The Center seminar from which this "Conversation" is drawn took place in September 1999, shortly after the decision of the Kansas State Board of Education that a knowledge of evolution would no longer be required on the statewide tests given to students; local schools could teach or not teach evolution, as they chose. The remarks of the two speakers and excerpts from the ensuing discussion follow. The seminar was moderated by Center vice president Michael Cromartie.

PHILLIP JOHNSON

Michael Cromartie: Phillip Johnson has taught law for thirty years at the University of California, Berkeley. A graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago Law School, he served as a clerk for Chief Justice Earl Warren in the United States Supreme Court. He is the author of Darwin on Trial, Reason in the Balance, and Objections Sustained.

Phillip Johnson: I am going to look at what actually happened in Kansas and then point out three significant things about the reaction of the press and the scientific community, which I think is the real story. I will conclude with a few words about how to handle this sort of controversy.

First, what actually happened. Early press reports tended to say that Kansas had banned evolution from the classroom, had stripped all references to evolution from its curriculum guidelines, and so on. Some reporters thought the school board was bringing creation science and the Bible into the science curriculum. This was all a misunderstanding, which stemmed, in part, from two things. One is that the earliest reports came before the decision was actually announced, and they were clearly from news sources on the science educators' drafting committee. That committee had given the board a strongly pro-evolution draft. Members of the committee were vociferously angry about the action the board had decided on, and they exaggerated the story of the atrocity that was about to be committed. The second source of misunderstanding, I think, is that this was the kind of story that reporters generally treat with a template. They start with Galileo, move on to the Scopes trial, and go through the whole religion-versus-science routine. I think some of them hit the "Bash Creationism" macro on the word processor. Many of the news reports and editorials could almost have been written by the same person.

The Kansas school board did not eliminate all references to evolution. In the revised guidelines it accepted there were almost four hundred words on the subject, compared to fewer than a hundred in the previous guidelines and more than seven hundred in the draft that the science educators had proposed. The new guidelines covered natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, and all of that. But the educators' draft had essentially said, These processes explain evolution at the micro level that we observe and also evolution at the macro level; they explain how man and his universe came to be. By contrast, the board majority drew a sharp distinction between micro-evolution--e.g., what occurs when insects become resistant to a particular insecticide, or changes are produced in domestic animals through breeding--and the origins story of how living things came to be in the first place. The gist of their final version was that you can't infer the latter from the former. In certain ways, I would say that the board's standards actually beefed up the treatment of the subject rather than watering it down. For example, they added new clauses to the educators' draft saying that natural selection can maintain or deplete genetic variation but does not add new genetic information.

You see, what the board was doing was not only distinguishing between evolution at the macro level and at the micro level, a distinction that is common, but expanding on that. The common micro/macro distinction seems to be about change of one kind, with a little bit of change distinguished from a lot of the same kind of change. That is not really what the issue is; the issue is new genetic information. That is to say, all living creatures are packed with complex information; this is often analogized to the software in a computer, which gives the instructions that make the whole complicated mechanism work. Where does that information come from?

Well, natural selection is not, many of us would argue, an information-creating mechanism. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find many people who believe that it is and that this can be demonstrated. That is the guts of the argument. And raising that issue, it seems to me, took this thing to a higher intellectual level, rather than watering it down. The Kansas board definitely took the view that evolution at the micro level is scientific, but as the creation story, or the origin-of-information story, it is a metaphysical and philosophical belief, not a scientific fact. That is why they decided that they would not require knowledge of it on the statewide exams for students. It was left optional for local districts or teachers to decide whether or what to teach about origins. They considered other alternatives and decided they couldn't get them, which is why they ended up with this decision.

That is basically what happened in Kansas. Now, the real story is the reaction to that decision. It set off a worldwide panic in the media and the scientific community. I want to say a little about that reaction and how those groups dealt with the micro/macro creation-of-information issue.

The Media Reaction

The reaction of the media was loud and widespread. There were table-pounding editorials in all the major papers in North America and in parts of Europe. The comment included some really fascinating abusive rhetoric. For example, in the Washington Post the columnist Gene Weingarten imagined God sarcastically thanking creationists for their support and saying, "Go forth and multiply. Beget many children. . . . And in time the genes that have made you such pinheads will be eliminated through natural selection. Because that is how it works." What other large social group could you call "pinheads" without risking a protest? The British author A. H. Wilson, a lapsed Christian who has written books about Jesus, Paul, and C. S. Lewis and doesn't seem to like any of them, referred to the entire American Midwest as "the land of the born-again boneheads." While there were some intelligent people in the United States, he said, virtually all of them lived "on the Eastern seaboard and in the big cities." In states such as Kansas, "the stupidity and insularity of the people is quite literally boundless."

In the current issue of Scientific American [October 1999] editor-in-chief John Rennie proposes an attempt at outright intimidation. "If you're on the admissions board of a college or university anywhere in the country," he tells readers, "please contact the Kansas State Board of Education or the office of the Governor and make it clear that in the light of newly lowered education standards in Kansas, the qualifications of any students applying from that state in the future will have to be considered very carefully. Send a clear message to the parents in Kansas that this bad decision will have consequences for their children." Essentially, he proposes to hold the children of Kansas hostage in order to force the board to reverse its decision.

Why were they so disturbed? Why not say, This is just a blip on the radar screen, and these people will probably be defeated in the next election? Well, what they're really concerned about, of course, is the possibility of a grass-roots revolt against the established religion of scientific naturalism. This concern was greatly heightened by the reaction of the politicians. The media and the scientific commentators cooperated in making the Kansas action a national issue that found its way into the presidential campaign, and the candidates were all asked to take a stand. Of course the Republicans said, Local control good; national regulation bad. George W. Bush, for example, said that it's fine if local authorities want to teach both creation and evolution; that would be better for education, in his opinion.

But what really struck fear into the hearts of the scientific elite was Al Gore's reaction, which on Monday was much like George Bush's, but which evolved, by micro-mutations, so that by the end of the week he was saying the Kansas decision was wrong and he opposed it. My instant analysis, which I'm not qualified to make, is that Gore doesn't want to go into the presidential election as the leader of the anti-God party, but neither does he want to go into the Democratic convention as the turncoat who repudiated the chattering classes.

The Scientific Reaction

The reaction of the scientific community fascinated me. It seemed to ignore the distinction between micro and macro evolution. Whether you can extrapolate the one from the other has been discussed for a century in scientific circles, and some leading scientists have expressed great skepticism as to whether micro processes can add up to macro ones. But from the reactions to the Kansas decision, you'd think that the leading scientists had never heard of this ongoing discussion. I'll give just two examples. The first is from a leading science journalist, Jonathan Weiner, whose book The Beak of the Finch. won the Pulitzer Prize and was universally praised as a convincing demonstration of the truth of evolution. Weiner relied very heavily on the variation in finch beaks that has been observed in the Galapagos Islands. In a population of finches, the average beak size is not the same every year. After a drought the beaks were measured, and the finches that survived the drought had beaks 3 to 5 per cent larger than the beaks before the drought. This very small difference in very small beaks--which I don't think you could see with the naked eye--was plausibly attributed to the fact that the larger beaks were advantageous in opening the last tough seeds. When the rains came, the beaks went back to normal. This proves that evolution is a fact. "I've seen it happen. How can anyone doubt?" Weiner wrote.

In this same vein, when commenting on the Kansas decision Weiner said, "Every time a hospital runs into a staph or strep infection that resists antibiotics, it is confronting evolution in action. Every time a farmer sprays pyrethroids and cotton moths go right on eating his cotton, that farmer is confronting evolution in action. A biologist once told me: 'These people are trying to ban the teaching of evolution while their own cotton crops are failing because of evolution. How can you be a creationist farmer anymore?'"

Of course, all this completely misses the point. Under the Kansas guidelines, they are teaching that insects can become resistant to an insecticide; they're just not saying that this kind of change explains how the insects came to be in the first place.

Dr. Maxine Singer, a noted molecular biologist who is president of the Carnegie Institution, replied, apparently on behalf of the scientific community, in the Washington Post. She said, "[Creationists] assert that disputes among scientists about the details of evolutionary processes cast doubt on the theory as a whole. But they give themselves away when they dwell on particular aspects of evolution that trouble their beliefs. I saw this recently when I talked with several members of the [Kansas] board. They accepted that within a species individual traits can change continually. But they were unwilling to recognize that some changes can lead to the emergence of new species, as when humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor." In other words, a blind religious prejudice is the only conceivable reason to explain the refusal to recognize the obvious. Skepticism about whether that finch-beak variation shows how you get living things in the first place would be indicative of an emotional unwillingness to face the facts.

From all this I began to think that maybe there are educational deficiencies in the treatment of evolution in our schools, deficiencies that later show up even in leading representatives of the scientific world. The whole idea that information-creation is a problem was ignored in all the scientific responses that I have seen, even though, again, you can see this in the literature. Richard Dawkins, the arch-priest of Darwinian materialism, says that there is more information content in a bacterial genome than in all the volumes of the encyclopedia put together. What the source of that is, whether natural selection or mutation is really an information-creation mechanism, seems to be a very intelligent question that, at least for official purposes, the scientific establishment ignores. That, it seems to me, is the central issue, and it is being treated with dismissive contempt.

The "Scientific" Reassurances

Pervasive in the editorials and in the responses from the leading scientists was the sentiment that it is a misunderstanding or a category mistake to think that there is any possible conflict between religion and science, because they are different orders of things and deal with different subjects. The Bible tells us how to go to heaven; science tells us how the heavens go. Philosophically, the basic argument--tirelessly repeated by Dr. Singer, among others--is that belief in God is a matter of faith, while science is a matter of reason, and never the twain shall meet. As she put it, "We can respect the faith of these people who believe the biblical story, but that has nothing to do with science," where we discover what really happened.

What this means, effectively, is that religion is a matter of the imagination, that faith is a form of fantasy. God is there in the same territory as Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, and Tinkerbell. Belief in them is not outlawed, and you cannot absolutely prove that God does not exist. It is entirely a matter of subjective belief, with no standing in the evidence. The people of Kansas are supposed to understand that. They should also understand that when the scientific authorities tell young people that they were created by an undirected, purposeless material mechanism, that is not a statement with any religious implications. To think otherwise is to make a category mistake. It is a scientific statement, and no back talk is allowed.

Scientific American, the bastion of the scientific-materialism project--and the same magazine that is calling for a boycott of Kansas high school students to punish the school board--published an article [September 1999] in which Ed Larson and Larry Witham commented on this "neutrality" position. The authors noted that when you measure opinion among elite scientists, that is, members of the National Academy of Sciences, less than 5 per cent believe in God. They gave a number of quotations to show that this disbelief really derived from the conviction that science itself had discredited belief in God. Against that background, Larson and Witham quote the National Academy's official booklet on how to teach evolution: before launching its broadside of scientific arguments against religious objections to teaching evolution, the booklet asserts that whether or not God exists is a question about which science is neutral. The irony is remarkable. A group of specialists almost all of whom are non-believers-- that is, scientific materialists, either atheist or agnostic--and who believe that science compels such a conclusion say to the public that science is neutral on the God question. This has been figured out, I can assure you, by the people in Kansas and lots of other people. They consider that the scientific elite is simply lying through its teeth about this issue.

The Gallup polls done over a period of time indicate that if you ask the public, "Do you agree with this statement: God created man sometime within the last ten thousand years pretty much as he is now?" about 44 per cent say they agree. They're classified as biblical creationists. (Note that the statement does not say anything about a possible long period of animal evolution beforehand; this is the kind of ambiguity you often find in polling statements.) Then another 40 per cent or so will say that they believe in a process of evolution that was guided by God throughout. That adds up to around 85 per cent. There are a few undecideds, and then about 9 per cent agree with the official scientific position that man was a product of a purely natural process of evolution over millions or billions of years, a process in which God played no part, which is what they mean when they teach in schools that evolution is a fact. The scientific elites are worried that they have such low public support.

There is a confusion here about the middle group. If you believe in God-guided evolution, are you an evolutionist or a creationist? Sometimes those people are said to be evolutionists. But they aren't, really, because what evolution aims to do is to provide a purely naturalistic explanation of life and its history and origin, allowing no role for anything supernatural. An intelligence that guided evolution would itself be unevolved and therefore supernatural. It could not be recognized. God-guided evolution is not evolution at all; it is slow creation. For strategic purposes, sometimes, the scientific community and their journalistic allies like to claim these people, and so they blur that distinction.

Further on that, because it is such a crucial point: my colleague Michael Behe in his well-known book Darwin's Black Box says he has nothing against common ancestry; there may be common ancestry from the first bacterium up to present-day organisms (or there may not be; he accepts that as a possibility). What he says is that you need an information source to produce the irreducible complexity, and the materialist mechanism can't do that. There has to be an intelligent designer guiding the process. Is Behe a theistic evolutionist or a creationist? Is he a friend of science or an enemy of science? In these terms, the answer is that he is an enemy of science. Why? You could very easily call his view theistic evolution. What makes Behe a heretic, rather than a member of the team, is that he says there is evidence of the need for intelligence. You see, that crosses the faith/reason boundary and brings the intelligent designer into the realm of things that can be seen by evidence, that objective observers can evaluate, instead of the realm of purely subjective belief. That is why he is on my side rather than their side, whereas somebody else whose position sounds superficially the same would be clearly on the other side.

Teach the Controversy

Finally, for many problems it is hard to find the right answer. This isn't one of them. This one is easy. The right answer is, "Teach the controversy." That is what should be done in education at all levels, as appropriate for the sophistication of the students. Of course you should teach what the mainstream scientists believe and why they believe it. That's an important thing for students to know. They should also learn why it is controversial. They should learn about the information-creation problem, the natural-selection problems, the micro/macro problem. If the scientific elite and the textbook writers are to insinuate religious conclusions, these ought to be brought out into the open so that they can be evaluated rather than being smuggled in as fact. The game plan is to pervasively insinuate metaphysical naturalism and materialism without actually labeling it, because a label sets up a target that people can reply to. That's dishonest. You need to have an honest teaching of why the reigning view of evolution is controversial. The dissenting opinion should be taken from its strongest proponents, rather than in caricature form--you know, "We'll ask Steve Gould what these crazy people say and have him describe their beliefs for them." While there may be complications with this in the practical implementation, it should be the goal. Teach the controversy.

And, I might add, this should be the goal for the press, as well as the schoolteachers and professors. What is particularly disappointing to me about most of the press reaction is that they really haven't explained the controversy as the dissidents see it. What we have gotten is the scientific establishment's take on the issue--that these people are crazy, they're Bible-thumpers, they have no case, they want to censor science education, and so on.

I do not want to block the teaching of evolution; I want to teach more about the subject than the scientific educators want young people to know. Incidentally, the Kansas school board seemed, superficially, to be trying to do the opposite, to decrease the amount of teaching of evolution. I talked with them about that. They actually want exactly what I've just said, but they couldn't get there from here. For one thing, they'd be tied up in litigation, because they'd be accused of doing it for a religious purpose, and the ACLU would sue. They couldn't do anything but what they did, other than surrender. But they told me that they all would agree with what I said.

In conclusion, I will quote once more from what you must think is my favorite periodical, Scientific American, which has in the current issue [October 1999] an article by two people named Gibbs and Fox, unknown to me, called "The False Crisis in Science Education." The article concludes: "The false crisis in science education--there isn't really one, it's not as bad as people say--masks the sad truth that the vast majority of students are taught science that is utterly irrelevant to their lives, and that scientists are a major part of the problem. Many think that the system is a good system because it produced them." About this point of irrelevancy: when you're told you are supposed to believe this because we scientific authorities say that it's true, and we don't want you to hear any of the controversy because we want to pretend that it doesn't exist, think how boring that can make what is potentially a fascinating subject. The reason that I get huge audiences when I speak across the country is that when all the issues are brought to the surface, people are fascinated by the subject.

Then, finally, the last paragraph of this story: "There's plenty of time after high school for the scientist-to-be to learn the minute facts of science. What they need from the schools are the higher-order thinking skills to distinguish evidence from propaganda, probability from certainty, rational beliefs from superstitions, data from assertions, science from folklore, credibility from incredibility, theory from dogma, and opportunity from crisis." I sign on unreservedly to that platform, though of course I believe it involves something quite different from what the president of the National Academy would think that it means. I think it means finding the dogma, superstition, and folklore wherever they lie, including in the official account.

Michael Cromartie: Thank you very much. Some hands have gone up already, and the first three are from the Washington Post! But before we open the floor to discussion, Gregg Easterbrook will give a brief response to what Phil Johnson has said. Gregg has written a couple of important books, one of which is called Beside Still Waters: Searching for Meaning in an Age of Doubt. He is a senior editor at The New Republic and a distinguished fellow at the Fulbright Foundation.

Gregg Easterbrook: I will start by agreeing with Phil Johnson's conclusion: to teach the controversy is the obvious way out of this dilemma for educational systems. It is very clear that students should be exposed to all sides of this fascinating dispute. It's a great way to teach critical thinking as well as information.

Let me offer a small defense of the honor of my colleagues in the journalism profession. Obviously we're all scurrilous and low and so on, but I don't think that the reaction was quite as one-sided as what Phil presented. The New York Times, for example, had several prominent pieces pointing out that there were some objections to evolutionary theory and there were some points to be made, not for literalist creationism, but on the religious side of the issue. Other press sources made those points as well.

It is true that the Scopes trial continues to grip our national consciousness on this subject in a way that is hard to comprehend. The Scopes trial put into our national mind the idea that evolution was somehow an I.Q. test, that if you accepted the logic of evolution you had a high I.Q. and if you objected to it you had a low I.Q. I commend to everyone the Gary Wills book Under God, because its chapter on Scopes is beautifully done. It talks about what really happened at the trial; the actual positions taken by Bryan and others are very revealing in light of the cultural cliché that the Scopes trial has become. But it is clearly true, especially in journalism, that we look for shorthand ways to express ideas.

I think you are also right, Phil, when you say that the ultimate question is not whether finch beaks change. The evidence that there is some evolution going on around us now is unarguable; the body of scientific evidence for some kinds of evolution is as strong as the evidence for force being proportional to the square of distance or any other rule of the natural world. The big question is, What starts the process? Where does the information originally come from? This is a huge unknown. When people on the Darwin side speak as if Darwin answered this question, or even addressed it, they are mistaken. All he did was muse on it. Darwin frequently wrote that he didn't have the slightest idea what started the process he was describing.

But you're wrong to say that science doesn't wonder about this issue, or that biologists don't talk about it. Biologists talk about this question a great deal, but they don't know what the answer is. Richard Dawkins, for instance, who is not a working biologist but who speaks for their positions pretty well, has written three books about how this process could have started on evolutionary terms. You may or may not find his answers satisfactory--I personally don't--but I think there is indeed a debate about this. What I dislike about the scientific community at this point is that they try to keep this as a private debate. They don't want the public to know about any questioning of evolution for fear that people would stop believing them. Most honest biologists would admit that it is extremely difficult to think of a plausible natural explanation for the origin of life.

But I think you are really swimming against the current, Phil, in the larger critique you make of evolution as being fundamentally flawed. Of course there are problems with evolutionary theory. There are nine or ten things about it that are sure to be changed in a hundred years, just as things are sure to change about many other closely held theories of today. When I go to scientific conferences, and I go to a fair number of them, I almost never hear biologists fundamentally challenge evolution as a flawed or mistaken theory. What they're doing is arguing at the margins. And when they get to this question of what caused the original information- creation, there is a huge blank spot.

I agree that a large sector of the scientific community wants to disprove religion and sees this as one of the goals of modern science. Why it has developed that way sociologically, I don't know. In a chapter of his forthcoming book on Kansas, Phil points out that among the sentences changed in the revised Kansas guidelines was one that in the original curriculum said, "The purpose of science is to find a natural explanation of the observed world." If you define science that way, then the purpose of science is indeed to disprove religion. The sentence was changed to, "The purpose of science is to find a logical explanation of the observed world." Logical may or may not be precisely the right word, but I like it better. If the natural explanation turns out to be the logical explanation, fine--that's the end point. But I suspect that most of the elite scientists we've been speaking about would agree with the former sentence, that the purpose of science is to find a purely natural explanation of the world. Exactly why it is that scientists see the disproving of religion as one of their goals, I'm not sure. Maybe it's all revenge for the trial of Galileo--the Church once repressed science, now science will do its damndest to repress the Church, and at some point in the future it will all be straightened out.

But if this is true, if the elite scientists are fundamentally trying to disprove religion, then why shouldn't that be their goal, so long as they are open and honest about it? If religion is strong and internally valid, it should be able to resist an assault from the National Academy of Sciences. For religion to be forced to deal with an intellectual discipline whose admitted goal is to disprove it--I don't have any problem with that at all.

Phillip Johnson: Yes, let people argue for what they think is true. I don't have any problem with that either.

A couple of comments on what Gregg has said. I'm really not arguing with anything, but I want to clarify a couple of things. First, a controversy like the Kansas decision does allow you to get on the op-ed pages. That's the way the fairness gene works in the journalistic genome. The Washington Post, for example, published an op-ed column by my colleague Jay Richards after they'd accepted other ones from our team but had never published them. But if you're looking at the official coverage, at the news reports and editorials, if there are instances of "we'll explain it to you as it appears to the objectors" they escaped my notice. There could of course be some that I don't know about.

The other point I want to clarify concerns the origin of information. The first living organism emerging from the soup of non-living chemicals-- the origin of the information for that is a great mystery. And indeed, for present purposes, the scientific elite have been throwing that question overboard, although in a lot of printed materials and on museum walls and so on they make claims about knowing the answer. The field is in such bad shape that they'll say, "We don't deal with that. That's outside our field." But the problem isn't limited to the mystery of the emergence of the first living organism. Even after you've got the bacterium packed with that encyclopedia full of information, you have to increase that exponentially to get the trillions of genes in the human genome, and all of these things in between. The issue isn't just at the beginning point but all the way up.

Amy Schwartz: I want to go back to something Phillip Johnson said at the outset of his talk when he described how the school-board majority arrived at the position they ended up taking. You state that there were other options they would have liked to take but that this is what they could get the votes for, making the distinction between macro and micro evolution.

PJ: Yes. Eliminating macro from what students must know for the required statewide test.

Amy Schwartz: That makes it sounds like an ordinary political compromise--you get what you can but your real position is elsewhere.

PJ: I think that what they would have liked to get, if they'd had their druthers, is the kind of thing that I advocate: you present the dissenting case on equal terms, and you teach the controversy. They felt they could not do that because of legal objections and because the educators just wouldn't cooperate at all. What they said, then, was that if it is going to be a one-sided presentation of a philosophy, it shouldn't be required in the scientific curriculum.

Amy Schwartz: But would the dissenting case be something different from what is now being taught? Because the distinction between macro and micro evolution as you described it does not sound like a description of a political controversy.

PJ: It is a scientific/philosophical controversy. The mainstream scientists and science educators insist that macro evolution--the information-creation or grand creation story--is just finch-beak variation writ large, over a long period of time; the micro evolutionary process explains the whole process all the way up and all the way down. That's what is in dispute. The Kansas school-board majority wanted some way to counter that claim, to have it put on the table as a debatable point rather than an absolute about which there is no possible rational ground for disagreement. What they would most like to have is a two-sided presentation.

Amy Schwartz: You mentioned that some leading scientists acknowledge the problem of going from micro to macro. An example?

PJ: Yes. Stephen Jay Gould made much of that in an often quoted article on paleobiology he published in the early eighties. Gould took dead aim at the standard textbook claim that all evolution is due to the accumulation of small genetic changes guided by natural selection, and that macro evolution is nothing but an extrapolation and magnification of the events that take place within populations and species. He said something like this: "This theory beguiled me with its unifying power when I was a graduate student in the late 60s, but since then I've been watching it slowly unravel as a universal description of evolution."

Benjamin Wittes: Would you say Gould is being deceptive, then, when he says--as he has done in repeated public comments in reaction to Kansas--that despite things he has written in favor of a different model of macro evolution, he's not arguing against a fundamental Darwinian conception of evolution?

PJ: He's not arguing what he means. I've written a lot about Gould--read my specific essays on him in Objections Sustained--and I know that it is sometimes very hard to tell what he thinks about a particular point because he says different things at different times. This is widely reported within the scientific community, too. But here's what unifies Gould with Dawkins, with whom he disagrees on every single point of importance in the theory. They both agree on metaphysical materialism. They agree on atheism and agnosticism. They agree that the enemy that must be defeated is the creationists. And they'll tell you that. Gould is hardly more enthusiastic about natural selection than I am. (I back that up in my published essays on the subject.) The metaphysics is what unites them. It is also, of course, the metaphysics of Harvard generally, and of the scientific and academic elite.

Benjamin Wittes: I was struck by your comments regarding which side theistic evolution should be considered married to. It seems to me that the 40 per cent of Americans who believe in theistic evolution could be married rather easily to the Darwinian side, and I was surprised to hear you take the contrary position. Their position seems roughly analogous to the position of those who say, I believe that the laws of physics have a sufficient intrinsic beauty that they had to have been guided in some sense; I believe you can see the hand of God in the laws of physics.

I'm not terribly sympathetic to the distinction you make between macro and micro evolution, but you could look at the laws of evolution and say, To the extent that the neo-Darwinian theory can be tested, which is at the micro level, it robustly passes the test. The theory does not predict that you would see the macro level after only a hundred years of observation, and so you rely on the fossil record for your belief in the macro level. Why is this not simply seeing the hand of God in the natural processes you observe?

PJ: At the risk of offending, I will say that I believe you may be the victim of the kind of education most of us have had in this. I had to unlearn it all after I got out of college and graduate school and took up these questions for myself. Here are the two things to understand. First, the usual position called theistic evolution is very similar to naturalistic evolution. They agree with Dawkins all the way except when he says, "And therefore there is no God." They say he ought to stop short of that final conclusion. God is invisibly and undetectably somehow behind the whole process; that's what is usually meant by theistic evolution. We know that by faith, not by reason. Now if you take that position and change it subtly, you could say, The very qualities of life give evidence that an intelligence had to be involved. The laws are real, but the laws are not sufficient to do the creating. They don't do the information-building. You need an intelligence operating within them. That is a matter of evidence, and legitimate inference from evidence. But if you say this, you are damned as a creationist and excluded from the scientific community. You may not make that argument because it is considered to be religion and not science.

Insofar as the evidence goes, it isn't a question of lack of time. If you look at the most powerful piece of evidence, the one that is used as the major example in all the textbooks, it is the finch-beak variation I spoke about. That variation is not changing anything in a permanent direction; it is not building a little bit of information; it is not creating or building anything at all. It is just back-and-forth variation that involves no creative change at all. A process that never gets started isn't going to the end of the universe, no matter how much time you give it. As to the fossil record, that raises a lot of complex things that we probably shouldn't try to get into here and now. I have three chapters on it in Darwin on Trial. My view is that the fossil record is absolutely nothing but trouble for Darwinism.

David Von Drehle: I'd like to review the bidding at this point. Can the Kansas school-board decision be defended? It seems to me that the two speakers agree that it can be.

Gregg Easterbrook: The specific things the Kansas school board did would not be my first choice of things to do, with the exception of the one sentence I highlighted, the change from "natural" to "logical" to describe the explanation science seeks. What's needed in public education now is, as Phil said, to teach the controversy. But it is hard to handle this because it's an interdisciplinary approach and most public high schools don't have interdisciplinary education. They have a biology class, and if they teach religion it is taught under American or world history.

I think because we do it by subject category, inevitably we get these excessively extremized disputes, where there is one party that wants to keep it just biology and pretend that religion doesn't exist, and another party sees the debate as a gladiatorial contest for the proof of religion. What you really need is an interdisciplinary way to teach this as not only an important subject but also a great way for kids to develop critical thinking skills so they can make up their own minds on this issue.

David Von Drehle: Are you saying that an interdisciplinary approach is needed because so-called scientific creationism really isn't science and they need to find some way to shoehorn the discussion into a science classroom? Or that it is science and it is just not in the right place now? Or that science at this level is making religious claims and therefore is not science, which I think is what Mr. Johnson is saying.

GE: You put a biology teacher on the spot if you have him teach evolution as a reasonable consensus point among biologists, which it is, and then expect him to say, But of course the major religions of the world also have their own explanations for why these things happen; please see your social studies teacher after class. Now if you have the biology teacher say, We're going to log onto the biblical creationist society's website and we're going to teach you the creationist explanation for these things, you have to be honest that these are not science consensus positions. Maybe they'll triumph someday, but today they're weak, and most of what you put in a curriculum is consensus positions. The solution to this is to have an interdisciplinary class where you teach the controversy of evolution.

PJ: Clearly if you have a question, the answer yes and the answer no to the question are still in the same subject area. So if the affirmation "Yes, natural selection can create as much as is needed," is science, then the no answer--" No, the evidence does not support that"--is science, too. I vigorously assert that this is not two subjects but one subject: what does the evidence show and not show about natural processes?

David Von Drehle: I think there are two subjects. There is a scientific debate about what the evidence shows or doesn't show. And there is a religious debate, with two different religions making claims about a topic they can't fully understand.

PJ: I wouldn't fight you if you wanted to say that there is only one subject on both sides, and it is religion. They should either teach evolution in religion class and not in science, or teach it in science and present both sides. It can't be that the yes answer is science and the no answer is religion.

GE: Phil makes a good point there. There are really three subjects. There is the materialist scientific position. There is the faith-based spiritual position--we know this by revelation or by scripture. And there is the newly evolved position--we find evidence of design when we study the natural world. The latter is the one that gives the scientific community the willies, the idea that we find evidence of design in the natural record or in the natural law. Because if it is just a matter of faith, people are entitled to their faith, regardless of whether it's right or wrong. But if you've actually got evidence, then you're arguing on science's own ground. I think that the evidence right now for design is weak, but it is weak evidence that has an up arrow. It gets stronger with each passing year. If I were a teacher, I would have to say that this evidence is a very fertile field for intellectual pursuit. However, right now it is quite weak.

Robert Parker: As I was listening, I was reminded of an anecdote--I'm not sure if it's true--of a Chinese scientist presenting a paper at an international convention in Beijing in which he attempted to debunk a part of Darwin's theory. The Americans in the audience were appalled. The presenter's response was, "Well, you understand, in the United States you can criticize the government and in China we can criticize Darwin!"

Here's my question. It is not difficult to find physicists embracing this debate, saying that there might be more evidence than people had originally thought for some grand design, for the idea that we don't know what was at the beginning of the Big Bang. We can't get back to the first three seconds. We're trying to, but it is still a big question mark. Physicists and others present it as something that is exciting and challenging and a goal for their discipline. Why is biology so reluctant to embrace the same strategy when the issue tends to be so similar?

PJ: I've written a fair amount about that. The premise of your question is certainly right. Cosmologists often sound like some kind of theistic or pantheistic Platonists, while biologists tend to be hard-core materialists. The great founders of the field like Watts and Crick were, and that tradition has been carried on. People tend not to feel anywhere near as threatened by the fine-tuning argument and the anthropic-principle debate in cosmology as they are when the design issue comes up in biology. I would guess that the most important reason is, you see, that the physicist or cosmologist is really only talking about deism. God made the laws and the constants at the beginning of time, before the Big Bang, or however you want to phrase that, and then the world runs by natural law or chance, or some combination of the two. But if you get into the history of life, you have the designer acting way down the road. If you get into the creation of human thinking, mentality, spirituality, and so on, you hit uncomfortably close to home. This is not the deist God that acted only at the beginning and then went away and left things to operate on their own. If it is a God, a designer, who remains close to us, then it is much more threatening and much more culturally controversial.

GE: I've been to a few conferences, especially during the past five years, where the Big Bang theory has heated up, and where cosmologists and religious and philosophical people have gotten together and had a reasonably good time even though they disagree and are at each other's throats. But surely if you tried to have a conference with working biologists and creationists you'd need police guards to separate them. Part of it is because you look at pictures from the Hubble deep-field telescope and your jaw just drops and you think, Something majestic must have accounted for this. But you don't look at a human being and have your jaw drop and think, Something majestic must have accounted for this, too. It is somehow a subconscious view within the modern ethos of intellectualism that things that are not human--the stars, the galaxies--are magisterial and beautiful, but human beings are bad, we're evil, we're environmentally corrupt, so we can't be impressed with our own existence. We must be the result of meaningless chemical accidents, whereas the galaxy must be an act of God.

PJ: Every culture has a priesthood. It has a creation story and a priesthood. The creation story tells its people where they come from and how they relate to ultimate reality. All sorts of conclusions are drawn from that about morals and the purpose of life and so on. It is a very important story, and the priesthood is the body that has the authority to tell the creation story. What the Darwinian revolution, particularly as managed by T. H. Huxley, Darwin's advocate in Britain, did was to enable the scientific professionals and academics to oust the clergy as the priesthood of society and to tell their own creation story. That has had an enormous influence--for good and bad. So then from time to time this gets disputed, and now we have this dispute: Is the creation story of the official priesthood true? Now of course the priesthood responds with indignation to this. They consider it evil to question their story. Our priesthood--specifically the National Academy, or more broadly, the scientific and intellectual community as represented publicly by the elite media-- finds its creation story being questioned. That is something that goes far beyond narrow scientific confines.

GE: That is a good point. To put it into a historical context: remember that at the end of the nineteenth century, the Anglican Church controlled hiring decisions at Oxford and Cambridge. Darwinism was a way to drive them out of that position.

PJ: I'm somewhat sympathetic to Huxley's cause for that reason, by the way.

GE: The Church should not have controlled tenure at those institutions. That had to be defeated. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of evolutionary theory, is not remembered by history, in part because he was a believer who wrote about the unseen universe of the spirit and the existence of God and was especially adamant on this one point, that human life could not be explained by what was known about Darwinian, evolutionary mechanics. That didn't fit into the political argument of the time in Britain. In the United States, Asa Gray, the leading biologist at Harvard University in the late nineteenth century, was a total believer in Darwin and was also a church-going Christian believer. He immediately went to the theistic position and said, This explains it, this explains how God managed creation--he did it through evolution. That was the position of the United States roughly until the Scopes trial, when we switched over to the British view of this issue. The British view has dominated since.

Gary Haugen: You've said a lot about the power of liberal elites in media and mainstream science to drive out discussion of religious assumptions from science. Would you comment also, perhaps, on the impact in the culture of American religion's retreat from science itself in this century--its anti-intellectual tradition, its fleeing from mainstream academic institutions to set up its own colleges and universities? Is that not also, perhaps, part of the story of why this debate takes the shape it does?

PJ: Oh yes. When I speak to conservative Christian audiences, one of the points I often make is, Don't complain that other people marginalize you--you've done enough to marginalize yourselves. That retreat from the intellect was part of the whole process. If you think about popular Christianity in our time, the great triumphs are things like the Billy Graham rallies. Now and then you'll have an intellectual figure of stature, but basically there is a retreat from the mind and an abandonment of the educational institutions to metaphysical naturalism. I've just been reading a book about how this has been repeated in the Christian institutions and how it was philosophically justified. What the religious people did or didn't do is as much a part of the story as anything that was done to them.

Hadley Arkes: I'd like to try to bring out something that was left implicit. Mr. Easterbrook, if the scientists take themselves seriously as scientists, they would have to acknowledge that a question about evidence is never out of season. It is never an inapt question to raise to an empirical scientist. Most of the arguments we've been seeing here are arguments drawn from probability theory or arguments dealing with the evidence. It's curious that this would elicit their discomfort or outrage.

On the other side, if they acknowledge that it is not simply an empirical project they're offering but a kind of a materialist philosophy, a kind of a surrogate for religion, then what's the state of the objection? Do they understand themselves that they're really offering a religion with the cover of science? Is that why they're offended? Do they understand that this is religion they're offering and they just don't want that exposed?

GE: I think it is more a definitional matter. That sentence in the old Kansas curriculum guidelines offers a good example: "The purpose of science is to find a natural explanation of the observed world." That's the organizing principle of modern science, and up to a point it makes sense that way. That is how they eliminate possibilities, among other things. If you talk to scientists about higher purpose or larger powers or what came before the Big Bang, most of them would say that this is beyond the definition of science, so there's no point in discussing it with you. I don't think it is conspiratorial, although there are some who are personally nasty about it; it is more the definition of their terms and a desire to see their version of the argument triumph. To see people from the middle come in and say that they are going to take a look at the evidence and try to convince you that the evidence argues for some force that is just not natural-- that blows the whole game. It is as if Stephen Jay Gould showed up at the Vatican one morning and said, You know, I've been receiving revelations, and I would now like to tell you why you have to alter all of your doctrines. They would just say that they didn't want to listen to this. It's the same thing in the science world. The intelligent- design argument, at least the early version of this, can be dismissed as weak science, which it is now.

PJ: I vigorously disagree.

GE: There are two versions, Phil. There is the version that you and Michael Behe give, which is much more on point, closer to science than that of William Dembski [author of Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology]. Dembski is very broad. For all we know, a thousand years from now people will look back and say that Dembski was the great genius of our age. Maybe, but his science is weak. You can dismiss the early version of intelligent design by saying that it's crummy science, but in the back of their minds biologists are saying, Well, today this is crummy science, but the evidence is now flowing in its direction. This weak theory is going to get stronger with the passage of time, whereas the evidence is flowing against Darwinism, and this currently strong theory is going to get weaker with the passage of time.

That's where the arrows point right now. That is one reason why the biologists are so nervous about it. Whereas if you talk to cosmologists, they don't have any idea what came before the Big Bang, and they will entertain any speculation because they don't have a theory.

PJ: I hold a lot of discussions with members of the scientific elite, and I find that they don't distinguish between naturalism and reason. So the idea of what was done in Kansas, the changing of "natural" explanations to "logical" explanations, wouldn't make any sense to them. In their minds things are either natural or supernatural. If they thought of anything supernatural, that would mean they couldn't do any science. Everything would happen at the whim of whimsical gods, and there would be no regularities and no science. Now, in my view this is a very mistaken way to understand the issue. The way I like to think about it is that there are three kinds of causes that are admitted in science generally: law, chance, and design or agency. The example often used to teach this is the SETI project, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. You get signals from outer space. They might be law regularities, like from pulsars. They might be chance noise, random noise. They might also be signals from a civilization out there.

I'd like to make another point. Some people argue fervently for the validity of evolutionary theory on the grounds of its usefulness for scientific purposes. Well, molecular biologists are not the only people who have important purposes in the world. Why should a mother in Kansas think it a good thing for her children to be indoctrinated in the truth of a materialist system because the evolutionary paradigm is useful for professional evolutionary biologists? Should we consider, for example, the much broader effects it has in terms of implying a certain kind of cosmos, in terms of delegitimating certain kinds of moral order? I don't want to argue that question here but merely to point out that it is indeed a question. Centuries ago they used to say that for scientific purposes you would use the theory that best "saved" the phenomenon. The theory wasn't necessarily true, but it worked the best for a particular technical purpose. That is not what the scientists of today say. They say that if the theory saves the phenomenon, if it works best for their purposes, then everybody ought to believe it. And it ought to be presented in the classroom in this "no back talk" way that nobody is allowed to challenge.

GE: But Phil, I think it is inarguable that some aspects of Darwinian mechanics have been tremendously useful for research in a lot of fields. The most obvious one that is hot right now is understanding disease pathology, and why diseases mutate and spread the way they do. Darwinian models are being very effectively used in disease studies to the benefit of all of us. Now the fact that the theories work in disease studies doesn't mean that they account for the creation of life. This is a huge distinction that Phil is right to say most biologists would rather not talk about.

Staph and strep are being closely studied now because they are mutating against a lot of the antibiotics we use, and several common field pests like the European corn borer are being carefully studied because they're mutating against insecticides. The reason that these mutations happen so fast is that the organisms appear to be selecting existing genes and emphasizing them in reproduction. This proves one of Darwin's points, but one of his lesser points. It does not explain how they got the genes for resistance to these things in the first place.

Paul Klaassen: I would like to know where we should go from here, or a prediction from both of you. The initial lens through which this issue has been viewed is quite polarizing. What is going to happen next? Are we going to get a second and third round? Is this likely to spread to other school boards? And will the level of discussion a year from now have developed in a different way?

PJ: The first New York Times story on the Kansas decision quoted me as saying that this is the science educators' "Vietnam." What I meant by this is that in the first place they have a determined adversary who is not going to surrender. They're not gaining ground. That's what the polls show, and that is why there is so much worry. If the enemy keeps on fighting, he wears you down. The second thing is that it is an adversary--that is, the anti-Darwinists--that can appeal to the liberal values of a lot of their opponents, just as the Viet Cong appealed to the anti-imperialist sentiments of the American public. The adversary can say, Let's hear both sides, let's have an open discussion, you don't know the majority position unless you have heard it effectively challenged, and so on. Already the polls show that two-thirds of the public favors something of the "teach both sides, teach the controversy" direction. The Kansas decision is certainly going to encourage other states and localities to do something like this.

The kind of over-the-top reaction that Kansas got will lose its force if used again and again. Eventually people get used to the idea that this is a controversy. You have to deal with it as something that's going to be around for a long time, and you have to teach people how to think about it. Although my crystal ball is as clouded as everybody else's, that is what I think will happen.

GE: Over the short term I'd expect the situation to stay just as polarized. Over the longer term, it seems to me that whatever we call it, whether intelligent design or a higher-power influence, it is a weak theory, but it is a weak theory that is gathering steam. When I read science findings, a high percentage of them in biology and cosmology, I often see that they fit the higher-power theory a lot better than the existing theory. Darwinianism is a large, top-heavy edifice and history suggests that like all top-heavy edifices it will crumble into a thousand pieces. Whether this is likely to take ten years or a hundred years I don't know.

Larry Witham: In high school science, the thing we learned about was heredity. When I survey this debate, it seems to me that micro evolution is essentially about heredity. Why is nobody saying that our understanding of insect immunity to insecticides and disease immunity to antibiotics and adaptable finch beaks is just an expanded knowledge of heredity?

GE: The ability of any organism--staph and strep are the ones that are significant right now--to evolve rapidly or change its molecular structure in response to a stimulus is a confirmation of something that Darwinism predicts. So at one level it is in favor of Darwinism. As for heredity, the way organisms are observed to respond is by calling on some existing genetic information and emphasizing it at the expense of other genetic information. But this of course does not answer the ultimate question of where this heredity arises from. The scientific community, and the molecular biologists especially, are now saying, See, we've got observational evidence of evolutionary forces at work. They do in fact have that. But nobody has observational evidence of the origins of this information.

Michael Cromartie: Phil, do you have a final comment?

PJ: I think that having a term other than "evolution" for what they call micro evolution would be very useful. Words help you to think. The term "evolution" is accordion-like. When the scientific establishment asks, "Has evolution occurred?" they want to define evolution as any variation. So of course it occurs. It occurs any time a baby is born. The gene pool is altered. So they say, Evolution is a fact. That befogs the issue. Not even the most biblical-literalist, fundamentalist- creationist doctrine holds that there is no variation. Rather, it holds that God created certain basic types with a capacity to vary well beyond the scope of what we observe as micro evolution. If you talk about that as evolution, you're totally missing the point.

This is the pea-under-the-shell game. Evolution is a fact because some variations happen; therefore evolution is your creator. That is essentially what the science educators' draft in Kansas tried to say in a very small number of words. What the school board did was to say, "No, that is not so. Variation is one thing, and information-generation is something else."

So, can the Kansas decision be defended? You bet.

DISCUSSION PARTICIPANTS

Phillip Johnson, University of California School of Law, Berkeley; Gregg Easterbrook, The New Republic; Michael Cromartie, Ethics and Public Policy Center; Hadley Arkes, Amherst College; Gary Haugen, International Justice Mission; Paul Klaassen, Sunrise Assisted Living; Robert Parker, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, & Garrison; Amy Schwartz, Washington Post; David Von Drehle, Washington Post; Larry Witham, Washington Times; Benjamin Wittes, Washington Post.