Science rightly deals with issues for which scientists have the required tools for making good observations that are relevant to the issues. Many people through the long course of history have been impatient with the slow pace of the scientific method. Many are the claims constructed along these lines: "nobody has figured out X, so X must have been due to devine intervention". Luckily, science does advance, and many are the claims from positions of ignorance that have been shown to have been premature and silly. A good example from the first half of this century concerns vitalism. For centuries the claim was made in the strongest of terms: "no matter how much materialists learn about the phyisical bodies of living organisms, materialistic theories will never account for life, which includes something beyond mere physicality." But, of course, once the molecular basis of life was revealed, it became clear how life is understandable in terms of chemistry. Vitalism fades away. An even older claim was: "we will never know what the stars are made of, they are beyond the realm of human access and understanding." We now know that stars are made of the same atomic components as the brains of the philosophers who once claimed that we could never know. Perhapse the most remarkable thing about Behe's book is how he can continue to expect people to play this kind of game, accepting arguments from ignorance in order to prop up religiously motivated beliefs.
On page XI of the Preface, Behe points out that "Evolution" is a flexible word. Behe claims that it was Charles Darwin who gave "evolution" the meaning of "a process whereby life arose from non-living matter." Later, on page 18, Behe notes that Darwin lived in a time when the biochemical basis of life could not be studied, and that Darwin could not really deal with the origin of life. Behe quotes Darwin, "How a nerve becomes sensitive to light hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated".
Darwin was bold to propose a theory of common descent, which he based on his vast knowledge of the many non-obvious similarities (such as patterns of embryogenesis) between apparently different and unrelated species. One of the great triumps of molecular biology is how the biochemical details of living organisms confirm Darwin's hunch that was based on anatomy. Darwin knew that in his day the time was not right to go too far into the origin of life. In 1863 he observed, "It is mere rubbish, thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter." But of course, today, we can study the chemical origins of life and even the cosmological origin of matter.
How can Behe be so aware of the practical and changing limits of scientific knowledge, yet still claim that there must have been a Designer of Life since we do not know all of the details of the origins and evolution of life?
A reply from Keith Robison. John Catalano's site has much more.
A defense by Nancy Pearcy of the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. More on Behe from Terry M. Gray. What you would expect from Phillip E. Johnson and the Access Research Network.
Go to John's Book Page.
Go to John's Home Page.