I already answered this question. I said that Denton’s view is possible, and also the view of direct divine creation is possible. I don’t have a firm view that one is right and the other wrong. What more would you like me to say? What am I not making clear? Or do you want me to pick one of the two, and insist on it, with a certainty I don’t feel?
Not in a science department in a secular university, it can’t. Maybe in a science department in a conservative theological institution, it can. I think there may be several cases of that. But I was talking about biologists – not necessarily even conventionally religious folks – who are trying for tenure in a secular biology department, and honestly believe that a good case can be made for intelligent design in nature. Those people have to shut up, or say good-bye to their careers, flushing 20 years of schooling down the toilet. That’s how open-minded some of your colleagues are to any idea that might even indirectly remind them of the G-word.
I’d put it another way. The fact that there’s no hope of there ever being any ID grants is in fact a problem – a problem regarding the university’s claim to be an intellectually open-minded place.
No, of course he doesn’t. But if one of those “observed mutations” was the production of a flagellar motor from scratch, I think he would be more inclined to postulate guidance.
There is no need to postulate guidance if the phenomenon you are looking at is such that it can reasonably explained without it. (Ockham’s Razor) But if you have strong reason to believe that unguided mechanisms could not achieve something, or would achieve it only by the rarest of flukes, then guidance is not an unreasonable suggestion.
The difference between you and Behe is that you are convinced – even though you can’t provide anywhere near a complete series of hypothetical steps – that unguided changes can feel their way to organic structures of immense complexity, whereas Behe doubts this. He thinks that for the major innovations there would have to be something tilting the playing field. Whether that is supernatural guidance, or some kind of inbuilt design, it certainly isn’t what Darwin, Mayr, Dobzhansky, Gaylord Simpson, Gould, Dawkins, Kimura, etc. were thinking about when they thought about evolutionary mechanisms. There’s just a fundamental disagreement over what is plausible conceptually, and over what has been verified empirically. The disagreement isn’t going to go away soon.