Eddie, just because you are blue in the face doesn’t mean that anyone else here is.
I don’t know about others, but my face becomes more red, not blue, while I am laughing at your contortions and contradictions.
Doesn’t it make you angry that the DI is paying people who write and argue for ID so much less than you do for nothing?
It doesn’t exist.
That’s nice. I wasn’t, but I wasn’t exactly clear about it.
A domino could represent a set of mutations that led to a particular trait. Or, if you prefer, we could have a series of dominos in which there is no indication of design, and another in which Behe would say at least some would have to have been designed.
The fact remains: Behe’s “billiard shot/front loading” claim is not compatible with his other writings on the subject.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6225/1014.full
Or do they not count, since they are empiricists?
Increased fitness as a result of selection is an outcome. It is not random.
Is your understanding of evolutionary biology really this poor, Eddie?
You’re making sweeping generalizations about TEs. Their views widely vary. There are front-loaded TEs – Lamoureux is like Denton, and acknowledges the influence of Denton – and there are “interventionist” TEs (but most of them won’t publicly confess to believing in intervention, for fear of being mocked by their scientist-colleagues for holding to “God of the gaps”) – Robert Russell is one of the few who has the backbone to be an outright interventionist (though he says the intervention wouldn’t be detectable). Then there are the vast majority of ASA and BioLogos TEs, who studiously avoid giving any clear account of how God is involved in evolution, and act very irritated when you ask them about it, as if you’ve impertinently asked them about their sex life.
ID folks – I’m talking about those ID folks who, like the TEs, are Christian – have very little quarrel with a Denton or a Robert Russell. Their quarrel is with the many TEs who seem to be basically offering a purely materialistic evolutionary theory and then tacking on God as a sort of pious gloss, a gloss which they keep isolated in their “faith” compartment and has no bearing on the way nature is. They see the TE God as a “do-nothing” God, a passive observer of what random mutations spit out and what happens to survive and what happens to die off.
That’s easy. The Catholics Behe had in elementary and high school taught him not just that God used evolution, but that God used Darwinian evolution – and he later came to see that mechanism as implausible.
Really? Gee, I wonder if I could apply for a Discovery grant to keep posting here. 
He doesn’t make any “claim”; he offers it as a theoretical possibility. He also offers intervention as a possibility. I’m waiting for the direct statements proving he clearly endorses one over the other.
Selection can only choose from items which arose randomly with respect to outcome.
So what? The end outcome still isn’t random. You wrote,
Selection is one of those processes. It is not random with respect to outcome.
Your claim is objectively false.
And that the point. Front-loading means God does not intervene (do-nothing, passive as you describe), because he doesn’t have to. The expert pool shot made intervention irrelevant.
And it’s not just Darwinian mechanisms, but UNITELLIGENT mechanisms - any and all material mechanisms
Maybe not, in the sense that the choice between death and survival, or between having lots of children or only a few, is not random. But selection can’t look forward to the next stage in evolution. It’s mindless and brainless. It selects from the random choices put before it. That contrasts with front-loaded evolution, which is guided by an initial plan to head toward certain goals.
Behe’s position in your quoted text does not contradict the stance of most Christian proponents of Evolution.
Where Behe fails is not covered in your quote and originates from his belief that he can tell which mutations are divinely designed, and which are not.
It’s an unintelligent process. What would an intelligent process be, given that selection is a valid explanation, even if unintelligent, as long as God creates the universe to operate in such a fashion?
Eventually the audience here will be sophisticated enough that we will no longer be distracted by atheistic scenarios.
Not just design. Remember, front loading means everything is planned, even randomness. There’s no such thing as a non divinely designed mutation, or anything else, anywhere in the universe.
Right – but the vast majority of BioLogos and ASA TEs are not attracted by front-loaded evolution; they give Denton a cold shoulder and only a few of them agree with Lamoureux. That’s why I was objecting to your use of the blanket term “TEs” and then equating that position with front-loading. If TEs were mainly front-loaders, there would be far less hostility between the ID and TE camps, because front-loading is compatible with design and even detectable design.
But once human will enters the scenario, that’s when the Deist interpretation no longer applies.
Prayers are answered, and miraculous events become more logically required.
Front loading is the only position a TE can take that does not require intervention. And as you admitted, that’s what Behe argues against TEs and his Catholic education (do-nothing, passive). It’s the interventionist TEs that Behe and the Discovery Institute find agreeable.
That’s not only a Diest interpretation, but a Christian one as well, especially among Catholics and Thomists.
Christians who support Evolution can accept as much of the miraculous as their conscience and faith requires.
I am a Unitarian… non Trinitarian… and i am fine with a non-random universe.