Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
by Michael J. Behe
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael J. BeheBrand: Simon & Schuster
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-03-07
ISBN: 0743290313
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Free Press
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Book Reviews of Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
Book Review: Behe's Book Reveals Hypocrisy of Naturalists
Summary: 5 Stars
Those who hold "science" up as the epitome of How To Know Anything, and claim that any hint of "religion" throws the genuine pursuit of knowledge out the window, reveal their hypocrisy when they attack Michael Behe's book. These people argue "Evolution is falsifiable, but the claim that God created the universe is beyond the realm of science." But that claim is unsustainable nonsense.
Charles Darwin, in his "Origin of Species," wrote, "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case." Is that even close to being a falsifiable position? "...Could not possibly have been formed..."? Do you see what a ridiculous standard that is? Let's put it this way: how do you naturalists out there like this argument? "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by a divine act of a Creator God, my Creationism theory would absolutely break down." Do you see how asinine this "falsifiable scientific view" actually is? The point is, being unable to show that something could not possibly have occurred is clearly light years away from showing that it is therefore true. And yet, that is precisely the ignorance that atheists wish to thrust upon the rest of us: they tell us a story of how something might have happened, and call that science. That's all they've got: myths that amount to tall-tales about how tails came to be formed.
And yet, to the extent that any human mind can prove that there are in fact complex organs that could NOT possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, Behe has succeeded in doing so. His book is a home run out of the deep field of the ballpark in demonstrating the ludicrous nature of the evolutionist's arguments. Michael Behe demonstrates that every single detail of an organism is so incredible, so (irreducibly) complex, so magnificently and obviously designed, that the argument that it all just happened because a whole bunch of time passed while random mutations occurred is rendered self-referentially absurd.
Behe has opened up "Darwin's black box" and demonstrated that the cell is not just a blob out of which anything can happen. Cells contain molecular machines that have different components, different structures, different arrangements, and different functions. They do not nebulously "morph" into other types of structures. And to attempt to argue that they do is not science, but foolishness.
Michael Behe is NOT writing as a religous man, but as a diligent and accomplished scientist. Critics love to throw the label of "religious" on Behe in order to discredit him, but their lack of arguments against the real claims of Behe's book combined with their abundance of ad hominems reveals that they are the ones who are biased.
In order to understand what is going on, you need to realize that there are two distinct definitions of science being used today. According to one, science is the impartial evaluation of observational evidence based primarily on repeatable experiments. According to the other, science must begin with the assumption that nature is all there is, a closed system of material causes and effects which cannot possibly be affected by anything outside the system.
This second definition, which is frequently smuggled into the first - and which is the real source of the attacks against Behe's book - cannot possibly be sustained or justified. A study of the development of science reveals that science uniquely emerged from faith - particularly the Christian worldview - and continues to require a monotheistic-friendly worldview in order to flourish today. Hellenistic thought could not ultimately produce science because it viewed the material world as inherently corrupt, and eastern thought tended to deny material reality altogether. Only monotheism and its acknowledgment of the possibility of an "Intelligent Designer" enabled the emergence of modern science.
The argument that the introduction of miracles results in a willy-nilly universe where "anything can happen" is a straw-man. Man constantly interferes in the "natural order" (e.g. I catch a jar that would otherwise have fallen to the ground). Why can't God so intervene? No religious tradition claims that God performs miracles randomly. The existence of faith does not in any way undermine science. Quite the contrary.
As it turns out, the abandonment of faith DOES undermine science. Philosophical naturalism, which represents itself as the most rational and logical of all approaches to reality, is in actuality self-defeating and incapable of defense. If indeed all matter combined by mere chance, unguided by any Higher Intelligence, then it necessarily follows that the molecules of our human brains are likewise the product of random chance. In other words, we think the way we do simply because the molecules in our brains happen to have combined in the way they have. Naturalists defeat their own arguments, for their beliefs become necessarily random without any absolute validity.
Science requires certain key philosophical presuppositions in order to get off the ground, and no idea can be more valid than its presuppositions. A partial list of these presuppositions would be the existence of a theory and mind-independent world; the knowability of that world; the orderly nature of that world; the existence of absolute truth; the uniformity of nature and induction; the laws of logic; the reliability of our cognitive and sensory faculties to serve as truth-gatherers and a source of justified beliefs; and even such things as the adequacy of human language to describe the world and the existence of moral values used in science (e.g., test theories fairly and report results honestly). Apart from all of these presuppositions, science - which cannot validate any of them - cannot even begin to form. Science emerged only because scholastic scientists assumed the biblical notion that an intelligent, personal God created man in His own image, and created an orderly physical universe for man's benefit and enjoyment. The above lists of presuppositions were derived from this religious view of the world. The idea of "Thinking God's thoughts after Him" was common among early scientists.
Let me leave you with a thought experiment for just the first of the nine or ten necessary presuppositions of science I gave you above: If I claim that you are a brain in a vat, with alien scientists creating sensory and cognitive stimuli via electrode stimulation, can you prove me me wrong using "science"? No. You need something else, don't you? You need the very sort of thing that scientists - who may be intelligent in their limited fields of knowledge, but are often foolish in the realm of real thought - want to keep out of the discussion. Throwing out the "bathwater" of the faith-dependent presuppositions for science discards the "baby" in this case, because science is worthless without the presuppositions which give it validity, and the presuppositions are worthless without the religious worldview which provide their foundation. Any "science" that explicitly denies the supernatural has its feet firmly planted in midair.
I hope you will see through the hypocrisy, arrogance, and absurdity of the critics of Michael Behe's wonderful book and just read it for yourself.
Summary of Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
Darwin?s Black Box helped to launch the Intelligent Design movement: the argument that nature exhibits evidence of design, beyond Darwinian randomness. Today, with the movement stronger than ever, Michael J. Behe updates the book with an important new Afterword on the state of the debate.?Time
Naming Darwin?s Black Box to the National Review?s list of the 100 most important nonfiction works of the twentieth century, George Gilder wrote that it ?overthrows Darwin at the end of the twentieth century in the same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at the beginning.? Discussing the book in The New Yorker in May 2005, H. Allen Orr said of Behe, ?he is the most prominent of the small circle of scientists working on intelligent design, and his arguments are by far the best known.? From one end of the spectrum to the other, Darwin?s Black Box has established itself as the key text in the Intelligent Design movement?the one argument that must be addressed in order to determine whether Darwinian evolution is sufficient to explain life as we know it, or not.
For this edition, Behe has written a major new Afterword tracing the state of the debate in the decade since it began. It is his first major new statement on the subject and will be welcomed by the thousands who wish to continue this intense debate.
Michael J. Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University, presents here a scientific argument for the existence of God. Examining the evolutionary theory of the origins of life, he can go part of the way with Darwin--he accepts the idea that species have been differentiated by the mechanism of natural selection from a common ancestor. But he thinks that the essential randomness of this process can explain evolutionary development only at the macro level, not at the micro level of his expertise. Within the biochemistry of living cells, he argues, life is "irreducibly complex." This is the last black box to be opened, the end of the road for science. Faced with complexity at this level, Behe suggests that it can only be the product of "intelligent design."
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