Reviewers have opened several lanes of traffic through the holes in Michael Behe's argument in his latest book advocating Intelligent Design, The Edge of Evolution.
Nick Matzke tackles one such hole at The Panda's Thumb, with Ed Brayton offering a helpful summary for laypeople and nonmajors at Talk to Action. Follow either of those links for the science, what I'm interested in here is the theology.
Both Matzke and Brayton call attention to this comment from Behe:
Here’s something to ponder long and hard: Malaria was intentionally designed. The molecular machinery with which the parasite invades red blood cells is an exquisitely purposeful arrangement of parts.
Malaria kills about a million people every year. Behe's assertion that this pestilence was "intentionally designed" echoes William Blake:
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? …Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb, make thee?
For Behe, the answer to those last two questions is always yes. This would seem to mean that, for Behe, God is the author of evil. His theodicy is as shoddy as his biology.
I'll leave it to my Calvinist friends to decide whether or not Behe is advocating a kind of supra-supralapsarianism. I'm not very good at sorting through the various lapsarian views, since I disagree with their notion that God is trapped down here in Flatland.
(As a wise man recently will have said, "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a nonlinear, nonsubjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly … timey-wimey … stuff.")
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In