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In the fall of 1987, Phillip Johnson, a middle-aged law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, began a sabbatical year in England. His distinguished academic career had specialized in criminal law and lately branched out into more philosophical fields of legal theory. Nevertheless, Johnson could not shake the feeling that his life amounted to a wasted talent, that he had used a first-class mind for only second-class occupations. He was "looking for something to do the rest of his life" and talked about it with his wife, Kathie, as they hiked around the green fields of England: "I pray for an insight," he told her. "I'd like to have an insight that is worthwhile, and not just be an academic who writes papers and spins words."

In London, Johnson's daily path from the bus stop to his office at University College took him by a scientific bookstore. "Like a lot of people," Johnson says, "I couldn't go by a bookstore without going in and fondling a few things." The very first time he walked by he saw and purchased the powerful, uncompromising argument for Darwinian evolution by Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker. Johnson devoured it and then another book, Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. "I read these books, and I guess almost immediately I thought, This is it. This is where it all comes down to, the understanding of creation."

Johnson began a furious reading program, absorbing the literature on Darwinian evolution. Within a few weeks, he told his wife, "I think I understand this stuff. I know what the problem is. But fortunately, I'm too smart to take it up professionally. I'd be ridiculed. Nobody would believe me. They would say, 'You're not a scientist, you're a law professor.' It would be something, once you got started with it, you'd be involved in a lifelong, never-ending battle."

"That," says Phillip Johnson, remembering back with a smile, "was of course irresistible. I started to work the next day."

Everything in him is absorbed by one exclusive interest,
one thought, one passion—the REVOLUTION.
—Mikhail Bakunin

Johnson does not look like a revolutionary. He does not even look like a Berkeley law professor, who (one might expect) should bristle in one way or another. Johnson carries a large, round, spectacled head on an ordinary body, looking vaguely pleasant and innocuous. His Berkeley home is small and exquisitely ordinary, unusual only in that his wife houses her 22,000 children's books in the basement, opening it regularly as a private library for neighborhood kids. Johnson is friendly, unpretentious, and barely capable of small talk. He loves intellectual conversation and can talk it nonstop, forgetting all else, such as where he is driving.

Once Johnson had sunk his teeth into evolutionary theory, it dominated his thoughts, his work, his conversation. While law—and criminal law, particularly—might appear to be the very worst academic preparation for attacking evolutionary theory, in fact it served Johnson well. Criminal lawyers consider how to present evidence and argument convincingly. (As the O. J. Simpson trial demonstrated, evidence alone won't convince a jury.)

Reading evolutionary theorists, Johnson thought of clever lawyers presenting a flawed case. Steve Meyer, a young philosopher of science then studying at Cambridge University, remembers Johnson saying that "something about [the evolutionists'] rhetorical style made him think they had something to hide."

"I could see," Johnson says, "that Dawkins achieved his word magic with the very tools that are familiar to us lawyers. [He was] deciding everything in the definitions. 'We define science as the pursuit of materialist alternatives. Now, what kind of answers do we come up with? By gosh, we come up with materialist answers!' If you take as a starting point that there's no creator, then something more or less like Darwinism has to be true as a matter of definition. It's only a question of the details.

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December 8 1997, Vol. 41, No. 14