EDITOR'S NOTE: The following is an excerpt from Intelligent Design Uncensored: An Easy-to-Understand Guide to the Controversy by William A. Dembski & Jonathan Witt. This chapter is written by John Mark Reynolds (IVP).
Chapter Three: The World's Smallest Rotary Engine
In chapter one the captain and pilot in our voyage into the cell argued over the tiny outboard motor called the bacterial flagellum. The characters were fictional, but they were rehashing a real scientific debate, one that has spilled onto the pages of the world's most prestigious science journals and into newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today. Let's consider exactly what the two sides are saying, boiling it down into everyday language.
The most prominent design theorist in the debate is Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, author of the bestselling Darwin's Black Box. His most visible opponent is Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller. Miller is coauthor of a high school biology textbook and perhaps intelligent design's most capable opponent. Some ID critics try to dismiss intelligent design simply by labeling it "religion" or "bad philosophy." Miller attempts this as well, but he deserves credit for also trying to address Behe's actual arguments.
Miller makes three main objections. He says Behe's case is based on what the scientific community doesn't know, whereas it should be based on what we do know. His second and closely related objection is that Behe improperly invokes God to explain scientific mysteries. Instead, Miller says, scientists should keep looking for a natural explanation. And finally Miller insists that the bacterial flagellum motor actually can be built up one small step at a time through random variations and natural selection.
Miller's arguments look good from a distance, but they fall apart on close inspection.
Miller Objection 1: A Gee-Whiz Argument
Miller claims that the problem with design theorists like Behe is a failure of the imagination. As he says, design theorists can't "imagine how evolutionary mechanisms might have produced a certain species, organ, or structure," so they dismiss the possibility. But Miller is mistaken. It isn't that design theorists can't imagine how those machines arose. Part of Behe's argument (and only part of it) is that no one has imagined how they might have arisen naturally, much less demonstrated an evolutionary scenario for them in the lab.
To really imagine something means to see it in rich detail. In this full sense of imagine, the Darwinists haven't imagined an evolutionary pathway for the bacterial flagellum motor, much less tested it in the lab and shown it to be sound. Theirs is a tale as vague as it is implausible.
Miller Objection 2: The God of the Gaps
Miller reminds us that science would never have gone anywhere if it had attributed every natural mystery to divine action. For instance, science might never have discovered the natural cause of lightning if it had gone on assuming these were bolts flung down by the gods. As primitive and superstitious as that attitude sounds, Miller says this is just the sort of god-of-the-gaps reasoning that modern design theorists use. He claims that we reason straight from the premise "Shucks, no one has figured out how the flagellum arose" to the conclusion, "Gee, a cosmic designer must've done it."
