I’m always interested to ask people about their, as the case may be, intellectual, spiritual, or political evolution. I want to know: You believe this now (fill in the blank), but you weren’t always convinced of (what have you). What was your point of entry for thinking about (this topic)?
Here, in discussing his new book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed, Douglas Axe talks a little bit about his point of entry for thinking dangerous thoughts about molecular biology, halfway through his PhD at Caltech then on to Cambridge University for postdoctoral work.
With Dr. Axe’s book out now, an initial line of attack against it is to wildly caricature his argument about the design intuition. Obviously, he’s not saying that this near-universal response to artifacts in biology is valid because it’s near-universal. It’s valid because it captures genuine scientific reasoning — observation, questioning, and deduction — going on in the form of what Axe calls “common science.”
This common science can be…what shall we say? I don’t care for the word “unpacked” when used in a context other than emptying luggage of its contents in an orderly manner. “Interrogated” isn’t much better. But fine, it can be unpacked and interrogated, judged in a rigorous way as to its merit.
That’s what Axe book does. But to know that, to understand and weigh his arguments and his evidence, you’d have to read it. And that, always, is something the Darwinist critics are reluctant to do.