Darwin On Trial - Contents

Contents

Johnson, a professor emeritus of law at University of California, Berkeley and a Christian, describes his specialty as "analyzing the logic of arguments and identifying the assumptions that lie behind those arguments." After reading Michael Dentons' Evolution: A Theory in Crisis and Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker, he came to believe that the scientific theory of evolution was based on materialistic assumptions and empty rhetoric, and decided to analyze the evidence for the theory. Johnson states, "I am interested in what unbiased science has to tell us about the history of life, and in particular how the enormously complex organs of plants and animals came into existence. ... What is important is not whether we call this process 'evolution,' but how much we really know about it. The argument of Darwin on Trial is that we know a great deal less than has been claimed." Johnson evaluates the evidence for evolution by natural selection using legal principles for assessing its probative value, and examines what he sees as the philosophical presuppositions of the scientific community.

Johnson states that he has no interest in discussing the Biblical account of creation in Genesis. Rather, the focus of the book is to examine whether evolutionary biologists have proven their case using evidence evaluated with an "open mind and impartially," and whether there is convincing evidence that the variety of life on earth came about through the purely material processes of natural selection. He claims that biologists have not made their case, that there are serious evidentiary holes in the theory of evolution, and that their conclusions are driven mainly by their prior assumptions and "faith" that there must be a naturalistic explanation for everything.

The book begins by recounting Edwards v. Aguillard, a US Supreme Court case regarding a Louisiana law requiring the teaching of creation-science; the law was ruled an "establishment of religion." Johnson states that an associated amicus curiae brief by the National Academy of Sciences improperly "defined 'science' in such a way that dispute the claims of the scientific establishment" and a rule it proposed against "negative argumentation the possibility that science has not discovered how complex organisms could have developed." Johnson believes that one cannot begin an argument with the assumption that this kind of definition of science is inherently true. Therefore, these are the kind of definitions and postulates he purports to examine, asking, "When the National Academy of Sciences tells us that reliance upon naturalistic expectations is the most basic characteristic of science, is it implying that scientists somehow know that a Creator played no part in the creation of the world and its forms of life? Can something be nonscience but true?" Darwin on Trial includes Johnson's examination of evidence and arguments about natural selection, genetic mutation, the fossil record, prebiological evolution and molecular biology.