A must read for ALL thinkers:
Phillip Johnson's Assault Upon Faith-Based Darwinism A modern monkey trial isn't what Phillip Johnson expected when he wrote a critique of evolution that launched intelligent design -- or was it?By Justin Berton
..."The very persons who insist upon keeping religion and science separate are eager to use their science as a basis for pronouncements about religion," he wrote...
...biologists have become so invested in the Darwinian worldview that they have ceased looking for contradictory evidence. "As the creation myth of scientific naturalism, Darwinism plays an indispensable ideological role in the war against fundamentalism," he wrote. "For that reason, scientific organizations are devoted to protecting Darwinism rather than testing it, and the rules of scientific investigation have been shaped to help them succeed."
Johnson regards scientists as today's reigning priesthood -- a monklike discipline that controls our culture's story of creation and protects its orthodoxy as ruling paradigms have done for centuries. "They are jealous of their power," he says. "They will do anything to protect it. If that means labeling someone like me as a Bible-thumper, then that's what they'll do. They'll say, 'You don't agree with evolution, therefore you believe in the Bible's account! You read Genesis literally!' Of course, that's the stereotype they want to preserve." ..
..."Part of what bothered me about the left ... was quite consistent with what bothered me later about Darwinism. It's the dogmatism, the insistence that everybody believe as they did." ..
..He eventually concluded that the naturalist's greatest accomplishment had been to deliver what the rationalists most wanted: a world without God...
..."And the desire was to be able to explain life without recourse to a Creator or any sort of outside force. The only test Darwin had to pass is that it is more plausible than any other explanation. The Creator is disqualified from the outset because the Creator would be something outside of science, and unobserved."
...It is often believed in intellectual circles, especially in the Darwinist circle, the people I'm debating, that the world is divided into two people: the people who have faith and the people who just reason. But this is a completely false idea about the world. Everybody reasons and everybody has faith." ...
...'The critics are religiously motivated and they believe in God and they're throwing their religion at us and they shouldn't be doing that, and they should keep that out of science,'" he says. "But being religious or antireligious is the same thing: It's a position about religion and God, and it goes beyond the evidence and into very confident assertions that are based more on personal convictions than they are scientific testing." ...
If they thought they had good evidence for something, and then they saw it in the Bible, they'd begin to doubt. ...
Perhaps Johnson's nonreligious critics have trouble taking him at his word because they don't understand the extent to which he believes that open intellectual inquiry will ultimately lead people to Christianity. Johnson believes this fundamentally: "We don't have to fear freedom of thought, because good thinking done in the right way will eventually lead back to the church, to the truth -- the truth that sets people free, even if it goes through a couple of detours on the way."