First Things RSS Feed - Phillip E. Johnson

Law Without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes

Fri, 01 Jun 2001 00:00:00 -0400

The great Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. penned a host of memorable aphorisms that summarize his legal philosophy: “The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience”; “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law”; “The duty to keep a contract at common law means a prediction that you must pay damages if you do not keep it—and nothing else”; “I often doubt whether it would not be a gain if every word of moral significance could be banished from the law altogether, and other words adopted which should convey legal ideas uncolored by anything outside the law.” Most memorably of all, “If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.”

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In Plato’s Cave

Thu, 01 Jun 2000 00:00:00 -0400

After growing up in poverty in rural Wyoming, Alvin Kernan joined the prewar Navy in 1941 to get a start in life. He began as an enlisted man serving on one of the aircraft carriers that were so fortuitously away at sea when the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor. He survived the sinking of the carrier Hornet in 1942, and the following year won the Navy Cross for flying as a gunner in the very first night carrier air skirmish. (Lt. Commander Edward “Butch” O’Hare, the celebrated air ace for whom Chicago’s airport is named, died in this action.) The eminent military historian John Keegan praised Crossing the Line , Kernan’s 1994 memoir of those long“ago adventures, as “an extraordinary book, most of all for the sense it conveys of the isolation of the individual in an enormous, impersonal organization into which, nevertheless, danger might at any instant intrude with an acutely personal immediacy.” The modest war hero probably could have published a best“seller in 1945, but he chose to tell his story only much later, when it seemed right to make his children aware of their heritage.

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Metaphysics Matters

Mon, 01 Nov 1999 00:00:00 -0500

In Defense of Natural Law
by robert p. george
clarendon/oxford university press, 343 pages, $65

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What Would Newton Do?

Sun, 01 Nov 1998 00:00:00 -0500

Sir Isaac Newton was a man of many talents. After his great scientific discoveries he had a remarkable second career as Warden of the Mint, where he implemented a difficult reform of the coinage that may have saved the British nation from financial disaster. He personally investigated cases of counterfeiting and sent scores of malefactors to the gallows. It is as if Einstein, after producing the Theory of Relativity, had served capably as Secretary of the Treasury or Attorney General. In any competition for the most intellectually gifted human being of all time, Newton would deserve to be on everyone’s short list.

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The Gorbachev of Darwinism

Thu, 01 Jan 1998 00:00:00 -0500

Stephen Jay Gould is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it any more. Readers of the New York Review of Books learned that much in June 1997, when they read a lengthy, two-part tirade in which Gould attempted to settle scores with some of his more prominent enemies within the guild of Darwinists. The targets were Daniel Dennett, John Maynard Smith, Robert Wright, and especially, although largely in the background, Richard Dawkins. One cannot understand the controversy without sampling the level of vitriol, which may be judged by this salvo from Gould:

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The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism

Sat, 01 Nov 1997 00:00:00 -0500

In a retrospective essay on Carl Sagan in the January 9, 1997 New York Review of Books , Harvard Genetics Professor Richard Lewontin tells how he first met Sagan at a public debate in Arkansas in 1964. The two young scientists had been coaxed by senior colleagues to go to Little Rock to debate the affirmative side of the question: “RESOLVED, that the theory of evolution is as proved as is the fact that the earth goes around the sun.” Their main opponent was a biology professor from a fundamentalist college, with a Ph.D. from the University of Texas in Zoology. Lewontin reports no details from the debate, except to say that “despite our absolutely compelling arguments, the audience unaccountably voted for the opposition.”

Of course, Lewontin and Sagan attributed the vote to the audience’s prejudice in favor of creationism. The resolution was framed in such a way, however, that the affirmative side should have lost even if the jury had been composed of Ivy League philosophy professors. How could the theory of evolution even conceivably be “proved” to the same degree as “the fact that the earth goes around the sun”? The latter is an observable feature of present-day reality, whereas the former deals primarily with non-repeatable events of the very distant past. The appropriate comparison would be between the theory of evolution and the accepted theory of the origin of the solar system.

If “evolution” referred only to currently observable phenomena like domestic animal breeding or finch-beak variation, then winning the debate should have been no problem for Lewontin and Sagan even with a fundamentalist jury. The statement “We breed a great variety of dogs,” which rests on direct observation, is much easier to prove than the statement that the earth goes around the sun, which requires sophisticated reasoning. Not even the strictest biblical literalists deny the bred varieties of dogs, the variation of finch beaks, and similar instances within types. The more controversial claims of large-scale evolution are what arouse skepticism. Scientists may think they have good reasons for believing that living organisms evolved naturally from nonliving chemicals, or that complex organs evolved by the accumulation of micromutations through natural selection, but having reasons is not the same as having proof. I have seen people, previously inclined to believe whatever “science says,” become skeptical when they realize that the scientists actually do seem to think that variations in finch beaks or peppered moths, or the mere existence of fossils, proves all the vast claims of “evolution.” It is as though the scientists, so confident in their answers, simply do not understand the question.

Carl Sagan described the theory of evolution in his final book as the doctrine that “human beings (and all the other species) have slowly evolved by natural processes from a succession of more ancient beings with no divine intervention needed along the way.” It is the alleged absence of divine intervention throughout the history of life—the strict materialism of the orthodox theory—that explains why a great many people, only some of whom are biblical fundamentalists, think that Darwinian evolution (beyond the micro level) is basically materialistic philosophy disguised as scientific fact. Sagan himself worried about opinion polls showing that only about 10 percent of Americans believe in a strictly materialistic evolutionary process, and, as Lewontin’s anecdote concedes, some of the doubters have advanced degrees in the relevant sciences. Dissent as widespread as that must rest on something less easily remedied than mere ignorance of facts.

Lewontin eventually parted company with Sagan over how to explain why the theory of evolution seems so obviously true to mainstream scientists and so doubtful to much of the public. Sagan attributed the persistence of unbelief to ignorance and hucksterism and set out to cure the problem with popular books, magazine articles, and television programs promoting the virtues of mainstream science over its fringe rivals. Lewontin, a Marxist whose philosophical sophistication exceeds that of Sagan by several orders of magnitude, came to see the issue as essentially one of basic intellectual commitment rather than factual knowledge.

The reason for opposition to scientific accounts of our origins, according to Lewontin, is not that people are ignorant of facts, but that they have not learned to think from the right starting point. In his words, “The primary problem is not to provide the public with the knowledge of how far it is to the nearest star and what genes are made of . . . . Rather, the problem is to get them to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus, Science, as the only begetter of truth.” What the public needs to learn is that, like it or not, “We exist as material beings in a material world, all of whose phenomena are the consequences of material relations among material entities.” In a word, the public needs to accept materialism, which means that they must put God (whom Lewontin calls the “Supreme Extraterrestrial”) in the trash can of history where such myths belong.

Although Lewontin wants the public to accept science as the only source of truth, he freely admits that mainstream science itself is not free of the hokum that Sagan so often found in fringe science. As examples he cites three influential scientists who are particularly successful at writing for the public: E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Lewis Thomas,

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The Storyteller and the Scientist

Tue, 01 Oct 1996 00:00:00 -0400

Climbing Mount Improbable
By Richard Dawkins
Norton, 288 pages, $25

Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
By Michael Behe
Free Press, 336 pages, $25

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The Circus of Death

Fri, 01 Mar 1996 00:00:00 -0500

The Gravest Show on Earth:
America in the Age of Aids
By Elinor Burkett
Houghton Mifflin, 375 pages, $24.95

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The Limits of Pragmatism

Mon, 01 Jan 1996 00:00:00 -0500

Overcoming Law
By Richard A. Posner
Harvard University Press, 605 pages, $39.95

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Yesterday’s New Age

Thu, 01 Jun 1995 00:00:00 -0400

Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon:
History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits
Who Brought Spiritualism to America By Peter Washington
shocken, 470 pages, $27.50

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