I found this fun lecture by the grandfather of the big-tent intelligent design movement, Berkeley law professor Philip E. Johnson.

I’ll bet you guys have all heard of him, but you’ve never heard him speak, right? Well, I was a young man, I used to listen to Phil’s lectures and his debates with Eugenie Scott quite a bit. This is one of my favorite lectures. Very easy to understand, and boilerplate for anything else in the origins debate. This is a great lecture – funny, engaging and useful. You will definitely listen to this lecture several times if you listen to it once.

The MP3 is here. (91 minutes, 62 megabytes)

The Inherit the Wind stereotype

• Many people get their understanding of origins by watching movies like “Inherit the Wind” (or reading science fiction)
• The actual events of the Scopes trial are nothing like what the movie portrays
• The law forbidding the teaching of evolution was symbolic, not meant to be enforced
• The actual Scopes trial was a publicity stunt to attract attention to Dayton, TN to bring business to the town
• The ACLU advertised for a teacher who would be willing to be sued
• They found a substitute physical education teacher who would be willing to “break” the law
• The movie is nothing like the actual events the movie is a morality play
• The religious people are evil and stupid and ignorant and bigoted
• The scientists and lawyers are all intelligent, romantic, and honest seekers of the truth
• The religious people think that the Bible trumps science and science is not as reliable as the Bible
• The movie argues that the reason why there is ANY dissent to evolution is because of Biblical fundamentalism
• The movie presents the idea that there are no scientific problems with evolution
• The movie says that ONLY Biblical fundamentalists who believe in 6 day, 24-hour creation doubt evolution
• The movie says that Biblical fundamentalism are close-minded, and not open to scientific truth
• The movie says that people who read the Bible as making factual claims are misinterpreting the Bible
• The movie says that smart people read the Bible for comfort and feelings and arbitrary values, not for truth

Guided evolution and methodological naturalism

• What scientists mean by evolution is that fully naturalistic, unguided, materialistic mechanisms caused the diversity of life
• Scientists do not allow that God had any real objective effect on how life was created
• Scientists think that nature did all the creating, and any mention of God is unnecessary opinion – God didn’t DO ANYTHING
• Scientists operate with one overriding rule – you can only explain the physical world with physical and material causes
• Scientists DO NOT allow that God could have done anything detectable by the sciences
• Scientists WILL NOT consider the idea that natural, material processes might be INSUFFICIENT for explaining everything in nature
• You cannot even ask the question about whether natural laws, matter and chance can explain something in nature
• Intelligent causes can NEVER be the explanation for anything in nature, and you can’t even test experimentally to check that
• Scientists ASSUME that everything can be explained with natural laws, matter and chance – no questioning of natural causes is allowed
• Where no natural explanation of a natural phenomenon is available, scientists SPECULATE about undiscovered natural explanations
• The assumption of naturalistic sufficiency is called “methodological naturalism”
• To question the assumptions that natural is all there is, and that nature has to do its own creating, makes you an “enemy of science”
• But Johnson says that naturalists are the enemies of science, because they are like the Biblical fundamentalists
• Naturalists have a presumption that prevents them from being willing to follow the evidence where it is leading
• Experiments are not even needed, because the presumption of naturalism overrides any experimental finding that falsifies the sufficiency of natural causes to explain some natural phenomenon

What can natural selection and mutation actually do?

• what evolution has actually been observed to do is explain changing populations of moths and finches
• finches with smaller or larger beaks are observed to have differential survival rates when there are droughts or floods
• no new body plan or new organ type has been observed to emerge from these environmental pressures
• the only kind of evolution that has been observed is evolution within types – no new genetic instructions are created
• in textbooks, only confirming examples are presented – but what is required is a broad pattern of gradual development of species
• if you look at the fossil record, what you see in most cases is variation within types based on changing environments
• the real question is: can natural law and chance be observed to be doing any creating of body plans and organ types?

What kind of effect requires an intelligent cause?

• the thing to be explained in the history of life is the functional information sequences
• you need to have a sequence of symbols or characters that is sufficiently long
• your long sequence of characters has to be sequenced in the right order to have biological function
• the only thing that can create long sequences of functional information is an intelligent cause
• intelligent design people accept micro-evolution – changes within types – because that’s been observed
• the real thing to be explained is the first living cell’s functional information, and the creation of new functional information

Critical response

The next 15 minutes of the lecture contain a critical response from a philosophy professor who thinks that there have been no developments in design arguments since Aquinas and Paley. He basically confirms the stereotypes that Johnson outlined in the first part of the lecture. I recommend listening to this to see what opposition to intelligent design really looks like. It’s not concerned with answering scientific questions – they want to talk about God, the Bible and Noah’s ark. It’s our job to get people like this critic to focus on the science.

Here’s my snarky rendition of what he said:

1) Don’t take the Bible literally, even if the genre is literal.

• all opposition to evolution is based on an ignorant, fundamentalist, literal reading of the Bible
• the Bible really doesn’t communicate anything about the way the world really is
• the Bible is just meant to suggest certain opinions and experiences which you may find fetching, or not, depending on your feelings and community
• if Christians would just interpret the Bible as myths and opinions on par with other personal preferences, then evolution is no threat to religious belief

2) As long as you treat the design argument as divorced from evidence, it’s not very effective

• the latest and best version of the design argument is the old Paley argument which involves no experimental data, so I’ll critique that
• this 200-year old argument which doesn’t rely on science has serious problems, and unnamed Christians agree with me!
• Christians should NOT try to prove God’s existence using evidence from the natural world (as Romans 1 says), and in fact it’s “Pelagianism” to even try
• Christians should divorce their faith from logic and evidence even though the Bible presents faith as being rooted in reason and evidence
• Christians should not tie their faith to the science of today, because science is always changing and the theism-friendly evidence of today might be overturned tomorrow
• It’s a good idea for me to critique the arguments of 1000-year old people who did not know anything about the cosmic fine-tuning argument – that’s fair!
• I find it very useful to tell people that the argument from design is false without mentioning any design arguments from DNA or cosmic fine-tuning
• We need to assume that the natural world is explainable using only natural causes before we look at any evidence
• We should assume that natural causes create all life, and then rule out all experimental evidence for intelligent causes that we have today
• As long as you accept that God is a personal opinion that has nothing to do with reality, then you can do science
• The non-Christian process theologian Teilhard de Chardin accepts evolution, and therefore so should you
• Remember when theists said God caused thunder because he was bowling in the clouds and then we found out he didn’t? Yeah well – maybe tomorrow we’ll find out that functional sequences of amino acids and proteins have natural causes! What would you do then?

3) What the Bible really says is that you should be a political liberal

Q&A time

The lecture concludes with 13 minutes of questions.