From Booklist
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 to avoid 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. Ray Olson
Defeating Darwinsim by Opening Minds FROM THE PUBLISHER
Defeating Darwinism provides a new and powerful treatment on evolutionary naturalism for students, parents, teachers, pastors, and youth advisors. Phillip Johnson aims not just to defeat a bad theory, but to defeat it by opening minds to the truth.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
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 he helps 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. (Aug.)
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