I normally don’t write reviews of slanderous articles, but Pennock’s article piqued my curiosity by claiming that ID-founder, Phillip Johnson, is a Post-Modern Fundamentalist Creationist. Since most Fundamentalists would deny any relation to PoMo, and most Presbyterians would deny being Fundamentalists, I had to read the article, and once I began to read the article, I had to post a response. So here goes.
Pennock starts out with the worst name-calling he can think of, calling Johnson “illegitimate” and a “bastard” child of his two worst nemeses: fundamentalism and post-modernism. Then on page 4 he whines that Johnson is name-calling when he says Darwinism is a creation-myth. Somehow I get the sense that this isn’t going to be a cool-headed, objective analysis.
Nevertheless, having written often on the subject of PoMo and its influence in biblical studies, I wanted to know the basis of his identification. His footnotes are telling: Barbara Forrest and himself. He even goes so far as to quote a paragraph or so of himself as proof of Johnson’s PoMo! (I can’t make this stuff up.) Here’s him quoting himself:
“When he claims, for example, that scientists are attracted to naturalism because ‘‘It gives science a virtual monopoly on the production of knowledge,’’ he is echoing the deconstructionist charge that knowledge is not discovered but rather is fabricated by the intellectual capitalists who own the factories of the knowledge business.”