Disagreement is not a very easy thing to reach,” observed John Courtney Murray. The act of disagreeing with a philosophical adversary requires an almost heroic selfiessness, a willingness to dissect your own world view to its very essence; after all, honest and genuine disagreement can only occur when the parties agree on common terms of discourse and first principles. This is the task that Philip E. Johnson has set for himself — and challenged his adversaries to take up — in his remarkable Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalm in Science, Law and Education (Inter-Varsity Press, 245 pages, $ 18).
Johnson, a professor of law at Berkeley, wants nothing less than to initiate a serious and civil deba te about the validity and consequences of naturalism, the doctrine that nothing exists beyond nature itself. This “permanently closed system of material causes and effects” has become our culture’s prevailing assumption, and the source of true knowledge and rationality.
Johnson believes open debate is the only means to expose naturalism for what it is: not the authentic view of reality but, in fact, the “established religious philosophy” of the country. Johnson wants to create a civil debate about our cultural assumptions in order to reintroduce the language of religion into the public square. The proper place to start, he says, is with the story of creation itself. “Every culture must have a creation story as a basis for things like philosophy, education and law,” he writes. “If we want to know how we ought to lead our lives and relate to our fellow creatures, the place to begin is with knowledge about how and why we came into existence. When there is radical disagreement in a cornmonwealth about the creation story, the stage is set for intense conflict.”
The highly relativistic “creation story” of naturalism — a Darwinian havoc of random mutations, natural selection, and impersonal laws — strips life of any higher purpose. And once a culture’s first principles are divested of meaning in this way, we are condemned to live by a philosophy subject to constant cultural and ethical revision. Worse yet, since naturalism effectively excludes the possibility of any pre-existing higher intelligence, it is a tautology — an argument that assumes its own conclusion. And that is not acceptable, says Johnson, for a doctrine that not only pretends to intellectual coherence but assumes the posture of telling citizens “how things really are.”
Within the moral universe of naturalism, there is simply no room for God. Either naturalism possesses sufficient power to support the assertion that life is merely cause and effect, or it does not. As Johnson proves, empirical evidence simply does not support this deeply unsatisfying idea. That means naturalism is not science, but philosophy — a secular religion.
Johnson’s effort to open debate on this subject is a profound challenge, because the academic and legal elite are reluctant to render their views vulnerable to competition and scrutiny. To suggest that what science cannot explain, the incidence of intelligent design might be able to, would “imply the existence of something supernatural, which is forever outside the knowledge and control of science.”
Johnson wants intellectuals, both naturalist and religious, to come together in pursuit of truth: “If Christian theists can summon the courage to argue that preexisting intelligence really was an essential element in biological creation and to insist that the evidence be evaluated by standards that do not assume the point in dispute, then they will make a great contribution to the search for truth, whatever the outcome.” He is clearly convinced that once the the public square finds space for the idea that the universe exists by intelligent design — by the grace of God — it would prove so compelling an alternative to implicit naturalist arguments that those arguments would lose their primacy. Johnson says he wants the larger culture to acknowledge a belief system besides naturalism, but he really wants more. Like any true believer, he knows his belief system is the right one. Those who argue for debate seek one not only to find the truth, but to persuade others to their view. But if the debate between naturalism and theism is honestly undertaken, how do we decide which system is better? By judging the consequences of each? To an honest naturalist, that might be acceptable, but to a committed believer in God, it is too utilitarian.
Johnson maintains that naturalists do not so much disavow natural law — the bedrock of his ideas about morality and justice — as they redefine it: “Even the nihilistic position that morality is an illusion and law should therefore concern itsall solely with utility is a statement about ‘how things really are” and therefore a proposition of natural law.” In particular, the commitment to abortion rights reveals such an absolutist view: “the right to abortion is founded on natural law doctrines, however confused: asserted facts about the human condition that human lawmakers must not overrule.”
Indeed, though Johnson does not say so, the abortion debate itself is precise ly the kind of discussion he advocates; there is an implicit agreement between pro-lifers and pro-choicers that our public life and institutions are based on values. Then we reach the critical iuncture at which these values are in confli ct, when we must decide which ones are better. And this is where the cultur e war begins. Johnson may place too much stock in “reason.” In the abortion deb ate, the two sides are perfectly aware that the other side has a coherent set o f ideas. And that only makes the debate all the more heated, all the more intractable.
When Johnson talks about American “cultural assumptions,” he is usually referring to ideas that have been imposed on ordinary Americans by elites. That is understandable, considering his position as a religious conservative working on the Berkeley campus. But if naturalism were as insidiously dominating as Johnson claims, there would be no cultural conflict over abortion. In this sense, Johnson concedes too much to the elite culture he criticizes. Ordinary citizens have proved time and again that they possess reserves of judgment and discernment to expose and reject that philosophy.
Reason in the Balance is a serious and original challenge to the secularist orthodoxy that still dominates the public square. Johnson’s case in support of intelligent design — that, to paraphrase him, we seem designed for a purpose because we were — is credibly and comprehensively presented, and his ease with the scientific arguments of naturalism is particularly impressive.
And precisely because he speaks from the hotbed of secularism itself and has standing in that community, Johnson is well suited to begin this vital discussion. In fact, with the publication of Reason in the Balance, he might even help to restore one of the imperatives of civil public debate: respect for the adversary.
Mary Sydney Leach is a writer living in Stafford, Va.
