Faith & Spirit Quote by Phillip E. Johnson

Johnson’s sentence performs a careful two-step designed to sound conciliatory while keeping the theological door bolted from the inside. He starts by “insist[ing]” on omnipotence: God can intervene, directly, anytime. That opening clause isn’t a throwaway piety; it’s jurisdiction. Before any evidence is weighed, the ground rule is set: nature is not a closed system, and any account of origins that pretends otherwise is, at minimum, incomplete.

Then comes the rhetorical pivot: “I am willing to be persuaded” that God chose not to intervene and instead used “secondary natural causes” like mutation and selection. The tone mimics intellectual openness, but the subtext is strategic. He’s not granting evolution independence; he’s offering it probation. Natural selection is framed as a tool God may have used, not a mechanism that, on its own terms, explains biodiversity. The willingness is conditional and asymmetrical: science is invited to speak only after theology has established the terms of admissible explanation.

Context matters: Johnson, an educator and a key figure in the intelligent design movement, aimed less to refute evolutionary biology on technical grounds than to challenge what he saw as its metaphysical add-on: philosophical naturalism. The quote is calibrated for a broad audience uneasy about a perceived “either God or Darwin” binary. It offers a third stance - “God through Darwin” - while smuggling in an important constraint: if evidence points to natural processes, that still doesn’t settle the deeper question of agency. That’s why it works rhetorically: it sounds moderate, but it keeps the ultimate explanation upstream of the lab.