Dispatches from the Culture Wars

In his testimony, and throughout his previous writings, Behe continually argues that there is a positive case for design: whenever you see a "purposeful arrangement of parts", that is evidence for intelligent design. This phrase popped up again and again in his testimony in various ways, but the bottom line for Behe is "that is exactly the basis for how we detect design, when we perceive the purposeful arrangement of parts." But here's the problem with this: what does "purposeful" mean in this context? How does one discern purpose? In this context, it can really only mean "functional" - a collection of parts that act together to perform a function. Indeed, Behe admits this in his testimony (p. 44 of cross):

I said that intelligent design is perceived as the purposeful arrangement of parts, yes. So when we not only see different parts, but we also see that they are ordered to perform some function, yes, that is how we perceived design.

So according to Behe, we know that a system was designed if it has a "purposeful arrangement of parts", and we know that an arrangement is "purposeful" if the parts are "ordered to perform some function." But wait a minute...when it comes to the antifreeze protein, a system that is obviously ordered (the development of the system involves a gene for a related protein, trypsinogen, being expanded, then duplicated, to produce a sequence of 41 tandem repeat segments) to perform some function (keeping the fish's blood from freezing at low temperatures), Behe does not infer design. In fact, we have multiple examples of antifreeze proteins in different species of fish, all derived independently of one another through different pathways, controlled by different genes and resulting in different sets of proteins, all of which Behe apparently accepts as being well explained by evolution without the need for the intervention of a designer. Yet these systems show the same trait - multiple parts order to perform a function - that he claims is a positive test for design.

So what does this inconsistency show? It confirms, once and for all, that ID is at base a "god of the gaps" explanation. He isn't really inferring design from the positive trait of having multiple parts ordered to perform a function, he only infers design when there is not yet a well understood and well documented evolutionary explanation for how a specific system with that trait developed through an evolutionary process. It is only in those instances where we don't yet have a thorough understanding of the pathway of development where Behe says, "A ha, God must have intervened to make it that way."

But as Michael Ruse likes to say, this type of argument is a science stopper. We can make that same inference or argument in science at all points leading up to having a problem solved or a phenomenon explained. At any point prior to that we could say, "Science cannot explain this, so God must have done it." Indeed, we did so for thousands of years by explaining thunderstorms, earthquakes and disease as evidence of the wrath of God and good crops as evidence of his pleasure with us. We now know better, and we know better because we didn't stop before we found a compelling theory to explain those things as being the result of natural processes.

Behe needs to be asked this question: If you now accept that the various antifreeze protein systems evolved without the intervention of a designer because we have well documented and reasoned explanations for how they developed, couldn't you have made the very same argument you make about the flagellum or blood clotting before we had those well documented explanations that you accept? And if that's the case, as it clearly is, and the inference to a designer from a lack of evolutionary explanation turned out to be false in that case, why should we think it's real in this case?