Michael Behe Quotes

Undirected natural processes like the Darwinian mechanism are incapable of generating the specified complexity that exists in biological organisms … the natural sciences need to leave room for design.

Proponents of intelligent design don't accept that some of the very complex nanomachines that we have inside ourselves could have come about solely on the basis of natural selection.

I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.

But sequence comparisons simply can't account for the development of complex biochemical systems any more than Darwin's comparison of simple and complex eyes told him how vision worked.

We find that intelligent design fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that intelligent design is a science … intelligent design violates the centuries old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; the argument of irreducible complexity, central to intelligent design, employees the same flawed and a logically contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the nineteen eighties; intelligent design’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community …

For centuries the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But [Charles] Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection.

The question is: exactly how did life get here? Was it by natural selection and random mutation or was it by something else? Everybody - even Richard Dawkins - sees design in biology. You see this design when you see co-ordinated parts coming together to perform a function - like in a hand. And so it's the appearance of design that everybody's trying to explain. So that if Darwin's theory doesn't explain it we're left with no other explanation than maybe it really was designed. That's essentially the design argument.

I believe the evidence strongly supports common descent. But the root question remains unanswered: What has caused complex systems to form?

The Bishop goes on to the human eye, asking rhetorically, and with the implication that there is no answer, 'How could an organ so complex evolve?' This is not an argument, it is simply an affirmation of incredulity.

There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design.

If you search the scientific literature on evolution, and if you focus your search on the question of how molecular machines - the basis of life - developed, you find an eerie and complete silence. The complexity of life's foundation has paralyzed science's attempt to account for it; molecular machines raise an as-yet-impenetrable barrier to Darwinism's universal reach.

Religious reasons, which is no reason. I notice Skeptic had a review of Dennett's book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Religious reasons amount to what Dennett terms "skyhooks." Do you believe in skyhooks? I don't.

In the study of this membrane [the retina] I for the first time felt my faith in Darwinism (hypothesis of natural selection) weakened, being amazed and confounded by the supreme constructive ingenuity revealed not only in the retina and in the dioptric apparatus of the vertebrates but even in the meanest insect eye. ... I felt more profoundly than in any other subject of study the shuddering sensation of the unfathomable mystery of life.

It was an effort to include intelligent design and treat it as science, disparaging evolution along the way. That will not stand.

It's so hard to figure out what's going on in biological systems. You just can't see them.

Since natural selection requires a function to select, an irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would have to arise as an integrated unit for natural selection to have anything to act on.

Intelligent design, unlike creationism, is a science in its own right and can stand on its own feet.

Evolution is cleverer than you are.

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. But I can find out no such case.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

You can't statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you're still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing.

We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance.

The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.

[Evolution Theory] is the motivating factor for guys like Hitler and Stalin and George Bush, by the way, who is a Satan worshipper, like we don't know that.

They say, you know, about evolution, it surely happened because their fossil record shows that. Look, my body and your body are miracles of design. Scientists are pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn't possibly have produced such machines.