Dawkins refutes Behe

The following piece of biased ignorance was written by, you guessed it, by a self-proclaimed "Evangelical Presbyterian Church Planter":

"In the July 1 New York Times, evolutionist and atheist evangelist Richard Dawkins reviews Michael Behe’s new book, The Edge of Evolution. Behe is a professor of biological science at Lehigh University and the author of Darwin’s Black Box, one of the first and most influential works on intelligent design. Dawkins’ review is full of invective, ridicule, and ad hominem attack–in other words, the kind of stuff he’s good at, especially when he has nothing particularly substantive to say. Behe responds in a blog on Amazon.com that strikes me as pretty effective, as well as remarkably restrained considering the extraordinarily rude treatment he gets from the Oxford don. I don’t know enough biology to know who gets the better of the scientific argument (what little there is in Dawkin’s review, that is), but I still think it’s worth a read, as I’m sure Behe’s book is."

No surprise that the writer is an evangelical. No surprise that the writer admits to ignorance of science. (One wonders what a "planter" is. Someone who spreads seeds of creationism?)

Richard Dawkins can word things strongly, I admit. Dawkins, like most rational scientists, is clearly tired of the stupid pseudoscience that is invented in an attempt to attack the fact of biological evolution.

Actually, Dawkins does not resort to invectives in the New York Times review. To label Behe's ideas "moronic" would be to resort to invectives. Nor does Dawkins make any ad hominem attacks. To call Behe a "misguided idiot" would be to resort to a fallacious ad hominem, true or not.

The fact remains that Lehigh University has posted a disclaimer about Behe's views on its website. (One suspects that if Behe had not already achieved tenure, then he might well have been forced to knock on the doors of the so-called Discovery Institute for a job.) The fact remains that the intelligent design camp makes refuted pseudoscientific claims to promote religious views. The fact remains that Behe has been forced to retreat from his earlier "irreducible complexity" chicanery. The fact remains that Behe adds nothing to scientific understanding in this book and that he resorts to distortions.

Sensible Christians view science and religious belief as being compatible; only Biblical literalists invent pseudoscience to attack well established empirical facts. If you wish to decrease your ignorance of science, then Michael Behe will never be worth reading because his intention is to distort science to fit his religious convictions.

I find popular science, such as Dawkins writes, rather slow going because I am past requiring that level of explanation that is necessary for those without postsecondary education in biological sciences. However, anyone who wishes to understand reality would be well advised to read Dawkins. As a start, despite negative claims by the evangelical, there is a good scientific refutation of Behe's flimsy argument in Dawkin's review.

Quo Vadis?
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reality & truth

A broad definition of reality includes all of our experiences, which determine how things appear to us.

However, our experiences can never encompass all that exists, all that is actual or real whether or not it is observable, accessible, or understandable to us. In this broadest sense, our methods of analysis cannot reveal all of reality to us.

Does matter comprise, at the quantum level, vibrating strings of energy? On the basis of mathematical formulations, theoretical physicists postulate that it does. Yet we cannot know as a certainty that this conceptualization is accurate unless and until experimental verification is devised. However, there is much more basis for belief that reality includes vibrating quantum strings than that the God of the Bible or any deity is a reality outside the idea of such. That is, ideas exist, but it does not necessarily follow that the thing proposed has any real existence beyond the concept. God or deities rank as highly improbable as explanations for the universe, for life on planet earth, or for events in our physical world.

"A fact or factual entity is a phenomenon that is perceived as an elemental principle."[w] Thus, a fact is not subject to personal interpretation, rather it an observed phenomenon in the natural world. On the other hand, definitions of 'truth' vary. For the purposes of this site, truth will be regarded as corresponding to fact and reality.

Quo Vadis?
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