Phillip E. Johnson

On this episode of ID the Future, we present two final, moving talks in a series honoring the late Phillip E. Johnson, author of the hit book Darwin on Trial and affectionately known as the godfather of the intelligent design movement. These two eulogies were given at his memorial service in November. The first speaker is Emily Johnson, Phillip Johnson’s daughter. The second is Stephen Meyer, director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.

On this episode of ID the Future we hear John Mark Reynolds’ concluding comments at the November 2019 symposium in honor of the late Phillip E. Johnson. Reynolds is a Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, president of the Constantine School in Houston, and a long-time friend of Phillip Johnson. Reynolds says he saw in Johnson a mind constant and relentless in the pursuit of truth, a man who refused to distort the truth to fit it into a materialist paradigm, and who passed along that mindset to as many as he could, for he knew there is no success without successors.

Today’s episode of ID the Future comes from a Berkeley, California symposium honoring the recently deceased Phillip Johnson. Biologist Jonathan Wells recalls how he met Johnson and the huge influence he had on Wells’ own research and writing. Then philosopher of biology Paul Nelson reminisces on Johnson’s keen intellect, his eye for hidden assumptions, his awareness that “we are not of our own devising,” and on the mountain range of new knowledge opening up to us in biology, one that scientists knew little about even 30 years ago and that Nelson says points strongly away from Darwin’s idea of common descent.

Today on ID the Future we hear the first of a series of podcasts in honor of the late Phillip E. Johnson, the pioneering thinker, networker, and organizer, who played such a crucial role in the development and growth of the Intelligent Design movement. These messages come mostly from a November 2019 symposium held in his honor in Berkeley, California. Today we hear Stephen C. Meyer, director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, as he opens the symposium and introduces speakers to come, and then the first of these speakers, Phillip Johnson himself, in thoughts previously recorded by Illustra Media on intelligent design, philosophical materialism, and strategies for accomplishing change.