All Intensive Purposes

The Washington Post profiles Phillip Johnson, professor emeritus at Boalt Hall, the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leading light in the creationist/intelligent design attack on evolution. It's hard to resist the temptation to engage in some dimestore psychoanalysis of this:

In the 1970s, Berkeley was roiling. Johnson opposed the Vietnam War but grew disillusioned and turned right. His wife, an artist, found feminism and wandered another way. Their marriage swept away like flotsam.

"I had been very happy for a long time," he says. "I was shaken to my core."

Johnson's daughter, Emily, remains close with each parent. She recalls a time of upendings. "Men of my father's generation really expected that if they did their job, and provided, how could their marriage fall apart?" she says. "They didn't know what to make of the new questions and new demands."

The night his wife decided to leave in 1977, Johnson attended a church supper with Emily, who was 11. The pastor spoke passionately of Christ and the Gospels. The professor doesn't remember a Lord-sundered-the-heavens moment; he wasn't rending his tweed jacket.

Eventually, says Johnson, he realized "that if the pure Darwinist account was accurate and life is all about an undirected material process, then Christian metaphysics and religious belief are fantasy." Many Christians would disagree. But then this conflict over creation science and evolution really isn't about a tension between Christianity and science -- it's about the tension between different strands of Christianity. But fundamentalist Christians do not about to take the (relativistic) step of acknowledging other Christian views.