The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism by Phillip E. Johnson
Book Review
by Steve Cowan

The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism by Phillip E. Johnson. InterVarsity, 2000; 192 pages

There’s a pesky gadfly giving evolutionary naturalism fits, and his name is Phillip Johnson. This book is his latest bite at the atheistic philosophy that currently controls our culture’s major institutions. The title of this work comes from an analogy Johnson draws in the introduction. As one may use a wedge to gradually split a log, Johnson proposes to use the "wedge" of the new Intelligent Design Movement in science to widen the cracks in evolutionary naturalism and eventually split it asunder. In The Wedge of Truth, Johnson points out some of the serious deficiencies ("cracks") in naturalistic science and attempts to show that the theory of the intelligent design of the universe answers questions that naturalism cannot.

The book is divided into eight chapters, each seeking to answer a question pertinent to Christianity’s debate with naturalism. Chapter One asks, "How can we tell reason from rationalization?" Johnson recounts the apostasy of Philip Wentworth at Harvard University. Wentworth claimed that his rejection of Christianity was due to his "enlightenment" in his science studies. Johnson, however, shows that Wentworth merely rationalized his apostasy with an appeal to science. He had effectively abandoned Christianity long before he went to college. The moral of this story, according to Johnson, is that Wentworth’s case "is paradigmatic of so many modernist intellectuals who thought they were dedicating themselves to a life of reason when. . .they were mostly learning to rationalize, to justify what they felt like doing" (p.36).

In Chapter Two, Johnson asks, "Can natural law and chance create genetic information?" He points out the failure of evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins to provide any examples of random mutations in organisms that increase the amount of genetic information, something that must happen if evolution is going to work. My favorite part of this chapter is the critique of Dawkins’ "computer analogy" which is supposed to illustrate how cumulative selection works. Dawkins postulates that a monkey banging randomly on a computer keyboard can produce the Shakespearean line, "Methinks it is like a weasel," in relatively few steps provided that the computer has the target line in its memory and "saves" the correct letters as the monkey types them. Of course, these two provisos give the game away because natural selection by its very nature cannot aim toward some pre-programmed goal, and thus couldn’t and wouldn’t know which "letters" it was supposed to retain.

Johnson deals with the current controversy in the Kansas state board of education in Chapter Three. In 1999, the board voted to adopt standards for science education that included criticisms of evolutionary theory and down-played Darwinists’ exaggerated claims for the evidence for evolution. Johnson shows how, once again, the media and Darwinists have teamed up to caricature the opposition and obfuscate the facts. Chapter Four addresses the claim of modern science to be the sole magisterium (teaching authority) of our culture on any matters of fact. Stephen J. Gould, Richard Dawkins, and others have made this claim explicit, saying that religion, while it may teach morality and value, cannot claim that miracles or divine revelation have occurred without being "at war with science" (p. 101). Such scientism, of course, is pure religion and not science.

In Chapter Five, Johnson discusses the evolutionary view of the human mind. That view entails that human beings are physical machines, that the mind is itself a machine selfishly geared for survival, and that there is no such thing as an individual self. Johnson shows the self-defeating nature of this view, its horrible implications for morality, and its inability to account for the notion of information in materialistic terms.

Chapter Six asks, "What are the arguments against intelligent design?" Answer: None. Johnson shows that Darwinists typically ignore, caricature, or ridicule creationist arguments rather than seriously critique them. And they repeat the old mantra that science is by definition materialistic, a tactic designed to eliminate the idea of intelligent design without ever considering the evidence for it. For this reason, Johnson is confident that "Darwinism is a pseudoscience that will collapse once it becomes possible for critics to get a fair hearing" (p. 141).

In Chapter Seven, Johnson borrows a distinction from J.I. Packer between "balconers" and "travelers." These metaphors refer respectively to those concerned with theory and those concerned with practice. Applied to the topic of this book, the "travelers" are the evolutionary scientists who have adopted a naturalistic approach to science and are thus preoccupied with the practical task of solving the of evolution. The "balconers" are the intelligent design "Wedgers" who are asking the theoretical question of whether non-naturalistic (intelligent) causes should be considered real possibilities in scientific explanations. Johnson points out that the concerns raised in earlier chapters of the book show why the travelers need to return to the balcony to find out if they are on the right road. Johnson goes on to argue that Christian theology will be one of the participants in that balcony conversation. In that conversation, Christians will argue that God has spoken in nature and Scripture and provided us with knowledge that provides the basis for a far more satisfactory worldview than naturalism.

In the final chapter, Johnson remarks on what the Wedge program has to say to intellectual spheres outside of experimental science, such as the humanities, where "literary despair" prevails. Modern, naturalistic science has been unable to provide any foundation for morality, human significance, or even reason itself. Intellectuals in the humanities, understanding that, have fallen into postmodern relativism and nihilism, where political power resolves disputes rather than reason and principle. Johnson concludes, "If reason is to be a reliable guide, it must be grounded on a foundation that is more fundamental than logic and that provides a basis for reasoning to true conclusions about ends" (p. 176). God can provide that foundation.

Like all of Johnson’s books so far, I found The Wedge of Truth to be delightful and informative reading. It will enable the reader to understand many of the weaknesses in evolutionary science, as well as why this theory still holds such prominence in our culture despite its glaring flaws. More importantly, this book provides a ray of hope that materialistic pseudoscience will soon be a thing of the past.

Reviewed by Steven B. Cowan
Associate Director of the Apologetics Resource Center

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