Daily Inspiration Quote by Phillip E. Johnson

Johnson’s sentence is engineered to sound like a modest clarification, but it’s really a trapdoor. By opening with “First,” he frames himself as orderly and fair-minded, as if he’s laying out neutral premises before a balanced assessment. Then he quietly narrows Darwinism to a single job: explaining “a certain amount of diversity” only “once we have… complex living organisms already in existence.” That conditional clause does the real work. It smuggles in an assumption that the origin of complexity is fundamentally outside Darwinian explanation, or at least not meaningfully addressed by it.

As an educator associated with the intelligent design movement, Johnson isn’t primarily doing biology here; he’s doing boundary-setting. The phrase “once we have” makes complexity feel like a given, an unexplained starting point, while “a certain amount” subtly downgrades evolution’s creative power to minor variation rather than major innovation. It’s a rhetorical move that invites the reader to think, “Sure, evolution can shuffle what’s already there, but it can’t generate the big stuff.” That’s the central talking point of his broader project: concede microevolution, question macroevolution, and redirect attention to a presumed gap where design arguments can enter.

Context matters because the line echoes a courtroom-style strategy: re-describe the opposing theory in the smallest defensible terms, then argue it doesn’t cover the most consequential question. The intent isn’t to summarize Darwin; it’s to reframe what counts as Darwinism’s proper scope, then imply that scope is disappointingly limited.