With our hometown Seattle Seahawks battling the Green Bay Packers for the NFC Championship, basketball just now is not the sport of the hour. But here’s a charming and interesting interaction between sportscasters Bill Walton and Dave Pasch. Pasch is known as a forthright Christian and, we learn, a Darwin skeptic. In the course of a live telecast of a basketball game on ESPN, his colleague Bill Walton offers him a copy of the Origin of Species as a birthday present, remarking that “We want to make sure that you believe in evolution. “
Pasch politely accepts the book, puts it aside, and says “I don’t.” He goes on to offer to educate Walton about “irreducible complexity.”
On which, I bet, he’d do a creditable job.
Isn’t it funny how Darwin doubters have to be up on their science, to some degree, to meet challenges from critics — even if your field has nothing whatsoever to do with biology or any scientific field. Whereas on the other side of the aisle, Darwin advocates fling insults, shopworn slogans, or books that they themselves likely have not read, and can be shockingly brazen in their ignorance.
I’m not speaking of Bill Walton, by the way, who may well be conversant with the classic texts of 19th-century scientific materialism.
And yes, I know that Michael Behe’s phrase “irreducible complexity” could be construed as a slogan, except that it’s sufficiently learned in nature that I would guess anyone who uses it in a conversation probably knows and could explain what it means. And it’s evident from the context that Pasch, given the opportunity, could speak about the subject. For more information about Dr. Behe and his argument for intelligent design from IC, see our Discovery Institute document “About Irreducible Complexity.”