"No doubt it is true that science cannot study God, but it hardly follows that God had to keep a safe distance from everything that scientists want to study"
About this Quote
Johnson’s sentence is a sly piece of boundary-work: it grants the concession that keeps the peace in modern discourse (“science cannot study God”), then flips that concession into a wedge. The pivot phrase - “but it hardly follows” - is doing the real labor, recoding humility as leverage. If science can’t put God in a test tube, Johnson implies, that doesn’t mean God obligingly stays out of the lab.
The intent isn’t to smuggle miracles into biology so much as to challenge a cultural habit: treating methodological naturalism (science’s self-imposed rule to study natural causes) as if it were metaphysical naturalism (the claim that nature is all there is). Johnson, an educator and a central figure in the intelligent design movement, wrote into a late-20th-century moment when “science vs. religion” had hardened into a social identity fight. His line is crafted to sound reasonable to a mainstream ear while quietly reopening questions the scientific establishment considers settled: origins, purpose, and agency.
Subtext: the “safe distance” jab caricatures scientists as gatekeepers policing reality, not just method. It suggests an asymmetry - science gets to declare what counts as real, while God is forced into the shrinking margins of the unexplained. By reframing divine action as potentially entangled with empirical phenomena, Johnson presses for intellectual legitimacy: if God acts in the world, then excluding that possibility isn’t neutrality, it’s bias.
Why it works is rhetorical judo. He accepts science’s limits, then uses those limits to argue that the reigning posture of separation is a philosophical choice dressed up as objectivity.
The intent isn’t to smuggle miracles into biology so much as to challenge a cultural habit: treating methodological naturalism (science’s self-imposed rule to study natural causes) as if it were metaphysical naturalism (the claim that nature is all there is). Johnson, an educator and a central figure in the intelligent design movement, wrote into a late-20th-century moment when “science vs. religion” had hardened into a social identity fight. His line is crafted to sound reasonable to a mainstream ear while quietly reopening questions the scientific establishment considers settled: origins, purpose, and agency.
Subtext: the “safe distance” jab caricatures scientists as gatekeepers policing reality, not just method. It suggests an asymmetry - science gets to declare what counts as real, while God is forced into the shrinking margins of the unexplained. By reframing divine action as potentially entangled with empirical phenomena, Johnson presses for intellectual legitimacy: if God acts in the world, then excluding that possibility isn’t neutrality, it’s bias.
Why it works is rhetorical judo. He accepts science’s limits, then uses those limits to argue that the reigning posture of separation is a philosophical choice dressed up as objectivity.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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