Phillip E. Johnson was doing what a University of California at Berkeley law professor was supposed to do during a mid-career sabbatical.

The former clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren had punched the academic clock -- hard -- and earned tenure. Now it was time to pause and look ahead after a divorce and his disappointing failure to land a judicial appointment. He had also converted to Christianity.

Visiting a London bookstore, he purchased "The Blind Watchmaker" by atheist Richard Dawkins of Oxford. Blitzing through that book led straight to another, Michael Denton's "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis." Johnson was no scientist, but he was fascinated by the rhetoric being used to crush debates about Darwinism.

"As a student of legal argument, I knew that how you state questions almost always determines the answers that you get," Johnson told me, during a 2002 conference at Palm Beach Atlantic University (where I was teaching at that time). "I knew that if I jumped into this fight it would take over my life. I would have people firing at me from all sides. It would cause incredible complications for me at Berkeley. 

"It would change everything. That was irresistible, of course."

Johnson found these kinds of debates irresistible, right up until his death on Nov. 2 at age 79, after years of struggles caused by two strokes.

Through it all, his goal was to "united the divided and divide the united, especially when the united were smug elites who felt no need to defend what they claimed to believe. … Christian elites of that kind bothered him just as much, if not more, than all the others," said philosopher John Mark Reynolds, president of The Saint Constantine School in Houston.

"We once joked that if all of the causes we were backing ended up winning, he would probably change sides -- since the odds were good we would become insufferable, like everybody else."

As a graduate of Harvard University and the University of Chicago Law School, Johnson had zero insecurity about his skills in intellectual combat. He was an academic samurai brave enough to air his heretical ideas about Darwin in a faculty-lounge forum a year after his London sabbatical. His Berkeley colleagues were not amused.