Then you haven’t learned much from your time here.
God can use Evolutionary processes… and God can use miraculous processes.
Michael Behe has explicitly asserted miraculous intervention in natural history.
A few years ago, I lectured at Hillsdale College as part of a week-long lecture series on the intelligent design debate. After Michael Behe’s lecture, some of us pressed him to explain exactly how the intelligent designer created the various “irreducibly complex” mechanisms that cannot–according to Behe–be explained as products of evolution by natural selection. He repeatedly refused to answer. But after a long night of drinking, he finally answered: “A puff of smoke!” A physicist in the group asked, Do you mean a suspension of the laws of physics? Yes, Behe answered.
Source: Darwinian Conservatism by Larry Arnhart: Has Anyone Seen Evolution?
This was referencing a November 11, 2002 lecture by Behe at Hillsdale College.
Also, in the December 1, 1996 issue of Our Sunday Visitor (a Catholic publication), Michael Behe is quoted:
“With Catholicism, you start with the knowledge that God made the universe and made light, but you don’t know how He did it,” Behe said “He might have done it in a puff of smoke, or He might have done it entirely through natural laws.”
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Please try to read more carefully: I did not deny that you had admitted that Meyer is a creationist. But you are now saying that he is a creationist because he says the evolution of life requires “massive infusions of information” from a designer, who he does not specify is necessarily God.
So that raises the question of why Behe is not a creationist, since he believes the same thing.
No need to try answer. The answer is obvious: Because Behe is a creationist, and your lame attempts to deny it just keep failing.
Here’s another one of your double standards: If you say Meyer is a creationist, where has he ever admitted this himself? Since you keep insisting it is poor scholarship to describe Behe as one without his open admission of this fact.
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Now we’ve seen several examples of where Behe has proposed direct intervention by his Christian God.
I wonder where Eddie will wheel his mobile goal posts to next? 
He served as the head of Mackenzie Presbyterian University (MPU) for the last eight years. MPU is a private religious school located in Sao Paulo. It advocates the teaching and study of intelligent design (ID), an outgrowth of biblical creationism that argues that life is too complex to have evolved by Darwinian evolution, and so required an intelligent designer.
According to the AAAS website, Aguiar Neto was recently quoted in an MPU press release as saying that ID should be introduced into Brazil’s basic education curricula as “a counterpoint to the theory of evolution,” and so that creationism could be supported by “scientific arguments.”
CBN is Pat Robertson’s network and news organization.
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Since, in all probability, you and I are the only people here who have read the book, it is not likely that anyone else here would be in a position to determine who is reading it more correctly.
He never said that every line in the book concerned modern ID theory. He was merely indicating that the book is loaded with analysis of chemistry, geology, etc., and with the implications, i.e., that the data seemed to call for a design interpretation.
As always, you make a mountain out of a molehill. And for no useful purpose. You’re simply trying to pick away at whether or not some people have used the term “ID” consistently, and trying to “catch them out” in a slip, in accord with your usual pedantic frame of mind. The larger point, that some scientists were saying “the data concerning the origin of life strongly suggest that design was necessary” before the 1987 court decision, completely escapes you. Or rather, it doesn’t escape you, but you want to divert the attention of readers away from that plain, inescapable, historical fact. Your tactic for achieving this distraction is to argue for days on end over what “an ID book” should or should not contain, but the fact is, the kind of reasoning from nature to design that ID proponents employ today was found in writers before 1987, and all your nit-picking distinctions cannot change that fact. So even if you manage to win some of the minor skirmishes about the exact wording used in the MLO book, you still lose the war. You can’t see the forest for the trees.
You don’t understand the difference between “postulates” and “concludes, at the end of an investigation.”
I would not agree with that formulation. The conclusions of natural theology don’t support the Bible specifically, but only a generic theism or deism. That’s compatible with the Bible, but it doesn’t support the Bible in the sense that apologists want to see, i.e., it doesn’t support either the Jewish or Christian use of the Bible, or even the notion that the Bible is revealed, historically true, etc.
Where have I done this? I have said that I have taught at universities for nearly 40 years now. That is true. I have engaged in virtually all of the academic activities that university professors engage in, including serving as a long-time reviewer for a peer-reviewed journal, reviewing a book manuscript for an academic publisher, contributing editorial corrections to a number of academic books, sitting as a voting examiner at a Master’s degree oral examination, sitting on search committees to find new faculty, attending seminars on the improvement of undergrad teaching methods, lecturing, co-lecturing, grading, spending hours in offices helping students with essay-writing difficulties, reporting cases of plagiarism, reading papers at annual meetings of academic societies, publishing book reviews and articles in academic journals, publishing academic books, doing community service (in the form of writing popular articles aimed at lay people, based on my research), and so on. I have been a member of two different scholarly societies. As a result of all this, I am extremely familiar with the internal life of universities. But did I ever say that I held a tenured position at a university? Did I ever claim any specific academic rank?
Dead wrong, as usual. Two overwhelmingly positively reviewed academic books on science and religion, not to mention several articles on the subject, led directly to my teaching courses on science and religion. And language qualifications led to my being hired as a Greek and Hebrew teacher.
Is correctly describing the composition of modern religion departments “complaining” about anything?
Is acknowledging the existence of liberal or secular Jews in academia “complaining about Jews”?
I acknowledge the existence of a secular Jew at Discovery – David Berlinski. Am I “complaining” against him?
And even if I were complaining against secular Jews (which I wasn’t), it would not follow that I had anything against Jews as such. In fact, I have high regard for Jewish religion and for the contributions of Jewish people to Western culture and civilization. Further, two of my graduate supervisors were Jews, and they both stand in my mind as models of what the university professor ought to be: widely read, broad in intellectual range, transcending mere specialist expertise, razor-sharp in intellect, cultured in the arts, gracious in discourse and debate, engaged in constructive public life beyond the university, and utterly outside of the spirit of bullying and enforced political correctness which now dominates the universities. They were beings of another era, scholars and philosophers from a more gracious and civilized intellectual culture. I revere their memories.
You have provided an anecdote from someone other than Behe, an anecdote reported on a partisan blog site by a foe of ID. I asked for statements in Behe’s written work. I take it that your reliance on an unconfirmed anecdote indicates that you can find no such statements.
As for your second statement, it contradicts your intention, since in it Behe does not commit himself to the view that miracles are necessary.
You have not offered a shred of written evidence that Behe “believes the same thing.”
In any case, as I have stated, the current point of dispute is not over whether Behe is a creationist. The current point of dispute is purely over a very small point of fact: whether or not Behe has ever explicitly and unambiguously stated that ID requires miracles.
I am not even asking you to surrender your view that Behe is a creationist. I am asking you to be intellectually honest and state: “I have never seen, and cannot now provide, any statement of Behe which explicitly and unambiguously asserts that miracles are required for ID to be true.”
If you cannot even concede a point of fact like this – which does not even require the surrender of your general view about Behe – then you clearly are not fit for objective scholarly or academic conversation, and in my view should be removed from the faculty at the University of Toronto, for failing to practice the basic requirements of scientific and scholarly honesty.
Well, gee, Eddie. I thought it was poor scholarship to attribute views to people which they have never expressed.
So, with that in mind, why are asking me to defend a claim I have never made?
I will repeat, since you seem rather dense on this subject: My position is that ID Creationists try to avoid explicit reference to things like miracles and God, because to do otherwise would make it more difficult for them to maintain the ruse that they area not creationists.
So why would I be obliged to point out examples where they have admitted to being creationists?
Hopefully that explanation will ease your confusion.
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No, of course not. He just says that the Christian god made a billiard shot at the time of the Big Bang, that set all of the particles of the universe into a sequence of motions that, 14 billion years later, would arrive at the exact configuration of a bacterial flagellum.
But he will never, ever use the word “miracle” to describe that. That would give the game away, and his fellow creationists know that he is referring to a miracle without him spelling it out.
Thanks for this article, Rich, which is yet another example of the sort of journalistic bias I’ve already covered extensively here.
The headline reads: “Brazil Picks Creationist…”
but then when you consult the actual story, it says: “Brazil’s appointment of an Intelligent Design advocate…”
So the writer of the headline slid from “Intelligent Design advocate” to “Creationist” without even bothering the justify the equation.
Later in the article, we see:
“MPU is a private religious school located in Sao Paulo. It advocates the teaching and study of intelligent design (ID), an outgrowth of biblical creationism that argues that life is too complex to have evolved by Darwinian evolution, and so required an intelligent designer.”
Leaving aside the oversimplified description of intelligent design theory, I note that the italicized words “an outgrowth of biblical creationism”, are nowhere justified in the article. The writer of the article is merely repeating the common trope, without any documentation.
Note that I offer no opinion regarding whether Neto is a creationist. He may well be. My point is only that article is written in such a way as to perpetuate the incorrect belief that if someone is an ID proponent, he is automatically a creationist. And this sort of slipshod writing gets repeated, over and over again, and soon the average person is making the equation, without ever having actually read the relevant sources or made any attempt to get straight what the relevant terms mean.
Hi @Eddie
Just pointing out to all here that Behe has indeed very unambiguously insisted on miraculous intervention, apparently after a long night of drinking … in vino veritas.
You disparage the source as a biased anecdote and imply Larry Arnhart is lying — I feel this response reflects more on you than on Mr Arnhart.
And the quote from the Catholic publication (which you cannot disparage as biased or anecdotal) buttresses my point, as it has Prof Behe using the same phrase “puff of smoke” as a very clear reference God’s direct intervention.
Why not just acknowledge the point that Behe definitely believes and has openly acknowledged that God’s intervention is required in natural history?
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So are you now changing your mind yet again, and deciding the “Creationist” and “Intelligent Design Supporter” are mutually exclusive terms?
You’re still evading a direct statement. I don’t want to hear your repetitious yammering about “ID Creationists” and how they conceal their true views; I asked you for a statement about Michael Behe.
Do you now freely concede that you have never seen a clear and unambiguous statement by Michael Behe that insists that miracles are necessary for intelligent design to be true?
Two answers are relevant here:
“I admit that I have never seen such a statement by Michael Behe.”
or
“I have seen such a statement by Michael Behe, and here it is:…”
If you give one or the other of these two answers, I will respond. If not, I will discontinue.
Now now, Eddie. I thought you were a philologist. Are you just going to ignore the obvious conclusion to be drawn from the fact that you keep finding examples where the two terms are used synonymously?
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Larry Arnhart’s article is explicit and unambiguous.
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Because he doesn’t, and hasn’t.
Arnhart’s story is not reliable, and in any case, it is anecdotal. Nobody would accept a claim of mine about some atheist that was based on a purely anecdotal source. If I reported a conversation where some atheist, when drunk, candidly acknowledged that he would never accept any evidence for design, no matter how good, because design means God, and he hates the very idea of God, and I used that as evidence for the atheist’s motivation and lack of objectivity, everyone here would scream “Anecdotal! Anecdotal! Doesn’t count!”
Find me some non-anecdotal evidence.
I asked you for statements from Behe that are explicit and unambiguous. Not statements attributed to Behe. Have you any scholarly training at all? Do you know the difference between, “X said this” and “This is attributed to X by Y”?
Are you denying that Behe made the"billiard shot" remark?
@Eddie – So your reponse is: Larry Arnhart is a liar.
OK
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