Phillip E. Johnson

Articles By and About Phillip Johnson

The following is an annotated list of article available online. While by no means exhaustive, they are a good sampling of Phil's life and work.

This piece by Phil from Access Research Network is a good overview of his challenge to scientific materialism. It was originally delivered as a lecture at a symposium at Hillsdale College, in November 1992

Berkeley's Radical - This extended interview from Touchstone magazine offers an in-depth look at Phil's beliefs and experiences, including a discussion of how his work in academia and legal scholarship shaped his current views.

Phil's Leading Edge Columns (the title referes to Phil's position at the vanguard of the Wedge Movement, further described below) are short essays on a variety of subjects that appear every other month in Touchstone Magazine.

Why Does the University Fear Phillip Johnson? by Raymond G. Bohlin, Ph.D. - a concise articulation of PJ's life and work by the founder of Probe Ministries.

Phil has done several interviews with Tal Brooke of the Spiritual Counterfeits Project which generally take the form of informal discussions, such as this one.

NCSE Interview - In this 1993 piece, PJ is interviewed by Yves Barbero for the National Center for Science Education ("Defending the Teaching of Evolution in the Public Schools"). If you want to experience Phil's "grace under pressure" and experience his bracing, uncompromising intellect this is a great example.

In 1996, NOVA Online asked Phil and Kenneth R. Miller (Professor of Biology at Brown University) to discuss the question, "How did we get here?" in conjunction with the production of NOVA's "Odyssey of Life".

2 years after the publication of Darwin on Trial, Scientific American published a scathing critique of the book by the nations' leading Darwinist, Stephen Jay Gould. Here is Phil's reply, unpublished by SA.

The Evolution of a Creationist by Russell Schoch - early (1991) profile of PJ.

The Wedge Strategy's Goals

1. To legitimate the topic of intelligent design, and hence the critique of Darwinism and its basis in naturalistic philosophy, within the mainstream intellectual community.

2. To make the critique of naturalism the central focus of discussion in the religious world....

The goals are intertwined because the approach which is capable of challenging the dominant philosophy in the secular world will also tend to attract the most interest in the religious world. Likewise, the secular world finds it fairly easy to ignore a view which it can categorize as marginal in the religious world, but very difficult to ignore a view which has widespread and growing public support.

...Getting the right issues on the table for unprejudiced discussion is the all-important step. Once that is accomplished, it will be impossible to conceal for long that Darwinism is based on naturalistic philosophy rather than on scientific testing, and that unprejudiced evaluation of the scientific evidence points to the existence of intelligent causes in biology.