Re: [asa] Behe on TE vs. Darwinism....

> "Common Descent is based on genetic continuity in the history of life
> on earth. Design, according to Michael Behe, is based on genetic
> discontinuities in the Tree of Life. Therefore, Design and Common
> Descent are not compatible. Make your choice: it is either Design or
> Common Descent. Contrary to Behe, both cannot be true."

Even if one accepts the defintion made here, which I don't think
entirely matches Behe's idea of design (not to mention many objections
raised to ID definitions of design), it would only be true that Design
and Common Descent cannot both be true in any given specific example.
This closely resembles a popular mistake from both evolutionary and
antievolutionary sources-evidence of one's preferred mechanism in a
given situation purportedly totally disproves the opposing view.

Not only does Behe's definition of Darwinism not match Darwin's own
views, his definition of Darwinism is not incompatible with his
definition of TE that he is trying to set in opposition. The
biologically definable randomness of evolution says nothing about
whether God could have set it up for a particular outcome-it just says
that scientific analysis of evolution yields results that are either
mathematically best described by a probabilistic model or else are
mathematically intractable (possibly chaotic in the mathematical
sense-good formulas exist but require too precise information on the
starting conditions to yield precise predictive output; possibly
without any known formula) and thus humanly unpredictable.
Restricting TE to God having set things up in advance is more
restrictive than most definitions of TE that I have encountered (e.g.,
it rules out tweaking through quantum events); it also risks making TE
more deistic, which conflicts with calling it theistic.

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections
University of Alabama
"I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
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