Behe and the New New Atheism
Michael Behe (pronounced BEE-HEE) is a biochemist, and a professor at Lehigh University. He gained notoriety in 1996 with the publication of his book Darwin’s Black Box (DBB). It may have actually hurt his standing with his fellow scientists that the book was named by the magazine Christianity Today as the years best “Christian” book. All that aside, the book generated substantial debate within the scientific community and continues today to be highly controversial.
The title of the book has to do with they way Charles Darwin and his peers viewed the fundamental building blocks of life in their day. Just as the atom is pictured as the building block of chemistry, so the cell performs the equivalent function for biology. Plants and animals are made of up cells—at least a trillion of them for human beings. Darwin, who could only dimly view cells without the help of the high powered microscopes we have today, thought each cell was simply a blob of protoplasm. In this way, the cell was a “black box” whose contents were likely to be simple and not important for his theory of evolution.
Fast forward a hundred years. Microscopes became very powerful. In fact advanced microscopes no longer use visible light, but electrons. A scanning electron microscope and its kin can probe the microscopic world with a power that rivals the Hubble telescope in its grasp of the cosmos. Individual atoms can even be viewed in all their glory.
So what happened when modern scientists finally opened Darwin’s black box? They were amazed! Rather than blobs of protoplasm, they found that each individual cell was a tiny, but highly organized factory, of miniature molecular machines. Examples of such machines can be found at www.arn.org/mm/mm.htm . A spectacular DVD showing the inner workings of the cellular factory is entitled Unlocking the Mystery of Life.
Now if you take the trouble to view some of these molecular machines, say by following the hyperlinks that branch off the above page and others that you will encounter, you find something striking: these structures appear to be man-made. For example, the bacterial flagellum motor looks very much like an electric motor made in some coil-winding shop in downtown Kearny, New Jersey! But in spite of its appearance, this “motor” is an object in nature. Somehow, “nature” was able to generate it from raw bits of molecules and atoms from “plans” it had encoded in the DNA of the organism that produced it. Very clever, Mother Nature! But Mother, where did you get the plans, and once you had them, what were the processes that you used to put the thing together?
That’s exactly Behe’s point. The theory that he, a professional biologist had been brought up on, aka Darwinian evolution, says that the processes at work are UN-planned and random. How is it possible that an unplanned random process can generate objects that in our macro-world are clearly planned and non-random?
For this I give Behe credit for being as good an engineer as he is a scientist. Engineers like me know that it is HARD to get machines to work right, even after many tries. Scientists, on the other hand, while very clever in their theories, usually are immune from actually having to make things that work and keep on working. Biologists, particularly, are principally observers—observers of things already with the appearance of design built in. They don’t actually get to design those things that are apparently designed. Oh, they might design a clever experiment to study their biological entities. But I’ve been there, done that, in my days as an experimental physicist. I can tell you it’s much much easier to design a clever piece of experimental apparatus, than it is to build some piece of electronics equipment that has to work perfectly for 20 years in the telephone system, where literally lives are at stake. (Think calling 911 when the electricity goes out.)
We use to have a saying at Bell Labs as we “interacted” with the marketing department. My colleague Gary Edmonds came up with it: “It’s not what you know that makes it hard, it’s what you don’t know that makes it easy.” By that he meant that the marketing folks were always wanting you to add features to your product that had never been done before. In their mind—not being real engineers—it should be easy to add those features. It was what no one knew (the new features and what it took to produce them) that led to the assumption that it would be easy to do. (It never was.)
And so it is in biology. The non-engineer biologist, like the marketer, can dream up all sorts of “just so” stories to explain how various biological entities came to be from other, simpler entities. The question is, can the biologist explain—by providing the detailed step-by-step processes—how a complex biological object came to be?
That was Behe’s first question. If Darwinian evolution is true, he said, then I should find in the biological literature (journals, treatises, papers, talks, books) a detailed step-by-step explanation of how the molecular machines I and others observe in the laboratory can come into existence by a series of small random steps predicted by Darwin. So search he did. For a long time. I imagine him slumped over his desk in the wee hours of the morning turning the pages of a densely printed journal looking for the article that explains the existence of the bacterial flagellum. But it didn’t happen. He never found such an article, nor any other that remotely explained in detail how any molecular machine came to be. His faith in the theory he had been taught in biology school was faltering.
Then came a second realization by Behe. The structures he was observing had an aspect about them that demanded an explanation. If you were to take one piece of the complex molecular machine away, the machine no longer functioned. At all. It wasn’t just partially broken, with some function left. It was a dead machine, that did nothing. But according to Darwin, complex machine C must have evolved from some less complex machine B, which in turned evolved from even less complex machine A, etc. And all of these machines: A, B, C…. should have some function! Because in the chain of A evolving to B evolving to C, if B had NO function, you would never GET to C. The B species would die out because there would be no reason to reproduce it. It was not “fit” as Darwin put it. And only the fittest survive.
So where did object “C” in the above example come from? If taking away ANY single component reduced it to a non-functioning clump of molecules, how can its origin be explained? Behe came up with a name for objects such as C. He called them “irreducibly complex.” By this he meant that such an object could not be reduced to a set of simpler functioning objects. Hunting for a simple non-biological example, he pointed to the lowly mousetrap. The common household mousetrap made by Victor (with the capital V emblazoned on it) has five components: a base, a spring, a hammer, a catch and a hold down bar. (Behe’s discussion of mousetraps can be found at www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_mousetrapdefended.htm .) If any one of these components is missing, the trap won’t catch mice. So all the precursors to the 5-component mousetrap that one can think of are non-functioning and therefore useless. Their biological analogs would not exist in nature because they confer no advantage and would leave no offspring.
So where do irreducibly complex objects come from? In our world, things like the Victor mousetrap are intelligently designed. That is, an intelligence with foresight and the ability to manipulate the environment with non-random movements produced such an object. Random movements without foresight won’t produce a mousetrap. Is it so large a leap to conclude that objects in nature that look like they are designed (irreducibly complex) are in fact designed? Mother Nature is intelligent. But Mother Nature is much more akin to an Intelligent Spirit than to a random non-planned Darwinian process.
This excursion into Behe’s argument brings us back to the stark contrast we looked at in the last entry. Where do the facts lead? Which of the two parties is suffering the delusion: Richard Dawkins or the Westminster Divines? Dawkins has criticized Behe for “not trying hard enough” to find a “natural” (non-theistic) explanation of his irreducible complexity. On the other hand, the noted (former) atheist Anthony Flew has examined the facts of biochemistry and become a theist! His story can be found at: www.biola.edu/antonyflew/ . To his credit he was willing to allow the data to overturn his presuppositions about the very nature of reality.
But long ago, before the biochemical facts we are discussing here became known, a logical argument was put together by the philosopher Blaise Pascal that bears repeating. This is sometimes known as Pascal’s wager. Suppose there is no God, but you decided to believe in Him anyway. One day you will wake up dead and He will not be there. But of course neither will you. You have lost nothing (since there truly is nothing to lose), and in the meantime you have had the comfort of your belief during your life. On the other hand, suppose there is a God, and you don’t believe in Him. Some day you will wake up dead, and He WILL be there, and hold you accountable for your unbelief. If life is truly a gamble, are you better wagering for God or against God? To Pascal it was obvious.
In our next entry we will return again to the definition of God from the pens of the Westminster Divines with a view toward seeing its practical implications for us as “spirits” created in the image of The Spirit. And we’ll consider a bit more about Behe’s more recent findings.