It is 65 minutes long and seems to prove design (Ok Johhny, I can see you rolling your eyes ). It’s an enjoyable watch so not tedious. Forget the politics or agendas of ID. Put all that aside, and watch a bunch of scientists and learned men, coming together to demonstrate how molecular machines testify to design. I’d love to know if some one has been able to refute what is said on the film. They seem to present an air tight case. The film is not too technical and so is suitable for ‘dummies’ like me.
Please someone, check it out and let me know what you think. Try and persuade me they’re wrong. Bet you can’t.
I am a sceptic by nature and so have looked into both sides of the ID / non-ID divide many, many times.
The only way one could ‘prove it for oneself’ would be to spend years studying hard at science and then doing all the experiments. The rest of us have to rely on experts - some here are happy to rely on Intelligent Design experts others are not (I am in this camp because I am convinced, by its arguments, that mainstream science does a better job of describing our universe than ID ‘science’ ). The claims in the video have been countered by mainstream scientists many times - and even by christian mainstream scientists - here’s an example from a scientist who self-identifies as a christian…
You have a point about ‘proving it for oneself’. I don’t think I could 100 % be sure about which ‘side’ is right, as my knowledge of biological systems is miniscule. I’m just re-watching the video, and then I’ll look at your links to see if the ‘claims’ in the film, (which to my limited brain seem very clear and reasonable) are indeed wrong. Thanks again for your input.
I think what we all do is lay greater weight to ‘evidence’ that tends support our existing view and less weight to that which claims to support the opposite. Evaluating any of this stuff is difficult for us lay people no matter what the subject.
Just a note also to say that the last link isn’t to a site refuting the video per se but is an example of a christian scientist who debunks a lot of the arguments used by creationists.
I actually have this video at the house, although I haven’t watched it yet.
The comments on the thread supposedly discussing the video do not discuss the video per se (maybe they do later?–there’s discussion about a three-part video rebuttal that the author took down to fix an error of his own), and from their complaints don’t seem very familiar with professional ID proponents.
The opposition to creationism link seems to deal solely with YEC, with no reference to the video particularly, including no reference to molecular machinery per se. (Jeff noted this himself while I was composing.) Since I haven’t watched the video, I don’t know if the topic is anything other than an argument from evidence of informational design in the apparatus of molecular machinery, but I know from experience that it’s rather a rarefied and technical topic.
While there are some people who (as the people in the thread complain) jump from ID to full-blown Christian doctrine and evangelism, which I agree is an illegitimate move, ID itself isn’t about that. YECers can borrow ID for their YEC purposes, of course, but OECers and theistic evolutionists and (to some degree) even atheists (whether they believe in previously developed designers or just in some non-directed biological process other than neo-Darwinian gradualism) can make use of it, too. That doesn’t make any ID argument correct, but there’s a difference between something being incorrect science and not being science at all–and even YECers have actual scientific arguments, sometimes very detailed ones. (Obviously the arguments must be refutable in principle on scientific grounds if someone refutes them on scientific grounds. A fair but unaccepted refutation just makes the unaccepters bad scientists. But that can apply either way. )
I’m so glad you’ve jumped in here Jason, as I value your input immensley. I’ve got the dvd, (which was a freebie at a Michael Behe Conference I attended a couple of years ago), and it’s much easier to watch than on youtube, where the intros are repeated. Please, please, please, pretty please try and watch it, as I’d love to know if you are blown away by what it presents, as I am. I think I’ll email Mr Behe to see if anything in the film has been shown to be wrong (the film is rather old now and I’m sure they know even more about the flagellum). I’ve emailed Mr Behe before and he’s kindly replied so fingers crossed.
I’ve just emailed Mr Behe, so I’ll let you know what he says when/if he replies. I’ve asked him if the film is going to be updated, or if the original content still stands, as it’s been a few years now. Also, if he’s coming here to the UK in the future.
I read some of the boston review but it was too technical for me.
I’ve read Ken Miller’s refutation from the ‘actionbioscience’ link and I can follow this a lot better. He says two things that seem to be down right wrong:
He says :
So far so good.
He then says:
Now to me, this statement is almost what Behe says, but not quite. It sounds like Miller is saying that Behe doesn’t agree with the first statement I quoted: that the sub parts of a machine can have uses in other machines. Behe is saying that the flagellum won’t be a flagellum until all the sub parts are brought together. He’s not saying that some of those sub-parts haven’t got any usefulness? Am I getting mixed up and confused here? There’s a strong possibility that is the case For example: if we conveniently take away all the sub parts and are left with the type 111 SS, which Miller goes on in his argument to mention, then we get a fully functioning machine, but does this machine represent a more primitive type of a flagellar motor? Maybe I’m not understanding what constitutes a primitive type?
Another example of where Miller seems to twist what Behe is saying is:
So if we take away all the parts of the flagellum until all we’ve got left is the type 3 SS, does the flagellum work? **No. **We no longer have a flagellum, which is what Behe is saying. The fact we have a sub machine that has a use in another system doesn’t disprove the IC of the flagellum? Or am I misunderstanding Professor Miller. Profuse apologies if I am.
After re-reading I think your points are quite fair. I would be interested to know what Behe’s position on the mousetrap emerging from the parts with other functions is (which is where Miller is coming from) .
More interesting is where Miller says…
“If Behe wishes to suggest that the intricacies of nature, life, and the universe reveal a world of meaning and purpose consistent with a divine intelligence, his point is philosophical, not scientific. It is a philosophical point of view, incidentally, that I share.”
In the film Scott Minnich argues that even if you could ‘take’ co machines and put them together to form a ‘new’ machine you can’t with the flagellum because the majority of it’s parts are ‘one offs’ only peculiar to the flagellum, so where would you get these parts from? If it can be shown that the type 111 sub machine is the precursor of the flagellum, then how did the other parts that are ‘unique’ come about, considering they need their own machines to build them (of which they too need machines to build them…). This is part of the film that seems to be very convincing for design. By reverse engineering, and looking at how the flagellum is assembled, it does seem to ‘prove’ that ALL the instructions and building machines need to be in place BEFORE you have the finished product…???
Yes, I’m glad Professor Miller does believe in ‘divine intelligence’. He’s a lovely guy who has replied to my emails in the past, which I appreciate as he must be a very busy man.
If life has evolved gradually (which having read Miller’s book ‘Finding Darwin’s God’, does make sense to me), then I believe the divine intelligence knew what would result from the big bang and so if we go right back to the very beginning, then all creation is intelligently designed.
Actually, Miller’s reply as you quoted it, Catherine, misses the point even farther: it’s the small proteins which are used by many bacteria as a device for injecting poisons into other cells, not the flagellum without those proteins.
(This is aside from the machinery-design implications in bacterias using a protein cluster as a device for injecting poisons in other cells. )
While I’m not a huge fan (yet?) of irreducible complexity arguments, IrreCom isn’t refuted by portions of a machine having other uses elsewhere. An IrreCom claim (which is a testable scientific claim that can in principle be demonstrably refuted, by the way, despite what the crowd on the sceptical thread Jeff linked to tends to deride) is refuted by demonstrating that removing a portion of the machine leaves a functioning machine with perhaps a different function. If a flagellum has a different supportive function for the bacteria when it’s too simple to be a flagellum per se, or even still functions as a less efficient flagellum for the bacteria, then that’s a refutation of the flagellum per se being IrreCom.
Such a rebuttal of IrreCom in regard to a claim about an IrreCom machine, however (and I don’t recall seeing that the flagellum has been refuted that way, although neither do I closely follow the exchanges back and forth), doesn’t refute design arguments otherwise in regard to that machine. A proposal of random copy-error or otherwise undirected development producing an effect that fits effectively in a new way into a system, or producing a neutral effect which happens to fit with positive new functionality into a later developed (or development of) a system, can easily strain probable credulity to the breaking point. Accidents happen, but building up what amounts to a city-sized complexly functional and productive factory (which, among other things, produces not only similarly complexly functional city-sized factories capable of the same products but also produces complexly functional city-sized factories with quite different yet still useful products) out of a series of millions of accidents, strains credulity. Especially when those city-sized factories combine together to work with other combinations of city-sized factories to build human-scale cities. Accidents, by definition, don’t really build things. (That’s a bit of an oversimplification of information theory, but it illustrates some principles.)
Proponents of totally non-intentional biological development (micro or macro or both) sometimes complain that ID proponents set up a false dichotomy by arguing non-intentional development must be impossible for particular cases (not all ID proponents think everything was intentionally developed anyway, but within a very large topical sphere non-ID proponents must hold to nothing being intentionally designed), therefore some kind of ID is true. But by deductive elimination, if something cannot have been non-intentionally developed, yet it exists, it must have been intentionally developed in some fashion by some agent (even if the fashion and the agent haven’t been identified). That’s generally how forensic criminology works, too, for detecting whether an event was an accident or intentionally designed. The question is whether non-intentional development has been properly ruled out thus deductable out of the option list. Even one deductively identified incident of intentional design would, by tautology, indicate ID is to at least that extent true–even though it wouldn’t necessarily say much about the designer yet (other than necessarily implicating the designer’s existence and knowledgeable competency on the topic).
Behe’s work, among similar ID proponents, has been (and to some extent always was) based on technical issues of biophysical and biochemical functionality and development, which are quite different from philosophical reasoning (although they include some of that, too, as does everyone in any science).
I admit, like yourself Catherine, that I often can’t make heads or tails of all this science stuff… and all the back and forth, all of the debating about this and that and the other, is sometimes confusing to me… but I’m sure you’re a lot smarter concerning these issues than myself though, because you’ve read and studied more than I have, and I have read and studied very little, though I hope to do so more sometime in the future…
But honestly, I don’t feel like I need to all that much (though I want to, so I can be more informed)…
I don’t have too many intellectual struggles in my faith, honestly, and I know this might leave me in a place of vulnerability according to the opinions of some, but I don’t base my belief in God so much on whether science backs up that belief or not, honestly… I mean, it would be nice if it did, but when there’s so much arguing back and forth on every side, people saying God exists for this reason, and God doesn’t exist for that reason, I honestly just get kind of frustrated with the whole thing and maybe even a little bored and kind of feel like ignoring it… maybe sometime in the future I’ll try to focus in on science and how it relates to faith more, but at the moment, that’s honestly not one of my biggest concerns…
Lately I’ve been re-reading Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller, one of my favorite authors, and this is one of my favorite quotes in the book that applies to all of this, I think:
That really resonates with me… more than anything I’ve struggled in my heart, rather than in my head, in my faith…
As far as having more objective reasons for why I believe in God, it’s because of the things that have happened in my life, miracles, if you will, that I can’t explain away… the best anyone has come up with to explain away all these experiences when I’ve shared them is ‘it’s just coincidence’… well, honestly, I just don’t buy that. You can only have so many coincidences before you start to wonder if something more is going on behind the scenes.
These experiences, and some of them have been more objective, as in things that happened outside of myself, things working together in such a way in the reality around me instead of just inside of me, have told me that there is something more going on, that there is more than just chance going on in this universe…
And that maybe, just maybe, there is a benevolent, and even personal, force, at work in my life, and even all of our lives…
I guess I call that God because that fits, and also, strangely enough, many of those experiences I’ve had point towards Jesus as the true revelation of what this God is really like… I believe, in other words, that this something more that’s been going on in my life has a lot to do with some Jewish carpenter who was walking around in Palestine a couple thousand years ago…
Granted, I’ve had more subjective experiences as well, and I have more subjective reasons for believing too…
I believe because I’ve seen and I’ve known and I’ve experienced a lot of love in the Christian community over the years (though, granted, I haven’t always, I’ve experienced a lot of brokenness and humanness too, but I’m trying to have something of a half glass full attitude here ), more so than elsewhere (though I have experienced it elsewhere, outside of the Christian community, to be sure), and I believe that there’s something to that, and I’m drawn to that, and also being part of a greater story that has meaning speaks to me in a way that I can’t explain, being a character in a story that matters means something to me, and I long deeply to be loved, and to be able to love, to be able to trust someone completely, and to be understood, to be forgiven, to be healed, to find a home, to find, well, something like a father, and much of the longing inside of me seems to have no answer in this world, or at least not any lasting or complete kind of answer, so I’m left wondering, like C.S. Lewis, if I was made for another world…
These are the kinds of reasons why I believe in God. Some of them more objective, some more subjective…
I hear people arguing about science, about the Bible, about theology and this and that and the other, and that’s all important for sure, and I argue about some of those things too, in conversation and in my own mind, but honestly, when it comes down to it, at the end of the day I just know in my heart that there’s something more going on, and it’s something that’s good, ultimately, or at least I hope it is, something I can believe in and even trust, and though I do have anxiety and doubt sometimes, even much of the time, sometimes wondering if I’m just crazy or if it’s all just a game, if I’m in something like the Matrix or the Twilight Zone or if there is a God but he’s just messing around with me, maybe even with all of us, pretending to care and pretending to love us, even so, I keep going, and don’t give up…
And this is the nature of faith… there is no such thing as certainty based on evidence I think, at least not in this life… you have some evidence, supporting this thing or supporting the other thing, and then you have faith… atheists may get a little annoyed when theists tell them that they have faith, but it’s true… everyone believes in something, even if they may not be able to back it up with all the evidence, even if all of their questions haven’t been answered… even atheists (and I was one once, so I know this) who don’t believe in God may yet believe in morality, or believe in love, even if they can’t scientifically prove that such things matter or even exist… they just believe.
And that’s okay. And that’s not a knock against atheists… those who believe don’t have all the evidence to back them up, don’t have all the answers, either…
We’re all just stumbling around I think, more or less, those of us who actually care to engage with those age-old questions, ‘where do I come from, why I am here, and where am I going?’ and ‘what is the meaning of life?’, we’re all just stumbling around, trying to find answers, or maybe even trying to find questions, even as we live our day to day lives, full of their ups and downs, in a world where there is as much pain and suffering as there is beauty and wonder, on a tiny blue ball spinning around in space, in a universe that is so vastly unexplored and uncharted…
And we can feel so small, can’t we? And if we’re humble enough to recognize it, there is so much that we don’t know… and probably more that we don’t know than what we do… those who are willing to be honest with themselves on both sides of this debate would have to admit as much, that really there is a lot that we don’t know, or at least not yet…
As for me, I just go with the little that I know and have experienced, and I take a shot in the dark, believing that I’ve seen and found some light, that God is there, that Jesus is there, that I’m loved and that I’m not alone, that all of us are loved, and that none of us are alone, even if there are many times in this world when such things do not seem to be true, but they actually are, despite all appearances to the contrary, and that one day we will find the answers we’re looking for, and that one day, all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well…
Not sure if this helps at all, but figured I’d throw this in to the discussion.
Jason, many thanks for clarifying some of the points I raised about Miller and IC.
Matt, your thoughts are always appreciated.
I sent various emails out last week and I’ve received two replies back: One from Mike Behe. He confirms that the information in the film is still valid and that discoveries over the years show that ‘the biochemical complexity of the cell has been discovered to be much greater than anyone (even me!) expected. The problems for Darwinism are much worse.’
I emailed the discovery institute and they too confirm that ‘the video is still accurate’. They linked me to this very interesting article : evolutionnews.org/2011/03/mi … 44801.html
I’ve also emailed Scott Minnich but not had a reply yet.
I watched UtMoL a night or two ago. I thought it was pretty impressive, although I’ve seen most of the material before. I didn’t like how they almost totally ignored mutation as a factor in neo-Darwinian biological evolutionary theory, partly because I didn’t think that was fair to their opposition, and partly because it really would have made their case look even stronger! (They very briefly mention how random copy errors just couldn’t be expected to build up information-rich functional machines of this sort, but a lot more could have been said along that line.)
What impressed me most, though, was a detail that doesn’t get talked about a lot: the scientists who gathered together for the original symposium had all come from backgrounds of firmly believing the neo-Darwinian syntheses but having discovered scientific reasons to doubt its utter hold in scientific orthodoxy. (Not everyone in the initial group was a scientist, but not everyone in the symposium that gathered to “fix” Darwinian theory with the neo-Darwinian synthesis was a scientist per se either. That was a detail I wish they had brought out more, because I found the underlying comparison to be rather striking.) Some had even been atheists or agnostics. One fellow had literally written “the book” on biogenesis theory, a book still being used 20 years after initial publication to support initial biochemical development of life, but the conclusions of which he had professionally disowned on grounds of scientific criticism.
). It’s an enjoyable watch so not tedious. Forget the politics or agendas of ID. Put all that aside, and watch a bunch of scientists and learned men, coming together to demonstrate how molecular machines testify to design. I’d love to know if some one has been able to refute what is said on the film. They seem to present an air tight case. The film is not too technical and so is suitable for ‘dummies’ like me. 
For example: if we conveniently take away all the sub parts and are left with the type 111 SS, which Miller goes on in his argument to mention, then we get a fully functioning machine, but does this machine represent a more primitive type of a flagellar motor? Maybe I’m not understanding what constitutes a primitive type?
and all the back and forth, all of the debating about this and that and the other, is sometimes confusing to me…