Philip Johnson - Jefferson E. Peyser Professor of Law, Boalt School of Law, University of California at Berkeley; former deputy district attorney; former clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren; author, Darwin on Trial, Reason in the Balance; former visiting fellow at Emory University and University College.

 One of the themes I hear repeated frequently is the enormous gulf that exists between the thinking of ordinary people, most Americans, and the standard thinking in the universities and among our cultural elites, like the elite of the legal profession.

Hence we can see the enormous respect in which Dr. Alfred Kinsey's work is held in the academic world and it's enormous influence on the law. We can also see things such as the opinion of the legal elite, and, I think, among the majority of Supreme Court justices today, who simply take for granted that homosexual marriage is a basic human right. It's just a matter of the timetable on which it will be inflicted on the country.

The outcome of elections really doesn't matter. This movement for change operates seemingly under its own momentum.

Why is it that intellectual opinion is the way it is? And is as influential as it is?

Well, many reasons can be given. We have to understand why the situation is the way it is. And that is the creation story that people believe in and generally accept, the creation story used as the basis for knowledge in all fields and also for lawmaking.

Every culture has a creation story. It has a priesthood, an official priesthood. That priesthood is the body which is charged with telling the story, telling the creation story to the culture. In our case, the priesthood isn't the Christian ministers. It used to be. It's scientists, it's intellectuals and it's the elites of the academic world.

It's very difficult to change a creation story or to challenge it. I'm going to tell you why that is. In fact, the real theme of my talk today is how to turn a loser into a winner. The battle against the Darwinian creation story has been a loser for reasons I think we now well understand and can change.

The argument over evolution has been seen as a Bible-versus-science conflict. It has been seen as a conflict over a scientific theory, which properly belongs to the body of expert opinion that develops theory and tests it. In short, it's a science issue best left to the scientists. The opponents of the new creation theory are seen as attempting to get scientific conclusions out of the Bible. They seem to be making some sort of a category mistake. That isn't really what the Bible is for or about.

In many of my lectures, I use as an example of the official view of this kind of conflict, the parable that Jesus gives in Matthew 13, of the mustard seed. This isn't what it's really about. This is what the world thinks the conflict is about. Jesus says, the kingdom of heaven is like the mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds, but it grows into a great flowering tree and so on.

Now, I understand that botanists have discovered a seed which is smaller than the mustard seed. It's an orchid seed from South America not known in Palestine in the first century. And there it is, smaller than the mustard seed.

In the view of the world, a person who believes in creation, a creationist, is somebody who says, "I'm not going to look through your microscope, botanist. That's an instrument of the devil. I'm not going to compare those two seeds. We have the authority of Jesus that the mustard seed is smaller, and that's all I need. It's right there. You're supposed to read the Bible."

The impression is that people who advocate creation want to take the microscopes and the bunsen burners out of the school laboratories, and just read Genesis to the students, or perhaps Matthew 13 in this case.

I've never met anybody who actually held that view, anyone who thought that the right way to find which is the smaller seed is to read the Gospel of Matthew rather than to look through the microscope. But that's the stereotype of the creationist: somebody who gets facts out of the Bible instead of from scientific observation and experiment.

Consider the political and intellectual consequences of putting things that way.

In terms of the intellectual consequences, this is a losing battle. The culture has decided that experiment and observation are the ways to learn the facts of the world. This view is so widely accepted that even Philip Johnson, when he travels to give a lecture on creation from California to Florida, wants to fly in an airplane which is maintained according to the best scientific principles. If I knew that the mechanic who worked on that airplane was reading the Bible instead of the service manual while doing the job, I'd be concerned. So would we all.

Put that way, it seems like you're just fleeing from rationality.

Moreover, when it's put as a Bible/science conflict, the people of God are divided.

The Catholics say, "Well, that's the Protestant issue. We have the teaching authority of the Church, but we're not committed to a literal reading of Genesis."

The God-believing Jews say, "Well, that sounds like a Christian issue to us, and we don't have any stake in that."

Even in the conservative Protestant religious world, you have an ongoing battle over the old earth and young earth positions, over what is the right way to interpret Genesis.

In fact, just about everybody is divided. So the stage is set for the agnostics to come in and say, "Well, our position is the neutral position. We just credit observation and science, so we just give the facts. Nobody should complain about that. Our opponents can't agree with themselves about anything."

So the Bible-versus-science conflict is a non-starter. And giving the impression that Bible-versus-science is the issue simply maintains the stereotype and assures that evolutionary science will retain its domination.

Well, what's to be done?

The key to understanding this whole problem and to defeating Darwinism is opening minds, in the words of the title of one of my books. It is to understand that, effectively, we have two definitions of science in our culture, not just one.

The word science has two meanings. And the scientific establishment and the intellectual establishment, in general, assume that these two amount to the same thing, that they're substantially equivalent. But they are not. They are potentially contradictory, and it is becoming evident that they are contradictory.

Now, what are the two definitions? One definition of science, the one that gives it its prestige, is illustrated by my mustard seed example: The way you find out something is you observe it.

The way you find out if men and woman have an equal number of ribs is not by theological debate. You get a cadaver and you count, or two cadavers in this case.

The way you find out the smallest seed: You look through a microscope and compare. You do calculations and rely, particularly, on repeatable experiments, so that every laboratory gets the same results regardless of the ideology of the experimenters.

This is a reliable way of finding out facts. This is empirical science, observational science. That's one definition. And when science means that, it's really rational.

The other definition is that science is applied materialist philosophy. Or applied naturalistic philosophy. In other words, for scientific purposes, when examining a question like the origin of human beings and life and how the universe came to be the way it is, you start with a bedrock, unchallengeable, unfalsifiable assumption that nature is all there is. And nature is made of matter. That is, particles, the things particle physicists study, which include energy, of course. The particles make up both matter and energy as we know it.

This is the starting-point assumption. In the beginning were the particles.

The Gospel of John, which is the text I always use when I speak from the pulpit on this subject, says, "In the beginning was the Word."

That's dead one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees wrong, according to the scientific consensus on materialist philosophy. No, in the beginning were the particles in mindless motion. Everything that was created was created by the particles spontaneously.

One can give a sort of a re-write or a parody of the prologue to the gospel of John in the following terms:

In the beginning were the particles. On at least one planet, the particles formed complex living stuff. And the stuff imagined God, but eventually discovered evolution.

The evolutionary story is the story of how the particles did the creating on their own.

One way to put it is, "If Darwinian evolution is the answer, what's the question?" The question is, "How do we get the creating done without God? Without a creator or intelligence playing any part."

 No evolutionary scientist ever asks the question, "Is it possible for chemicals in a chemical soup to come together and spontaneously form a simple, living organism?" See, the answer for that is taken for granted. Of course it is.

What's the proof? Living organisms exist. That's all the proof we need.

Is it possible for that simple organism, on its own and in an environment over a long period of time to become more complex and eventually give birth as descendants to all the plants and animals that exist today, including human beings? Of course. How do we know that? Human beings exist. Complex plants and animals exist. That's all the evidence that we need. Because science is defined as the working out, in details of models, of a materialistic -- a naturalistic-creation story, regardless of the facts and regardless of the evidence.

I'm not going to try to give you any real science here. I don't have time for that. You're very welcome to buy a copy of Darwin on Trial for my detailed explanation of the science.

I'll give you just one piece of evidence. It's one of the most famous scientific experiments ever conducted. And it's in all of the text books as the most prominent and impressive example of the creative power of Darwinian natural selection.

Most of you have read this somewhere because it is in all the textbooks. It's the "peppered moth" story. The story is simply that there is a species of peppered moth in the Midlands of England. It's been studied for a couple of hundred years, as long as there have been scientists, really. It consists of two colors of moth, a light-colored one and a dark-colored one.

Most of the moths are light-colored, a minority are dark-colored or melanic, after the pigment in them that makes them dark.

During the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, the trees and the forests became darkened by industrial smoke. Because of that, the dark-colored moths were, for a time, better camouflaged on the trunks of the trees than the light-colored moths. The birds couldn't see them as easily against the dark background. Due to this shift in the color of the background trees, the moth population shifted, so that, for a time, the dark moths were in the majority.

Then air pollution laws kicked in in the 20th Century. By the mid-20th Century, the background trees were light colored again, and the population went back to normal so that there was once again a majority of light colored moths.

That's the end of the story, and that's all that happened. That is the most impressive thing that natural selection has ever actually been observed to do.

Now, notice, it doesn't show any creative power whatsoever. There are light moths and dark moths at the beginning, there are light moths and dark moths at the end. The only thing that has been shown is a change in the relative frequency of the two types. And this is used as evidence that the same process, repeated over a long period of time, is responsible for the origin of moths and trees and birds and scientific observers in the first place.

You can see that there is a huge gap. And every piece of evidence that's used to establish evolution by natural selection is like this. There are others, but it's just repeating the same thing.

There's a huge gap between what natural selection has actually been observed to do and what it would need to do to be a creative agent. What it would especially need to do is vastly increase the amount of genetic information which is present in the organisms -- that's the software, the instructions that make it work. And it has no power whatsoever to do that.

Because this shows nothing, it's almost an anti-climax. I almost hate to bring this up but, in fact, the experiment's also been completely discredited in its own terms.

Not only does it not prove anything, it isn't true. It's basically a fraud. It's well known to people expert in the literature that the same experiment was run, the same observations were run, elsewhere in the world. And there were the same shifts in population in areas where the trees were not affected by industrial smoke. So that clearly wasn't the cause of the shift.

Moreover, the moths do not settle on tree trunks in the first place. When you see photographs in the biology textbooks that show them on the tree trunks, as you do, the scientists glued them on the trunks to make those photographs.

This is not creation science, I'm telling you. It's not creationist propaganda. That is acknowledged in the official scientific literature.

Why did they do that? Why was this experiment so convincing? The answer to that is very simple. If you are a believer in materialism as a world view and naturalism as a world view, the Darwinian story simply has to be true as a matter of logic. You don't need any evidence. Non-living chemicals have to be able to make living organisms and organisms have to be able to get to be as complex as moths, and eventually human beings, are. Because that's the only way to do it.

What would be the alternative? See, the alternative would be the participation of an intelligent agent, would be God, in a word. But you can just say Intelligence and leave it at that. And that, they say, is religion. That's not science. Science is materialism. Science sticks to material entities. In my books, you'll find I quote from any number of leading scientists, but this is the official view they take.

What those who work with me and I have done is to shift the question in the debates in the university world and in the Christian world about this. Let's not talk about the Bible and science. I never bring the Bible into this. Because, as soon as you do that, the scientists never let you stop talking about Noah's ark.

You see, they want to talk about the Bible because they know how to handle that and how to ridicule it.

What they don't want to talk about is the peppered moth. They don't want to talk about the lack of evidence, the fossil problems, all the other problems with their theories. So we have to keep the attention focused on that.

That's why it's always my opponents who bring up the Bible. And I always insist we're not going to talk about that today. We're going to talk about the lack of evidence for your theory and the real reasons, the philosophical reasons, why you believe it and are so determined to shut out criticism, not to allow criticism to be heard in the schools, in the text books, on television or wherever.

Incidentally, the experiment I've just told you about, the peppered moth experiment, has been discredited. You could have read that last week, if you get the Washington Times. They carried a story about it in the Washington Times. My people were responsible for that. You won't read about it in the Washington Post, and you won't read about it in the New York Times.

Even at the Washington Times, the science reporters wouldn't touch it. Only the religion reporter would write about it. That shows you how complete the censorship is, because this is true on every other such issue.

Now, when we change the question to the one that I am presenting, we have big changes in the one way the whole debate is structured.

I come in and say, "Here's the question.

 "We have two definitions of science. One says you follow the evidence, regardless of where it leads; whether you like it or not you follow the evidence. Fair mindedly. That's why science had to be independent of religion or the Bible, so the scientists could follow the scientific evidence. That's the official story on that.

"But you also say we follow philosophical materialism and naturalism regardless of the evidence. Now, which is it? What if the evidence points away from the materialist conclusion? Should we follow the evidence or the philosophy? Should we believe unquestioningly in the philosophy of materialism on the basis of faith? Which is it?"

You see how that changes things? In the first place, we're putting the issue in a way recognized as a legitimate way to argue questions in the mainstream academic community. We are, in fact, very much in line with a field called sociology of knowledge, which looks at the reasons why elites hold the opinions that they do. They just never applied it to this case because this is the sacred cow, the branch on which everybody is sitting. They don't want to saw it off. But applying methods which are otherwise standard in the academy to this question is an inherently legitimate inquiry.

In the second place, it takes the high ground of freedom of inquiry and freedom of speech for the creation side. You see that? It reverses what I call the "Inherit the Wind" stereotype from that propaganda movie/fiction about the Scopes trial. In that movie the people who stand up for creation are always ignorant Bible thumpers whose big message is to tell everybody else not to think.

Well, we're telling everybody to think. We're raising the questions, saying, "Isn't this a legitimate question to ask?"

Well, they know it's a legitimate question, and they have to say, "Let's change the subject, let's talk about Noah's ark," because they cannot answer that question.

The other thing this approach does is to change the political alignments and the religious alignments. Behind this question, "Do we follow the evidence or do we follow the materialist philosophy," is a question not of a scientific theory, but of the reality of God. That's another way of phrasing the question, "Is God real or imaginary?"

In a naturalistic world in which an unguided process of evolution is our true creator, there is still such a thing as religious belief. Don't ever be fooled when the National Academy of Sciences or a similar group says, "Oh, we're not against religious belief. Some scientists have religious belief."

Religious belief is a naturalistic category. That's why there's no college in the country today that has a department of theological science. But many of them have a department of religious studies, where they study the religious beliefs of primitive tribes, like Christians, along with cannibals and head hunters. They're all on an equivalent basis.

You see, it's a part of human experience to have religious belief. What is taken for granted in this academic world is that God is essentially a grown-up version of Santa Claus. It isn't that God created mankind. It's the other way around.

Mankind, lacking knowledge that evolution was their true creator, imagined this father figure in the sky. When you learn about evolution, that's the death of God. It's philosophical jargon. The death of God occurs when you realize that God was created by the human imagination -- that a mindless process of evolution is our true creator.

That issue also reaches into the Roman Catholic world, into the world of Eastern Orthodoxy, which is a very vibrant player on this issue, by the way, and very helpful. It puts aside the debate between the old and the younger factions in Protestant Christianity. I always say, that's a very interesting issue, how old the earth is, how we should understand Genesis and so on. Let's put that on the back burner for now.

The question that's prior to how long it took for God to create is, "Was God necessary in the process at all?" That's the first question. We should get to that first.

When we've got God back in reality, then we can have a wonderful conversation later on about exactly how long it took and other issues. And we will have that conversation in a much better spirit, because we'll have had the experience of working together on this primary issue.

This puts the issue in a way that both qualifies the debate as legitimate in the secular academic stage and states a central position which unifies the people of God around an agenda. It doesn't unify them on all the questions coming down the pike, of course. But it unifies them in the sense of how to proceed for now. We find that this has enormous appeal. When I've had a chance to explain it, it is just about always accepted widely throughout the Christian world as the proper way to approach the issue.

This is why we can turn this issue from a loser into a winner. Because, if you simply look at the poll data, ninety percent say that they believe in God as our creator. They're about evenly divided between people we would call Biblical creationists, who are a very large minority in the country, and people who believe in God-guided evolution. What those people don't understand is that there's no such thing as God-guided evolution. If there's a mind behind it and guiding it, it's not evolution as the scientific world understands the term. It's slow creation. Sometimes I call it soft-core creation.

If you have a mind present, you don't even need evolution. Excluding that mind is what their whole theory is about. To say, "We know that evolution created us because there is no God," and "Isn't it wonderful that God chose that way of creating us," -- that's utterly incoherent. So we have to teach people that that's the case, that there is no such thing as God-guided evolution.

God could create slowly or gradually if that's what he chose to do. And we could look at the evidence to decide whether that is what he chose to do. But in either case, that's creation, not evolution as the scientific world defines the term.

We potentially have a very large majority of the public with us on this, particularly when we reverse that "Inherit the Wind" stereotype and put the scientific elite in the position of being the ones who want to shut down free inquiry and free debate.

In order to carry out this program, we've had to have not just a couple of good debaters and not just law professors out there making the argument, but an entire intellectual movement.

You can read about that in my book, Defeating Darwinism.

We call that movement "the wedge." The wedge metaphor comes from the way you can approach a thick log. It looks like it's impenetrable. It looks like you can't get through it, but there's a crack in that log. There always is, isn't there? There's always a crack between the fibers.

In this case, the crack is the gap between the definition of science as empirical evidence and the definition of it as applied materialist philosophy. We get in that crack.

My work represents the sharp edge of the wedge. Making the initial penetration. Behind it, there is an ever-growing work of scientific literature and literature in history, sociology and rhetoric and so on -- developing a whole intellectual program on the solid foundation of the assumption God is real and our true creator rather than imaginary. That has consequences, starting with that assumption, instead of starting with the assumption that, for example, Alfred Kinsey started with: No God. Margaret Meade started with it in her own fraudulent research that contributed to the sexual liberation agenda.

So we have this whole intellectual movement, as the wedge gets thicker and thicker, and penetrates farther.

The initial stages are already in place. Many of you had heard of Michael Behe's book, Darwin's Black Box. He is a very reputable biochemist from Lehigh University. His book shows how the evidence of molecular biology shows irreducibly complex systems that consist of complex parts, all of which have to be in place at the beginning for the system to work at all and hence which can't be put together step by step by a mindless process.

What Behe shows, in short, if you do follow the evidence rather than the philosophy, leads straight to the conclusion that an intelligent designer had to be involved.

 We tend to avoid the "G word." Everybody knows that's coming. You really don't have to go that far.

I want to reassure the scientists. All you have to do is just recognize that an intelligence was involved. Whether it cares how you live your private life or not is another question. Of course, you and I know it's not going to stop there. But this is the way to get the idea in front.

Indeed, they know it's not going to stop there. When I debate this in scientific circles, it's usually about five minutes into the question period when somebody says, "Does this mean we're going to have to change our sexual behavior?" That's the worry all over the room. You can tell it's there.

I say, "We'll talk about that tomorrow. Right now, let's look at the biological evidence." Because they'll never look at the evidence if they see what's coming. They'll do what they did with the peppered moth. They'll glue those moths to the tree trunks if they have to.

So we have Behe's work. And my colleague, William Demsky, a Ph.D. in philosophy and mathematics, has just come out with a book from Cambridge University Press on the mathematics of how you tell intelligent design from apparent design that is not real. This, again, is a completely legitimate scientific subject.

You know that great atheist, Carl Sagan, the one who's told every school child the cosmos is all there is, ever was, or ever will be. Sagan's big interest, scientifically, was in receiving signals from outer space and decoding them to see if they were from an intelligent source, as opposed to random noise created by operation of physical laws. You can tell what's a message. If you've seen the message, you know how it was done. If the signals gave the series of prime numbers, that couldn't be from anything but an intelligent source.

If you applied the same reasoning Demsky shows to the biological cell, it screams design: "I was made by an intelligence." That's what the evidence is trying to tell you, if you look at the evidence without the materialist blinkers on.

So we have this gradually increasing penetration into the academic world and a gradually increasing unity in the Christian world.

Recently Demsky and I were at the University of Texas in Austin. Demsky put on a seminar, and all the professors in the philosophy department came. They were arguing with him because they don't want to believe it. But the point is that they're there arguing with him. You see, it's on the table. Everybody knows it's a legitimate issue.

Then I had my third debate or dialogue with the most famous scientist at the University of Texas, by far their highest-paid faculty member, Stephen Weinberg, the Nobel-Prize winning physicist. He's a Jewish atheist who doesn't like the God of the Old Testament any better than the God of the New Testament. But he comes back to discuss the issue. Every other year I go to Texas. It's become a kind of institution. He gets more respectful every time. It doesn't matter to me that he's against me on the merits. He's putting the issue on the table.

As I tell everybody, winning this debate is no problem. Anybody can win. I never even think about winning the debate. That will happen automatically because the issue will take care of itself. The truth will take care of itself. It's getting the issue on the table that's hard. It's getting the hearing. It's getting the science writers at the New York Times and the Washington Post to report it as an issue. No matter what they say about it. After that, victory comes, no problem. Because the theory is so contradictory and the evidence is so overwhelming that once the issue is legitimately on the table, that's the way the debate will go.

All we have to do is get the word out, teach enough people. Right now, we don't need laws through legislatures for balanced treatment of this and that. Eventually there will be changes in the laws.

Right now, we have the resources to do the job ourselves. It can be done, no matter what the other side thinks. We have the resources through education, through home schooling, (where my books are used very, very widely) Christian schools, church programs, the Christian media, and the secular media, insofar as I and others are able to penetrate into them.

I'm just now writing a review of Stephen J. Gould's latest book for Commonweal magazine, a liberal Catholic journal. We're continually moving into new journals, getting the word out. That's what we need to do now.

We have to get the word out and educate people in the right way to think about this issue. We have to teach them about the "Inherit the Wind" stereotype. We have to teach them not to present this as a "Do you believe or don't you believe science?" issue. That's a dead end. That's a loser. That's guaranteed defeat.

We have to teach them how to ask the question, "Why did all those scientists think the peppered moth proved that natural selection can make a human being? Why didn't they care whether the experiment was done honestly?" These are the kinds of questions.

We now have the college biology professors going crazy because they're being constantly asked questions like that. We have hundreds and hundreds of young people going in and doing that. We just need to make it thousands and thousands.

We need to harness the irrepressible spirit of adolescent revolt to our side. That's what we're doing by making it a free speech issue, a freedom of inquiry issue. Why aren't we allowed to ask these questions? Why can't we have honest teaching on this subject?

So we are getting out the word. And there are lots of ways for people to help us with that. You may have some kind of an educational program. You may have young people who are interested in the truth and so on. Who doesn't know young people like that? You can get them started. High schoolers read my book, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, and they get excited. I get e-mail like this: "I went into class. I gave my report. The teacher couldn't shut me up. He said, 'You've got a point. This is not what I thought.'"

I just get this constantly off the Internet. Eventually, Gould and Dalkins and the other rulers of science will have to come out and fight and stop hiding behind their power to censor. When they do, the end will be near. We will win that debate as soon as we have advanced far enough to get it really started. Anyone can help with educating.

One of the things we've had to do is to find sources of support. Not for me -- my own work is self-supporting. But for the young people, the young Ph.D.'s, post doctorals and so on, who obviously can't get jobs in the academic world to pursue this agenda. They can't get them in the Christian academic world either, because the faculty culture is as devoted to a naturalistic understanding of creation there in as many places as in the secular world. That's another story.

 But even if they did get those jobs, they'd have such heavy teaching loads that they wouldn't be able to write. So we have to give them post-doctoral follow-ups, either as a job or a supplement to whatever teaching they are doing. This is done through the Discovery Institute in Seattle. You might know of that institute. George Gilder works out of there, a very well-known person. Discovery Institute operates our Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. We have some wonderful funding sources. We've got enough funding to take care of our central core of people. This is growing all the time. One of the reasons I speak to a lot of groups is to make potential donors aware that this research work is something very much worth supporting.

Although we need resources and we're very grateful to the people that provide them, in a sense, in the end, we almost don't. What we need is not so much resources as recovery of courage. In the 20th century, the story is a recovery of courage and of self-confidence.

In the 20th century, the story of Christianity, the story of the Christian faith, has been a retreat from the intellectual world.

There have been great successes during the century. Look at the career of Billy Graham, the wonderful rallies and so on. Perhaps he's the most famous man in the world. But his is an appeal to the heart, not an appeal to the intellect.

At the time of their founding, the secular universities were all founded on the basis of Christian and biblical truths. They became completely secularized and agnostic. So today, all thinking there is agnostic, and everything else is excluded.

To defeat this doesn't take a power play. In fact, it's not helped by a power play. To defeat it just takes a spirit of courage, of open mindedness, of asking the right questions, of refusing to be intimidated, and of saying these things. These issues have to be considered on the merits, whether it makes you uncomfortable or not. Of saying we know the right questions to ask, and we're not going to be put off with smoke and fog. Of getting young people to see that they should have confidence in the truths that they were taught at home.

The worst possible thing to do is to try to protect them from the teaching of evolution. What I tell Christian parents, I'll tell you right now. Our goal has to be to teach our young people more about evolution than the scientific establishment wants them to know. When they come into that freshman course and the professor says, "Let me tell you about the peppered moth," they will break into a grin. They'll think "I've known about that from my cradle, and I know what's wrong with it, too."

What a tremendously affirming effect that has. "I was taught the truth at home; I was taught the truth in my church. I wasn't told some fairy story and protected from the contrary evidence. No, I was taught how to meet those challenges."

We can do it. A real faith is one that has confidence that the truth can stand the test of combat. I've put it to that test. I've put the truth to the test at the University of California at Berkeley, at the University of Texas, at universities around the country in discussions with intellectuals and scientific people.

Let me tell you -- I know it's true. I know that the truth can stand the test of conflict. It will speak for itself when you give it a chance to do so. In the beginning was the Word. That's true. It's as true scientifically as it is theologically. You can rest your life on it. In fact, you'd better rest your life on it. And that's what will win this victory.

QUESTION: I'm very involved in education, particularly what's happening in our undergraduate schools as well as the elementary and secondary. Most of the teachers of science today still say they teach the scientific method. How do these same teachers reconcile that with evolution, because the two are contradictory?

MR. JOHNSON: That's exactly why I brought up the two definitions of science. They don't understand the difference. When I speak to a scientific audience and I say, "You have to distinguish between materialism and following the empirical evidence, because they're not necessarily the same," they're shocked.

I presented this at a major scientific conference in Europe this summer. A Nobel-Prize winning biologist got up with his hands just shaking with fury and said, "You've attacked science." This is the teaching that we have to do, what we have to get across. They don't understand that.

QUESTION: Are they seeing it, are they seeing the contradiction?

MR. JOHNSON: No, they don't see it. Most of them don't see it. If they're thoroughly brainwashed, they don't see it even after it's explained to them. If you do not convince the people who are hard-core adherents of the materialist philosophy, you convince all the other people around them and discredit them.