1. Michael Behe's new book The Edge of Evolution is yet another statement of a scientific fact that is becoming more and more obvious and more difficult to refute: life was not the result of random mutations and natural selection. Nor were the different phyla or even the different classes and species of vertebrates. This is a claim that is perfectly sustainable on the basis of scientific observation alone.
In his previous book, Darwin's Black Box, Michael Behe had convincingly made the point that molecular machines, such as the flagellum or the cilium, could not be made by random mutations. These are systems that depend on the simultaneous convergence of multiple interdependent parts, within a complex, specified and integrated whole, to perform a totally innovative function in a very efficient and precise manner.
Someone had to have this specific function in mind along with the intelligence, information and ability needed in order to determine, conceive, specify, produce and gather all the different parts which, once precisely adjusted, will allow for a complex molecular mechanism to function. The fact that not even all the past and present scientists combined have enough intelligence and information to create DNA and to specify miniaturized machines remotely as complex as the different molecular machines, speaks eloquently for the fact that the One who designed these machines has a whole lot more intelligence and more information than the whole scientific community put together.
2. In this new book Michael Behe expands his argument, relying to a great extent on the scientific developments that have been taking place in the last ten years. The recent project ENCODE, if taken into account, would only bring more powerful evidence of intelligent design, since it definitely does away with the concept of junk-DNA and underlines the extreme complexity and functionality of the whole genome, including the so called untranslated regions (UTR's).
Michael Behe demonstrates once again what many scientists, both creationists and non-creationists (v.g. Michael Denton, Lee Spetner, Werner Gitt, John Sanford), have been saying for many decades now. Random mutations and natural selection, although observable on a daily basis, have nothing to do with particles to people evolution. They don't create new complex specified information that codes for completely new structures and functions. Not now, not in a million years!
That's because all observable mutations are cumulative and degenerative. They destroy information, the genome and the cell functions. As the universe is losing order and reusable energy, so is the genome losing information. Order, energy and information had to be there in the beginning, and they could only have been brought about by a rational, powerful and intelligent God. There is simply no plausible alternative to that conclusion.
Mutations don't have the magic properties that would transform them in a "blind watch maker". The "blind watch maker" is, in reality, a "blind watch breaker!" It has a destructive effect!
On the other hand, natural selection does nothing else rather than selecting and eliminating pre-existing genetic materials. Natural selection is a "negative-sum game", as far as genetic information is concerned.
Relying on the interaction between the human body and malaria parasites as well as between malaria, sickle cell disease and medicine, Michael Behe shows that from these relationships no new genetic information arises that is able to create new protein-protein interactions, much less new molecular machines. On the contrary, the dynamics of human body/malaria/sickle cell disease is a destructive one.
The same results come from the observation of HIV's resistance to medication, as well as from the studies of intraflagellum transportation (ITF), frozen Antartic fish, or E. coli, the highly reproductive and mutant bacteria, among other examples.
The odds are totally against random evolution, as the many have already understood and Michael Behe competently reiterates. A random and incoherent process has no information to create nothing whatsoever. To create functionally integrated objects one needs intelligence and information, something random mutations and natural selection just can't provide.
Mutations and natural selection are not about creation. They are about death, suffering, disease and, at best, adaptation to changing environmental conditions through the elimination of the less fit. Natural selection results in loss and less.
3. Michael Behe is certainly not (yet) a Young Earth biblical creationist. However, in my view he ends up making a powerful argument for instant (and recent) creation. I will only sketch the reasons that lead me to say that. One must start by saying that although he speaks about common ancestry, the arguments he puts forward to support it are actually not very strong, and are to a large extent compatible with the concept of a common Creator. Young Earth creationists deal with this subject at length. What's more, Michael Behe makes the important point that the creation of the simplest forms of new three protein interactions is totally beyond the edge of evolution.
In doing so, Michael Behe gives strong support to the idea according to which to create life, along with the different classes of functional plants and animals, of incredible complexity, integration and fine-tuning, one needs huge amounts of theoretical information and practical ability. Scientists lack both.
All the different parts have to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right shape, in the right amounts to perform the right tasks. In my view, this does away with billions of years of random or non-random evolution and speaks loudly about instant, careful and precise creation, jusk like the Bible states.
If we bring within this picture the fine tuning of the Universe for life (v.g. right stretching of the Universe, right outward motion of galaxies, right electron charges, right proton mass, right water, galatic habitable zones, Sun, Moon, Earth gravitational interaction), a reality that Michael Behe briefly describes in the ending chapters of his book, we realize that the biblical message of a systematic, integrated, low-entropy, fine-tuned and purposeful creation in six days, as absurd as it may seem to the naturalistic scientific community, becomes not only plausible, but actually the only possible option, when compared with other naturalistic and even non-naturalistic alternatives.
And if evolution didn't happen, this can only mean that rocks and fossils are not to be treated of evidence of gradual evolution (as even evolutionists such as Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge would concede), but as the evidence of a cataclysmic event causing rapid deposition and fossilization. What's more, human language, since it also requires anatomical, physiological and informational fine-tuning, cannot be the product of random evolution. And once again all we are left with is the biblical model of creation, fall, global flood, Babel, and dispersion. Like it or not.
All things considered, I think this is the only working model! If Michael Behe would take his time to study the matter in depth he would find that the arguments from the various disciplines that are currently used to defend cosmic random evolution and millions years against biblical young earth creationism are as weak as the ones that once tried to establish a strong link between random mutations and information generating evolution.
Of course, I am well aware of the fact that young earth creationism makes the relationship between science and religion much more complicated (or simple, depending on the perspective) than the naturalistic establishment previously would have it.
But to defend young earth creationism is very far from being an act of blind faith and/or anti-scientific fundamentalism. It is simply based on the verifiable notion that the same naturalistic, materialistic and evolutionary pressupositions that have led biologists in to a misguided belief on mutations and natural selection (or about junk-DNA) have also blurred the vision of scientists and in all other disciplines, leading them to develop a very distorted interpretation of scientific evidence and of reality as a whole.
What Michael Behe has realized about the unsubstantiated faith of evolutionary biologists, biblical creationists have long realized about the unsubstantiated faith of evolutionary geologists, astrophysicists, anthropologists, paleontologists, etc. Their models just refuse to work.
Biblical creationism is not a thing of the past. It is the only viable alternative for the future.
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