Intelligent Design Piece on NPR’s Morning Edition

NPR’s Morning Edition had another driveway moment yesterday, broadcasting Scientists Hesitant to Debate Intelligent Design, about the latest religiously-based challenge to evolution theory.  Reporter David Kestenbaum interviewed leading ID’er Michael Behe, a biology professor at LeHigh University, as well as ID opponent Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University.  The piece was fairly even-handed; go listen.

I have no problem when ID’ers challenge evolutionary extremists (such as atheist scientist Richard Dawkins) who categorically insist that, in the story of life’s origin and development, there’s no room whatsoever for God. 

But too many ID’ers insist on going beyond that — and go off the rails in the process. 

Certainly there’s much we don’t (yet) know about how such-and-such a biological feature came into being.  But some ID’ers jump to the conclusion that we should therefore simply stop looking for more evidence.  They triumphantly proclaim that the feature in question simply could not have arisen through evolution; so why bother investigating any further?

Categorical statements like this by ID’ers are just as bad as the opposite ones by the evolutionary extremists.  People who make such statements are leading with their chins.  As Professor Miller points out (paragraphing and emphasis edited):

As he [Behe] realizes, however, the mere existence of structures and pathways that have not yet been given step-by-step Darwinian explanation does not make much of a case against evolution. Critics of evolution have laid down such challenges before, only to see them backfire when new scientific work provided exactly the evidence they had demanded.

Behe himself once made a similar claim when he challenged evolutionists to produce transitional fossils linking the first fossil whales with their supposed land-based ancestors (Behe 1994: 61). Ironically, not one, not two, but three transitional species between whales and land-dwelling Eocene mammals had been discovered by the end of 1994 when his challenge was published (Gould 1994: 8-15).

I’ve found a useful rule of thumb to be that all categorical statements are bad — including this one.  Zealots on both sides of the intelligent-design debate should keep that in mind.