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Behe spoke at my university recently, to an audience of professional molecular biologists. Pretty much everyone thought his argument was a sad joke. You have to understand that Behe isn’t very honest. I read partway through his book, and quit because I got too frustrated with the fact that Behe was twisting the truth, knowing that he could get away with it because his target audience doesn’t know enough about biology.
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“Sucker” is a bit harsh, but Behe has indeed deceived you. Search for his name in GD and you’ll find earlier threads in which we go into more detail. The two big problems:
1.) Behe’s argument is based on the fallacy of the argument from ignorance. As many of my coworkers pointed out to him, if you just say “our current understanding of evolution can’t explain this,” then pretty much any scientist admits that there are things we don’t understand yet. The problem is that Behe then goes on to say, “since you can’t explain it, I win by default, and I choose to explain it by magic.”
2.) Behe is a very dishonest guy, in more ways than one. To wit:
a.) He presents himself differently to different audiences, to the point that it’s hard to find out what he believes. To my coworkers, he presented himself as basically being a theistic evolutionist. To a creationist audience, however, he’ll present himself as being a creationist, and go on about transitional fossils and suchlike.
b.) He doesn’t accurately report the scientific facts which he uses to support his arguments. (For that matter, he time and again attacks strawman versions of evolution.)
c.) Ultimately, Behe refuses to admit any possibility that he might be wrong. When a scientist confronted him with an apparently random process at work in creating IC structures, Behe replied that it only looked random, and God was secretly manipulating things behind the scenes. Similarly, Behe could just as well demand that you prove that there isn’t an invisible unicorn in the room. See? That proves unicorns really exist. Behe is living in his own thought bubble, and even when his arguments are debunked, he retreats into claims that God is secretly operating behind the scenes and just making things look like evolution is at work.
d.) Behe is generally a weaselly guy. Remember, you’ve read a book in which Behe presents his ideas without anyone else around to challenge them. Plus, like I said, he’s presenting them to non-experts, so he can twist the truth without getting caught. During Q&A at my university, I’m not sure he gave a straightforward answer to even a single question he was asked, because his arguments really don’t survive knowledgeable scrutiny. So far as I know, Behe refuses to engage in a moderated debate on his work. And remember, there’s a reason why this “scientist” has published his work in a book for nonscientists to read, rather than publishing scientific papers for scientists to read.