguish methodological from metaphysical naturalism and then to deny their separability: methodological naturalism, he argued, "slides into" the metaphysical kind, so that the working scientist ends up the theist's opponent whatever her private beliefs. His proposed alternative was "theistic realism." Johnson's primary works are copyright-locked and absent from the corpus; they are quoted extensively in the Stanford Encyclopedia.

Positions held in this wiki

• Methodological Naturalism — Scope and Limits — the legal-rhetorical architect of the theistic-science position. The SEP preserves his distinction — methodological naturalism is "the scientific stance of trying to explain by laws and by refusing to introduce miracles," whereas "Naturalism is a metaphysical doctrine… what is ultimately real is nature" (Ruse, SEP 'Creationism' §5, quoting Johnson 1995: 37–38) — and his claim that "many important questions — including the origin of genetic information and human consciousness — may not be explicable in terms of unintelligent causes" (ibid., Johnson 1995: 209).

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: Darwin on Trial (1991) and Reason in the Balance (1995) are not ingested (copyright). Johnson is quoted at length in SEP 'Creationism' §5. See meta/ingestion-queue.md.

Principal critics

• Thomas Henry Huxley — the Victorian source of the evidentialist naturalism Johnson attacks; on Huxley's method, no extant supernatural hypothesis meets the evidential bar.
• Robert T. Pennock — Kitzmiller expert witness for the constitutive reading of MN, directly opposing Johnson's slide thesis. Ruse presses that "many people think that they can be methodological naturalists and theists," so "methodological naturalism is not a religion equivalent" (SEP 'Creationism' §5) — the slide thesis is "asserted, not demonstrated."

See also

• Michael Behe, William Dembski — the scientific program Johnson's strategy sought to legitimate.
• Alvin Plantinga — the theistic-science position's philosophical heavyweight.