Answering the Best Objections to Irreducible Complexity and Intelligent Design w/ Dr. Michael Behe 

As promised, here's a post compiling all my past conversations/debates featuring Michael Behe: chroniclesofstrength.substack.com/p/the-michael-behe-collection-conversations?r=q941p&s=w&

I've always thought of mental process as the antithesis of natural process, that's why we find they are mutually exclusive in nature and function. It seems to me that if the space-time-matter-energy of the world is under the thermodynamic law to break down, run-down, disseminate, or lose energy, then mental processes are constantly attempting to build up, organize, functionalize, and aggrandize, properties that natural processes do not have any ability to do. But in between this cline is programmed "mental" process, those processes that our mentality programs to mimic the building, organizing, etc. that we accomplish, such as computer programming. Trees and plant life certainly demonstrate this type of functionality. But then we must ask, if we program computers, who is programming trees, plants, etc.? But that is a separate question entirely. I like CS Lewis' argument that the creation doesn't relate to its creator as side-by-side entities that discover each other, but the relation is best characterized as Hamlet to Shakespeare. Hamlet will never see Shakespeare from within the play in which he's placed, but the play is patterned after his authorship on every level.

You have to love the mindset of an evolutionist, they use intelligence, knowledge, and understanding with intent to explain the emergence of life but refuse to accept intelligence, knowledge, and understanding were necessary in the intent to create life.

great vdieo

Hey Pat love your channel! Do you have any good introductory epistemology book recommendations? Thanks!

Love Dr. Behe. Unfortunate that so much attention is paid to not serious people who bully people into going along with their presuppositions. Sad that we allow them to.

I can't make heads or tails of this discussion. Anyway, I heard one guy say that he doesn't believe God created man because he believes that God has no desire to create man. If I understood this correctly, then I think this is putting it very lightly. I believe that God doesn't even NEED to create man because He (God) is already perfect. So the question is why Did He? This is because there is so much Love between the FATHER and the SON that there is more than enough Love to share with man. It's like there are couples who has so much love between them that they adopt more children on top of their real children.

Maybe in a revised edition of his books, Dr Behe shoukd add a new Chapter Zero, front and centre of the book in question, answering all the objections by the press that they keep repeating so that they stop outting them in the reviewnof the book cos theyre already answered in the book!

Dr. Behe is dope

Lets say that an intelligence had a hand in designing some of these biological machines. Presumably that would have to be at the level of DNA 'programming'? I'm wondering at what point this would be. Is it spontaneous changes or during some specific process and how does a DNA change at some point in time propagate through all the cells of an organisms. Presumably near conception?

And EVEN if the book were written in a different language, we would recognize the design in it. When we look into the cell, the closer we look, we see an invisible hand.

Hey, do you know of any good philosophical books on the Eucharist? Information about spatial extension in the Eucharist?

ALL life fulfills all the requirements of a necessity for the origin and maintenance of life, plain and simple.

I just do not get why you would need irreducible complexity for his initial argument: 1. A mind behind it is the ONLY observed explanation for parts arranged as a machine with a purpose. 2. We observe parts arranged as machines with a purpose in biological machines. Therefore A mind is behind biological machines.

Every time I watch these wonderful ID scientists, Dr. Behe, Dr. Meyer, Dr. Tour....go up against these chemical origin of life scientists, it always reminds me of the dialog between Dr. Tyrell and Roy Batty explaining to him why he could not extend life.....life is not easy to make. (Movie referenced...Blade Runner 1984)

Hasn't a lot of this been disproven? Like the blood clotting thing and wales?

Dr. Michael Behe must be a master of all knowledge, I like it a little more than dunk of a bull.

Quick suggestion: please place your webcam on a separate surface from your computer/table cos everytime you hit the table, your camera view shakes and thats distracting and doesnt come across as pro.

Now we have determined our Creator exists now the question is; how can we communicate with Him?

I think where he is going wrong is a confusion between purpose and function.

Nice to see Michael Behe. Great interview. Edit...i appreciate you are setting up objections to Behe, but i feel like you got stuck in the philosophical weeds and beat a dead horse on philosophical objections over the scientific ones.

As a biologist, the idea of evolution through random error seems foolish these days. We all study many processes like endosymbiosis, whole gene duplication, hybridization, horizontal gene transfer, gene jumping and so on that produce huge changes. We also study adaptive radiation where after a snowball earth, for example, species rapidly evolve to fill millions of empty niches. Over millions of years, new Classes, Orders, Families and so on emerge time and time again. In the vey least, some cooperative consciousness is involved, even at a basic level, with a decision-making process of evaluating, remembering and decision making taking place. It is intelligence at every level finding the best alternative to suit the local circumstances. It is very sophisticated, multi-level intelligence. Call it intelligent design? Sure. Irreducible complexity? It remains a puzzle for scientists. Maybe in 50 years we will develop more knowledge about how that might take place. It seems to happen millions and millions of times, and I can’t yet just say “God did it”.

Anchor your camera.

He was refuted during Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board.

What is wrong with RU-vid I can't believe I'm seeing this video now 😔 Are they purposely trying to keep these videos from people.

Atheisss say all you need to do is need or want and evo kicks in You would need a brain to know if you need to evo So you would need a brain from the start and what container that would needed to self evolve held that brain To many dead ends for that starting line thinking

15:50... and we understand this because it has been demonstrated to be true. We have proven humans make ink and use it to write books. No such connection has been demonstrated between the universe and a creator.

Bhee and his colleagues were so utterly defeated in Dover versus kitzmiller that a judge appointed by Ronald Reagan utterly through their case out. Intelligent design is simply religion dressed up as science

If you start with a conclusion and then work backwards to prove it, then you will rarely find truth. Especially if you identify your conclusion as "true" at the onset of your investigation.

You can always logically pick apart an argument but when you zoom back out and look at everything, God is the ONLY explaination. God unites science, philosophy, morality AND history (i.e. psychology).

And to the young Christian philosopher with the crucifix on the background, shal we start our lab sessions in the name of God, and then conclude that God exists and created everything? Forgive me for doubting your critical objectivity.

Michael, as a cultural anthropologist, and while I do not see the evidence backing your inferences on ID, I have come to respect the sincerity of your work and public performance. Nonetheless, I want to urge you to consider that science is never conducted in a socio-political vacuum. I am afraid that the religious anti-science crowd is something you need to consider when framing your responses. The earth was not created in six days, even if an interlocutor has an ak47 pointing at me.

Irreducible Complexity is a creationist concept. It is “I believe in god, therefore X” which is not at all scientific. You cannot falsify god. You cannot test a hypothesis based on “surely god did it”.

You have not refuted anything. Your theories and hypotheses are actually completely un scientific themselves. But I'll forget about that for the moment. And just ask one question. If there is no intelligent desiand generally speaking, everything was a sort of random occurrences or events over long.s of time. That means that everything is random, including the thoughts in your brand at this very moment. So your brain is just a random occurrence. It was not designed to be a brain to think to use logic. So that would mean every thought you have is also just a random event. So your brain was not designed to think. Why would you believe anything that you do think. Is this theory of yours? That debunks intelligent designs supposedly something that you designed with your intelligence. Or is it just random words coming out of your mouth? How did you come up with an intelligent design theory? If intelligent design does not exist? It sounds like you're sayintelligent design doesn't exist except when it refers to you. It's actually completely illogical. The problem is not that The lack of evidence for God or an intelligent designer. The problem is you do not want to believe in one. A true scientist follows where the evidence takes him even if he doesn't like, where it takes him. All evidence suggest a creator a designer. Despite the evidence you refuse to believe, and that's the problem.

why did God design painful cancer in young children?

You might as well call this answering the best objections to a flat Earth. Because just like the flat Earth intelligent design is wrong so it doesn't make any sense to answer objections to it because it's just wrong..

MB conflates purpose with function. It's an equivocation fallacy combined with an argument from analogy. The only reason you know there is a purpose behind human-designed things is the prior knowledge and evidence that humans designed those things. One of his favorite examples about how we recognize design in Mount Rushmore... There is no reason to think that if an alien race with no prior knowledge of humans or human faces saw Mount RUshmore for the first time they would think it was designed and not a naturally occurring rock formation. He is poisoning the well with these fallacious analogies where our own knowledge and bias tells us that humans made that thing. There is a reason it's called the watchmaker FALLACY. A proper analogy would be if you see a shape or an object that is completely unknown and unrecognizable to you and you have zero intuitions about it, you have no reason to think 'design'. That's where his argument falls apart because all his analogies just come down to intuition based on human-created things. Intuition can get things very wrong when it comes to things you've never seen and don't understand. Theists really want to be able to use analogies to prove something but analogies are not arguments. Does this guy not recognize his own anthropomorphic bias in these analogies? Here is how absurd these arguments are. I can use the same logic and assert that ALL fundamental particles (quarks, electrons, etc.) must be designed because they serve the purpose of being constituent parts for other things, since we know that humans design complex things from simpler things. There is no need to talk about bacterial flagellums or human eyes or biology altogether, because based on that logic EVERYTHING is designed because everything consists of particles which serve that purpose. See the problem? I've asserted/made-up an INTENDED purpose in particles, when i'm actually only describing a function. Every single thing in this universe has a function i.e. every thing does what it does, and the second you conflate function with purpose - which is the basis of this entire nonsense argument, you've made a fallacious argument and you can use that to say that everything is designed. But if everythign is design, you can't distinguish designed things from non-designed things because there are no non-designed things. See how intuition can lead you down to some ridiculous conclusions? Also IC has been thoroughly debunked by the science community.

The real problem for intelligent design is the designer. You see if you're proposing some kind of supernatural superbeing as the designer, you first need to justify why it needs to be a supernatural superbeing in the first place, but by that point who cares? you're just proposing creationism with extra steps. If on the other hand you hold an agnostic position on the designer - could be natural, could be supernatural - you're accepting the proposition that a designer of sufficient intelligence and complexity to design all life on this planet could come about as a result of natural processes. and if the designer can be the result of natural processes .... then so can all life on this planet

Man get to the point 11:41

It comes as no surprise that virtually everybody commenting here, in favor of Behe, invoke religiously motivated assumptions. It’s always God (he?), or who being forcibly injected at the limits of their understanding. It’s all “god of the gaps” dressed up in jargon. How many millennia of you pushing this deity back further and further before you start to realize that it explains nothing.

Question to Dr. Behe: How does its feel to completely drop your scientific integrity to advocate for a cult, and basicly lie to your audience?

A computer made life and the rest of the universe. DNA is a code that must come from intelligence. A GOD would not need any code!

You talk too much!