Do you ever wonder what Darwin proponents would say if they ventured to address arguments for intelligent design in detail? Do they ever? I asked Brazilian chemist Marcos Eberlin to comment based on his own experiences. He was in Seattle to speak about his new book, Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose.
Of course, sometimes evolutionists do debate about specifics. But remember what happened when they came after Michael Behe on polar bear genes and other matters in his book Darwin Devolves. Find the archives of that debate here, including Behe’s exchanges with Richard Lenski, Nathan Lents, and others. As Eberlin observes, for Darwinists, the “devil is in the details” and they fear the devil.
Come to think of it, that metaphor may not be the very best, but you get the point. They greatly prefer to argue at the level of generalities, insults, or empty claims of “consensus,” because when you get down into the finer points, they sense that they can’t win. Eberlin recalls here the story of how one seemingly robust scientific “consensus” dissolved, revealing how fragile it always was.