Phillip E. Johnson

 Editor’s note: Phillip E. Johnson, Berkeley law professor and author of Darwin on Trial and other books, died on November 2. In days to come, Evolution News will share remembrances from Fellows of Discovery Institute. John Mark Reynolds blogs at Patheos where this was originally published. Men must endureTheir going hence, even as their coming hither;Ripeness is all.* So says the noble Edgar in King Lear about the death Read More ›

On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin sits down with Dr. Michael Denton, a Senior Fellow of the CSC who holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry. Denton is the author of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, which has been credited with influencing both Phillip Johnson and Michael Behe, as well as Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe, which elaborates on the evidence of design in nature. Read More ›

Phillip Johnson, law professor emeritus of UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, is widely recognized as the godfather of the contemporary intelligent design (ID) movement. As the author of several books and numerous articles explaining scientific, legal, and cultural dimension of the debate over ID and Darwinism, Johnson was one of the most prolific authors in the formative years of the movement.  It was Read More ›

Marks the 20th anniversary of Phillip Johnson’s classic book Darwin on Trial. For more information, visit www.darwinontrial.com.

An intimidatingly learned colleague has written to a few friends to deplore the latest bulletin on Senator John McCain, who is of course running for president. The news is that McCain has agreed to speak at a luncheon hosted by the Discovery Institute in Seattle. What offends my friend is that the think tank in question supports the concept of Read More ›

For his 50th birthday, Phillip Johnson’s friends and family presented him with a cake topped with an icing portrait of the retired criminal law professor as Don Quixote.

A clever analogy, friend and colleague James Gordley remembers thinking, but a trifle unfair.

“Whatever Phil is tilting at, it’s not windmills,” Gordley, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said of his longtime friend.

Indeed, many of Johnson’s supporters might say a more appropriate analogy would be that of David and Goliath: one man – 50 years old at the time – taking on the cultural titan that is Darwin’s theory of evolution.Johnson, 65, is often referred to as the father of intelligent design – the concept that the world of living things is too complex to have been created through random genetic mutation, as dictated by Darwin, and that a higher power must have been involved.

Fifteen years after his book ignited debate on the subject, Johnson still accepts speaking engagements to discuss intelligent design with new audiences. Though not a trained scientist, Johnson said the issue warrants discussion beyond the scientific field.