Category: Intelligent Design Creationism Watch

An ID advocate, lacking scientific arguments, claims that atheism saps life of meaning

May 2, 2019 • 8:15 am

Intelligent Design (ID) advocate David Klinghoffer, an Orthodox Jew, spends a lot of time attacking me on the Discovery Institute Website Evolution News. It’s almost an obsessive animus, for he regularly trawls this site looking for ammunition. But I pay little attention to the man.

First of all, his criticisms of me have nothing to do with science, but are recycled tropes about how horrible atheism is. That’s because Klinghoffer and his ID cronies have no scientific ammunition against evolution, and so are reduced to ad hominems about evolutionists or criticisms of unbelief or moans about the destructive effects of accepting evolution. He also beefs endlessly about my “tone”.  Sorry, but Liars for Moses—or Jesus—don’t deserve respect. Klinghoffer is irrelevant in any serious scientific discourse.

In the end, it’s almost amusing how desperate people like Klinghoffer have become. It’s now twenty years after the ID “Wedge Document” was leaked, with its timeline proposing that within two decades they would make ID and anti-materialism the dominant paradigm in science. Ultimately, their goal was to bring Jesus into the public schools, although I suppose that even Orthodox Jews like Klinghoffer can piggyback on Christianity. But they’ve failed at both endeavors, and so are reduced to flailing about in their pages.

Here’s one example (click on screenshot). It’s a very short read:

Klinghoffer quotes author and radio host Eric Metaxas, who himself appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show, where Metaxas said this:

Nobody really says this because it’s too ugly, but if you actually believe we evolved out of the primordial soup and through happenstance got here, by accident, then our lives literally have no meaning. And we don’t want to talk about that because it’s too horrific. Nobody can really live with it. But what we does is, we buy into that idea and we say, “Well then, what can I do? Since there’s no God, I guess I can have guilt-free pleasure. And so I’m going to spend the few decades that I have trying to take care of Number 1, trying to have as much fun as I can. By the way, having kids requires self-sacrifice. I don’t have time for that. I won’t be able to have as much fun.”

Klinghoffer adds:

Ugly indeed. To which Carlson agreed:

But what a lie. What a lie. As you lie there, life ebbing away, you think, “I’m glad I made it Prague.” Actually people don’t think that as they die.

And so to the question that Klinghoffer thinks will flummox and destroy Darwinists (my emphasis)

Carlson asks: “Then what’s the point of life? Going on more trips? Buying more crap? Clothes? I’m serious. What is the point?” It’s a good question to ask the next Darwinist with whom you have the opportunity to chat. Or the next theistic Darwin-appeaser who soothes us with the assurance that there is nothing terribly corrosive about the evolutionary perspective.

This is bizarre, and the rebuttals come easily to mind. The idea that being an atheist turns you into an amoral hedonist, too self-absorbed to even have children, is ridiculous. Nonbelievers may have fewer kids than, say, Mormons or Orthodox Jews, but it is the custom of those faiths to propagate. Nearly all of my atheist friends have kids.

Beyond that, the article is circular in its implicit assumption that because true meaning and purpose can come only from accepting God (and presumably following God’s Plan), then without God you are without purpose. And this is somehow supposed to be a reason for us to accept God, even though he doesn’t show himself these days.

And that’s a crock. In one of the most popular threads that ever appeared on this site, “What’s your meaning and purpose?“, I asked nonbelieving readers to tell me what they considered the purpose and meaning of their own existence. Almost all respondents (there were 373) found their meaning and purpose in their jobs, their avocations, their children, and so on, and not in worshiping a fictitious deity. The “Darwinian Perspective,” or at least the atheistic one, hadn’t at all proved terribly corrosive. Indeed, people found it liberating.

The idea that without God life has no meaning is patronizing, bogus, and wrong, and refuted by simply looking at the many atheists (or atheistic areas like Scandinavia) for which lack of meaning and purpose is not an issue.

Worse, Klinghoffer, Metaxas, and Carlson’s views boil down to something like this: “Believe in a god, even if there’s no evidence for one, because without it life has no meaning.”

But can you really force yourself to accept fiction solely on the grounds that it gives you a purpose? I can’t, and I doubt that most readers can. You’re either brainwashed from the get-go, and thereby get an automatic meaning, or you accept that there’s no evidence for a God and come to terms with it—just as we come to terms with our own mortality. As Plato recognized in the Euthyphro Dilemma, people really do get their morality (in Plato’s case, “piety”) not from God’s dictates but rather from non-goddy considerations—in other words, secular considerations.

This is why I find Klinghoffer and his ilk so ridiculous. They’re supposed to be supporting Intelligent Design, but since they can’t do that, they blather on about how Darwinism and atheism turn adherents into selfish, amoral nihilists. But there’s as little evidence for that as there is for ID itself.

Intelligent Design advocates finally sneak God back into their “science”

April 7, 2019 • 12:30 pm

 

The video below, in which Intelligent Design creationist Stephen Meyer explains ID to conservative writer and speaker Ben Shapiro, accomplishes two things—beyond demonstrating that Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, continues, despite withering criticism from scientists, to bang on about supposedly unevolvable “complex specified information” and the Cambrian Explosion as evidence for the Great Designer.

First, the video has eliminated any trace of respect I had for Ben Shapiro. Although I’m opposed to nearly all (well, let’s just make that all) of Shapiro’s political opinions, I thought his rhetoric was useful in challenging Woke college students who hadn’t thought through their views.

But now Shapiro has cast his lot with creationism, albeit the “sophisticated” form of creationism adumbrated by Meyer and his cronies. Shapiro is now beyond hope; it’s never not a good move for someone who pretends to be an intellectual to ally himself with thoroughly debunked pseudoscience.

Shapiro is, of course, an Orthodox Jew, but I thought that, contra Orthodox creationists, he had at least some respect for science. But he’s been moving towards ID creationism for some time, and now he’s clearly bought the whole hog.  You can argue whether babies have souls (Shapiro thinks “yes”), but it’s a different issue to say that evolutionary theory is deeply flawed, for that’s a matter of empiricism.

Second, the video nakedly reveals the ultimate goal of the ID movement revealed: to sneak God back into the science classroom. I discuss that below, showing that Meyer reveals what we knew all along: IDers conceive of the Designer as the Christian God. That, of course, was part of the Discovery Institute’s secret (but leaked) Wedge Document that, back in 1999, outlined a strategy to attack materialism in science and replace it, in both professional science and the science classroom, with Jesus. I quote from that document; emphasis is mine.

The very beginning of this [Wedge] strategy, the “thin edge of the wedge,” was Phillip Johnson’s critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. Michael Behe’s highly successful Darwin’s Black Box followed Johnson’s work. We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions. 

To get their creationism taught in the schools, IDers had the clever strategy of taking God out of the theory, at least explicitly. They then pretended that there was just some unspecified “mind” behind evolution, and that mind could be God, but it could also belong to space aliens or any overweening intelligence. But that was a lie: IDers wanted all along for the Judeo-Christian God to be the Designer. And you didn’t have to be a scientist to see this, for that was the decision of Judge Jones when he rejected the teaching of ID in Dover, Pennsylvania schools as a form of disguised religion. The replacement of “God” with “Designer” was clearly a duplicitous tactical strategy.

Those familiar with Meyer’s “theories” of ID, contained in his two books Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, will see them trotted out in the video below. I won’t waste time showing how they’ve been rebutted, but will just give you some links to read (you can see other criticisms in the Wikipedia entry for Meyer). Some good rebuttals of Meyer’s creationism can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

At 47:44, Shapiro asks Meyer how he connects ID theory to God. Meyer explains that “it takes a mind with conscious awareness to generate information in a digital form”, and that such a conclusion is at least “theistic friendly.” Meyer then says he’s writing another book about cosmology and physics—The Return of the God Hypothesis—using as evidence for God “anthropic fine tuning” and the idea of the “Goldilocks Universe”. And that evidence of design, as well as the origin of the Universe itself, cannot, says Meyer, cannot be explained by “an agent within the cosmos”, so space aliens are out.  Meyer concludes that theism itself is the best explanation of all the evidence from biology, cosmology, and physics.

So there we have it. Meyer is trotting out the same shopworn arguments—fine-tuning, the anthropic principle, and the Cosmological Argument—claiming that together they show that the designer is a theistic God. There’s nothing new in what he says, but I guess the ID people decided it’s time to bring God out from behind the screen to complete the Wedge Strategy.

Over at Evolution News, the flaccid house organ of the Discovery Institute, David Klinghoffer extols the video below, showing Meyer in discussion with author and speaker Eric Metaxas. Klinghoffer osculates Meyer’s tuchas copiously:

Meyer, a philosopher of science, talks about the move to the next frontier in the argument for intelligent design. His forthcoming book, which is going to be huge, is The Return of the God Hypothesis. [JAC: the book’s subtitle is Compelling Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God]. With Metaxas, who imperfectly disguises his own brilliance behind a hilarious comic persona, Meyer explains the origins of his thinking about design in cosmology and biology, tracing those back to a 1985 conference he just happened to attend in, yes, Dallas.

The YouTube notes say that this talk was “taped at the 2019 Dallas Science and Faith Conference at Park Cities Baptist Church in Dallas sponsored by Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.”  You’ll hear some of the stuff that pushed Meyer towards his new book, including our supposed impotence to understand the origin of life, the existence of “complex specified information” (again), our failure to understand consciousness, and so on.

Starting at about 42 minutes in, Meyer starts making the case for God as “the designing intelligence.” The evidence is pretty much the same as above: the supposed fine-tuning of the laws of physics, the existence of a “Goldilocks Universe”, and so on. These things, argues Meyer, are “built into the cosmos from the very beginning”, and so can’t be created by some within-the-Universe being like a space alien. Ergo, the designer is God.

Very clever, but physicists don’t accept the cosmological data as evidence for God. They remain solidly atheistic.

Seriously, if God wants us to accept Him, why can’t he just come down to Earth and do a few irrefutable miracles that can be witnessed, photographed, and so on? (On pp. 118-119 of Faith Versus Fact, I lay out evidence that would provisionally convince me that there is a God, and I believe Carl Sagan also sketched the kind of evidence that would convince him that God existed.) Why, then, is God invisible? Is He testing our faith by denying us evidence of His existence, so that only those who are able believe without evidence get saved?

But now I venture into theology, and that’s the realm of Meyer and his colleagues.  I’ll merely quote the philosopher Delos McKown: “The invisible and the nonexistent look very much alike. ”

h/t: Stacy

The evolution of “irreducibly complex” antifreeze proteins in a polar fish (and a fish-slap at Behe)

March 14, 2019 • 11:00 am

A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows how a functional protein (an antifreeze protein in the blood of an Arctic fish) can be assembled out of scraps of genome that have no function at all. Moreover, the protein doesn’t become functional—e.g., being secreted into the fish blood to keep it from freezing—until the very last step of gene assembly, so the sequence looks “irreducibly complex”. But, contra the IDers, we can construct a perfectly naturalistic evolutionary sequence by looking at DNA in relatives and putative ancestors. This shows that the appearance of “irreducible complexity”—the existence of an adaptation that doesn’t seem to function until all its parts are in place—does not require a Behe-ian creationist Designer, but can arise from natural processes. But we already knew that.

Click on the segment below to read the paper; the reference is at bottom and the pdf is here.

The molecular mechanism and reconstruction of the evolutionary path is complicated, but I’ll try to present it in a stepwise fashion. (Remember that this is complex and I may get some stuff wrong; but I’ll do my best). Zhuang et al. used known phylogenies of fish related to the two “antifreeze” fish in the family Gadidae, a group of codfish. These codfish have functional antifreeze glycoproteins (AFGPs) that act to keep their blood from freezing when the cod swim in super-cold polar waters. The proteins do this by keeping ice crystals from forming and acting as sites of nucleation that could turn the fish into popsicles.

The fish’s AFGPs consist of three bits: the antifreeze protein itself, which consists of repeats of the amino acid sequence threonine-alanine-alanine (Thr-Ala-Ala), a second secretory protein that gives a signal to the genome to enable the antifreeze protein to be secreted into the blood, and a promoter region that is necessary to allow the DNA sequence to be transcribed into RNA (which then makes the antifreeze protein).

What’s remarkable about this configuration is that every bit of it, including the two proteins themselves and the promoter sequence, was cobbled together via translocations and duplications of DNA (this happens passively in the genome) until all the elements were in place. And the “functional” gene couldn’t function right up to the very end, when the promoter sequence moved to the right place to allow the protein-coding region to produce an RNA transcript. This entire series of steps was reconstructed by sequencing the DNA of relatives that don’t have functional AFGPs, so we could see the evolutionary order in which things were assembled, and where the functional bits originally came from.

Here’s how it occurred; this is Figure 4 from the paper, and I give its caption:

Evolutionary mechanism of the gadid AFGP gene from noncoding DNA. The color codes of the sequence components follow Fig. 1. (A) The ancestral noncoding DNA contained latent signal peptide-coding exons with a 5′ Kozak motif, adjacent to a duplication-prone 27-nt GCA-rich sequence. (B) The 27-nt GCA(Ala)-rich sequence duplicated forming four tandem copies. (C) A 9-nt in the midst of the four 27-nt duplicates became the three codons for one AFGP Thr-Ala-Ala unit and underwent microsatellitelike duplication forming a proto-ORF. (D) A proximal upstream regulatory region acquired through a putative translocation event. (E) A 1-nt frameshift led to a contiguous SP, a propeptide, and a Thr-Ala-Ala-like cds in a read-through ORF. (F) Intragenic (Thr-Ala-Ala)n cds amplification, fulfilling the antifreeze function under natural selection.

The evolutionary stages posited (and supported by sequence and phylogenetic analysis) are A-F. First, there is a sequence of GCAGCAGCA in an ancestor, a sequence that would normally code for repeated alanines, but wasn’t functional (this is found in a relative). It expanded through duplication: A —>B.

Then, a mutation from a guanine to a cytosine base in another ancestor converted one Ala-Ala-Ala sequence to a Threonine-Alanine-Alanine amino acid triplet, which itself expanded through successive duplications (B —>C). The gene now had four Thr-Ala-Ala units, but was still nonfunctional. But this was to be the core of the functional protein in the future; it’s the dark blue bit seen in C through F above.

Another part of the genome had a nonfunctional sequence that could serve as the secretory protein to get the dark blue protein secreted into the blood. A deletion of a single nucleotide (C—>E) rendered it capable of producing a signal protein (the purple bit in D-F). But the entire system was still nonfunctional because it lacked a promoter region.

Finally, the system became functional when the protogene moved to a location near a nonfunctional DNA region that could serve as a promoter for the nascent gene. Now a gene producing a repeated Thr-Ala-Ala protein could function and secrete it into the blood.

Further, natural selection could now act on the functioning gene to make it more effective, simply by selecting for those genes that had even more duplications of the Thr-Ala-Ala segment, so we had a big protein of repeated units that could act as an antifreeze in fish blood (E—>F). (More repeats = better antifreeze protection.)

It’s a bit more complicated than this, but this is the essence of how the final protein came to be. And it’s not speculation, because all the bits can be found in other species or posited in ancestors, and so this reconstruction is fairly sound. Moreover, it involves processes known to operate in the DNA: the moving of bits around by translocation, duplication of sequences, etc. No divine intervention is required to do this, even though the protein isn’t functional until it’s put together with the secretory protein and the promoter.

One might ask this reasonable question: “Well, if the nascent antifreeze protein is just sitting there and not doing anything before it becomes active, why isn’t it inactivated by mutations?” That’s a good question, and one answer is that the process took place reasonably quickly so that mutations (which are, after all, rare) didn’t have time to turn the dark blue protein core into gibberish. And once that core formed, duplication of the Thr-Ala-Ala would be rapid, promoted by natural selection because more repeats confer greater antifreeze activity.

So here we have an “irreducibly” complex system, functional as an antifreeze system only at the very end, but one that formed purely through natural and well-known genomic processes. No God or alien designer required. It’s a good example of how hard work (sequencing and phylogenetic reconstruction) can dispel the objection “we don’t understand how this irreducibly complex system formed, so God must have done it.”

The whole paper, besides being a really lovely piece of work, is a slap in the face of IDers like Michael Behe—a fish slap like the one below:

__________

Zhuang, X., C. Yang, K. R. Murphy, and C.-H. C. Cheng. 2019. Molecular mechanism and history of non-sense to sense evolution of antifreeze glycoprotein gene in northern gadids. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116:4400-4405.

Behe’s book sliced and diced again—by members of his own department

March 13, 2019 • 3:00 pm

If you go to the website of the biology department of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, where resides the ID creationist Michael Behe, you’ll find this disclaimer:

To my knowledge, this is unique not only in science, but in any academic department, for here you see an entire department disowning the intellectual oeuvre of one of its members. The disclaimer is there because Michael Behe has tenure and can’t be fired, though he spends his life pushing a discredited form of gussied-up creationism. Rather than lose students who might think the entire department approves of Behe’s Biblically-based ideas, and thus embarrass their whole department, they put up the disclaimer. They tolerate him because they have no choice, but they don’t accept his work.

Although I’m unaware of any review in the popular press (save mine in the Washington Post) of Behe’s new book, Darwin Devolves, it has been reviewed in the scientific literature, most notably by Lents, Swamidass, and Lenski in Science. And, of course, all reviews by real scientists have been negative, for ID has been lame and discredited for years, emasculated by the Kitzmiller et al. vs. Dover Area School District trial. (Behe testified in that case and embarrassed both himself and fellow IDers). Behe and his Discovery Institute can’t abide this criticism, and have struck back, but their blows are ineffectual. Just today their flaccid house organ, Evolution News, issued four distinct attacks on me alone. I’m bursting with pride!

Now today a new review appeared in the prestigious journal Evolution. The kicker is that it’s by two members of Behe’s own department: assistant professor Gregory Lang, who works on microbial evolution, and assistant professor Amber Rice, an organismal evolutionist. I don’t think they need fear loss of tenure for writing this, as all the department save Behe spurns intelligent design, but it is a delicious irony. You can read their very critical review, which pulls no punches about their creationist colleague, by clicking on the screenshot below (reference at bottom, pdf here).

It’s a good review (by “good” I mean “well thought out and well crafted”, not “approving”), and shows that there are critical thinkers and good writers in that department. It’s also muy negative, and I’ll give one or two excerpts to show that Lang and Rice pull no punches:

Darwin Devolves contains a few factual errors and many errors of omission that have been pointed out by others (Lents and Hunt 2019; Lents et al. 2019), but it is two critical errors of logic that undermine Behe’s central premise that degradative mutations cripple evolution. First, Behe falsely equates the prevalence of loss‐of‐function mutations to the inevitable degradation of biological systems and the impossibility of evolution to produce novelty. By selective presentation of data, he exaggerates the role of degradative processes in evolution. Second, as he has previously, Behe attempts to argue from analogy, equating proteins with machines and convincing us that machines cannot evolve. Calling a flagellum an outboard motor may have some merit as a teaching tool, but it is not reality. Showing that a hammer cannot evolve into a fishing rod tells us nothing about real constraints on protein evolution.

Many of their comments mirror mine and Lents et al.’s, but they add even more about the notion of “irreducible complexity” and Behe’s persistent but flawed analogies between organisms and human-designed machines.

And they faced the same dilemma I did: should I review this travesty of a book and draw even more attention to Behe’s views? But they, like I, decided that Behe needed a scientific rebuttal lest people think his views were acceptable to scientists.

. . . By reviewing Behe’s latest book, we run the risk of drawing attention—or worse, giving credibility—to his ideas. Books like Darwin Devolves, however, must be openly challenged and refuted, even if it risks giving publicity to misbegotten views. Science benefits from public support. Largely funded by federal grants, scientists have a moral responsibility (if not a financial obligation) to ensure that the core concepts of our respective fields are communicated effectively and accurately to the public and to our trainees. This is particularly important in evolutionary biology, where—over 150 years after On the Origin of Species—less than 20% of Americans accept that humans evolved by natural and unguided processes (Gallup 2014). It is hard to think of any other discipline where mainstream acceptance of its core paradigm is more at odds with the scientific consensus.

Why evolution by natural selection is difficult for so many to accept is beyond the scope of this review [JAC: my take is here]; however, it is not for a lack of evidence: the data (only some of which we present here) are more than sufficient to convince any open‐minded skeptic that unguided evolution is capable of generating complex systems. A combination of social and historical factors creates a welcoming environment for an academic voice that questions the scientific consensus. Darwin Devolves was designed to fit this niche.

I don’t think there will be amiable feelings in the biology building when Behe encounters these two. But he’ll be retiring soon—or so I hope, as he’s 67. In the meantime, he’s and the IDers are going to emit lots of tirades about his colleagues on Evolution News, as none of them can tolerate—much less learn from—criticism.  In the acknowledgments section, though, Lang and Rice play nice. After taking the guy’s book apart, they applaud his collegiality, demonstrating the maxim of my advisor Lewontin when dismantling someone politely: “give with one hand and take with the other”. To wit:

. . . Finally, we acknowledge Michael Behe—despite our academic differences, we maintain that Mike is an easygoing departmental colleague with whom we continue to share the day‐to‐day tasks of academia.

I can live with that, though I don’t really believe the “easygoing” part.

____________

Lang, G. I. and Rice, A. M. (2019).  Evolution unscathed: Darwin Devolves argues on weak reasoning that unguided evolution is a destructive force, incapable of innovation. Evolution. doi:10.1111/evo.13710

More email from evolution-haters

March 11, 2019 • 8:45 am

Well, maybe “evolution hater” is too strong a term for this woman from Virginia, who wrote me an email this morning. She said “there is no need to respond,” but given that she sent me an unsolicited email, I’ll send her the link to this post, along with the comments. Feel free to respond, but again—be polite. (I informed the retired Air Force officer who wrote me yesterday of the readers’ responses.)

Dear Professor Coyne,

I read with interest your review of Behe’s book.  As a nonscientist, I am not in a position to make any critical judgment on either view.  As the mother of five and grandmother of seven, I know what the younger generation is seeking- authenticity without vitriol, Truth without preaching and a genuine desire to tackle the “Tough” questions of our time- which include  open discussions of the Four big questions- Origin, Meaning, Morality and Destiny.

Personally, I find evolutionary theory sorely lacking in any meaningful answer to any of theses questions and the attempts to address them fall into the hubris and arrogance of scientism rather than the humility that stems from wonder at the order of the universe and a willingness to admit we do not know everything.There is no need to respond.

There was a postscript:

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing.  Pascal

My comments:

1.) It saddens me to see a non-scientist claim that they’re not capable of making a critical judgement of ID. The arguments are not that arcane and have been addressed in many popular venues. I think this is just intellectual laziness, or perhaps an unwillingness to engage with the criticisms of ID.

2.) Why is a scientific discussion, or promoting evolution, which happens to be true, “preaching”?  In fact, any attempt to say something that contradicts another person’s religious beliefs is always construed as “vitriol.”

3.) Evolutionary biology doesn’t really deal with the questions of “Origin, Meaning, Morality, and Destiny” except insofar as abiogenesis (the study of how life began) can be considered part of evolutionary biology, and insofar as some aspects of morality—its roots in our animal ancestors—can be examined scientifically.

But, of course, religion, while it may tackle these tough questions, doesn’t answer them. For example, what is the proper moral behavior? If you’re a Christian it’s one thing (actually more, depending on what kind of Christian you are), if you’re a Muslim it’s another thing, and if you’re a Scientologist it’s still another.  The fact is that evolutionary biology actually answers the questions it asks, while religion does not. (Is there a God? Who knows? If there is one, is it the Christian God, Allah, or Shiva? Who knows?) Or if religion does provide answers, there are better (and more consistent) answers provided by secular humanism and ethics.

4.) Once again we see the scientism canard leveled at people like me (at least I presume it’s me, since she’s reacting to my book review). Well, I admit that we don’t know everything, and I know of no scientist who disagrees. The thing is that in 100 years we’ll know more about biology and evolution than we do now, while theologians and believers won’t know one iota more about the divine. It is not the scientists who have hubris, but the believers. And any changes and improvements in morality will, as Steve Pinker argues, come not from religion but from humanism.

 

I get emails from Christian creationists

March 10, 2019 • 10:45 am

The email below arrived this morning from a retired officer in the U.S. Air Force who had read my critical review of Michael Behe’s new Intelligent-Design book in the Washington Post. (I am, by the way, pleased that virtually all the commenters at the Post accept evolution and reject ID—something I didn’t expect). Re the email: it always surprises me when somebody who doesn’t seem to know much about evolution or biology (or biochemistry in this case) decides to lecture me about The Way Things Are.  Even more presumptuous is that they think they’re going to make me a Christian without knowing much about my views and personal history. But of course that’s what evangelical Christians do.

Read and weep. Please feel free to comment (politely, please), as I’ve told this person that I’m posting his email and will send him the link in a bit.

Professor Coyne

After reading your Sunday Washington Post book review of “Darwin Devolves,” I can only ask you:  you would presume that there is a creator for the wrist watch on your arm, the computer on your desk … why would you not similarly presume that our world, with all its complexity, variety, functionality, and even beauty, that there would not be a Creator—God—for our world … the universe?

Who is the crazier and off-base?  The person who thinks that such variety, complexity, functionality and beauty just ‘evolved’ out of primordial mush (where did the primordial mush come from anyway?)  Or, the person who believes and understands that such characteristics of ‘creation’ could not have come about without design and creation?

How does that logic flow?  Order implies functionality; functionality implies design; design implies intelligence; intelligence implies a Creator?

I would think the clear solution to your dilemma is that ‘evolution’ since the world’s creation is a corollary to the larger plan of creation set in motion by God.  Once the original creation was complete and God’s plan set in motion, evolutionary events and activities take place as part of that larger divine plan.  Heck, the complexity—yet functionality—of genes and DNA that so much of your book review talks about needed ‘design’ for all that to work in some orderly fashion.

And as to your statement about “the Christian belief that homo sapiens is a special creation of God,” it is.  Humans are the only sentient beings, “created in the image of God” (“imago dei”) with both a soul and a corporal body.  Quite simply, God did not promise the cocker spaniel population (or any other creature on this earth) eternal life with Him after their time on this earth is finished.  If anything, the “spark” of life and the inevitability of death for us all should have you at least thinking a little more profoundly.

I offer you the famous quote from Saint Anselm, the father of modern scholasticism: “Lord, let me not understand so that I may believe; let me believe so that I may understand.”

Deo gratias
NAME REDACTED

I could adduce Hume’s principle about miracles about the issue of “who is the crazier and off base” here, but I did that in a response to this person, also pointing out sources of information about how life could have evolved from chemicals. I also asked this person, since he seems to know that there is a Christian God, why that god would work through evolution instead of creating everything de novo, as it so plainly states in Genesis.

But I am vastly amused at his assurance that we have souls but cocker spaniels don’t, and therefore dogs don’t go to Heaven. This, of course, was the deranged conclusion of Edward Feser that I wrote about in 2015. The Argument from Dogs is the silver lining in this cloud of ignorance.

Behe and his publisher distort his reviews, pretend that they praise his work

March 8, 2019 • 10:15 am

Blurbs on books are usually selected by the publisher, but they’re always, at least in my experience, vetted by the author. Here, sent in a comment by reader Michael, is a reproduction of the back cover of ID-creationist Michael Behe’s new book, Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA that Challenges Evolution (you can also see these quotes on the Amazon site):

Note that there are two respectable reviewers here : my first student Allen Orr (now a professor at Rochester) and James Shreeve, Executive Editor for Science at National Geographic (Axe and Leisola and Carlson are IDers themselves and either creationists or affiliated with the Discovery Institute). Did Orr and Shreeve really praise Behe? Of course not: these are statements taken out of the context of the full review of Darwin’s Black Box.  Creationists, of course, are good at that. First they take biologists’ scientific statements out of context, making them seem as if they’re favoring ID, and now, in book blurbs, they blatantly pretend that Orr and Shreve are praising Behe. Let’s look at the sources of the quotations.

Here’s Orr’s review of ID and Behe’s views in the New Yorker in 2005 (click on screenshot), and the quote Behe and HarperOne (the publisher) use is below it:

The quote on the book cover:

Michael J. Behe, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University (and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute), is a biochemist who writes technical papers on the structure of DNA. He is the most prominent of the small circle of scientists working on intelligent design, and his arguments are by far the best known.

What you don’t see from the excerpt is that Orr’s piece completely dismantles Behe’s Argument for Design from Irreducible Complexity (as well as Dembski’s “No Free Lunch” argument), so the publishers are pretending that Orr liked Behe’s work. I’ll let you read the New Yorker article for yourself to see how Orr demonstrates why Behe’s arguments for a Designer aren’t dispositive because there are always Darwinian alternative pathways, even though we may not know which one was taken. As always, the ID tactic that when you don’t understand how something evolved, to punt and say, “Well, that means God did it”, is simply a dumb and unproductive program. Where’s the independent evidence for God, or, in Behe’s cynical euphemism, “The Intelligent Designer”? Absent that, ID is an ungrounded speculation, rightly rejected by Judge John Jones as Christianity in disguise.

Orr’s final assessment of why biologists reject ID:

Biologists aren’t alarmed by intelligent design’s arrival in Dover and elsewhere because they have all sworn allegiance to atheistic materialism; they’re alarmed because intelligent design is junk science.

Here’s Shreeve’s New York Times review from 23 years ago (click on screenshot):

The full quote excerpted on Behe’s book cover:

In ”Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution,” he argues that the origin of intracellular processes underlying the foundation of life cannot be explained by natural selection or by any other mechanism based purely on chance. When examined with the powerful tools of modern biology, but not with its modern prejudices, life on a biochemical level can be a product, he says, only of intelligent design. Coming from a practicing scientist — he is a biochemist at Lehigh University — this proposition is close to heretical.

Unlike Orr, Shreeve is not a working biologist, but he still sees the problem of punting to God in our ignorance (he does tout complexity theory, despite the fact that, as Orr notes, good old natural selection provides plausible means for the evolution of systems that look irreducibly complex):

Mr. Behe may be right that given our current state of knowledge, good old Darwinian gradualist evolution cannot explain the origin of blood clotting or cellular transport. It doesn’t provide a mechanism for genetic inheritance either – but does that mean that James Dewey Watson and Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA, shouldn’t have gone looking for one? Before an investigator declares the cell to be God’s last holdout, he must consider other natural causes for the origin of biochemical complexity, including the spontaneous organization of componenets [sic] suggested by complexity theory itself. Mr. Behe remarks on the vagueness of complexity theory itself. Mr. Behe remarks on the bagueness [sic] of complexity theory today – a curious charge, coming from a creationist – but what about its future, or that of paradigms as yet unconceived? Shouldn’t we leave something for our children and grandchildren to puzzle out besides which systems int he cell are intelligently designed and which are not? Because something is beyond our understanding today does not mean it will be beyond theirs.

HarperOne, the religious branch of HarperCollins Publishing, used the New Yorker and NYT quotes just to give an aura of authority to Behe’s work: “look, he was praised by the fancy New York media”. But he wasn’t, and if you read the full reviews you’ll see that neither reviewer accepts Behe’s contention that things that look (to Behe) irreducibly complex must have been the product of a Great Mutagenic Designer.

Only somebody who was intellectually dishonest would sanction the use of these misleading blurbs on their book. But of course Behe and the Discovery Institute are very anxious for this book to do well (it isn’t) because they see it as a pathway to public and scientific acceptance of Intelligent Design. Too bad they’re wrong.