Understanding Creation, Evolution and Intelligent Design

Interview with Dr. Michael Behe, Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University and a Roman Catholic

Some 80 years have passed since the Scopes Monkey Trial sparked a heated battle on teaching creation and evolution in public schools. The public debate is still running, but according to some professors scientific developments have fundamentally shifted the landscape on the discourse by adding relatively new theory - intelligent design - to explain the origins of life.

Intelligent design (ID) advocate, Dr. Michael J. Behe, Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University and a Roman Catholic, took some time to speak to the Christian Post about his views on evolution, creationism, and Intelligent Design.

What is ID?

ID is just the idea that you can detect the effects of an intelligent agent on parts of nature.

Intelligent agent is just a being who is smart enough to have done things that you’re looking at.

A non-controversial example, if you drove past Mt. Rushmore, you’d realize quickly that the mountains that you were looking at were not just shaped by unintelligent forces, but by some intelligent agents as well. In my thinking, we can also tell that an intelligent agent has affected parts of life as well, parts of biology.

What is the difference between ID and creationism?

In my thinking, ID goes out and looks at nature. It looks at what we have learned about nature and asks the question: what is the best way to explain what we have found in the nature? Creation science starts from the Bible, from the creation stories in the Bible and goes out and says what can we find in nature that can support the creation stories?

Are you saying that the starting points are different?

Yes, I think ID starts with the nature and creation science starts with the Bible.

What is the view of creationists on ID?

Some creationists think that ID does not go far enough. They say that it does not lead one to Jesus or even to God and therefore, it’s an inadequate idea for helping to save souls. I would say I totally agree with them. It’s not intended to be a complete answer to all the important questions of life. It’s only intended to be a very minimal idea relating to what we’ve found in biology.

Nonetheless, ID, on its own merits, is a good idea. It’s just not a complete answer to life’s most important questions.

What about ID vs. evolution?

ID is not opposed to evolution if evolution is simply understood as common descent or the theory that organisms descended one from the other, even with the modification. If ID deals only with the question of how did the elegant and sophisticated features of life we see in biology get here? Did they get here by an unintelligent process such as Darwin’s idea of random mutation and natural selection or did they get here by intelligent process, by the deliberate actions by an intelligent agent? So ID is actually compatible with a large amount of what goes under the name evolution.

Do a majority of ID advocates agree with evolution?

I think it’s a mix. It’s hard to tell. There are a fair number of ID advocates who do not think that common descent is correct. Many of them don’t think it’s correct simply because they see no evidence that one type of organism can change into another type of organism even with the intelligent direction. So they think the evidence does not support common descent.

I, on the other hand, think common descent is a reasonable idea because of what it accounts for the similarities that we see among different kinds of organisms. And I think if an intelligent agent arranges things, perhaps one kind of organism can in fact give rise to a different organism, for example, from fish to amphibian and to reptile and so on. I think intelligent agent guided process could have helped to do something.

In the Bible, in Genesis 1, it says God created each living organism “according to its own kind.” What is your response to this?

I’m not a theologian, so I stay away from that. I’ve heard theologians who are much more learner than I am arguing different interpretations of that. I’m just an ordinary biochemist so I try to stick to science and stay away from the theology.

Can all these three theories somehow be in harmony?

It all really depends on what you mean by creationism, evolution, and intelligent design.
Everything depends on your definition of what you mean things. If evolution you mean an unintelligent process or a random process, then I don’t think that it’s compatible with ID. If by evolution you mean common descent and if by creation you mean a new sort of animals without ancestor then clearly they can’t both be correct. But if you think creation as God’s activity and evolution simply as descent, but which allows guidance by God, then yes, I think it can then reconcile all of those.

Currently, there is a very heated debate on whether ID should be allowed to be taught in public schools, what is the core reason why people think ID to be taught in public education?

I think one good reason is that many people think it’s true that unintelligent processes cannot account for the elegance and sophistication of what we see in the living world. And when they look at the evidence that is offered to support Darwin’s theory, they find it to be very inadequate. They find arguments for design that is for the proposition that some structures in life require intelligent direction to be compelling, to be persuasive.

I think many people just support ID teaching in schools because they think it’s a persuasive idea. They think that the exclusion of ID and teaching of Darwinism is based more on philosophical considerations. Because ID has what many people think of as religious implications, then simply because of that it’s not allowed to be taught in schools. But if the evidence supports it, then it should be allowed to be taught even if it has religious implications. A truly neutral approach to teaching science in schools is to allow the evidence to guide one’s conclusions and not to artificially rule one idea out of bounds simply because the person doesn’t like its implications.

Do you see ID having enough evidence?

Yes, I certainly do. Well, I am a biochemist and biochemistry studies molecular basis of life. And in the past 50 years, science has discovered that at the very foundation of life there are sophisticated molecular machines, which do the work in the cell. I mean, literally, there are real machines inside everybody’s cells and this is what they are called by all biologists who work in the field, molecular machines. They’re little trucks and busses that run around the cell that takes supplies from one end of the cell to the other. They’re little traffic signals to regulate the flow. They’re sign posts to tell them when they get to the right destination. They’re little outboard motors that allow some cells to swim. If you look at the parts of these, they’re remarkably like the machineries that we use in our everyday world.

The argument is that we know from experience that machinery in our everyday world that we use in our everyday world required design, required an intelligent agent that put it together, who understood how it was going to be used and who assembled the parts. By an inductive argument, when we find such sophisticated machinery in other places too, we can conclude that it also requires design. So now that we found it in life and in the very foundation of life, I and other ID advocates argue that there is no reason to not reach the same conclusion and that in fact, these things were indeed designed.

About 50 years ago Watson and Crick deduced the structure of DNA, the double helix. The first structures of proteins, which are the parts like the machines in the cell, were discovered and before we really didn’t know how the cells worked at all. In the past 50 years, we’ve gotten more and more knowledge about how the cell works. And the more we know, the more sophisticated we have discovered that it is.

Michael J. Behe, originally from Harrisburg, PA., graduated from Drexel University in 1974 with a B.S. in Chemistry and did his graduate studies in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania where he was awarded the Ph.D. in 1978 for his dissertation research on sickle-cell disease. From 1978-1982 he did postdoctoral work on DNA structure at the National Institutes of Health. From 1982-85 he was Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Queens College in New York City, where he met his wife.

In 1985 he moved to Lehigh University where he is currently Professor of Biochemistry. In his career he has authored over 40 technical papers and one book, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, which argues that living system at the molecular level are best explained as being the result of deliberate intelligent design. Darwin’s Black Box has been reviewed by the New York Times, Nature, Philosophy of Science, Christianity Today, and over one hundred other periodicals. He and his wife reside near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with their eight children.