I DON'T BELIEVE I HAVE much read Michael Behe though I have listened to some interviews with him. He makes some good points on a lot of things within his range of expertise. I try to listen to everything and have no index of forbidden ideas, I leave that to the atheist-materialist types.
The most serious thing we disagree on is his contention that there is a theoretical basis for someone believing that "Darwinism," by which I think he means natural selection (as I almost always do when using the word) and Christianity are compatible, which is untrue.
While to get to where Behe does in that claim you have to abandon the aspect of Darwinism that allegedly denies there is teleology in evolution (something which, I will note, though Darwin and his followers repeatedly say that they are constantly making teleological claims within natural selection). I think just as Behe has to ignore that to square Darwinism and Christianity, to make natural selection square with the Gospel of Jesus, the writings of Paul, especially James, etc. you have to ignore that the center of The Law and the Prophets is "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
While my basis for complete disbelief in natural selection as a thing having some "objective" reality, not to mention as THE engine of the evolution of species, is based in problems with it. First and foremost the impossibility of doing science around that because you would have to have an enormous program of observing, measuring and analyzing the forever lost past so it is having caused the evolution of one or all species can not be a scientific claim. It is an ideological assertion or a just-so story.
The second is, as a number of full blown true believers in natural selection will admit, is the impossibility of testing claims about it based in narrative stories of that same forever lost past.
My misgivings about natural selection most certainly include the depravity of natural selection as a theory, depravity that was a chosen inheritance from its predecessor, Brit-class-based Malthusian economics, but, from the view of credible science, it doesn't follow the rules. While Behe criticizes what he has proposed as attempts to find replacements or supplements to natural selection, "niche theory" the one I'm most familiar of those he named as not having even the theoretical completeness of explanation that natural selection does, he ignores that if your framing is scientific method natural selection replaces that with stories that convince on the basis of seeming plausibility, not on rigorous analysis of actual observation and measurement. That it is not only hard but impossible to do the required observation, measurement, etc. that does nothing to change the fact that if you can't do it, you haven't really done science.
Though from a realistic point of view, what science is at any given point isn't based on precisely following scientific method, it is based on what scientists call science at any given time, something which they will attempt to cancel but by then, as can be seen in the endurance of Darwinian eugenics that is getting people killed in the current pandemic, they really can't cleanse the minds of humanity from what was once asserted to be "scientific fact" in fact, you can't really get scientists to cut discontinued science out of their discourse. Darwin and the Darwinists never got rid of teleology, after all. And I've pointed out the materialists have had to create creator gods out of probability, random selection, a ridiculous unnamed power of creating jillions of universes out of nothing but ideological desperation.
He does say some things I've also said - we're hardly the only ones to point that out - he does admit that the attempt to theorize the structure and life of the "first organism" is impossible, as I repeatedly and with great detail have pointed out, rightly slamming some of the same "abiogenesists" that I have. He also admits that that theorized "first organism" under common descent theory (which I accept as a plausible position while admitting it isn't a scientifically supportable claim) may not be any more real than I claim natural selection may not be. He has pointed out that Francis Crick's "panspermia" stuff is ludicrious, though in what I recall he didn't point out that leaves such panspermia fans with the same problems they had before, just located in a time long ago, on a planet far away. Mixing Star Wars with the problems of atheist biologists doesn't seem to be a good thought model for getting out of the soup.
More generally, I've pointed out that the rules under which science is allegedly done, by common agreement, excludes a number of things which are far more rigorously observed than the entire range of interested speculation and assertion (which always benefits the biologist or other claimants and hardly ever harms their interests) one is one which I think is causing a lot of trouble in the wrangling over Covid, the question of morality. When scientists are dealing and making and manipulating things which can lead to the life or death of everything from individuals, to communities, to societies to the human species, to life on Earth, allowing them to merrily go on their way unanswerable for the consequences of their work is going to prove to be either insupportable going on or fatal. I think a revision of the "method of science" is going to be forced by the consequences of what they do, by their incredibly lax attitude toward telling the truth (See Retraction Watch For Examples) and their near total sense of immunity from considering the consequences of what they do - either that or the permission they will claim for their colleagues to do the most appalling things on behalf of the piously asserted "quest for truth." If they were questing for the truth they wouldn't excuse the lies so many of their colleagues publish in reviewed journals, with their valued and respected colleagues passing on those as they review them.
I think one of the things that would have to change to make his intelligent design into science would be that ban on the consideration of teleology, I'm skeptical that you can use scientific method to find it as I'm certain there is no way to eliminate intelligent design from anything scientists do so there is no way to use science to demonstrate intelligence was not required to come up with anything it studies. But I'm only interested in that to attack that atheist-materialist-scientistic orthodoxy because of its political, social and moral effects.
I do recall hearing him point out that while the AMS ideology has to crumble if there is even one miracle anywhere that Christianity is entirely compatible with the idea that, as science claims, there are physical laws that are real and really do operate in the typical workings of the physical universe. That is obviously true, the rigid monism of athest-materialist-scientism lives or dies on whether or not there are "miracles" and if someone kills it off with one, good. It leads to depravity.
Michael Behe is not a fundamentalist nut job, he is a dissident biologist who has transgressed the atheist-materialist-scientistic bounds that are enforced in, especially, English language college-credentialed culture. If his science goes anywhere, I don't know and I'm not especially interested, I'm a political blogger, the consequences of what they do and claim and assert and get made into public policy and law rot out the morality of our society is what interests me.
I'll listen to him though he's not one of my major sources for information on this topic.
I typed this really fast because this week has been hellishly busy for me. I will probably follow up.
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