Recently Mark Shea, a well-known Catholic writer, dispensed himself from the need to read or quote any ID theorists by creating his own theorists and explaining what is wrong with their imagined theses in a national Catholic paper.
Mike Behe, author of Edge of Evolution, responds at Evolution News & Views:
Reading this reminds me of the scene from Annie Hall right before Woody Allen brings Marshall McLuhan on camera to tell someone pontificating about his ideas that “You know nothing of my work.”
Regrettably, Shea appears to know little about ID. Here is a very brief reply. No published ID proponent has ever said or written, “Golly, look how complex life is. Must be some sort of supernatural explanation for that.” And, quite irresponsibly for a journalist, Shea produces no quote remotely resembling it (or any quote or link at all, for that matter). Rather, design proponents have carefully explicated how we ordinarily come to a positive conclusion of design from physical evidence (by apprehending a purposeful arrangement of parts, in my formulation), and show that sophisticated biological systems which have been uncovered in recent decades by the hard work of science fit those criteria to a T.
We then demonstrate that, Darwinian pretensions notwithstanding, no non-design explanation for the elegant molecular machinery and copious genetic information of the cell is anywhere in sight. We therefore tentatively argue (all science is necessarily tentative) that currently the best explanation for those features of life is deliberate intelligent design.
Would quoting actual ID theorists reveal that Shea’s criticisms are irrelevant and that his answers don’t fit their questions (and possibly don’t fit anyone’s questions). Such cleverness wasted.