While probably true on a purely theoretical level, this claim is disconnected from reality.
This claim has no theoretical or empirical basis
How did State A evolve? Would a better question be; what is mechanistic origin of State A? If you ask the first question you are assuming your conclusion in the question.
@John_Harshman makes an interesting point here.
There can never be any proof of that conjecture as long as we allow the possibility of divine intervention. God could be behind anything, in nature or in a lab. There’s no way to tell by observation whether any event is natural or supernatural. This is why ID is the death of science.
I agree with John that it needs to be addressed how to make ID useful and not destructive. The alternative (a single model) is also problematic where thousands of papers are based on the assumption that the model is correct in every case.
Have the ID’ers demonstrated that there was an event in the history of the evolution of life that required “more than two coordinated mutations”? Where have they done this?
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You have to explain why it’s disconnected. How do you distinguish between natural and supernatural events?
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No, the total size of the space doesn’t tell you any such thing. Knowing the total size of the searchspace tells you only that and nothing else.
Like I did here. And here.
Do you have a mathematical model of the design and creation of new genes? No? Hmmm, weird.
Not necessary when we can simply observe new functional genes evolve by all the usual mechanisms. Duplication and divergence, recombination, gene-fusion etc.
You mean like the Vpu gene in HIV Behe ended up conceding did in fact evolve? T-urf13? Nylonase? Innumerable other examples.
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That’s the claim. WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE???
Where is Behe’s mathematical model? He is the one making claims about “coordinating mutations” being difficult to impossible, so where is the model backing that claim?
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Some of my favorite examples are the new photosynthetic organelles in Paulinella and various animal lineages, at various stages of endosymbiosis. The Paulinella ones are furthest along, with significant plastid genome reduction and nuclear gene transfer, but in various animals you have cleptoplasty, vertical transmission of plastids, and in at least one case, the transfer of a gene involved in photosynthesis to the animal nuclear genome.
I think the problem is Behe can say ‘yup, that’s happening, and it’s most reasonable to attribute it to design’. So actually observing something directly is no barrier to inferring design in the absence of a literal step-by-step account of the evolutionary pathway of whatever event. And that’s bananas. Nobody should take that seriously.
Also:
Not. The. Question. That’s just moving the goalposts backwards in time. It’s whack-a-mole. If the problem is evolving the cell without a flagellum, then why bring up the flagellum at all? Because it’s a response to getting an answer to how the supposedly unevolvable feature evolved, that’s why. If you’re gonna play that game, just go all out and say abiogenesis requires miracles, and that’s the conversation that can be had. That’s the honest version of the argument to make, instead of a fighting retreat through ever-more-ancestral traits.
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Let’s give this a thought experiment.
If you have a 3 digit telephone number that has 1000 possible combinations or total search space. How many people do you need with telephones to have a 90% chance of calling someone on the first try.
Is this solvable in your opinion?
ID darling James Tour is literally calling for the cutting off of funding and total cessation of origin of life research.
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Where is the analogous calculations for function in genetics?
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This seems like a very Christian way to think about it. I like it. I wonder if this type of “explanation” has been used historically within Christian theology.
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Found a[nother] problem with this line of reasoning.
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Again you are starting with assumptions as we all do 
Abiogenesis as a single event is an assumption. It may or may not be true. How would you challenge the claim that the eukaryotic cell required miracles or the origin of multicellularity and the ubiquitin system required miracles. The origin of sight or flight etc.
The reality is we are seeing evidence of lots of complex molecular origin events with chicken and egg problems. How they came about is the real tough question.
“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”–Christopher HItchens.
That’s easy. Chicken ancestors were not chickens but were egg layers. The egg came first.
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That, again, is a different question from the one Behe asks, and responding to “here’s how Derived Trait X could have evolved” with “yeah but where did Ancestral Trait W come from?” isn’t engaging with the question at hand; it’s moving the goalposts to an entirely different question. Which, fine, but then don’t pretend to care about Derived Trait X in the first place. Just make the argument about W, or V, or U, etc.
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It would seem consistent with the notion of “God’s plan” and with the notion of his eternal nature.
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I agree with you and that’s why I suggested putting aside the origin of the new genes vs how a natural evolutionary event may have occurred. Mike discusses natural evolutionary events in Darwin Devolves. These events involve the change to existing genes.
I don’t make a habit of challenging empty assertions. How would you support it in the first place?
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The claim is not all that outlandish. In fact, depending on the definition of “two coordinated mutations”, it can be trivially true.
The rub lies in Behe’s inability or refusal to explain how his assumptions pertain to any evolutionary model that is accepted by evolutionary scientists.
It is not dissimilar from the situation with his " Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residues" paper. There he went thru extensive calculations to show that evolution is impossible - if every single combination of mutations other than the one he defines as a target is subject to negative selection.
Lynch wrote a response paper showing that under conditions that approximate those that exist in the real world (as opposed to the fake world that Behe imagines to exist) there is no such barrier. Behe was invited to respond to this paper and conceded that Lynch was correct. Yet somehow he continues to make the same arguments that he has admitted in the peer reviewed press to be fallacious. I find that really strange.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1110/ps.041171805
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1110/ps.051674105
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Yes, and it demonstrates my point. In order to argue that the size of the search space is a problem, you had to also stipulate something about the chance of success, that is the number of people who have phone numbers. In other words, at the very least you need to talk about the ratio of numbers to people.
And further still, you have given no indication of what kinds of search-strategies are available. Is the process of searching intrinsically biased towards numbers likely to be answered when called? Does getting a digit wrong some times still end up resulting in a poor connection, but a connection nevertheless? Do number holders cluster together? Do calls cluster together? Does one successful call lead to information about other useful numbers?
So merely blathering about the number of possible phone numbers says nothing about how likely you are to call someone. It’s not clear, taking your analogy further, why would there would need to be a 90% chance of success “on the first try” when sampling sequence space for function? And just what constitutes a “try” in evolution?
“Oh gee there’s a lot of possible phone numbers” is not an argument for anything.
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