The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [105]
Behe has contributed to several books, including Mere Creation, Signs of Intelligence, and Creation and Evolution. He was catapulted into the national spotlight, however, by his enigmatically titled and award-winning best-seller, Darwin’s Black Box. According to David Berlinski, author of A Tour of the Calculus, Behe’s book “makes an overwhelming case against Darwin on the biochemical level” through an argument “of great originality, elegance, and intellectual power.” Added Berlinski: “No one has done this before.” 4
In fact, it was this book that lured me to Lehigh. I knew that Behe’s theories could provide strong support for the idea that a designer created the tiny but complex molecular machines that drive the cellular world—that is, if his arguments could withstand the objections of skeptical Darwinists.
PEERING INSIDE THE BLACK BOX
The “black box” in the title of Behe’s book is a term scientists use when describing a system or machine that they find interesting but they don’t know how it works. As an example, Behe gestured toward the Dell computer on his desk. “A computer is a black box for most people,” he explained. “You type on the keyboard and you can do word processing or play electronic games, but most of us don’t have the foggiest idea of how the computer actually works.”
“And to Darwin, the cell was a black box,” I commented.
“That’s right,” he replied. “In Darwin’s day, scientists could see the cell under a microscope, but it looked like a little glob of Jello, with a dark spot as the nucleus. The cell could do interesting things—it could divide, it could move around—but they didn’t know how it did anything.”
“There must have been speculation,” I said.
“Of course,” Behe said. “Electricity was a big deal back then, and some believed that all you had to do was to zap some gelatinous material and it would come alive. Most scientists speculated that the deeper they delved into the cell, the more simplicity they would find. But the opposite happened.
“Now we’ve probed to the bottom of life, so to speak—we’re at the level of molecules—and there’s complexity all the way down. We’ve learned the cell is horrendously complicated, and that it’s actually run by micromachines of the right shape, the right strength, and the right interactions. The existence of these machines challenges a test that Darwin himself provided.”
“A test?” I asked.
“Darwin said in his Origin of Species, ‘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.’ 5 And that was the basis for my concept of irreducible complexity.
“You see, a system or device is irreducibly complex if it has a number of different components that all work together to accomplish the task of the system, and if you were to remove one of the components, the system would no longer function. An irreducibly complex system is highly unlikely to be built piece-by-piece through Darwinian processes, because the system has to be fully present in order for it to function. The illustration I like to use is a mousetrap.”
I chuckled. “Do you have problems with mice at your house?”
“Actually, yes, we do,” he said with a laugh. “But a mousetrap has turned out to be a great example.”
He stood and walked over to a filing cabinet, removing a run-of-the-mill mousetrap and putting it down on the desk next to me. “You can see the interdependence of the parts for yourself,” he said, pointing to each component as he described them.
“First, there’s a flat wooden platform to which the other parts are attached. Second, there’s a metal hammer, which does the job of crushing the mouse. Third, there’s a spring with extended