Phillip Johnson

Phillip E. Johnson (1940–2019) was a UC Berkeley law professor and considered the founder of the intelligent design movement. Johnson became a born again Christian after his divorce,[1] and then suddenly was led to believe that science did not support the theory of evolution. Of course it had absolutely nothing to do with his conversion.

The divine comedy
Creationism
Running gags
Jokes aside
Blooper reel
v - t - e

Johnson popularized the term "intelligent design" in its current form in his book Darwin on TrialFile:Wikipedia's W.svg. Johnson decided to present evidence in the form of a trial and to use legal standards of admissibility as the ideal criterion to vet evidence. Legal criteria for evidence are very different than the standards applied in science; for starters, most legal evidence is anecdotal in nature, incorporating none of the standards of randomized controlled trials, reproducibility of experiments, or double-blind studies that characterize scientific evidence.

Johnson, and others who have taken a similar approach for a full range of woo and crank ideas, abused the difference in the standards of evidence to overstate their case. Johnson claimed that if he can prove evolution "false" under legal standards (which, essentially, amounts to not having an ironclad and irrefutable proof that the theory of evolution is true), this somehow applies to scientific standards. The whole exercise is a futile gesture, since creationism and intelligent design have failed both in the realm of science and in the realm of law. Johnson's big idea was shown the door in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court case.

AIDS denialism

Johnson and was an AIDS denialist, like Jonathan Wells (both were Discovery Institute Fellows). Johnson had written several articles denying the link between HIV and AIDS.[2]

gollark: You're actually reading at least 36 antimemes per second. You just forgot.
gollark: It's the perfect choice for command line tools (you don't need environment variables or anything for that, no), web applications (sockets are also not actually a thing which exist), data science (data is just lists, right? osmarkslisp™ is great at lists), or systems applications (I am attempting to get it into the Linux kernel in place of BPF).
gollark: osmarkslisp™ features:- tail call optimization (Python lacks this for bee reasons)- strings, somewhat- very fast (sorts a 200-element list of integers in mere seconds)- intuitive syntax with 912571897189274 brackets- no macros, but still really minimal builtin operations- approximately functional scope
gollark: osmarkslisp™ *does* have APIs to access GTech™ solar sites.
gollark: osmarkslisp™, yes.

See also

References
  1. The Wedge at Work: How Intelligent Design Creationism Is Wedging Its Way into the Cultural and Academic Mainstream, Barbara Forrest. Chapter 1, Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics, MIT Press, 2001
  2. http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/index/pjohnson.htm
This article is issued from Rationalwiki. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.