How does a thinking Christian reconcile science with faith? Instead of giving a direct answer, Johnson invites us to rephrase the question, or even to ask an entirely different one. Johnson, a Harvard-educated law school professor, came to faith in Christ later in life. Having spent many years in academia, his passion now is to see professors and students won to Christ and delivered from the politically-correct slavery of the academic world.
He is probably best known for his book, Darwin on Trial, published in 1991. As that title suggests, there he applied a legal methodology in assessing the claims of evolutionists and materialists. In The Right Questions, he focuses more on the faulty and unproveable assumptions that underlie their science—their blind commitment to a materialistic and naturalistic explanation for the universe and everything in it. As he puts it, the Christian begins with the assumption “In the beginning was the Word.” The Darwinist says, “In the beginning were the particles,” although they would not phrase it in those terms. Each statement is a foundational assumption upon which a worldview is based. Neither statement can be “proved” or disproved, at least not in the scientific sense; rather each statement is accepted by faith. Scientists tend to deny that charge, arguing that they only go where their science leads them. However Johnson quotes preeminent Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin who wrote, “[Science] has a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.”
This work is much wider ranging than his previous works as well as being more personal. Topics include: The human genome project and the meaning of life, 9/11, Islam, the war on terrorism, Genesis and gender debate, religion and its role in education and public life. He shows how the materialistic philosophy of science impacts the way society thinks about these bigger issues. Johnson argues that the battle is often won or lost in the way the question is phrased. Until now, the evolutionists have been framing the questions, using their assumptions. He points out how if Christians can reframe the questions, they can often change the whole tenor of the debate.
In each section he tries to reach the root of the issue. For example, with respect to Genesis, he writes: “I did not want to become involved in the long-standing and deadlocked battle between the Bible and science. Rather I wanted to point out that the real battle is not between the Bible and science but between science as unbiased, empirical observation on the one hand, and science as applied naturalistic philosophy on the other….”
Of final note is Johnson’s autobiographical chapter in which he chronicles the Lord’s dealings with him through the stroke he suffered in 2001 and his subsequent recovery. He describes how the Lord used that experience to take him to a deeper trust in the Lord. As he puts it: “I knew myself to be not so much a believer in Christ as a skeptic about everything else, a recovering rationalist who had lost his faith in world’s definition of reason, but who knew only the world’s Jesus…What I needed was the only solid rock, the real Christ….”
While I find it difficult to get a handle on the book as a whole because the range of topics covered is so broad I found Johnson’s approach helpful in thinking about some of these issues. It certainly helps lay some groundwork for a more profitable line of approach in dealing with them. Yet the lack of answers is vaguely unsettling. While Johnson is confident that soon Darwinism will join Marxism and Freudism in the dustbin of discarded ideologies, I find little reason to be so optimistic.