Is the “middle ground” that a partnership exists between a thinking Creator and an unthinking phenomenon we will call “random pushing of stuff around that throws up new stuff that works”? Are the two equal and co-eternal? Seems tough to hold the “little bit of both” position.
It's a logical and intriguing possibility. The problem is, no such mechanism has been identified, as yet, as far as I know.
Natural Selection isn't "random"...it is "design within a system" in the form of an alogorithm of selecting the more effective direction. While it won't always proceed in the direction of what might be a most-efficient end structure, it does work to build complexity and functinality. In fact, "Natural Selection" is now being used in many fields where a computer model is allowed to select parameters that are applied in a next generation of a computer model...after repeated runs, the computer model is able to improve itself and get closer to a solution.
Behe seems to have missed the past 10 years, where it can be seen that intermediate steps do occur on the path to complex structures, sometimes for entirely different functions from the "final" structure.
This is something I've been wondering. For those who haven't followed the ID debate, the ID advocates start with the world as we see it, and ask how it could have gotten this way. They posit three possible explanations: necessity, chance, design. Some things are the way they are because of necessity (the arrangement of sodium atoms in a salt crystal, for instance). If something is not necessary, it still might be achieved by chance or accident. If neither necessity or chance is an adequate explanation, the only thing left is design.
The main line of argument of the ID proponents is that chance, i.e. "random mutation followed by natural selection," can't explain what we see. They present some fairly sophisticated mathematical arguments for this.
However, I wonder if they have rejected "necessity" too quickly. At some deeper level, is there something about the nature of matter that requires "accidents" to go in a certain direction. Their calculations about the impossibility of randomness getting us here may be correct but irrelevant, if there's something besides pure randomness at work.
Obviously I have no empirical evidence to support this idea, which amounts to nothing more than a supposition. However, it might be worth considering as an alternative to the arguments about whether chance is sufficient or not to produce what we see about us.
I suspect there is, but I also suspect something along the lines of intelligence put it there. “It” is probably something along the lines of magnetism, an invisible force whose effects can be seen even though the force itself can’t be (though we’re further along in our understanding of magnetism now, it was until fairly recent decades simply a mysterious invisible force). My operating hypothesis is that intelligence first evolved as energy, not as an outgrowth of material “life”. Science has not seriously explored how energy-only intelligence might have created and manipulated matter. It might well have endowed matter with a magnetism-like force that tends to pull it towards the energy-source of intelligence.
I think there’s a middle ground here. Instead of the randomness of natural selection or the “outside” influence of intelligent design, why can’t design be an inherent property within the system?
A long forgotten field of study called General Systems Theory started to wrestle with these issues before it became appropriated by certain government types with a different agenda. The objective of that field of study would span the various pin-headed objections on both sides.
GST is more in the spirit of math and physics, where it is believed that it is possible to describe, predict and control complex systems by discovering the right sets of mathematical equations. That, for example, a tantalizing clue came from finding that the same set of equations governed the activity of bees at the entrance to a hive and the movement of molecules at the air-liquid interface was the sort of thing they hoped to find more of in their research. But alas.
Then along came chaos theory some 20 years later. Some of its claims challenge ideas about general systems theory. They also challenge our more statist notions of God.
Also, the notion of control of human events by God that power controversy over ID are themselves pretty naive. Critics need to ask themselves just what they mean when they trash ID.
As for “inherent properties within a system”, John Von Neuman, late great Hungarian mathematician, made a similar proposal many years ago when he suggested that our ability to understand complex math is determined by our genetic and neural make up.
Anyway, my point is there is a lot that is ideologically simpatico with ID in mainstream academia. You just need to look for it.