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Michael Behe and Matthew Ramage Debate Evolution and ID, Pt. 1

Source: ID THE FUTURE via idthefuture.com
Reprinted with permission

Today’s ID the Future brings the first part of a friendly debate/discussion between Lehigh University biologist and intelligent design proponent Michael Behe and Catholic theologian Matthew Ramage. Led by Philosophy for the People podcast host Pat Flynn, Behe starts by noting that he is a lifelong Catholic who accepted from childhood that, as he was taught in school, if God wanted to work through the secondary causes of Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms to generate the diversity of life, who were we to tell him he shouldn’t or couldn’t do it that way? Behe says that his skepticism toward Neo-Darwinism arose many years later and stemmed purely from his scientific research.

Ramage, who specializes in the work of Pope Benedict XVI, sees God as indispensable to creation but also embraces universal common descent and emphasizes God’s ability to work through secondary causation. Ramage asks Behe if he agrees with common descent. Behe explains why he finds the issue trivial and says the crucial issue is what Behe argued for in Darwin’s Black Box, namely that mindless Darwinian mechanisms lack the creative power to have generated life’s diversity, and that we have compelling positive reasons to conclude that the purposeful arrangement of parts, such as we find in mousetraps and molecular biological machines, is the work of intelligent design. Ramage urges Behe to spend more of his rhetorical energy distinguishing himself from creationists who reject evolution in toto. Behe again pushes back, saying he doesn’t care “two hoots” for the issue of common descent, and that the important thing to focus on is how the science has turned against modern Darwinism and its emphasis on random changes and natural selection.

Behe acknowledges that Darwinian evolution nicely explains things like the emergence of wooly mammoths from elephants, or polar bears from grizzly bears, but he says these are examples of life filling various evolutionary niches via devolution. It doesn’t get you the evolution of all living things through mindless evolutionary mechanisms. There are many other elements and nuances in this lively conversation between a Catholic scientist and a Catholic theologian. Tune in to hear more, and stay tuned for Parts 2 and 3 of the debate. (This podcast conversation is used here by permission of Pat Flynn.)Photo courtesy of Celeste Behe.

Michael J. Behe

Michael Behe

SENIOR FELLOW, CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND CULTURE
Michael J. Behe is Professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. Behe’s current research involves delineation of design and natural selection in protein structures. In his career he has authored over 40 technical papers and three books, Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA that Challenges EvolutionDarwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, and The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, which argue that living system at the molecular level are best explained as being the result of deliberate intelligent design.

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Header image: Luc Mercelis via flickr.com