@Eddie , for the most part I have to agree with you … but only if we can tidy up the enigma of Dr Behe.
I know Dr Behe likes to talk about those designs that are so complex they have to be designed. And a careful reading of his commentary leads the reader to understand that the complex design is NOT executed with a miracle … but with a providential set of natural events.
Eddie, if you can agree with these thoughts so far, then we can proceed directly to “the rub”: how does purportedly “poorly designed” plants and animals escape God’s design?
… left nearly a year ago[1], and so won’t even see your post let alone reply.
You seriously need to find out how to check whether some-one is still posting.
Unless this is some carelessly planned attempt to further some hidden agenda, in which case you should stop wasting everyone’s time with pointless posts.
Apart from a single drive-by anti-Canadian rant in November. ↩︎
His position is evidence for design… hard stop. He does not speculate of how the design happened as he sees that as a much more complex subject.
I agree with you God guided evolution is a possible explanation but the large transitions are hard to renationalise why God would use reproduction vs having independent origins.
Where I agree with Behe is that either being true is way less important than the evidence for design.
You have just used Meyer’s reason for rejecting bad design — we don’t know how God would work — and yet you don’t see that as incompatible with rejecting common descent because you don’t know why God would use that?
Hi John
Analysing the details of a complex design is not the same as speculating on the method of design.
Hi John
I don’t agree he misrepresents the real evidence. I think Behe and you come from very similar positions as he agrees Common descent is a possible explanation. I can only assume your position against Behe is based on the belief he is attacking the scientific consensus.
Behe has never articulated a well-defined position. He has no need to, since his objective is solely to fool ignorant rubes into believing there is scientific evidence for the Christian god.
Like malaria, HIV is a microbe that occurs in astronomical numbers. What’s more, its mutation rate is 10,000 times greater than that of most other organisms. So in just the past few decades HIV has actually undergone more of certain kinds of mutations than all cells have endured since the beginning of the world. Yet all those mutations, while medically important, have changed the functioning virus very little. It still has the same number of genes that work in the same way. There is no new molecular machinery.
And yet you don’t need to know the intricate design of a human and chimp to know they’re probably modified from the same ape. Further, the number of changes is quite few, and the number of required changes even fewer. You still aren’t making any sense at all.
The quote below was written by Dr Behe and published in 2009:
“My own view is that there is real design in the universe and also real contingency. That is, there are events whose outcome, although permitted, was not specifically intended for themselves by God. (Harkening back to the cartoon example above, God may in fact not have intended that specific, apparently random pattern of leaves on my lawn, and I see no particular reason to think that He did.)”
“There are also events that were specifically intended by God, in my view. As I try to explain in The Edge of Evolution, the more we know about nature, the more deeply into life specific design is seen to extend. It may go even more deeply than we can conclude from today’s empirical evidence (and I think it very likely does) but I don’t think there’s any need to conclude that specific design is required to explain the difference … between the different varieties [species] of finches on the Galapagos, let alone the pattern of leaves on my lawn.”
Looking at the latter text in bold font, Behe is clearly enlisting common descent as part of nature, but depicting God’s role as sometimes that of the painter Jackson Pollack - - where a splash of red paint was certainly intended for the bottom right hand corner of the canvas, but not its specific size or shape.
If we look at Behe’s first paragraph where I first used bold font, I will be so bold as to reverse his syntax to make his meaning even more clear:
"…the more deeply into life we see specific design extending, the more convincing cases become of God guiding evolution.
Impatient how? You have had all the time in the world to gather any and all sources you could to try and compose a case for Behe’s position being well-defined. @Faizal_Ali would have had no opportunity to reply to your message until you post it, and no choice but to wait until you do. Nobody was spurring you on, nobody set a time limit, nor a penalty for late replies. Of your own volition you yourself chose to hit the submit button before you have collected a case. That’s not a display of Faizal’s impatience, it’s a display of yours.