Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #338390 in Books
• Published on: 1997-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 131 pages

Customer Reviews

One of the best!
Like his past books, Johnson deftly shows the flaws in evolutional theory. Anyone who reads this and his other books and still thinks evolution is real does not understand real science in the least. This book is well-written and to the point. He doesn't argue from religion, but shows that science itself says evolution does not happen.

The Darwinian agenda
If you've been a fan of Stephen Gould's, as I was for many years, you've noticed from time to time little -- ahem -- difficulties in his easy, engaging arguments and analogies. Gosh, you said to yourself, I didn't quite see the transition there but that's just me, surely. After all, it *had* to be this way, didn't it? I mean, everything came out of somewhere to here, right? Like, Darwinism's not brain surgery.

Well, Phillip Johnson argues that it is. Darwinism is a device for grounding materialism in the culture such that any objection to it can be reflexively dismissed as "fundamentalist" or an "attack on science" conducted by "lawyers" or "Christians". And, he further argues, the trick is done with smoke and mirrors, the sort of dazzle that professors of law like Johnson are skilled in detecting and tracking. Oddly enough, scientists are not very good at this sort of thing (few of us are these days), and only a couple seem worried over all these rhetorical leaps across chasms of missing data to dogma. Darwinism, like Marxism and Freudian psychology, is arguably a failed attempt to account for ourselves *in spite* of what we know. This book is an eye-opener: if it hadn't been written especially for Christians, I'd like to see it everywhere a high school kid might pick it up. It's almost as important to keep children from worshipping false gods as it is to set them looking for the true.

Johnson Can Only Envision a Selective Baloney Detector
There is so much wrong with this book I don't know where to begin. In the first chapter the author tries to make the reader believe that scientists cannot possibly have a poetic bone in their bodies (the Grand Canyon example). The point the author is missing is that perhaps scientists know when to put aside the fantasy and use some reality when explaining something. Also, the whole chapter on baloney detection is a disgrace. The author completely misrepresents Mr. Sagan's ideas on "baloney detection." Mr. Sagan, in "The Demon-Haunted World", stressed that we should use his "baloney detection kit" on everything, not just those ideas that we dislike. Mr. Johnson, however, hypocritically asserts that Mr. Sagan would not use the kit on the theory of evolution and yet the author (perhaps fearing the outcome) definitely didn't turn the kit on his own (religious) theory. Furthermore, in an amazing display of ignoring the obvious the author mentions the Archaeopteryx and Ambulocetus fossils and instead of giving an explanation for their existence he instead uses the illogical argument that "few fossils=no evolution." Either the author doesn't understand the fossil record (fossils are not easily made in nature, and there will be more fossils found as time goes on), or he simply wants to misinform his audience. There is so much more wrong with this book but I'll end my critique with pointing out that the author doesn't seem to understand that science must look for "natural" explanations to phenomena. Just to say "God did it" would mean that no further investigation would be necessary. And that would be the end of science.