Michael Behe on the “purposeful arrangement of parts”

Although Michael Behe, is associated with the concept of irreducible complexity, he now says he prefers to explain ID as “purposeful arrangement of parts”:

A correspondent asked about “specified complexity” and the intelligent design of the eye. I explained why I much prefer the phrase “purposeful arrangement of parts” as a criterion for design — versus irreducible complexity, specified complexity, specified small probability, information, complex specified information, or other phrases.

The critical difference between ID and Darwinian evolution (and all other proposals for unintelligent evolutionary processes) is the involvement of a mind in ID. The philosopher Lydia McGrew once wrote that the basic question of ID boils down to the question of “other minds.” One of Alvin Plantinga’s claims to fame is that he argued fifty years ago in God and Other Minds that (I paraphrase) the perception of the existence of God is the same sort of problem as the perception of the existence of other minds.

Michael Behe, “Recognizing Design by a “Purposeful Arrangement of Parts”” at Evolution News and Science Today (June 10, 2021)

“Purposeful arrangement of parts” is actually much easier for the average person to understand.

Biochemist Michael Behe is the author of Darwin’s Black Box and (1996), The Edge of Evolution, and Darwin Devolves.

Copyright © 2021 Uncommon Descent . This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement UNLESS EXPLICIT PERMISSION OTHERWISE HAS BEEN GIVEN. Please contact legal@uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana