Michael Behe has just wrapped up a speaking tour of the UK. Finishing it off over the weekend was a lecture at a conference at the Oxford Brookes University, and now a short column in The Guardian responding to Andrew Brown.
My contention is that ‘the purposeful arrangement of parts’ to achieve a specific purpose is the criterion that enables us to recognise design. I argued that the conclusion of design in the bacterial flagellum and in many other biological systems is no different from discerning it for a mousetrap or a Ford Mondeo.
So what makes Intelligent Design fundamentally different from Darwinism? The Darwinian view which dominates biology holds that the design we all see in life is merely illusory and that life is essentially a blind and purposeless phenomenon. Intelligent Design claims that the design is real and demonstrable; we are left to draw our own conclusions about the implications.
How the design is delivered, however, is a separate matter.
Read the full piece here.