Faith & Spirit Quote by Phillip E. Johnson

Johnson’s line is less a neutral description of “philosophical materialism” than a strategic reframing of what’s at stake: if you treat reality as exhaustively physical, God doesn’t just become unreal, he becomes trivial. The jab is in that last clause, “and not a very important idea,” which slips from ontology (God as mind-only) into social diagnosis (God as culturally optional). That move matters. It paints materialism not merely as a theory about matter, but as an engine of diminishment, draining transcendence into a small, private notion you can keep or discard like a preference.

As an educator writing from the creationism/intelligent design world, Johnson’s context is the late-20th-century fight over whether “science” in public life quietly imports a worldview. He’s targeting the commonly heard claim that science is method, not metaphysics, by insisting the metaphysics is already baked in: materialism doesn’t just bracket God for lab purposes; it demotes God in the hierarchy of human concerns.

The subtext is a cultural critique. “Philosophical materialists” functions as a category label that gathers atheists, secular scientists, and modern institutions into one camp, then assigns them a shared posture: not only disbelief, but indifference. It’s a clean piece of persuasion because it invites the reader to feel that the real issue isn’t evidence, it’s respect. If God is “not very important,” the implication goes, then nothing beyond the measurable will be treated as binding - and that’s the worldview Johnson wants you to suspect, even before you debate its claims.