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Leadership U.
Phillip Johnson has been a
professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, for 26
years. He received his B.A. from Harvard and his J.D. from the
University of Chicago. Johnson is the author of Darwin on Trial
and more recently Reason in the Balance. Darwin on
Trial contends theories of evolution are based on philosophical
naturalism. Reason in the Balance explores the post-modern
philosophy and it's impact on society. Since the writing of his books,
Johnson has spoken and debated extensively with experts on these issues.
It's clear that Philip Johnson was born and raised in a small Midwestern town. He's congenial, rumpled, and without social pretension. He also is slightly impatient, fully articulate, and supremely confident of his judgment, a confidence he possessed at an early age. In 1956, as a bright 16-year-old high school junior in Aurora, Illinois, he saw no reason to return for his senior year. Instead, and on his own, he applied for early admission to Harvard, "on the ground that they had to rescue me" from the intellectual confines of his small-town culture. Harvard agreed.
Today, at the age of 51, a professor at Boalt Hall and a devout Christian, Johnson once again has seen the need to break away from what he considers the intellectual sterility of his surroundings. The result is his controversial new book, Darwin on Trial, an attack on Darwinian evolution and, beyond that, on what he calls the reigning paradigms of our intellectual life: naturalism, materialism, and agnosticism. (One judgment of how well he has succeeded is in the review on page TK.)
Johnson came to his passionate belief in Christianity as an adult. As a child in Illinois, he remembers being driven to a branch of the Methodist church on Sundays by his mother; along the way, they dropped his father off at the golf course. "This experience gave me an abiding love," he likes to recall, "for the game of golf."
At Harvard, the ambitious but intellectually lazy Johnson coasted along with a B average in English literature; after graduation, he looked around for something interesting to do. His father, an accountant who had never been to college, wanted him to go to law school. "So that was out of the question," Johnson says, remembering his feelings of rebellion and arrogance as a youth. "I had to go off and join the Foreign Legion, or something equivalent." He managed, once again, to arrange his own deal: a job teaching English in East Africa. His plan was to travel around the world, stopping for a year in Kenya to teach high school. This he did, but his plan to return through Asia was cut short when he was called back home because his mother was dying of cancer.
At this point, Johnson gave in and entered law school at the University of Chicago. He says he was still "getting by on flair," but he nevertheless graduated first in his class. And when he failed to get the United States Supreme Court clerkship he wanted, he came instead to California to clerk for State Supreme Court Justice Roger Traynor (sp?).
While in San Francisco, Johnson came over to Berkeley to talk to Boalt professor (and later chancellor) Ira Michael Heyman, who recommended him for the position of clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren. Following that clerkship in Washington, D.C. and offers from East Coast schools, in 1967 Johnson decided to return to Berkeley and accept a post on the Boalt Hall faculty in 1967. He has been here ever since, although he asked for, and has been granted, leaves of absence to do criminal prosecution.
At Boalt, Johnson taught criminal law and criminal procedure, wrote the proper papers, and earned tenure. But during the 1970s he became troubled by an emptiness at the base of both his personal and professional life. "There was something fundamental missing from the whole package," he remembers. A personal crisis prompted a profound change in his life.
He and his first wife were drifting apart. In the spring of 1977, the older of their two children, then ll, attended a vacation Bible school at the College Avenue Presbyterian Church. She needed a parent to accompany her for the final night of the class, on a Friday evening. The night before, Johnson's wife told him she was leaving. Johnson decided to inform his daughter of the family breakup following the church event the next evening.
"In that state of mind," Johnson says, "one of those times when you're ready to rethink your whole life," he went to the church and listened to the minister discuss his faith and values. "I was suddenly struck by the fact that this was a real possibility for me," Johnson says. "I thought, 'You know, this guy really believes what he's saying. He lives it. And I could too!' That was the moment at which conversion became a real possibility for me.
"This went along with the feelings that intellectually and professionally the ambitions I had for really doing something worthwhile were blocked by a sense of superficiality, by the fact that everyone was building castles without foundation. All of this led to a momentous change in my life." Johnson met his second wife, Kathie, at the First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, which they both still attend.
He claims that he has found a more rewarding intellectual life among the people in his church than he found at the University itself. "I don't mean to insult anybody, but there is an inherent superficiality, in my opinion, to a completely agnostic, naturalistic, philosophically materialistic approach to life. It prevents people from thinking about things that are really important, things they have to think about in order to get at basic issues." As the 1980s progressed, Johnson developed a firm foundation from which to challenge what he calls the governing academic and intellectual culture. All he needed was a topic. Then, during the 1987-88 academic year, while he was a visiting professor at University College in London, he stumbled upon some books on evolution.
He now had a possible topic. But, after a first reading of Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchman, an argument in favor of neo- Darwinism, Johnson wondered if he could mount a successful challenge. "I really didn't know how anyone could answer this case," he says. He gave the book a second reading. "Suddenly, I saw: By gosh, this is carried by brilliant rhetoric--by just the kind of stuff that lawyers do! The evidence isn't there. It gets you to accept the conclusion as an assumption and then carries you along with the brilliance of the argument."
One evening, in November 1987, Johnson said to his wife: 'You know, I think I understand the problem with this whole field. But, fortunately, I'm too sensible to take it up professionally or to write about it. Because nobody would believe me, I would be covered with ridicule and contempt. It would be absolutely foolhardy to take on this thing.
"Well, of course, that was irresistible. I started the next morning."
During the remainder of his year in London, Johnson wrote a "brief" against Darwinian evolution. When he returned to Berkeley in the fall of 1988, the first thing he did was to hold a faculty colloquium on the subject at Boalt Hall; he also began to write drafts of a book-length treatment and to search for a publisher. He finally found one in Regnery Gateway, a small house specializing in conservative political thought, which brought out Darwin on Trial this summer. In the book, Johnson turns his legal training on evolutionary science's "creation story" and argues that evidence for its claims is lacking.
"The whole purpose of the Darwinian evolutionary story," he says, "is to take a position on the religious question, to show that you don't need a preexisting intelligence to do all the work of creation."
Is Johnson a creationist? The trial lawyer answers the question cautiously, demanding to define the term. "In what sense?," he asks. "The word 'creationist' has been turned by the media into a very specialized word: it means a young-earth, six-day, Biblical literalist. In that sense, I'm not a creationist. However, the concept of creation can mean simply that we are here as the result of a preexisting intelligence which planned our existence for a purpose--whether through instantaneous creation or 4.6 billion years of gradual development, to which you could attach the word 'evolution.' The length of time and the nature of the mechanism is not the key issue. It's whether there's an intelligence and purpose behind our existence--or our existence is random and accidental. I'm on the former side of that, and if that's creationism, let them make the most of it." Johnson claims to be on the side of most Americans, the 80 percent or so who profess to a belief in God. The intellectual and academic world, he says, "simply doesn't comprehend the way the rest of the culture thinks." He clearly recognizes that he is going to be seen as a "kook" by his academic colleagues, although he says he has been pleasantly surprised by the support he's received from people familiar with his book on the Berkeley campus.
But the degree of support he receives from the academy is not, finally, important to him. The impulses that led the young Philip Johnson to leave high school early for Harvard, to set off on his own agenda around the world, and to enter the adventurous arena of trial work--plus the religious conversion he experienced as an adult--have combined to leave him supremely confident in his attack on what he calls "the holy of holies" of the intellectual world.