What Darwinism Can't Do

The Edge of Evolution

By Chuck Colson, Christian Post Guest Columnist Saturday, October 20, 2007

The intelligent design (ID) movement has been accused of a lot of things over the years. Among the mildest of those accusations is that ID is just religion masquerading as science.

Anyone who could seriously think that, cannot be paying attention. Intelligent design, as defined by the Discovery Institute, teaches simply "that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected [random] process such as natural selection." That's it. It does not attempt to define or describe that cause. Most scientists who subscribe to intelligent design do believe in some form of evolution. And some of them are not even believers in the Bible—they are secularists. They simply believe that Darwinism does not have all the answers, especially about how life originated. (Darwin himself never pretended certainty on that.)

Now, with the publication of Michael Behe's second book, there is little excuse left for anyone to remain ignorant of what intelligent design actually is. Behe, you may remember, is the professor of biological science from Lehigh University who shook up the scientific world when he published Darwin's Black Box over a decade ago. Now he has written The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. Behe leaves no doubt of his belief in natural selection. He even goes much further than many of us, including myself, by declaring his belief in a common ancestor.

In short, he is more than willing to acknowledge common ground with the evolutionists. All he is trying to show here is that there are certain things that Darwinism cannot answer. But even for that, he gets pilloried. The New York Times showed Behe's book the ultimate disrespect by assigning someone who had publicly disagreed with and denounced him to review it: the vehement "anti-theist" Richard Dawkins, of all people. So much for the objectivity of the New York Times. That would be roughly the equivalent of the New York Times asking me to review one of Dawkins's books. Fat chance.

Naturally, Dawkins accuses Behe of doing exactly what he does not do: Namely, he suggests that Behe states that where evolution reaches its limits, "God must step in to help."

Behe does no such thing. What he does is provide a series of case studies, such as the malaria virus, the AIDS virus, and the human immune system, and shows what evolution did or did not do for them. For example, he shows that although human cells have evolved in many ways to combat malaria, many humans are still vulnerable to it—and in some cases, those human cells are even worse off than they were before. This means that evolution is not always as progressive as Darwinists would have us believe. As Behe puts it, what Dawkins and others have called an "arms race" is really much more like "trench warfare," unleashing forces that can damage organisms as easily as it can help them. So evolution has its limits.

I suggest you ignore the forces that would stifle all dissent, and take a look at Behe's book The Edge of Evolution. Even if you do not agree with everything in it, as I do not, you do not need to follow the Darwinist line that everything you disagree with must be squashed. Dare to think for yourself. You just might learn what the Darwinists and the anti-theists do not want you to know.
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From BreakPoint®, October 19, 2007, Copyright 2007, Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with the permission of Prison Fellowship Ministries. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced or distributed without the express written permission of Prison Fellowship Ministries. "BreakPoint®" and "Prison Fellowship Ministries®" are registered trademarks of Prison Fellowship