Faith & Spirit Quote by Phillip E. Johnson

Johnson’s phrasing is courtroom-tight and strategically incendiary: “In short” promises plainspoken common sense, then “effectively outlawed” smuggles in a charge of state coercion. He’s not merely disputing a scientific consensus; he’s reframing it as a civic injustice. The sentence works by converting an epistemic argument (what counts as an explanation in science) into a rights argument (what viewpoints are allowed to exist). That’s a powerful rhetorical move because it recruits readers’ distrust of gatekeepers and turns methodological rules into ideological censorship.

The key word is “involved.” It’s broad enough to cover anything from direct divine craftsmanship to a deistic nudge, letting Johnson cast the entire spectrum of theistic belief as the excluded party. “Implicitly negated” adds a second grievance: even if no one formally bans belief, the cultural effect of teaching evolution under methodological naturalism makes God seem not just irrelevant but false. He’s warning about downstream meaning-making: if official knowledge can’t name God, public imagination eventually stops imagining God as real.

Context matters: Johnson was a leading architect of the intelligent design movement, writing in the aftermath of U.S. legal battles over creationism in schools. Courts didn’t “outlaw” God; they barred sectarian doctrine from science curricula. Johnson’s intent is to collapse that distinction, portraying a constitutional boundary as an anti-religious program. The subtext is political: restore legitimacy to supernatural causation by challenging the authority of “science” as a cultural institution, not just a method.