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What Darwinism Can't Do
The Edge of Evolution
October 19, 2007
The intelligent design (ID) movement has been
accused of a lot of things over the years. Among the mildest of those accusations is that ID
is just religion masquerading as science.
Anyone who could seriously think that, cannot be
paying attention. Intelligent design, as defined by the Discovery Institute, teaches simply
"that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an
intelligent cause, not an undirected [random] process such as natural selection." That's it.
It does not attempt to define or describe that cause. Most scientists who subscribe to
intelligent design do believe in some form of evolution. And some of them are not even
believers in the Bible—they are secularists. They simply believe that Darwinism does not have
all the answers, especially about how life originated. (Darwin himself never pretended
certainty on that.)
Now, with the publication of Michael Behe's second
book, there is little excuse left for anyone to remain ignorant of what intelligent design
actually is. Behe, you may remember, is the professor of biological science from Lehigh
University who shook up the scientific world when he published Darwin's Black Box over a
decade ago. Now he has written The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism.
Behe leaves no doubt of his belief in natural selection (evolutionary adaptation) . He even goes much further than many
of us, including myself, by declaring his belief in a common ancestor.
In short, he is more than willing to acknowledge
common ground with the evolutionists. All he is trying to show here is that there are certain
things that Darwinism cannot answer. But even for that, he gets pilloried. The New York Times
showed Behe's book the ultimate disrespect by assigning someone who had publicly disagreed
with and denounced him to review it: the vehement "anti-theist" Richard Dawkins, of all
people. So much for the objectivity of the New York Times. That would be roughly the
equivalent of the New York Times asking me to review one of Dawkins's books. Fat
chance.
Naturally, Dawkins accuses Behe of doing exactly
what he does not do: namely, he suggests that Behe states that where evolution reaches its
limits, "God must step in to help."
Behe does no such thing. What he does is provide a
series of case studies, such as the malaria virus, the AIDS virus, and the human immune
system, and shows what evolutionary adaptation did or did not do for them. For example, he shows that
although human cells have evolved in many ways to combat malaria, many humans are still
vulnerable to it—and in some cases, those human cells are even worse off than they were
before. This means that evolution is not always as progressive as Darwinists would have us
believe. As Behe puts it, what Dawkins and others have called an "arms race" is really much
more like "trench warfare," unleashing forces that can damage organisms as easily as it can
help them. So evolution has its limits.
I suggest you ignore the forces that would stifle
all dissent, and take a look at Behe's book The Edge of Evolution. Even if you do not agree
with everything in it, as I do not, you do not need to follow the Darwinist line that
everything you disagree with must be squashed. Dare to think for yourself. You just might
learn what the Darwinists and the anti-theists do not want you to know.
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This article, making such a great commentary as
usual, is borrowed from Chuck Colson's 10/19/07 "BreakPoint" on-line e-mail commentaries
about the Christian "worldview". What "worldview do you live by? Consider his organization's teaching ministry materials & supporting this ministry
with an on-line contribution
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(posted 20 October 2007; adjusted 13 April 2016)
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