Edward T. Oakes, Review of The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations
of Naturalism. By Phillip E. Johnson, "First Things", January 2001, No.
109, s. 48-52.

Letters to Editor

Edward T. Oakes replies.

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"First Things: A Journal of Religion and Public Life"
109 (January 2001): 48-52.

Newman, Yes; Paley, No

The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism. By Phillip E.
Johnson. InterVarsity Press. 220 pp. $19.95.

Reviewed by Edward T. Oakes

In the course of the lectures that later became The Idea of a University,
John Henry Newman neatly described the favorite rhetorical trick of
secular intellectuals: They persuade the world of what is false, he
said, by urging upon it what is true. Newman wrote these words in 1852,
seven years before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859;
and although he expressed no disquiet at the book when it was finally
published (initial reviews in the Roman Catholic press were generally
positive), one must salute his uncanny insight into the ways of what might
be called the hegemonic Darwinians. For sleight of hand artists such as
Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Pinker dupe the public with
this very same distracting trick.

Unfortunately for these masters of legerdemain, law professor Phillip E.
Johnson has taken on a second (though related) career: exposing the
forensic tricks used by these totalitarian Darwinians. The job,
admittedly, is tricky: because secular intellectuals (especially those who
espouse philosophical naturalism, the doctrine that says that every event
in nature is caused by nature) invariably start with eminently true facts
about the world, the trick for the antinaturalists is to find the false
amid the true. But because the reasoning of naturalists is often subtle
(or, frequently, just plain aggressive), the temptation often proves
irresistible to deny the true in an effort to uproot the false, much like
the servants in Matthew 13 who first wanted to tear up the weeds only to
be told by their master that they would destroy his crop of wheat thereby.

It must be said that in his past writings Johnson has not always spared
the wheat of evidence to uproot the naturalist weeds. Although Johnson's
citations of his past writings in The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the
Foundations of Naturalism imply (in the author's mind, at any rate) a
continuity in his views, the careful reader will detect more concessions
here to a Darwinian view of evolution than were obvious in his previous
polemics. For example, he now concedes that if nature is all there is,
and matter had to do its own creating, then there is every reason to
believe that the Darwinian model is the best model we will ever have of
how the job might have been done. This sentence at least hints that a
frontal assault on Darwinian doctrine will prove difficult, and perhaps
bootless. Moreover, in a sentence that comes close to echoing Newman,
Johnson admits that criticism from outside the naturalist's proper domain
will work best: Science itself requires the assistance of outside critics
to check the tendency of ambitious scientists to go into the worldview
business.

Johnson's shift of strategies becomes most evident in his treatment of
Pope John Paul II's famous letter on evolution to the Pontifical Academy
of Science in October 1996. In his book Defeating Darwinism by Opening
Minds (1997), Johnson had treated his readers to the rather amusing
spectacle of a Presbyterian professor lecturing a Polish Pope on his
dangerous flirtations with evolution, materialism, and secularism. The
criticism was friendly, of course, somewhat on the analogy of the Jewish
Norman Podhoretz warning the Prime Minister of Israel not to trust Yasir
Arafat. Johnson even went so far as to say that the Pope had only himself
to blame when the media implied that the Roman Catholic Church had
capitulated to science.

Now he seems more inclined to let the Pope's text speak for itself; and in
letting go of his annoyance at the Pope, Johnson makes clear that the Holy
Father is merely applying Newman's generic insight to the specific
question of evolution. For in Johnson's phrasing, the Pope drew a line
between 1) legitimate scientific theories based upon empirical evidence,
which the Church will honor, and 2) overly ambitious manifestations of
materialist philosophy, which contradict truths which are fundamental to
the Church's magisterium.

True enough, but how we draw the line remains the sticking point, on which
the Pope (quite wisely, in my opinion) offered no advice. In general
(again in my opinion) Johnson succeeds best when he stands outside the
whole Darwinian system as a worldview and approaches it with the forensic
skills he gained from his years as a law student and professor; he proves
weakest when he takes on the Darwinians in their own chosen (battle?)field
of evolutionary biology. This judgment might seem surprising to those
familiar with prior attacks on Johnson's work from the bulldogs of
Darwinian naturalism, men who are not loath to point out that he is no
biologist but just a kibbitzing lawyer swimming out of his depth. But
then, in moments of delicious irony, many of these same men seem to
stumble into embarrassed floundering when it comes to answering his
objections to the specifics of their theory.

A close reading of The Wedge of Truth will demonstrate, I think, the
legitimacy of this judgment. First, lawyer Johnson has a wonderful
capacity for remembering the exact wording in the briefs for Darwinism
written by its many apologists and can spot a contradiction in an author's
writings separated by decades; and his respect for rules of evidence means
that he can detect a rhetorical sleight of hand no matter how subtle the
guise or intimidating the authority. In the margins of the galleys given
to me for this review I would mark Gotcha! or Oops! every time Bulldog
Johnson took a bite out of the pant legs of the Darwinians, and to see him
on the attack is alone worth the price of the book.

My favorite passage in that regard comes from his chapter on the raw hokum
purveyed under the fancy name of evolutionary psychology, which
discipline insists that the mind is just a collection of copycat units
of mental replication called memes (analogous to, and pronounced like,
genes). As Johnson rightly points out, a memetic account of the mind
is fatal to science, since it implies that even the scientists are not
really scientists [just mindless copiers], and that their boasted
rationality is really rationalization. In that case, why imagine that
scientific reasoning can make true statements about ultimate reality?
Extreme forms of modernist rationalism thus merge seamlessly with
postmodernist relativism.

Similarly, under this rubric both religion and natural selection are
memes. But what makes one true and the other false? Victory inside the
brain of one meme over another? The elevation of one meme over another by
state censorship? Some extreme Darwinians are fond of calling the meme of
religion a computer virus, but that implies that the very idea of
religion somehow undermines the efficient functioning of the human brain.
Not only is there no evidence for that, even if there were, it would
reintroduce the teleological question what is human functioning for so
that one could distinguish a meme as virus from one that helps the brain
correspond to reality. As Johnson pointedly asks: If unthinking matter
causes thoughts the materialists don't like, then what causes the thoughts
they do like?

All well and good; unfortunately, after having nicely roughed up his
opponents Johnson fails to land the knockout punch he thinks he can claim
for himself. Throughout his writings on this subject, he has explicitly
aligned himself with the so called intelligent design theory most
famously expounded by biochemist Michael Behe and mathematician William
Dembski (thinkers often afforded the hospitality of these pages). Just as
the ordered and irreducible complexity of a human artifact infallibly
indicates a designing artificer (no watch without a watchmaker), so too,
says the theory, does the irreducible complexity of the universe and more
specifically of life indicate an intelligent (divine?) Artificer creating
and guiding the universe.

Although I do not subscribe to this theory, the space of a book review
does not permit adequate treatment of this theme, so for these purposes I
will grant, for the sake of argument, the truth of the theory. But if
Johnson has been most successful in this book as a lawyer and not as a
biologist or exponent of information theory, perhaps I can step outside
Johnson's project as a whole and kibbitz as a theologian by pointing out
the theological inadequacies of his strategy, even when true. The main
problem, at least for a theologian, is that the results are so nugatory.
Consider an analogy: to vary the Robinson Crusoe story, suppose I had been
stranded on an island as the lone survivor of a shipwreck and was
searching for intelligent life in that small universe. But instead of
finding the human footprint of Man Friday in the sand, let us say that I
was to come upon a clearing in the forest with a circle of ten roundish
stones. Even without the presence of recent ashes in the center I would
know from both the form and the irreducible complexity of the
arrangement that humans had done this work of arrangement for a purpose.
But unless the ashes were recent, I would not know whether these
artificers were still alive; and, ashes or no, I would have no indication
whether these presumably living men might prove friendly or hostile.

Similarly with the intelligent design argument: Who, pray tell, is this
artificer? The God of Genesis 1-3? Visitors from outer space expert in
cell engineering? David Hume's clumsy craftsman who botched the job?
Malign Sartrean gods who, to paraphrase Gloucester's lament in King Lear,
kill us for their sport as wanton boys do to flies?

The surprising, indeed eye popping, answer Johnson comes up with is: The
Holy Arranger is the Logos of God, the Second Person of the Trinity. For
the first six chapters, the author had been simultaneously conceding
microevolution to Darwinism while barring the way to macroevolution: that
is, the different species of finches on the Galapagos Islands, with their
differently sized beaks adapted to the respective flora of each island,
arose purely from natural selection. But apparently the divergence between
elephant and tiger is too much for Johnson's imagination, and here he
implies, without fully saying it, that intelligent design must be
responsible for the unique architecture (or Bauplan, to use the standard
taxonomic terminology) of the elephant versus the tiger.

These are standard objections in the anti-Darwinian literature and are
easily met (by genetics primarily, a subject not treated by Johnson here).
But at least we are debating inside the world of biological controversy.
Then suddenly in the seventh chapter, the author lurches, without so much
as a by your leave, into a theological meditation on the Logos of John's
Gospel, all but claiming that the Intelligence behind intelligent design
is indeed the Second Person of the Trinity. Leaving aside the
uncomfortable fact that no biblical or doxological text in either Judaism
or Christianity praises God as the Celestial Cell Constructor or Divine
Bauplan Architect, such a strange segue from information theory to
theology could look even remotely plausible only if the bond between the
ratio of the Divine Logos and the working out of evolution is extremely
tight, so tight that one can, like some theological Merlin, read back into
the character of the designer from the morphology of living beings. But in
that same chapter Johnson forbids just such a move; in a sentence that
out Barths Karl Barth, he explicitly says that a God created by human
philosophy is just another idol. Thus does the lawyer himself lapse into
contradiction.

The problem with this whole line of argumentation is not just that the
intelligent design partisans need to reread their Hume, although they do.
The man they really need to consult is, once again, Cardinal Newman, who
leveled devastating artillery against the argument from design, especially
in The Idea of a University, which despite its well deserved fame has long
gone underutilized by philosophers of religion, perhaps because his
critique of their work is so devastating. In any event, he rightly calls
any attempt to read the nature of God directly from the universe physical
theology, which, he says, he has ever viewed with the greatest suspicion:
True as it may be in itself, still under the circumstances [it] is a
false gospel. Half of the truth is a falsehood.

Throughout Johnson's book, and indeed throughout all his writings on this
subject, there lurks, like the Ghost of Christmas Past, clanking chains
and all, the unexorcised spirit of the Anglican Archdeacon William Paley
(1743-1805), whose lucubrations on the clockmaker God so impressed
Darwin in his undergraduate days. In my opinion, anyone who follows that
hyper cheerful, almost Candide like clergyman down the designer road is
asking for trouble later on; and indeed once Darwin became a naturalist
(in the nineteenth century meaning of that word: an investigator and
collector of species), his departure from Christian orthodoxy was
well nigh inevitable. (Think of the difference it would have made to
contemporary Christianity if Darwin had read Pascal instead of Paley in
his days as a divinity student.)

One concludes this book not only grateful for the Pope's letter on
evolution, where all of Johnson's mistakes are assiduously avoided, but
also in admiration for the Holy Father's lavish praise of Cardinal Newman
in his more recent encyclical Fides et Ratio. For in the fewest possible
sentences Newman has summarized every logical flaw in this book: Half the
world knows nothing of the argument from design and when you have got it,
you do not prove by it the moral attributes of God except very faintly.
Design teaches me power, skill, and goodness [meaning here, cleverness in
craftsmanship], not sanctity, not mercy, not a future judgment, which
three are of the essence of religion. . . . I believe in design because I
believe in God, not in a God because I see design.
 

Edward T. Oakes, S.J., teaches in the Religious Studies Department at
Regis University in Denver, Colorado. His translation of Josef Pieper's
The Concept of Sin has just appeared from St. Augustine's Press.

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