Behe testified at the Dover trial. He made about as convincing a scientific case as Bryan did in the Scopes trial.
Reminds me of an old D&D sourcebook. It originally used the word “mage” for the spellcasting class, but TSR told them the official term for that class was “wizard”, so they did a global find-and-replace. Leading to such oddities as a sword dealing 1d8 points of dawizard, and illusion spells creating a visual iwizard.
But that is not what IDers propose. They propose a much more interventionist Designer than someone who just got things going. Their Designer made eyes and flagelli (is that the plural of flagellum?).
Intelligent Design, (capitalized) is a specific attack on evolutionary theory. It has noting to do with cosmology or the origins of the universe. It certainly cannot “encompass evolution” since it is actually a non-scientific attack on evolutionary theory.
Now, the Creationists who support the use of “intelligent design” to sneak their religion into public schools are quite willing to confuse that issue, most famously persuading Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna to write an op-ed piece for the New York Times garbling the terms evolution and intelligent design and driving several officers of various Vatican and Catholic collegiate offices to pull their hair and announce rejections of his essay.
I’m not sure that Behe is the founder of that movement. I’d have thought that Philip Johnson held that position, (although he is a lawyer, not a scientist). Behe developed the hypothesis of Irreducible Complexity that was added to the Intelligent Design arsenal, despite being pretty thoroughly debunked within a short period of Behe’s publications.
It is also a bit shaky to identify Behe as “neither a creationist or a fundamentalist.” Behe has a record of tailoring his speech to fit his audience, and when speaking to religious groups, often strikes a strong pose for the creationist camp, even when giving lip service to Darwinian evolution as something that probably does happen, although playing little role in the development of life. And, while not a Fundamentalist in the sense of belonging to the Moody Bible Institute, his brand of Catholicism tends to be aligned with similar doctrinaire outfits.
Flagella. Generally speaking, for Latin words, if it’s an “-us” ending, the plural is “-i,” if it’s an “-um” ending, the plural is “-a.”
AFAIK, the Catholic interpretation of the “day length” is that it can’t mean 24h days because those didn’t get invented until the fourth day. Maybe that’s only the Spanish Catholic interpretation, of course; I don’t have the Catechism handy. I know Dad was already taught about the “can’t be 24h” thing and that was under the Astete Catechism, c. 1945-1955.
Then again, the Catholic Church is also perfectly happy with Evolution and that is official… not “doctrine” as it’s got nothing to do with dogmas, but definite “policy” (“separation of Church and Laboratory”, if you will). Maybe we’re just not religious.
There’s an old, maybe-apocryphal newspapering yarn that a big-city paper had a software function that replaced every use of the word “black” with “African American.” A few months later, the mayor was quoted as bragging that “the city budget is back in the African American.”
See the play or movie Inherit the Wind for an entertaining discussion of the concept of Biblical inerrancy, and the actual length of the “days” it took for God to create the world.
I loved the bit where he asks the Creationist lawyer -“It says here that God created the world on January 1st, 4004BC at 9AM. Was that central time or eastern time? It couldn’t have been Rocky Mountain Time, the Rocky Mountains weren’t created yet.”
As I understand it, the arguement is that evolution is the result of a huge series of mutations that were happy acidents, including the evolution of life itself from chemical roots.
Intelligent design says the odds of this happening by accident were too unlikely, so therefore there must be a guiding hand shaping evolution toward certain goals; so that intermediate results like half-way-there semi-eyeballs were forced on unfortunate creatures who had no use for them, gained no advantage, so that the final result - useful eyeballs - could appear in the next phase of evolution.
I suppose it’s sort of like the old hack philisophy argument about pre-ordination vs. free will, with guiding hands.
The eyeball one is easy to see. A photosentive patch can detect when an organism is hidden, or something is approaching blocking the sunlight. A sensitive patch inside a depression adds directional information; more cells, deeper pit adds more directional and time/motion information. Cover the light-sensitive hole with a transparent skin to protect the sensitive spots. Add musculature to make the eye somewhat aimable; Eventually to the point where it’s a pivoting ball…
Each step is sufficient advantage it’s no surprise that when it happened it led to more sucessful creatures.
The Catholic Church, AFAIK, does not concern itself about evolution. The bible is taken as “inspired by God” but not so specifically literal truth that they will argue over specific words. After all, the thought goes that the word is then transcribed by humans using the limited languages and concepts of the day, and subject to copying and interpretation errors. They have 2000 years of varying copies, apocrypha and forgeries, not to mention the old testament material. The interesting point (IIRC, from a James Blish SF novel) is that the big problem with evolution is simply that somewhere in the distant past some prehuman creature without a soul gave birth to an early human with a soul.