A recent post here at Viewpoint received some mention at Telic Thoughts and triggered a lively discussion there. Truth to tell, most of those who disagreed with our post pretty much missed the point.
That point is this: Few academics would undertake to review a book that was not in his/her professional discipline. To do so is to cast doubt on the value of the review and the competence of the reviewer. The reviewers of Behe's latest book The Edge of Evolution are predominately scientists. It follows, therefore, that they must feel that the parts of the book that they critique deal with matters of science. Otherwise, they may as well be engineers critiquing a book on medieval poetry.
Now Behe is one of the seminal figures in what has become known as the Intelligent Design movement, and he makes it clear in EOE that he believes there is empirical evidence which points to the utter inadequacy of materialistic, naturalistic processes to do the job of creating molecular machines and systems. That conclusion leads in turn to the further conclusion that a mind is in some way or another involved in the evolution of life.
Thus his book is an ID text, written by a prominent ID advocate and reviewed by scientists who are evaluating the case he makes. They're not saying that his arguments are not scientific. They may think him wrong, but they're not dismissing him for writing a religious or philosophical book. The critics, at least those who go beyond name-calling and insult, address the evidence that Behe adduces and try to show that he's drawing the wrong theoretical conclusions from it. Whether they're correct or not, their engagement with the EOE argument makes it puzzling that some people still assert that ID is religion not science. After all, what are scientists doing reviewing religious arguments?
RLC
