Michael Behe's view on common descent

This is a good example of the line of thinking I find unhelpful. You are dividing nature into “normal/law-like” and “stochastic” parts. That seems exceptionally hard to apply to nature in a consistent way. Are mutations and natural selection a normal or non-normal part of nature? How about weather?

Second, you indicate that science can tell us the sort of processes that a divine being can/cannot (or does/does not) “guide.” This reminds me of a line I hear frequently from ID folks: “God cannot guide an unguided process.” How exactly can science tell us what an “unguided process” is? Wouldn’t a much better response—especially from those supposedly concerned about the metaphysical overreach of the sciences—be to say, “science is not equipped to tell us what sorts of processes God can or cannot guide, and if it does, that’s a metaphysical overreach”?

So, funny story. I actually attended the same homeschool group as Michael Behe’s children, for several years. I have a newspaper clipping of me standing with Behe’s son Leo accepting a prize for the Homeschool Spelling Bee. I idolized Michael Behe during my ID days. He came to the homeschool group a couple of times and I got to talk with him about how stupid evolutionists were (and thank him for helping me realize that).

It wasn’t until I read Darwin’s Black Box in High School that I had the foggiest idea that Behe accepted Common Ancestry. I remember exactly where I was when I read it for the first time, and being shocked and confused because why would someone like Behe believe something as stupid as “macro-evolution”? And I think the fact that it took me several years in the ID movement to realize that Behe accepted common ancestry, is pretty telling.

But the main reason Michael Behe isn’t on the list is because he is not a leading theologian, Church leader, or apologist, which also ruled out Francis Collins.

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