Daily Inspiration Quote by Phillip E. Johnson

Johnson’s line is a scalpel aimed at the prestige of “naturalistic philosophy” in modern intellectual life. By insisting that “truth as such” isn’t especially “important,” he’s not merely quibbling over definitions; he’s accusing an entire worldview of quietly downgrading the very thing it claims to deliver. The phrasing is strategic: “as such” signals a meta-level complaint, a charge that naturalism can still talk about truths (facts, models, predictions) while treating Truth with a capital T as optional, like an outdated metaphysical luxury.

The subtext is cultural as much as philosophical. Naturalism, in this framing, becomes less a method for investigating the world than a gatekeeping regime: it decides in advance what kinds of explanations are admissible, and then congratulates itself for staying “objective.” Johnson’s insinuation is that once you reduce knowledge to what can be cashed out in evolutionary usefulness, pragmatic success, or scientific consensus, you haven’t refuted truth; you’ve replaced it with something easier to manage: credibility, coherence, survival value.

Context matters because Johnson is widely associated with the intelligent design movement, and this sentence reads like an opening move in that larger argument. If naturalism can’t justify truth as a binding ideal, then its authority to rule out non-natural explanations starts to look less like rigor and more like preference dressed up as inevitability. The line works because it weaponizes a modest tone (“not particularly important”) to deliver a major indictment: a philosophy that can explain everything except why we should trust explanation itself.