Posted on 11/05/2005 11:47:03 AM PST by Lurking Libertarian
The Case of Behe vs. Darwin An unassuming biochemist who became the lead witness for intelligent design is unfazed by criticism but glad he has tenure.
By Josh Getlin, Times Staff Writer
HARRISBURG, Pa. — As he took the witness stand in a packed courtroom, ready to dissect Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, biochemist Michael J. Behe looked confident and relaxed. Then he learned what it felt like to be under a microscope.
Isn't it true, an attorney asked, that Behe's critique of Darwin and support for intelligent design, a rival belief about the origins of life, have little scientific support?
Yes, Behe conceded.
Isn't it also true, the attorney pressed, that faculty members in Behe's department at Lehigh University have rejected his writings as unscientific?
Behe, a slight, balding man with a graying beard, grudgingly answered yes.
"Intelligent design is not the dominant view of the scientific community," he said. "But I'm pleased with the progress we are making."
After two grueling days on the stand, Behe looked drained. He was also unbowed. In a nationally watched trial that could determine whether intelligent design can be taught in a public school, the soft-spoken professor had bucked decades of established scientific thought.
Behe (pronounced BEE-hee), one of the nation's leading advocates of intelligent design, challenged Darwin's theory that life evolved through natural selection and a process of random variation. He argued that living organisms are so highly complex that an unseen, intelligent designer must have created them. That designer, he said, is God.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Please crank up the Ping list (that is, if Darwin Central deems this article worthy).
Does Darwin get to testify?
The best book I know of for debunking evolutionary idealogy is Chesterton's The Everlasting Man.
From Ch. 1
That is the sort of simple truth with which a story of the beginnings ought really to begin. The evolutionist stands staring in the painted cavern at the things that are too large to be seen and too simple to be understood. He tries to deduce all sorts of other indirect and doubtful things from the details of the pictures, because he can not see the primary significance of the whole; thin and theoretical deductions about the absence of religion or the presence of superstition; about tribal government and hunting and human sacrifice and heaven knows what. In the next chapter I shall try to trace in a little more detail the much disputed question about these prehistoric origins of human ideas and especially of the religious idea. Here I am only taking this one case of the cave as a sort of symbol of the simpler sort of truth with which the story ought to start. When all is said, the main fact that the record of the reindeer men attests, along with all other records, is that the reindeer man could draw and the reindeer could not. If the reindeer man was as much an animal as the reindeer, it was all the more extraordinary that he could do what all other animals could not. If he was an ordinary product of biological growth, like any other beast or bird, then it is all the more extraordinary that he was not in the least like any other beast or bird. He seems rather more supernatural as a natural product than as a supernatural one.
But I have begun this story in the cave, like the cave of the speculations of Plato, because it is a sort of model of the mistake of merely evolutionary introductions and prefaces. It is useless to begin by saying that everything was slow and smooth and a mere matter of development and degree. For in the plain matter like the pictures there is in fact not a trace of any such development or degree. Monkeys did not begin pictures and men finish them; Pithecanthropus did not draw a reindeer badly and Homo Sapiens draw it well. The higher animals did not draw better and better portraits; the dog did not paint better in his best period than in his early bad manner as a jackal; the wild horse was not an Impressionist and the race-horse a Post-Impressionist. All we can say of this notion of reproducing things in shadow or representative shape is that it exists nowhere in nature except in man; and that we cannot even talk about it without treating man as something separate from nature. In other words, every sane sort of history must begin with man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone. How he came there, or indeed how anything else came there, is a thing for theologians and philosophers and scientists and not for historians. But an excellent test case of this isolation and mystery is the matter of the impulse of art. This creature was truly different from all other creatures; because he was a creator as well as a creature. Nothing in that sense could be made in any other image but the image of man. But the truth is so true that, even in the absence of any religious belief, it must be assumed in the form of some moral or metaphysical principle. In the next chapter we shall see how this principle applies to all the historical hypotheses and evolutionary ethics now in fashion; to the origins of tribal government or mythological belief. But the clearest and most convenient example to start with is this popular one of what the cave-man really did in his cave. It means that somehow or other a new thing had appeared in the cavernous night of nature, a mind that is like a mirror. It is like a mirror because it is truly a thing of reflection. It is like a mirror because in it alone all the other shapes can be seen like shining shadows in a vision. Above all, it is like a mirror because it is the only thing of its kind. Other things may resemble it or resemble each other in various ways; other things may excel it or excel each other in various ways; just as in the furniture of a room a table may be round like a mirror or a cupboard may be larger than a mirror. But the mirror is the only thing that can contain them all. Man is the microcosm; man is the measure of all things; man is the image of God These are the only real lessons to be learnt in the cave, and it is time to leave it for the open road...
Now, as a matter of fact, there is not a shadow of evidence that this thing was evolved at all. There is not a particle of roof that this transition came slowly, or even that it came naturally. In a strictly scientific sense, we simply know nothing whatever about how it grew, or whether it grew, or what it is. There may be a broken trail of stone and bone faintly suggesting the development of the human body. There is nothing even faintly suggesting such a development of this human mind. It was not and it was; we know not in what instant or in what infinity of years. Something happened; and it has all the appearance of a transaction outside of time. It has therefore nothing to do with history in the ordinary sense. The historian must take it or something like it for granted; it is not his business as a historian to explain it. But if he cannot explain it as a historian, he will not explain it as a biologist. In neither case is there any disgrace to him in accepting it without explaining it; for it is a reality, and history and biology deal with realities. He is quite justified in calmly confronting the pig with wings and the cow that jumped over the moon, merely because they have happened. He can reasonably accept man as a freak, because he accepts man as a fact. He can be perfectly comfortable in a crazy and disconnected world, or in a world that can produce such a crazy and disconnected thing. For reality is a thing in which we can all repose, even if it hardly seems related to anything else. The thing is there; and that is enough for most of us. But if we do indeed want to know how it can conceivably have come there, if we do indeed wish to see it related realistically to other things, if we do insist on seeing it evolved before our very eyes from an environment nearer to its own nature, then assuredly it is to very different things that we must go. We must stir very strange memories and return to very simple dreams, if we desire some origin that can make man other than a monster. We shall have discovered very different causes before he becomes a creature of causation; and invoked other authority to turn him into something reasonable, or even into anything probable. That way lies all that is at once awful and familiar and forgotten, with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms. We can accept man as a fact, if we are content with an unexplained fact. We can accept him as an animal, if we can live with a fabulous animal. But if we must needs have sequence and necessity, then indeed we must provide a prelude and crescendo of mounting miracles, that ushered in with unthinkable thunders in all the seven heavens of another order, a man may be an ordinary thing.
Chesterton here cuts thru the nonsense, thru the idealogy surrounding Darwinism. This idealogy of "evolution" has spread to every concievable field of endeavor - society evolves, culture evolves, the Church evolves!
This dovetails perfectly with liberalism, if society evolves then new ideas are by definition better and we must throw out the old ideas since they are as outdated as the "ape-man".
In Chesterton's time it resulted in Social Darwinism and Eugenics, the fruits of which we are still reaping. Now it's sociobiology, which when I described it to my son, said it made him feel like an insect in a hive (from the mouths of babes!) which is about the most accurate summation of sociobiology I've ever heard.
The point is if you want to talk about the science of evolution or the science of creationism then do that, biology, astrophysics, geology, whatever... but if you can't go into a lab and replicate it, it's not science it's philosophy and if it's philosophy then let's apply the principles of philosophy not the the scientific method. You have to use the correct tool for the job.
The plain fact of the matter is that Darwinism leaves us with an effect without a cause, which is just bad philosophy.
In my opinion, the only thing that Darwin definitively proved has evolutionary charactaristics is his own theory. Every time new science emerges that isn't consistent, his theory is tweaked just a little bit to account for it. The way it is now, you could apply his theory to any similar or disimilar structures that exist in the Universe.
Good post, well put.
Thanks.
bump
I don't know enough about this Meru Foundation's theological perspective but it doesn't appear Catholic, which to me means its in error and their conclusions are irrelevant. When the orginal article says ". First, it's bad science; and second, if the logic presented is followed through on, it inevitably leads to a compound god" are they denying the Trinity? God is three persons in one substance, de fide.
We can't replicate a supernova in the lab. Does that mean they can't be studied scientifically?
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So is Noam Chomsky.
There are alot of things going on in a supernova, some you can study in a lab and some you can't. You have to break down a phenomenon that like that into it's component processes.
Some natural phenomenon is not easily replicable so you have to make do with observing it when it occurs, this would seem to apply to something like supernovae.
You can construct hypothetical models using mathematics on a computer, but note the term - hypothetical ie hypothesis. It's not a theory til it's been observed, documented and repeated.
The scientific method is an exercise in inductive reasoning - from the specific to the general. Your conclusions do not always flow from the premises because there can be unknowns at work that makes your process invalid. The classic example. Deductive reasoning goes from the general to the specific, its conclusions follow from the premises: eg All men are mortal (distributed major premise) Socrates is a man (undistributed minor premise) Socrates is mortal (undistributed conclusion) Induction is the opposite: eg. Socrates is mortal (undistributed major) Socrates is a man (undistributed minor) All men are mortal (distributed conclusion *** INVALID***) So you need a whole bunch of socrates to say there is enough evidence is presume all men are mortal but even that isn't "proof"
What a waste of two minutes. Next time don't bother.
The trial is about whether there can even be a mention of any alternative to evolution.
That's your best shot?
We accept all kinds of unexplained things. Physics, the hardest of the sciences, accepts quantum entanglement and quantum uncertainty. Quantum events include suceh things as radioactive decay which has no local cause at all. Uncaused events are commonplace; the are the rule in particle physics.
Yes, Behe conceded.
That is not what Behe said. ID may not have the suppost of most scientists, but Behe did not say ID did not have significant evidence supporting it.
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