Phillip E. Johnson (born 1940) is a retired American law professor and author. A born again Christian, he is considered the father of the Intelligent Design movement, which criticizes the theory of evolution, and promotes creationism as an alternative. Johnson has also participated in a movement challenging the scientific orthodoxy that HIV is the cause of AIDS. In both of these areas he is accused of promoting pseudo-science.
Despite the fact that he has no formal background in the biological sciences, Johnson has become a prominent critic of evolutionary theory. Johnson popularized the term "Intelligent Design" in its current sense in his 1991 book, "Darwin on Trial", and he remains one of the best-known advocates for the Intelligent Design movement.
Johnson is best known as the founder of the Intelligent Design movement and principal architect of the Wedge Strategy. He is one of the Intelligent Design movement's most prolific authors and a serves as program director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC). Johnson has advocated strongly in the public and political spheres for the concepts of Intelligent Design;
According to Johnson, "The movement we now call the wedge made its public debut at a conference of scientists and philosophers held at Southern Methodist University in March 1992. Johnson describes the wedge strategy thusly:
According to the Discovery Institute, 400 (0.8 percent) heavyweight Ph.D.s are challenging evolution, and predicts the majority of scientists by 2020 will embrace Intelligent Design. But the "movement" is a blip amid 50,000 (99.2 percent) U.S. scientists who aren't rallying against evolution, says Wade Worthen, a Furman University biology professor. The National Academy of Science, American Association for the Advancement of Science and "every other legitimate scientific organization has repudiated Intelligent Design and supported continued teaching of modern evolutionary theory," he says. "There's no debate within the scientific community - we know what science is, and what it's not."
Furman biology professor Wade Worthen says Intelligent Design is a perfect example "to distinguish quackery from real science." He offers a guide to teachers forced to teach Intelligent Design: Real science describes how the physical universe works with experiments based upon testable, predictive hypotheses. Intelligent Design, by contrast, simply proposes that some characteristics of living systems are too complex to explain by evolution, so must have been '"made in their entirety" by an unknown "designer" using an unspecified mechanism.
"Intelligent Design relies on unknown supernatural agents, doing unknown things, with untestable mechanisms, as 'explanations' for physical phenomena," Worthen says. "It makes no predictions except 'there are things too complicated for us to explain.' "
Intelligent Design "theory," when confronted by an unknown or an apparent contradiction, reaches for "the most preposterous conclusion possible: 'I can't explain this, so it must be caused by an unknown designer with powers,' " says Worthen. Intelligent Design advocates "throw up their hands, claim we'll never know, and attribute these phenomena to aliens, boogeymen, Gods, demons or other unspecified 'Intelligent Designers.' "
Intelligent design offers no testable hypotheses and, instead, offers only an explanation for observations of complex structures and phenomena in biology that must be taken on faith. As such, it offers less to a science class than does "flat-Earth theory" or "Earth-as-the-center-of-the-solar-system theory," both of which led to testable hypotheses and, ultimately, their rejection as predictive explanatory theories. If we were to consider Intelligent Design a "theory," the advances in genetics and developmental biology that have provided explanations for the origin of many complex structures in recent years would lead us to reject it along with flat-Earth theory and geocentrism.
The proponents of teaching either creationism or Intelligent Design usually argue that schools should be teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution as an explanation for the diversity of life on Earth. For some reason, usually having to do with religious beliefs, they single out evolution from the myriad of other scientific fields for this criticism.