An Easy-To-Understand Guide for Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds - (Lawyer Puts Darwinism on Trial) by Phillip E Johnson (Paperback)

About the Book

Phillip E. Johnson provides an easy-to-understand guide on how to effectively engage the debate over creation and evolution.

Book Synopsis

Christianity Today Book Award

A Clear and Concise Handbook to Debating Evolution

Amid the complex scientific debates surrounding the topic of evolution, Christians need an easy way to understand the basic issues without oversimplifying.

In An Easy-to-Understand Guide to Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, Phillip Johnson provides an answer: the key to defeating the false claims of Darwinism is to open our minds to good thinking habits. He gives first-rate advice on avoiding common mistakes in discussions about evolution, understanding the legacy of the Scopes trial, spotting deceptive arguments, and grasping the basic scientific issues without getting bogged down in unnecessary details. With this book, ordinary Christians can find the resources they need to discuss and defeat the false claims of Darwinism.

Throughout this book, Johnson addresses questions like:

• How can I have a reasoned conversation about creationism without being dismissed as a religious fanatic?
• How can I effectively use logical reasoning and investigative procedure?
• How can I apply critical thinking to questions both of religion and of evolution?
• What is Intelligent Design?

In the bestselling and critically acclaimed books Darwin on Trial and Reason in the Balance, Phillip Johnson exposed the misleading claims of evolutionary naturalism. With this book, he provides an accessible yet powerful treatment of these issues for high-school students, parents, teachers, pastors, and ordinary readers. Johnson aims not just to defeat a bad theory, but to defeat it in the right way: by opening minds to the truth.

Review Quotes

"By profaning the scientific establishment's most sacred cows, U.C.-Berkeley law professor Johnson has earned critical acclaim and brisk sales. Now, the witty iconoclast who questioned the scientific evidence for Darwinian evolution in his Darwin on Trial (1991) provides a short, simple manual to help students, parents, teachers and pastors debate evolution, 'a subject, ' Johnson says, 'that has for too long been protected from critical thinking by law and academic custom.' Included in the book are tips for using what Carl Sagan once called a 'baloney detector kit' to verify the evidence used by opponents in an argument, as well as tips for detecting ad hominem and straw man arguments. Johnson's greatest contribution, however, is that hehelps non-scientists distinguish between scientific fact, like microevolution within species, and unproved scientific theories, like macroevolution, which claims that molecules became men. He is also adept at exposing philosophical bias behind ostensibly 'objective' scientific arguments. With measured prose and systematic thinking, Johnson uses his legal expertise to demonstrate the ways in which arguments about evolutionary theory may be conducted."

Publishers Weekly

"Johnson feels his successful antievolution books, Darwin on Trial (1991) and Reason in the Balance (1995), are more complicated than parents and teachers need to prepare students to take on the evolutionists. Hence, this shorter version of his overall thesis that also advises how to debate evolution. Johnson first makes clear what he perceives the real adversary to be: a dogma that insists life arose solely by chance and that denies contrary evidence a hearing. He then counsels believers toavoid such common mistakes as retreating from theism to deism (and so transforming a continuously creative God into an uninvolved First Cause), to learn to spot faulty analogies and other forms of poor logic, to know the soundest scientific data casting doubt on classical evolution, and to persist--for, he says, the days of Darwinian hegemony are numbered. He firmly believes and seeks to persuade readers that his ultimate causes, aside from religious faith, are freedom of inquiry and the opening of now closed minds."

Booklist

About the Author

Phillip E. Johnson is a graduate of Harvard University and the University of Chicago Law School. He taught law for more than thirty years at the University of California at Berkeley where he is professor emeritus. For the last decade Johnson has also been at the forefront of the public debate over evolution and creation. He has taken his message to such places as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. His InterVarsity Press titles include Reasonin the Balance, The Wedge of Truth, The Right Questions and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds.