The most unlikely of these respectable renegades is Phillip E. Johnson, who once clerked for the liberal Chief Justice Earl Warren and who now holds an endowed law school chair at the University of California at Berkeley. Since his conversion to evangelical Christianity at the age of 37, Mr. Johnson has written three books attacking evolution. To Mr. Johnson, evolution is the linchpin to the naturalistic world view because it presupposes that creation was a chance development that life could happen without God. Science has taught us you don't. You can believe in the creator as an unnecessary add-on if you want, but the process proceeds by itself.
Many believers find no contradiction between the idea of a creator and evolution.
For them, it is not an either-or proposition. For years, the teachers resisted demands to amend the statement. Huston Smith, professor emeritus of religion at Berkeley, and Alvin Plantinga, a philosopher of religion at the University of Notre Dame. Another ally of Mr. Johnson is Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University who contends that the molecular machinery of cells is so complex and interdependent that this is proof of purposeful design. These new creationists avoid one pitfall of their predecessors by not positing, at least publicly, the identity of the creator.