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Second of three parts; (click here to read part 1)

In reply, Behe immediately wrote an op/ed piece, which lingered for a month on an editorial desk. Then, on October 25, front-page headlines around the world reported Pope John Paul II's puzzling (and widely misunderstood) statement on evolution as being "more than a hypothesis" based on "fresh knowledge" that scientists should be free to investigate, keeping in mind that the soul is a direct creation of God.

Since Behe is a Roman Catholic scientist who teaches in the biology department at a major university, both the Times and Behe sensed a tie-in. Within a day his piece had been rewritten to connect it with the pope's statement.

In this article, Behe explained that the pope's statement for him is nothing new. As a Catholic, Behe was taught that evolution could be viewed as God's way of creating.

What forced Behe to change his mind about the truth of Darwinism and to propose intelligent design was not religion, but scientific discoveries in his own field. The pope spoke of "several theories" of evolution, Behe noted, explaining that the only valid theory of evolution that he saw emerging from the biological evidence took note of the unmistakable signs of "intelligent design."

Inevitably, many scientists charge Behe with "thinly disguised creationism." This strategy is employed by University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne, whose review of Behe was published in September in the prestigious British journal Nature. While Coyne admits, "There is no doubt that the pathways described by Behe are dauntingly complex and their evolution will be hard to unravel," he claims that Behe has offered no solution: "Behe's 'scientific' alternative to evolution [is] a confusing and untestable farrago of contradictory ideas." Twice in the review Coyne's rhetoric links Behe to the San Diego "scientific creationists" whom professional evolutionists tend to dismiss. Coyne describes Behe's work as a "new and more sophisticated" version of literal-Genesis creationism.

In fact, Behe has explained clearly his differences with the young-earth creationists. For example, he is willing to accept "as a working hypothesis" Darwin's concept of common ancestry. He even declares "I am not a creationist," defining the word narrowly as including a belief in recent six-day creation as derived from a literal reading of Genesis.

Behe believes that God happens to be the Intelligent Designer to which his biochemistry findings are pointing, but he stresses that science itself may not have the ability to ferret out the identity of the designer any more than astronomers can determine from their measurements the one who caused the expanding universe to spring into being out of nothing. Behe sees science and religion as two lines of investigation that connect or overlap in the area of origins, but neither of these human endeavors can claim to usurp the function of the other.

Thus, religion may help create the conceptual space needed for Behe's thinking to change, but he traces his doubts about Darwin to a series of intellectual shocks or "rude scientific awakenings" he received while working in the arena of biological origins over the past decade. His thinking took unexpected turns through interactions with colleagues in biochemistry, whose contagious skepticism of Darwin stirred him to carry out his own investigations, which in turn led to his emergence as a leading figure in the design movement.

Michael Behe grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as one of eight children in a middle-class family. His father, taking advantage of the GI Bill, was the first of his family to go to college, and he became the manager of a branch of Household Finance Corporation.

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April 28 1997, Vol. 41, No. 5