Phillip E. Johnson
| Phillip E. Johnson | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 18, 1940 Aurora, Illinois |
| Occupation | Law professor (retired), author |
| Known for | Intelligent design |
Phillip E. Johnson (born June 18, 1940) is a retired UC Berkeley law professor and author who is considered the father of the intelligent design movement. He became a Christian while a tenured professor. He is a critic of what he calls "Darwinism". By "Darwinism", he means "fully naturalistic evolution, involving chance mechanisms and natural selection". As a Christian, Johnson believes "that a God exists who could create out of nothing if He wanted to do so, but who also might have chosen to work through a natural evolutionary process instead". Johnson rejects that evolution is a fact and favors neo-creationary views known as intelligent design (ID). He was a co-founder of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC) and is credited with establishing the wedge strategy, which aims to change public opinion and scientific consensus, and seeks to convince the scientific community to allow a role for God in scientific theory. In the early 1990s, while the link between HIV and AIDS was disputed in some circles, as a member of The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis, a prominent AIDS denialist group, Johnson questioned if HIV caused AIDS. Johnson eventually abandoned that position in 1996. The consensus of the scientific community considers Johnson's opinions on evolution to be pseudoscience. In Chapter 12 of "Darwin on Trial" entitled "Science and Pseudoscience", Johnson argues that scientists accepted the theory of evolution "before it was rigorously tested, and thereafter used all their authority to convince the public that naturalistic processes are sufficient to produce a human from a bacterium, and a bacterium from a mix of chemicals."
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