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.