I’ll ignore your justification of for not citing your source. You could have quoted the block you quoted and told me what Day and Page of the Kitzmiller judgment it was from; or you could have quoted the block and given me the URL. I wasn’t complaining about your quoting the block; I was complaining only about your failure to say where you got it.
That’s fine, if you make that distinction and hold to it. But as you can see, Tim and Faizal are insisting that Behe actually said it, and thus dragging out the argument unnecessarily. If they had conceded right away that he didn’t say it, then we could have focused on the more interesting question about whether he believed it. But something about the ethos here makes it necessary to deny everything I say, just on principle. This, “Eddie says it, so let’s go out and deny it” habit is not adult behavior.
There are several separate questions here, which need to be distinguished. If you look closely at all that I have written over the years here, I have usually tried to distinguish them fairly precisely, but in these frictional free-for-alls, where people jump in from all directions, often slightly shifting the topic when they do so, I may have occasionally said things that aren’t as clear as they could have been. So let me restate:
1 – ID, as such, allows both front-loading and intervention as possible means of implementing design in nature. That is, they are both conceptually compatible with a designed world. (Whether front-loading is physically plausible, given what we know about genes, etc., is another question entirely.)
2 – Behe, when asked about the options, has confirmed that both front-loading and intervention are conceptually compatible with ID. (See article I have linked to many times.) He has also never explicitly chosen one over the other, but has chosen to represent them as possibilities without openly endorsing one of them.
3 – Behe has said a number of things about how evolution works which lead a number of his readers to think that he favors the interventionist model, i.e., God tinkers with evolution, altering the natural course of events.
Now, to be clear about my own view, I think there are grounds in certain of Behe’s phrases for thinking he personally favors the interventionist model. So if people want to argue, “This statement of Behe doesn’t make sense unless he is envisioning some kind of divine tinkering,” I have no objection to that, provided that they can make a good case. I believe that this is what T. aquaticus has been saying all along. And I’m not saying he’s wrong. He may be right. I’ve only been opposing his habit of representing his inference (about where Behe’s thought logically leads) as something Behe has asserted. What Behe has asserted is nowhere near so clear.
George is convinced that Behe advocates a front-loaded model. I would not go that far. I would say that Behe allows a front-loaded model. I don’t think we can be sure that Behe personally endorses such a model.
I’d prefer never to talk about qualifications and experience, but a number of people here, especially Burke, keep making false assertions about them. And they know I’m helpless to respond, without giving away my identity, which I don’t want to do. If others would drop all malicious attacks on my supposed lack of training, I could easily refrain from talking about my qualifications at all. I offer this as a deal, to spare future debates over this. However, I don’t expect Burke will accept any such deal, since it seems to be a necessary thing to him to pepper all his replies with “You don’t really know very much about this, do you?” and such expressions.
The quotation specified “Darwinian mechanisms” and “neo-Darwinian processes”, not “evolution” (which under front-loading would not proceed by “Darwinian” mechanisms). The point is that if evolutionary change were limited to what Darwinian mechanisms can do, evolutionary change would need a supernatural boost to produce the goods. However, if evolutionary change proceeds by a different method, it might well be that some front-loaded naturalistic path would be possible. Behe is here allowing both possibilities: (1) Darwinian mechanism supplemented by miracles, or (2) non-Darwinian, front-loaded evolution without miracles.
Again, it may well be that Behe conceives of evolution as proceeding by a combination of natural means (e.g., he grants neo-Darwinian mechanisms some capacity) and supernatural additions. If anyone here thinks that is his view, I won’t say they are wrong, as long as they admit that they have reached this conclusion by their own possibly fallible inferences and not found it in his direct statements.
But note that even if Behe is counted in the “interventionist” camp, that still confirms my overall analysis, i.e., that ID, as such allows for those who accept a macroevolutionary process, and further, that these people come in two variants:
1 – Those who think that evolutionary change is partly natural, maybe even mostly natural, but supplemented by some, possibly much, supernatural intervention;
2 – Those who think that evolutionary change is wholly natural, but set up so as to be end-directed.
And we would have Behe and Denton as examples of each.
So ID is not, as such, incompatible with the acceptance of macroevolution, even though it is incompatible with any wholly Darwinian account of how evolution works.
And of course I’ve already granted that most ID proponents do not accept macroevolution. So I’m in the minority among ID proponents. But our number includes some of the most illustrious ID people, Behe and Denton.
