Quote of the day

I would not have a lot of trouble, actually, talking about any scientific doctrine as a theory, and as one among many, but then I am a student of poetics, and we always think that way.

The problem in the U.S. -- and I pray that it does not spread too much further -- is that people on both sides of this debate turn into literalists. Listening to fundamentalist believers debate aggressive atheists just hurts my head, and I'm sure that many decent folks feel the same way, that there is no space left for those of us who respect convictions about the spirit and yet read their expression in historical context.

I don't know. I don't think that making fun of ignorance is going to help us, although ignorance is clearly threatening us.

It isn't his ignorance I'm making fun of, it's that he's accidentally revealed the truth. Those behind Intelligent Design don't just oppose atheism, they oppose intelligence and education. They want people to remain ignorant and ill-informed, the better to manipulate them.

The Editors of Scientific American must be part of that intelligent, educated segment of the culture.

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above, in it's entirety is behind a subscription wall, full details available at my place here.

Pogge, you are missing the point. That phrase is steeped in the anti-intellectualist tradition of American fundamentalism. His audience knows who he is talking about. He is talking about all those "egg heads" who look down on good, Christian folk. He knows his audience hates those "egg heads" (lots of class hatred there too) and so invokes them like a talisman.

The class hatred is a response to condescension from above, so to speak. It often goes far beyond condescension into undisguised, ugly hatred. As a Christian, I understand very well why Christians resent the sophisticated sneerers out there. Its natural, if un-christian, to return the sentiment.

I call it mutually assured bigotry - MAB for short.

There are some very intelligent people behind intelligent design, and non-Christians among them as well.

There are some very intelligent people behind intelligent design

I won't argue that. But what are they up to? There's an interesting post at Hullabaloo.

pogge, I didn't mean you with my last line -- sorry: I put that badly. You are always gentle and reasonable in the way that you write. I had the noisy literalists of both extremes in mind as I was writing, and didn't realize how that line could be applied.

Dinna fash yerself, lassie.

(Is that how you say that?)

I'll argue that point.

Anytime, anywhere.

And anybody that wants to - let's start with a little ol' Drosophila gene called 'Sevenless'.

pogge: Och, aye.

You could drop the f from "yerself" if you wanted to be even more authentic.

When I say I won't argue that, I'm talking about the people behind Intelligent Design, not the people who believe it. There are some extremely clever strategists pushing this.

That is interesting. I've heard of the Wedge thing. It was referenced by a writer in a textbook about intelligent design I was browsing at our university book store. He argued that since Philip Jonson wrote a book called The Wedge of Truth it couldn't be considered a hidden agenda sort of thing. He also figured that ID should stand or fall on its scientific merits which was the point of the textbook. (a collection of writers from both sides of the debate)

I think it will be fascinating and a good thing to see more Christians becoming interested in science.

He also figured that ID should stand or fall on its scientific merits...

But it has no scientific merits. A theory which can't be proven false isn't science. I would have no problem with ID being taught in religious studies but it has no place in a science class.

I think it will be fascinating and a good thing to see more Christians becoming interested in science.

Almost missed this. Are you under the impression that all biologists are atheists? There are lots of scientists who are Christians. And Muslims. And Jews. And Buddhists. And Hindus. And Sufi....

Ok, stand or fall on its merits or lack thereof.

There are serious scientists who argue for ID and to take an example of a disprovable component, so to speak, of the ID theory there's Micheal Behe's irreducible complexity arguement about which I was involved in a bit of a debate about. He posits that there are a number of biological structures that absolutely need several parts in place to work. If any one of them isn't there, the structure doesn't work at all. Its disprovable - if you can show that there are clear step by step ways for various biological systems to have evolved as opposed to taking fantastic leaps all at once which would make it almost absurd to think it happened by random mutation. Behe's arguement has stimulated good debate. I learned a lot about evolutionary theory while I conclude that he still has a stronger arguement than his opponents. They seem to deal in hypotheticals like the "roman arch" theory - the arch is built up with scaffolding that is taken down afterwards. The arch appears to be an irreducibly complex structure needing all of its peices in place to stand while it was actually built up bit by bit.

Speaking of scientific merit, I don't think its scientific to assume from the outset that life cannot have originated from an intelligent being. Am I correct that scientific naturalism does just that?

Whether or not ID is ultimately a viable contender with its opponent, what I fear is that the reaction to it will be as fundamentalist and dogmatic as the fundamentalists supposedly behind ID. That won't help anything.

I certainly do not think that there are no religious biologists. I meant more Christians - meaning to imply that there are already a number of them.

There are serious scientists who argue for ID

There are serious scientists in particular fields who argue for ID without submitting it to the same peer review process by which they earned their reputations as serious scientists.

From what I can see, Behe took his theory of irreducible complexity directly to the public. No publications in scientific periodicals, no experimentation, no peer review. Serious scientists have, in turn, considered his theory and found it wanting.

I don't think its scientific to assume from the outset that life cannot have originated from an intelligent being. Am I correct that scientific naturalism does just that?

I don't know what "scientific naturalism" is but science tries to make as few assumptions as possible. Science doesn't assume there is or there isn't an "Intelligent Designer", it works with the facts it has.

That is quite what ID-ers are about. Behe was working with the facts: there are stuctures that appear to be such that stepwise evolution could not have created them. The logical conclusion appears to be that there was more than chance involved in their development. But that idea has been ruled out by the establishment, so to speak.

Hugh Ross is working with the facts when he says: we can only know of one universe - to believe there are others is purely speculative. The universe we're in appears to be ordered in such a manner that the chance of it resulting from purely random forces are utterly unlikely. There must be something behind it.

It is a conclusion rather than an assumption.

Look at the words in your comment. There are structures that "appear" to be such. That's a speculation. The universe ... "appears" to be ordered in such a manner. Another speculation. They've reached the conclusion they want and then dreamed up a theory to support it. That isn't science.

Of course scientists speculate. But when they're finished speculating they get down to the business of constructing hypotheses that can be tested. And the scientific community concludes nothing until those tests can duplicated by any other scientist who cares to with the same results.

When opponents of evolution say it's "just" a theory, they're wrong. It's a scientific theory which has been subjected to the disciplined scrutiny of trained scientists for 150 years. Call me when Behe or Ross start publishing in the journals in such a way that other scientists can duplicate their results.

I'm not arguing that faith has no place in your life. That's for another discussion. I'm arguing that it has no place in science. And I'm arguing that Intelligent Design has no place in a science classroom because it misleads students about what science is and how it's done.

So, what kind of structures are we talking about here, anyway?
I know they used to talk about eyes. They would say there's no use having half an eye. Turned out there is too, and scientists carefully illuminated each stage from photosensitive spots on single-celled creatures through arrays of light-sensitive cells in a pit for directionality, to "pinhole camera"-like eyes, all the way through to human or octopus eyes with complex retinas, lenses and the whole shebang.
So, what kind of structures?

PLG--

Doesn't matter -- show me a complex eye and I'll show you a functionally critical modular signaling pathway that is patterned by homologous genes in a budding yeast....and from there we can go up and down the evolutionary ladder anyway you choose.

Case in point a critical fly eye gene mentioned upthread called "Sevenless", which is the prototype of all that ImClone targetted with Erbitux. Regardless, let's ignore Martha Stewart and her own not-so Intelligent Design, for the moment and move on to another Drosophila gene called "Wingless"*.

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*hint: adematous polyposis coli

OK, you guys are losing me now but don't let that stop you. Carry on.

Robbie, I recommend that you put down the Behe and actually read an academic journal like Evolution or The Journal of Evolutionary Biology or Nature or Science, etc. If it is too technical for you, you can go and read Richard Dawkins's books like The Extended Phenotype or Climbing Mount Improbable for clear, well-documented rebuttals to the points raised by Behe and his ilk.

To make a play on the old adage about the Holy Roman Empire, Intelligent Design is neither intelligent nor well-designed.

I'm lost too :)

pogge: "Look at the words in your comment. There are structures that "appear" to be such. That's a speculation. The universe ... "appears" to be ordered in such a manner. Another speculation. They've reached the conclusion they want and then dreamed up a theory to support it. That isn't science."

That's just not true. "appear" is not a speculation, its an observation. Behe's basic logic is: look, we've got these structures that don't work if just this peice is missing. They don't work if just that peice is missing. They don't work if just that other piece is missing. The dominant theory of evolution says things evolve tiny bit by tiny bit, with each step improving the viability of the organism. How can that explain these structures? Is it reasonable to theorize that the whole thing popped into place at once by random mutation? What else could explain the origin of these structures?

This is what Darwin said about irreducibly complex structures: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

I tend to agree with Darwin, although I have seen decent replacement theories on how evolution could occur in an other than stepwise fashion. Genetics don't only change by point mutation. There's mixing and matching, and so on.

Ross looks at the various laws and constants of the universe and argues that life as we know it could not exist if any one of a large variety of those (such as the speed of light) were different by an often infitestimal amount. He also says its useless to speculate about life as we don't know it unless we can demonstrate how it could work. So we have life and his observation of what life depends on is such that it would seem ("seem" being a way of expressing the fact that this is a scientific theory and therefore subject to doubt) that this is not a randomly generated universe.

That is absolutely scientific reasoning. There's a crazy paradox in the works as I see it. A lot of people figure that any "scientific" theory that concludes that there is most likely an intelligent force behind our universe is self evidently not a scientific theory. Yet to assume that they are wrong because of their conclusions... that is surely not scientific either.

PLG - there are some structures in Behe's Molecular Machines:
Experimental Support for the Design Inference. It includes eyesight, protiens, and a few other examples. http://www.arn.org/mm/mm.htm

And this links to a page of Behe's answers to critics. The third one down addresses the peer-review comment you made pogge, and you might be interested in it: http://www.arn.org/behe/mb_response.htm

I figure that the at times fundamentalist response to ID is no way to show kids what science is about either. Your 150 years of science arguement appears compelling, but don't forget that it was once accepted that Newtonian physics had vitually explained how the universe worked - that all the next generation of physicists had to do was carry the calculations to the next decimal point.

It's ultimatly is an appeal to authority, even if an apparently reasonable one.

Justin, just saw your post. I think I'll start with the textbook at the university bookstore, although I appreciate the suggestion and may get around to reading some Dawkins one day. It could be fun...

Ross looks at the various laws and constants of the universe and argues that life as we know it could not exist if any one of a large variety of those ... were different by an often infitestimal amount.

So?

So we have life and his observation of what life depends on is such that it would seem ... that this is not a randomly generated universe.

Why not? It could be. Ross is working backwards. He wants to believe that life couldn't possibly be the result of random generation because the odds look so long, so he has to suppose an intelligence. But supposition is all it is. That's not the way science works.

I read the comments from Behe about peer review. It doesn't prove a lot. Any unorthodox theory will meet resistance so he's got a tough road to hoe even if he's right. But the resistance he's meeting doesn't prove he's right. He needs to come up with specific tests that others can duplicate.

Notice that he's gotten a warmer reception from philosophical journals than straight science publications. Maybe that's because what he's doing is really closer to philosophy than to science.

What I take from it is that he's in a similar position to Ross. He looks at a structure whose complexity he can't find a way to reduce and figures that if he can't, no one can. Admittedly the one rebuttal he printed went way off track, but it did make the essential point. Conventional evolutionary science continues to answer questions that seemed unanswerable even a short time ago. The onus is still on Behe to prove his point using scientific methodology.

Robbie: What Behe is saying is that there are some structures are irreducibly complex and thus could not have evolved according to accepted theories of so far. This is fine as a negative argument. However, his implicit positive one, viz., that god created these structures, sucks. The problem is how does a non-spatially extended God interact with the world to create these structures? What the ID people want is to do have an unworkable and outdated Cartesian substance dualism declared a scientific. It is not.

Aw darn.....I messed up in my fervor going up and down that ladder leaning against the phylogenetic tree....

Because I'm not pre-supposing an intelligent hand that wipes out randomness in one foul swoop.

Quite the opposite.

What I am suggesting is that small organizing steps, steps that can be driven entirely driven by natural selection, can fuel huge leaps in organization later.

Thus, all of these calculations of the infintesimal odds to reach a complex structure based on random combinations themselves have infintesimal validity because the combinations themselves are not random.

Apologies for the confusion and greater apologies for the appearance of slagging on PLG - didn't mean to do that at all.

?What I am suggesting is that small organizing steps, steps that can be driven entirely driven by natural selection, can fuel huge leaps in organization later.?

If these organizing steps are produced by natural selection, wherein the intelligent design?

An intelligent creator just drops out as an irrelevant postulate.

pogge: "Why not? It could be. Ross is working backwards. He wants to believe that life couldn't possibly be the result of random generation because the odds look so long, so he has to suppose an intelligence. But supposition is all it is. That's not the way science works."

Well of course it *could* be. Just about anything could be - evolutionary theory could be wrong, but that doesn't mean it is. I don't understand your attribution to Ross of him wanting to believe something and coming up with a theory to support it. I mean, lets suppose he is - shouldn't his theory be flawed? Does he have a history of nutty theories that have been shown to be wishful thinking? This is related to the anonymity debate at the E-Group and elsewhere. Most people seem to figure an arguement should stand on its merits.(or lack of)

Lets go through the scientific method and see how it applies to Ross's theory:

1.State the problem
2.Make Observations
3.Form a Hypothesis
4.Do the Experiment
5.Draw a conclusion.

Problem: how did life come about

Observations: we cannot know there are more universes than our own. we cannot hypothesize life as we don't know it (ie, not carbon-based) until we can demostrate that it could work. only known life is on earth. conditions for that life are pretty fragile, and dependent on a lot of variables being right - even for the simplest of organisms.

Hypothesis: The existence of any life is dependent on a lot a variables being right (I'll give examples from one of Ross's books later) - such that the chance determination of those variables is an unlikely explanation. They were more likely set by an intelligence.

Experiment: Look at what conditions are required for life. Look to see if there is life on other planets - that will improve our knowledge on what conditions life requires.

Conclusion: Ross concludes that life was almost certainly not the result of chance.

There are two ways to approach his theory. You can look at the conclusion and say "that's self-evidently not scientific". That objection, however, is self-evidently not scientific - it assumes that a particular conclusion is wrong. That's exactly what you (pogge) accuse Ross of doing - making assumptions about conclusions. The other option is to argue its merits.

Behe's case is more complex. His theory is that evolution was guided by an intelligent force. You cannot prove that. You can't run tests on that. Yet Behe argues in this letter that intelligent design is empirically detectable: http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_idisnotcreationism.htm

Clearly, his challege to Darwin's theory and his own theory are separate things.

koby: "how does a non-spatially extended God interact with the world to create these structures?"

That objection is philosophical. Or are you saying that there's no way to observe this influence, and therefore it's out of the purview of science?

RossK, Ross's "infitestimal" calculations aren't about biological structures but about the conditions neccessary for life in the first place. Natural selection can't address his theory unless the universe's charachteristics were determined by that.

So maybe your arguement could apply to Behe. But Behe is arguing that there are structures that simply don't work unless a number of peices are working at once. He argues that it couldn't have happened stepwise. Darwin said the same thing (as I quoted earlier). I think stepwise evolution is refuted by Behe, but there may be other explanations.

I hope this isn't too blathery, I'm trying to keep it short.

Thanks all -- points well taken....will make sure I clarify things, but most importantly stay calm and not start ranting, next time.

Re: stepwise....remember Darwin had the phenes, but he didn't have the genes...and while Mendel had (or forced) the genes, he didn't have the modularity within them, which is even something that Crick didn't have when he cracked the code (as opposed to that bit of serendipity he had a little earlier when he guessed right about the structure based on Rosy Franklin's crystallographic images).

whoops....almost started again.

Natural selection, genetic drift are readily intelligible mechanisms. Divine intervention is not. Categorize the point how you will, the point still holds.

Robbie:

I don't believe more examples from Ross' work will serve any purpose because I can see where I part company with him.

Observations: we cannot know there are more universes than our own.

To say we cannot know something isn't an observation, it's an assumption. He's making a leap from "we don't know" to "we can't know" without foundation. He's postulating a theory based on what we don't know, rather than what we do know. That's where I say he's backing into his conclusion.

This is similar to what I said Behe is doing. He can't reduce the complexity of a structure right now, so he assumes that no one will ever be able to do it.

It may make for interesting theories, but I don't believe they're scientific. Science works on the premise that if we work patiently enough and carefully enough, we can find out.

I just wanted to answer this now, more later... "To say we cannot know something isn't an observation, it's an assumption"

Its more a statement of fact - or what is accepted as the correct theory. Not that I have a clue about it, but Einstien stated that as soon as something exists whithin one universe it cannot know or detect any other universe. I'm sure Ross'll change his mind if that turns out wrong, but you work with what you know in science.

There seems to me to be more than a little irony in invoking Einstein to support Ross. While Ross is an Old Earth Creationist, doesn't he still believe in a creation event, a discrete beginning to the universe? Einstein thought the universe was timeless with no beginning and no end.

So Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is just a theory despite the fact that scientists have been banging on it for generations and the overwhelming majority still feel it's overwhelmingly the best explanation we have. But Einstein's theories, which are infinitely more difficult to prove and which physicists are still struggling to understand suddenly become certain enough to stand as refutation for Darwin's theory?

Oh man.

I missed the Hugh Ross thing way upthread.

Now I get it.

Thought I had become an old earth creationist....

Am glad that I'm at least on an assymptotic path with the guy who thinks about no beginning and no end (but does figure on physical laws as being organizing principles).....

Sorry, Ross. I'll try to remember to be specific about which Ross I'm referring to from here on out.

Maybe I should change my name to Chrysler....and head on out to Washington DC for a handout of a billion or two, give or take.

Ross?s theory doesn?t address Darwin?s theory. His is cosmological, while Darwin?s is biological. His ID argument is focused on the universe and the conditions for life rather than the development of it. So let?s say it is possible to detect other universes. Until we know how it makes sense to work with what we know.

RossK: ?Darwin had the phenes, but he didn't have the genes?

Right. I love the slogan style poetry!

koby ? I misunderstood your point. I had the point you?re actually making in mind when I noted that Behe?s negative argument against Darwin?s theory and his claim to be able to find empirical evidence of Intelligent Design are separate things. In fact I think I said what you just did: ?Behe's case is more complex. His theory is that evolution was guided by an intelligent force. You cannot prove that. You can't run tests on that.?

On the other hand you can never prove that natural selection is responsible for life. You can run tests to show that it?s possible (or impossible). Maybe, in the absence of any other explanation, the degree to which we discover it to be possible should determine the degree to which we agree with the probability of one theory or the other.

pogge?s objection to that: ?Science works on the premise that if we work patiently enough and carefully enough, we can find out.? is a strong one. Take the history of vestigial organs: it was originally thought that there were a number of them, but one by one functions have been discovered for each. One of the latest postulated vestigial organs is the muscle that moves your ear. People are getting desperate! I believe Isaac Newton?s great advance in our understanding of the world was based on the idea that God would make a rational world based on underlying laws.

But there seems to be a point of tension here. Behe?s work has been to show that it appears that life is not explainable without postulating intelligent intervention. In Darwin?s time the cell was thought to be a mere blob. Now we know that it is a fantastic machine. While Behe does not assume there can be no refuting of his argument (?When I first read this section of Miller's book I was quite impressed by the prospect that actual experiments--not theoretical, "just-so" stories--had produced a genuine, non-trivial counterexample to irreducible complexity.? ? Michael Behe) I think he has good reason to predict that the evidence in his field will continue to support it. That?s what it?s been doing since Darwin?s time. If the evidence does continue to march in that direction then is it reasonable to assume that the opposite of the evidence is true? By all means be critical, and look closer, but don?t discount it out of hand.

On Behe--OK, so he claims proteins, eyes, and "a few other examples" are cases of irreducible complexity.

OK, so he's flat wrong about eyes. They're not a case of irreducible complexity. Even the most minimal eyespot turns out to be useful; there's plenty of critters to this day that have them. And there are tons of stages in between, and each of them turns out to focus light a little better than the one before, from simple light-sensing to directional light-sensing to various stages of blurred imaging and motion detection. There's a voluminously documented record of gradual change between critters with only a tiny bit of eye and critters with a little bit more of an eye and critters with something of an eye and critters with most of an eye. Eyes aren't irreducible complexity. Period, full stop, the end, there is no longer any serious question on the subject. If this guy is still pushing eyes as irreducible he is flat out mistaken or intellectually dishonest.

Proteins. Proteins aren't all that complex, at least not the small ones. And early life and almost-life, like little globs of impure water with lipid membranes, would be at the size of single cells (depending on definitions they wouldn't actually *be* cells yet, but they'd be happening at that size level). Which in turn means that you could fit billions of them in one tidal pool, or around one undersea vent, or whatever--much less worldwide. Which means that there'd be an awful lot of kinda-random events happening in them every day, and really a lot every year, and starkly unimaginable numbers in a billion years. The chances of something sooner or later starting to repeatably make some kind of protein or protein-like substance that was in some way useful to it seems high. And once that happened, and there ended up being millions of those because the proteiny thing was useful, you're going to get variations happening and you're going to end up with lotsa proteins and more elaborate proteins and the whole nine yards. If you can dig some kind of early RNA transcription of molecules at all, I don't see where proteins are a big problem.
It might be unlikely that we'd get *the particular proteins we ended up with*--but it's likely we'd get *something*. And as usual, the stuff that didn't work wouldn't happen again.

On the universe thing--that's an interesting argument, sort of. Let's see if I can paraphrase it. Basically, it appears to come down to:

It seems as if most sets of physical laws a universe could have would not support the kind of life we have here on earth. It appears that those physical laws are somewhat arbitrary, and there are effectively an infinite number of possibilities as to what kind of universe there might have been.
Since we don't know that any other kind of life can exist, we can for practical purposes say that if the universe had been different, there would have been no life.
Thus, it is a vanishingly unlikely coincidence that we are in a universe where life can exist.
If there were many universes, this difficulty would be defeated, but we can't or at least don't know if there are so we need to think as if there are not.

Conclusion:
God, or some equivalent creative principle, must be responsible for this apparent extreme co-incidence.

Is that a fair description?
OK, I think there are a number of problems with that argument, whether it can be considered "scientific" or not.
First, there is a lot of current cosmological research which suggests a number of problems with some of the assumptions. Multi-universe hypotheses are looking more likely and more testable all the time. And, there is also research suggesting that the physical laws coming out of big-bang events are not arbitrary but have various constraints. This stuff pretty much blows the whole hypothesis out of the water; if there are many (presumably infinite) universes then it becomes effectively inevitable that we'll be in one of them, and we're asking questions from that particular one because, duh, it's the one we're in. But, leaving that aside--

Perhaps most importantly, it's interesting what this guy insists on assuming about things we don't or can't know. We don't/can't know whether there could be other kinds of life, so we must assume there isn't any. We don't/can't know whether there are many universes, so we must assume there aren't.
Now I think it's fair to say we don't or can't know if some supreme being was really responsible for something that appears to be a co-incidence. Yet on this don't/can't know, he insists suddenly that we must assume it *WAS*. Maybe he should make up his mind about which direction we must go on questions the answers to which we don't or can't know.

From a different direction, look, there's a universe. It must have some set of physical laws. Any other set would have been equally unlikely and an equally wild co-incidence. If it had happened to be a wild unlikely co-incidence that resulted in no life, then there would be no living things around saying "hey, what are the odds of these particular physical laws", but that would not in itself make those laws less unlikely. The laws we happen to have aren't particularly any *more* unlikely than any other set.
So the argument reduces to "Things are as they are and not some other way. God must be responsible!"

I'm not persuaded.

And now I'm even less persuaded than I already wasn't. You know what I mean.

pogge: "And now I'm even less persuaded than I already wasn't"

:) Join the club though...

PLG: "They're not a case of irreducible complexity. Even the most minimal eyespot turns out to be useful"

That arguement was basically used by Darwin and its what Behe starts with: http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_idfrombiochemistry.htm
(first paragraph - "A Series of Eyes")

He's not saying there's no simpler example out there, as I guess you've taken by the irreducible title. Something is irreducible if there are a certain number of parts (I think just more than one) where if any of those particular parts were missing none of the structure works to any appreciable degree. Behe asks how can that evolve step by step when you need each of these particular parts to all be there at once?

Your arguement about the origin of protien is a well done standard formulation. I think Behe prefers to deal with specific structures. I'd just point out that scientists have been unable to make that sort of thing happen, despite their best efforts to date.

I think your summarization of Ross's arguement is good.

I'd certainly agree that if it were discovered that there are a near-infinite number of universes Ross's arguement would lose its compelling-ness.

I find your arguement that Ross is making unwarranted assumptions confuddling. We don't know about life as we don't know it and we don't know about other universes. The best of our knowledge is that life requires a strict set of conditions and there's only one universe. Given that, the most likely explanation is that there was intelligence behind it. Its a probability calculation.

Assuming there is only a very small set of universes that could support life your claim that the fact that there is life proves that that fantastic chance did happen stretches out my tent of confuddlation like a tent. It looks at life and says, in the words of Napolean Dynamite, "lucky!" It assumes that God couldn't exist - if there's life it automatically proves that it occured by chance.

Is that what science must do?

Maybe its the time of night, but I'm just too terribly confuddled.

You're missing the point. It's not just the eyespots. Eyes with something missing *AREN'T USELESS*. You DON'T need all the parts. If you have a human-style eye minus the lens, the focus sucks but you can see blurry stuff. Actually, my dad has an eye like that due to an accident with a champagne cork in his youth. He can't close the other eye and drive, nor can he read with it, but if something was jumping out at him he'd for sure know. It works to an extent that's way, way more useful than not having an eye.
And there are creatures like that. There are or have been creatures with all the different stages of partial eye. The different stages work to differing degrees. An eye minus one or some of the structures in a modern eye is not useless. His notion that it would be is wrong, false, disproven. This is not the stuff of serious arguments.

As to protein--yeah, scientists haven't been able to replicate supernovas either. So? I gotta tell you, if my argument was a standard one, that must mean it's a pretty frickin' obvious counter to Behe's, because it was just what occurred to me from a fairly rudimentary knowledge of the research in this kind of thing. If you know what's been going on, it's just clear common sense.
Amino acids form spontaneously under some expected early-earth chemical conditions. It only takes a few amino acids to make a simple protein. What would be amazing would be if it hadn't happened. As to Behe preferring to talk about specific ones--yeah, I'm sure he would prefer that. I'm losing respect for this guy by the minute. There's masses of proteins out there, there's bound to be some that are difficult to investigate the background of. There's probably way more proteins than there have been biologists in the history of the world. No matter how many he sets up and finds are shot down, I'm sure he'll always be able to come up with a few dozen more and say triumphantly "Nobody's explained the background of *these* proteins"
Really, if the general phenomenon of the evolution of proteins is fairly clear, and if it's also clear that in a massive number of cases one can trace relationships between different ones, if in short you have a general mechanism that is clearly operating in many, many cases, I really don't think it gets you anywhere to say "Oh, but you haven't shown the mechanism operating in this case" unless there's something massively qualitatively different about that case than all the others.

I don't assume there can't be a God. It's impossible to disprove one, for one thing. But I'm not willing to just assume one into existence, either. I mean, if you *really* want to get down to discussing amazing co-incidences, consider which of these is more unlikely:
1. We live in a universe which happens to have physical laws which allow for life (specifically, us)
2. We live in a universe which happens to have metaphysical laws allowing/mandating that it have a God in it who happened to be such that He would decide to create a situation with physical laws that would allow for life (specifically, us) because for some reason, sacks of water and chemicals at particular temperatures were the only sort of intelligent/spiritual being He was interested in or perhaps capable of producing.

Lucky! As usual, I find positing a God only makes things seem explained until you realize you haven't explained the God. The reason people avoid noticing this and feel as if it's an explanation is that positing a God isn't really a process of explanation. It's a process of abdication. People talk God at the point where they don't want to have to deal with something. Depending on your perspective, it can be seen as the point where people give up on pride and embrace humility. Or it can be seen as the point where people give up on responsibility, for finding knowledge or formulating ethics, and surrender their independence and adulthood in favour of following a leader who will make it unnecessary to think any more. Even the best and most enlightened of religious people would say themselves that, basically, their belief in God makes it easier to do good because the decision has really been made for them by God, so they don't have to rely on their own weak will or impoverished understanding as much. Maybe that's a good thing. But it seems to me that the decision to embrace a deity is an emotional, perhaps spiritual one in which the deity fills a lack or, to view it with the negative spin, provides a crutch. It's not an intellectual decision, and people who try to make it one aren't engaged in legitimate intellectual search, they're people whose pride in intellect is too great to let them accept that their embrace of a deity isn't about that.

Join the club though

I should probably have been more clear rather than going for the joke. I was never persuaded that either Ross or Behe had done what you suggest they set out to do - prove intelligent design. I'm now less persuaded of that and more convinced that their theories are flawed.

You haven't supplied any examples from Behe that stand up in any other way but to suggest that in his view, intelligent design is the default position until every single thing in the universe is explained to his satisfaction by some other means. Not buying it.

And the same with Ross. It's a probability calculation? We're not talking about a statistics exercise. We're talking about a strict methodology.

The post that started this whole discussion concerned a pastor who wants these types of theories to be introduced into public school science classes. The people on whose behalf that pastor is speaking would love it because their goal is to gain for these pseudo-scientific theories a credibility they don't deserve. Nothing in this discussion has increased the credibility of those theories in my opinion. They don't belong in a science classroom.

If Behe and Ross want to continue to work on their theories, fine. If you think they're interesting, fine. But keep them out of the classroom. They don't meet the standard.

Its been a good discussion, notably free of name-calling and all that. I'm a bit burned-out at the moment but I should have another comment by monday.