Michael Behe - Irreducible Complexity and Intelligent Design

Irreducible Complexity and Intelligent Design

Further information: Irreducible complexity and Intelligent design

Behe says he once fully accepted the scientific theory of evolution, but that after reading Evolution: A Theory In Crisis, by Michael Denton, he came to question evolution. Later, Behe came to believe that there was evidence, at a biochemical level, that there were systems that were "irreducibly complex". These were systems that he thought could not, even in principle, have evolved by natural selection, and thus must have been created by an "intelligent designer," which he believed to be the only possible alternative explanation for such complex structures. The logic is very similar to the watchmaker analogy given by William Paley in 1802 as proof of a divine creator.

The Edwards v. Aguillard U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1987 barred the required teaching of creation science from public schools but allowed evolutionary theory on the grounds of scientific validity. After that decision, supplementary school textbook Of Pandas and People was altered to change references to creationism to use the term intelligent design. The books of lawyer Phillip E. Johnson on theistic realism, dealt directly with criticism of evolutionary theory and its purported biased "materialist" science, and aimed to legitimise the teaching of creationism in schools. In March 1992 a conference at Southern Methodist University brought Behe together with other leading figures into what Johnson later called the wedge strategy. In 1993 "the Johnson-Behe cadre of scholars" met at Pajaro Dunes, and Behe presented for the first time his idea of 'irreducibly complex' molecular machinery. Following a summer 1995 conference, "The Death of Materialism and the Renewal of Culture," the group obtained funding through the Discovery Institute. In 1996 Behe became a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (later renamed the Center for Science and Culture) dedicated to promoting intelligent design.

In 1993, Behe wrote a chapter on blood clotting in Of Pandas and People, presenting arguments which he later presented in very similar terms in a chapter in his 1996 book Darwin's Black Box. Behe later agreed that they were essentially the same when he defended intelligent design at the Dover Trial.