THE LEADING EDGE by Phillip E. Johnson
Content with Truth
My regular contribution to Touchstone is still titled “The Leading Edge,” but it is time to issue a disclaimer. I am no longer the leading edge of the Intelligent Design movement. In retirement from my career as a law professor at the age of 69, I am content to play a supporting role for a new generation of superbly qualified scientists and scholars who have taken over the responsibilities of leadership.
Prominent among these new leaders is Dr. Stephen Meyer, whose magisterial explication of the cell’s protein synthesis and DNA replication processes can be read in his new book, Signature in the Cell, published in 2009 by HarperOne. The book will probably be trashed by frantic materialists, but open-minded readers will have no difficulty seeing how the evidence of biology, considered impartially, points unmistakably to the role of an intelligent cause in the origin of the cell, however unacceptable that conclusion may be to biologists trained to assume that their discipline is founded upon a commitment to materialism, and that a new Dark Age will be upon us if that commitment falters. Insofar as biologists cling to the belief that a combination of chance and physical law produced the first cell with its machinery, they do so not because of what they know about the cell, but in spite of what they know.
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Phillip E. Johnson is Professor of Law (emeritus) at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Darwin on Trial, The Wedge of Truth, The Right Questions (InterVarsity Press), and other books challenging the naturalistic assumptions that dominate modern culture. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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