"If Johnson is going to make a leap of faith, he'd prefer it to be a religious one. 'I am a philosophical theist and a Christian,' he wrote in Darwin on Trial. 'I believe that a God exists who could create out of nothing if He wanted to do so, but who might have chosen to work through a natural evolutionary process instead.'
Darwin on Trial is not just an attack on evolution, but on the very modern principles of science. Johnson believes Galileo and his descendants worked to solve the questions of our existence based on science, not faith, but that for several centuries since then, men of reason -- astronomers, mathematicians, philosophers -- have conspired to purge God from the handiwork of the universe. By the time Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859, the fatal blow had been cast.
'The very persons who insist upon keeping religion and science separate are eager to use their science as a basis for pronouncements about religion,' he wrote. 'The literature of Darwinism is full of antitheistic conclusions, such as that the universe was not designed and has no purpose, and that we humans are the product of blind natural processes that care nothing about us.'
Johnson suggests that evolution has become a faith-based movement in its own right. He maintains that biologists have become so invested in the Darwinian worldview that they have ceased looking for contradictory evidence. 'As the creation myth of scientific naturalism, Darwinism plays an indispensable ideological role in the war against fundamentalism,' he wrote. 'For that reason, scientific organizations are devoted to protecting Darwinism rather than testing it, and the rules of scientific investigation have been shaped to help them succeed.'
Johnson regards scientists as today's reigning priesthood -- a monklike discipline that controls our culture's story of creation and prot"
