Would you agree that this is what Behe’s statement implies?
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You haven’t answered my question, which was asked weeks earlier than yours.
“Yes, I admit that I am drawing an inference from Behe, and that he never actually says directly in any of his works that intelligent design would require miraculous interventions” – that would do nicely.
Already did, on many occasions. I am looking at the implications of what Behe said.
Will you answer my question?
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Okay, @T_Aquaticus, thanks (I think) for heaving this anchor my way… let’s see if we can trace these assertions. I’m going to put in a call for @Eddie , because we may need a professional “Behe-Channeler” at the ready.
1st part of quote from Micahel Behe, In the DVD Case For A Creator: Part A
“The National Academy of Sciences has objected that intelligent design is not falsifiable, and I think that’s just the opposite of the truth. Intelligent design is very open to falsification. I claim, for example, that the bacterial flagellum could not be produced by natural selection; it needed to be deliberately intelligently designed.”
[[PRESUMABLY: Flagellum cannot be produced by “Natural-Selection-without-God-Setting-the-Pool-Balls”.]]
1st part of quote from Micahel Behe, In the DVD Case For A Creator: Part B
“Well, all a scientist has to do to prove me wrong is to take a bacterium without a flagellum, or knock out the genes for the flagellum in a bacterium, go into his lab and grow that bug for a long time and see if it produces anything resembling a flagellum. If that happened, intelligent design, as I understand it, would be knocked out of the water. I certainly don’t expect it to happen, but it’s easily falsified by a series of such experiments.”
[[PRESUMABLY: Although God has already “loaded” design into the creation of flagellum, God will most likely not have loaded “Pro-Flagellum-Natural-Selection” to be manifested inside a laboratory.]]
2nd part of quote from Micahel Behe, In the DVD Case For A Creator
“Now let’s turn that around and ask, How do we falsify the contention that natural selection produced the bacterial flagellum? If that same scientist went into the lab and knocked out the bacterial flagellum genes, grew the bacterium for a long time, and nothing much happened, well, he’d say maybe we didn’t start with the right bacterium, maybe we didn’t wait long enough, maybe we need a bigger population, and it would be very much more difficult to falsify the Darwinian hypothesis.”
[[HARDER TO PROVE REVERSE: Proving that Nature-Alone can produce flagella might take a HUNDRED attempts before anyone is satisfied that it can’t be done.]]
3rd part of quote from Micahel Behe, In the DVD Case For A Creator
“I think the very opposite is true. I think intelligent design is easily testable, easily falsifiable, although it has not been falsified, and Darwinism is very resistant to being falsified. They can always claim something was not right.”
**[[CONCLUSION: Behe is not asked to reproduce God’s Super-Natural-Selection, because nobody expects God to “hop” when someone says Jump. So, if a test case produces flagella, then Behe is willing to concede that it was not God that made it possible. Conversely, if Neo-Darwinists are not able to produce a flagellum, they will not be willing to admit failure until they have tried virtually every trick in the book."
Having the quoted text has been helpful. It doesn’t sound quite like what you were complaining about … but let’s hear your objection(s) again.
Not really. My explanation is that it is easy to reply when one has the evidence on one’s side. If that’s not the case, a lot of rhetorical contortions are required–like yours.
Didn’t Behe have his own Amazon blog a while ago? What happened to that?
At least in my eyes, this would apply to Irreducible Complexity as a whole. Behe would not expect any IC system to emerge anywhere in any population as we observe them. This is further supported by how he describes these populations. He treats them all as if all of the mutations that emerge in living populations are random. At no time does he point to any front-loaded mutations that have been observed in the lab or in the wild.
Not directly and precisely, and not without much foot-dragging.
OK. No, I don’t agree that this is the implication of the Behe paragraph that you quote. And even if it were the logical implication of that paragraph, it still wouldn’t square with other statements that Behe has made, which allow for non-supernatural unfoldings of design. All along he has been saying that the question whether the design is effected by supernatural interventions or by some kind of intrinsic teleology built into life at the beginning is a secondary question, compared to the larger question of whether there is design. For him, ID theory is focused on demonstrating the design, not on deciding between supernatural intervention and natural, front-loaded processes. Maybe you would rather he was more explicit on whether he personally thought interventions were involved? If so, why not write and ask him?
That’s the point I am making. Behe appears to be contradicting himself.
That would only beg the question of what isn’t designed. If everything can be front-loaded so that it unfolds naturally, but is still designed, then does design really mean anything? Is a cloud forming in the sky as designed as a bacterial flagellum?
I don’t think you are perceiving the reality. There are Ph.D.s in science who read hundreds or thousands of blog posts per week, and write many themselves. No matter how well they know the material, it takes a certain amount of reading time to get through it all, and a certain amount of writing time to reply so often. If one is a moderator or blog owner, even more time is required for administrative issues. Then there are people like Coyne, who even when they were still holding faculty positions were blogging regularly, debating regularly, and writing popular books on evolution, all of which takes away time from teaching and/or research. Or people like Ken Miller, holding a chair in the Ivy League while spending a huge chunk of their time travelling around the country to debate evolution vs. ID, rather than in the lab or in the classroom. Use your basic arithmetic. All of this large amount of time must be subtracted either from one’s teaching or one’s research. Take your pick.
Ask yourself how many peer-reviewed articles in his field Ken Miller has published since he published Finding Darwin’s God in 1999. Ask yourself how many of his undergrad or grad classes he had to absent himself from between September and April as he was travelling the country debating Behe, Meyer, etc. The point is that if Miller, Coyne, etc. were teaching in four-year colleges, they wouldn’t have the time for all this travelling, debating, blogging, etc. They’d be crushed under a load of multi-class preparation, grading of labs and mid-terms, etc. It’s because they hold positions which give them considerable discretion in the use of their time that they can invest so much time in these extracurricular debates. The average Joe kind of professor doesn’t have that luxury – which is why you see so few average Joe professors debating extensively on these internet sites. They don’t have the time.
I’ll answer your question with an illustration. When you were a little kid, did you never play with dominoes? Did you never line up the dominoes in interesting shapes, e.g., the shape of a heart, or a snake, or whatever, and then knock the first one down, and watch with delight as all the dominoes fell down in a pattern? That should provide the answer to your question. All the forces operative in the falling of the dominoes are entirely natural, but there is detectable design in the arrangement. Why should the dominoes be arranged to look like a heart or a snake? Was that arrangement accidental? The intelligence is detectable despite the wholly natural explanation for the falling of each domino.
So design does really mean something, even when we can see only natural causes operating between the steps of a process. If the process adds up to something we can’t explain without positing design, then design is a genuine causal factor, on top of (not against) all the efficient causes operating.
Why should a cloud look the way it does? Why should the rings around Saturn be there? Once you introduce front-loading like this, I really don’t see how you can differentiate between designed and undesigned. How does Behe determine if an observed mutation was random or designed? What methods does he use?
If we observe them happening through natural processes, why wouldn’t those natural processes be sufficient as an explanation?
You seem satisfied with this section:
1st part of quote from Micahel Behe, In the DVD Case For A Creator: Part B
“Well, all a scientist has to do to prove me wrong is to take a
bacterium without a flagellum, or knock out the genes for the
flagellum in a bacterium, go into his lab and grow that bug for a long
time and see if it produces anything resembling a flagellum. If that
happened, intelligent design, as I understand it, would be knocked out
of the water. I certainly don’t expect it to happen, but it’s easily
falsified by a series of such experiments.”
[[PRESUMABLY: Although God has already “loaded” design into the
creation of flagellum, God will most likely not have loaded
“Pro-Flagellum-Natural-Selection” to be manifested inside a
laboratory.]]
You summarize the significance of this Behe narrative like so: “At
least in my eyes, this would apply to Irreducible Complexity as a
whole. Behe would not expect any IC system to emerge anywhere in any
population as we observe them. This is further supported by how he
describes these populations. He treats them all as if all of the
mutations that emerge in living populations are random. At no time
does he point to any front-loaded mutations that have been observed in
the lab or in the wild.”
Mr. T., could this be the reason why I.D. advocates don’t feel
compelled to run their own lab work? What would they be proving,
right?: “We ran the simulation for 2 months, and we couldn’t do what
God did. So now it is up to the Neo-D’s to run their lab simulations
for years and see if they can produce results from randomness.”
When you think about it, the only way to prove “God’s influence in the
affirmative” is to arrange for some impossible task, and then ask God
to do it." < This is essentially what the Christian Alchemists of old
did, in conjunction with favorable astrological readings! In those
days, however, Alchemists couldn’t get God to create, but the new
style “Chemists” started having breakthroughs by actually working
chemistry as a non-supernatural process.
@swamidass , how come it has taken me 2 years to realize that
Intelligent Design has no other task than to devise tests that
Evolutionists cannot recreate without praying to God for assistance!!!
When God is the “Independent Variable”… nobody expects you to run
experiments! What would you run?
@T_Aquaticus, would you do along with this assessment of the situation?
I would ask how they determined that God wasn’t affecting their populations during those 2 months. How do they differentiate between a front-loaded mutation and a random one? Behe claims to detect design, so how does he detect front-loaded mutations or random mutations in living populations?
It seems to be the corner ID supporters have painted themselves into. Once you combine front-loading with claims of detecting design then you suddenly have to make claims about what God does and doesn’t do at all times.
Is it a painted corner, or is it inevitable logic? As a
pro-evolutionist, working from a Christian perspective, Behe’s Pool
Shot scenario suits me perfectly.
I’m starting to think that it isn’t surprising that I.D. folks didn’t
know how to defend themselves against this criticism (except for
Behe);
and that it’s just a little surprising that we Evolutionists couldn’t
see the unavoidable logic of their position and defend their position
ourselves!
John Harshman keeps telling me I write too much. If I do so, it’s because some of the people here seem to need explanations repeated before anything sinks in. Have you not seen my repeated example of the architect and the building? The building is erected entirely through natural causes – no magic, no miracles, just cranes, shovels, hammers, nails, etc., driven by human muscles powered by natural causes. But the building won’t exist without the plan. The plan is a necessary cause for the existence of the building. The sequence of natural causes involved in construction is not an adequate explanation for the existence of the building. Do you find this hard to grasp? Can you deny that it is true?
This shows a continuing misunderstanding of what ID is claiming. No ID proponent claims that we can look at Mutation X and say, this one was caused by natural causes, and doesn’t tend to complete any design, and then look at Mutation Y and say, this one was caused by a miracle produced by God to effect a certain design. It is the overall result that indicates design, not particular mutations. When we see a sequence of mutations occurring that we would not expect to occur by chance, we suspect that design was involved. One needs the whole pattern before one can make a design inference. Any individual mutation tells us nothing.
You can of course debate about whether ID people have calculated the probabilities correctly, but that is not the point we are discussing here. I’m setting forth the general method they use to determine design, not defending particular calculations. It’s an overall pattern they look for, not spot miracles that can be photographed by scientific equipment.
I can look at the Great Pyramid and say the thing was designed. I don’t have to know whether or not every single stone was shaped by human craftsmen. For all I know, there is one stone in the structure that just happened to have the right shape by natural erosion, etc. But I can be sure that, even if there are a few stones that came from nature uncut, the overall structure was designed. Nature would not produce a structure like that without the aid of design. Again, for all I know, the Egyptian Gods fashioned all the stones, and floated them supernaturally into place from a quarry a hundred miles away. Or maybe human beings cut them and thousands of slaves dragged them on rollers. It is absolutely irrelevant which method was used; I determine design without reference to the question of magic versus human labor. The design is inferred from the patterns in the structure, the obvious intentionality of the secret tunnels and chambers, etc.
The painting begins when they claim that they can detect design as something that differs from random processes, at least from what I can see.
So God makes a plan and physically changes DNA and organisms just like humans build buildings?
How do you determine if a sequence of mutations would not occur by chance?
Would you say that the Grand Canyon is also designed? Are you saying that design is something that is not natural because you contrast design with natural erosion?
So when you say that the bacterial flagellum is designed, this means nature could not have formed it?
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If you ask me, it’s their lucky break, and we just didn’t even realize it. Nobody expects God to be an Independent Variable… and I don’t know how any Scientist can put the burden of proof on I.D. - - IF it was provable.
But maybe this should help I.D. understand that this is part of why it is not something science can ever prove. Behe is right in one sense… when would science be able to rightly say … we have done every possible test … and so we can stop testing. We’ll NEVER achieve that point in the process!
And Behe should realize that as well!
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Your post seems contradictory. If ID says that design is provable, then doesn’t that put the burden of proof on ID to demonstrate that certain mutations are designed and others are not?
If someone says that they think God designed nature but it isn’t scientifically detectable in any way, then I see no reason to question their claim.
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As I’ve said repeatedly, and as Behe has said repeatedly, that is one possible option for God as the designer. Another is for him to use some sort of “automated” evolutionary process that proceeds naturally, once programmed.
How do you know the stones in the Great Pyramid didn’t arrange themselves by chance?
Something could be both designed and executed by natural causes. Again, to repeat myself against John Harshman’s complaint of my long-windedness, that is the point of Denton’s book Nature’s Destiny. About the Grand Canyon, I make no claim whether or not it is designed, but it is at least logically possible that God would use natural causes to create scenes of breathtaking beauty for the enjoyment of his human creations.
No, that is precisely the link in your thought that I am denying. It might be designed by God from before the beginning of creation, but executed by a complex series of natural causes, also planned by God, though not interfered with by God. It might also be executed by divine interventions. I don’t claim to know which, and I don’t see why one needs to know which, to argue whether or not the thing is designed.
There are factories today which produce complex products entirely by automated processes. Once the raw materials are fed in, no intelligent being touches the process, and ten thousand plastic chairs or pop bottles or windshield wipers or whatever are stamped out or assembled. When I see one of those products, I may not be sure whether it was made in an old-fashioned factory, where workers added parts or shaped material in the old-fashioned, hands-on way (intervention) or whether robots made it by wholly automated processes (front-loading). But I can be absolutely certain that the product was designed, not the result of mere chance, or even chance plus natural laws. I can be certain that intelligence went into it. That’s all ID claims to detect – the intelligence required by the overall transition from non-existence to existence of something, not the exact spatial and temporal location of the intelligent action during the process.
Behe’s claim is that you can’t get to a bacterium with not the slightest trace of a flagellum, to one with a fully developed rotary flagellum, without design. He never says that you can’t get there without a miracle. So he leaves open the possibility of some inward, teleological thrust built into life from creation, operating through natural means, causing life to diversity in intelligent ways. I say that he leaves open the possibility; whether that is his personal favored explanation, I would not venture to say.
You insist that Behe requires miracles; George (for a time, until he conceded my point) insisted that Behe denied miracles in favor of perfect mechanical pool shots. I say that Behe has not committed himself to either of those options, but has consistently maintained, for at least 9 years now and probably much longer, that both are logically possible, and both compatible with ID inferences.