Science & Tech Quote by Phillip E. Johnson

Johnson is picking a fight with the referee, not the players. By calling science a "monopoly" in the "realm of knowledge", he frames modern scientific culture as a gated community: self-policing, self-justifying, and therefore structurally incapable of entertaining the most basic outsider question, "Is Darwinism true?" The move is rhetorical jujitsu. Instead of arguing evidence for or against evolution, he shifts the argument to epistemic authority - who gets to decide what counts as a legitimate question.

The subtext is grievance dressed as critique. "Evolutionary biologists do not find it meaningful" implies arrogance or evasion, as if biologists are dodging scrutiny. In practice, biologists constantly test evolutionary claims, but they typically treat "truth" as a philosophical or theological category and reserve their language for "supported", "falsified", "best explanation", and "predictive power". Johnson exploits that methodological habit to suggest a moral failure: scientists won't answer because they can't, or because their rules forbid it.

Context matters: Phillip E. Johnson is a central figure in the Intelligent Design movement, and this line reads like a strategic brief. It invites readers to see Darwinian evolution less as a robust scientific framework and more as an ideology protected by institutional norms. The intent is to reopen the courthouse door to metaphysical alternatives by arguing that science has overreached its jurisdiction. The quote works because it turns a technical point about how science talks into a populist story about exclusion, power, and the suspicion that "they" have rigged the game.