Related articles and links |  1 of 5

Behe's Darwin's Black Box
Evolutionists, who pretend entropy doesn't bother them, must now pretend Michael Behe doesn't either ["Meeting Darwin's Wager," Apr. 28]. They assume improbable events happen given eons of time, touting those eons rather than credible detail. Behe's chemical challenge turns the tables, putting time on his side mathematically: If the events evolution requires have very nearly zero probability, then more time passing makes evolution less likely. (Churning Behe's mousetrap parts in a washing machine doesn't make them more nearly assembled the longer you do it.) Truly "irreducibly complex" events by definition have zero chance of happening with any frequency that matters, prompting Crick, the DNA discoverer, to conclude the necessity of intelligent design. The genius of both Behe's and Phillip Johnson's arguments is that they require Darwinists (and theistic evolutionists) to put up or shut up. Too bad the pope's writers weren't as lucid as Behe.

Howard J. Bartlett
Casselberry, Fla.

* Though I appreciate men like Behe and Phillip Johnson (whose book I recently studied), I sometimes wonder about the goal of research attempting to validate God. Should any converts be made to the "Intelligent Design" side, you still have not invited anyone into the kingdom. How ironic that all of this research could be encapsulated in 34 words by the apostle Paul: "For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse" [Rom. 1:20, NASB].

Edward Dolan
Greeley, Colo.

I applaud CT for selecting Michael Behe's book, Darwin's Black Box, as its Book of the Year. I also see a danger in an uncritical embrace of the apparent attack on the Darwinian paradigm.

My impression is that Christian publications have been so heartened to find such unlikely allies against crude Darwinian atheism as Phillip Johnson, David Berlinski, and now Michael Behe, that they have overlooked the wide panorama of possible responses which do not necessarily lead to an Intelligent Designer. The intent of Christian apologists should not be the advance of science but the intellectually acceptable defense of the faith. Identifying that cause too closely with the vagaries of current cosmologies or the biochemical critique of Darwinian leaps of faith is too much like the largely discredited "God-of-the-gaps" arguments.

But in spite of this mild disclaimer, I am certain that Christian thinkers need to remain engaged with this extraordinary debate in science about origins.

Pastor Les Borsay
The Community Church of Hudson
Hudson, Iowa

It is not an overstatement to say that Michael Behe's book will prove to be one of the most influential books of this generation. But courageous, logical, and innovative as he is, even Behe has sidestepped an important problem. In his book he stated that he accepts Darwin's concept of common ancestry as "a working hypothesis." But how is it supposed to work? Behe has shown very clearly that complex systems such as human vision, blood coagulation, and humoral immunity could not have arisen by chance. Thus organisms that possess these systems cannot be descended from organisms that do not. A dog may be descended from a wolf, but it is certainly not descended from a trilobite.

Michael Denton, Behe's intellectual inspiration, showed in his book (Evolution: A Theory in Crisis) that smaller gaps are insurmountable. The amniotic egg cannot arise from an amphibian one, an avian respiratory system cannot arise from a reptilian one, a feather cannot arise from a reptilian scale, and so on. What line of descent then does Behe envision that would have led to, say, modern mammals? How can common descent be a working hypothesis after the damage that Behe and Denton have done to it?

next page... |  1 of 5

June 16 1997, Vol. 41, No. 7