Our regular readers know who Michael Behe is. Not only is he a Discovery Institute Senior Fellow, he was the Discoveroids’ star witness in the Kitzmiller case — see Kitzmiller v. Dover: Michael Behe’s Testimony. And he’s also a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University. His colleagues at Lehigh are so impressed by his brilliance that they publicly disassociated themselves from him by issuing this statement: Department Position on Evolution and “Intelligent Design”.
Behe is featured prominently in an article we found in the Baptist Press: Ebola ‘utterly mysterious’ to Darwinists. This is big news about an important topic, so we’ll give you some excerpts, with bold font added by us for emphasis:
Secular scientists who tell Americans that Ebola is not likely to become airborne are unwittingly basing their conclusion on the lack of evidence for Darwinian evolution, even though many of them are proponents of Darwinism, a leading scientist in the Intelligent Design movement told Baptist Press.
Don’t listen to those secular scientists. They’re all fools! Instead, pay attention to what the Baptist Press says:
In addition to providing the only viable explanation of Ebola, a Christian worldview inspires more compassion for Ebola victims than a Darwinist perspective, commentators have noted. Viruses in general also provide evidence that the universe is the product of an intelligent designer rather than blind chance, they say.
Yes! The evidence is clear. Let’s read on:
The Ebola virus “is kind of like a tiger pacing in a small cage,” Michael Behe, professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., told BP. “It can go back and forth, fast and slow. The mutations are making it go back and forth rapidly, but it’s not going very far from where it is.”
Ebola’s apparent inability to become airborne “is in line with what we see in other organisms,” said Behe, a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute [skipping a description of that outfit]. The microevolution (smaller changes within a species) represented by Ebola’s rapid mutation “is easy to see,” Behe said. “But macroevolution, or big changes in organisms” like those necessary to turn Ebola airborne, are “either non-existent — which I think — or extremely rare.”
Aha, we’re in luck — Ebola is limited to micro-evolution. We continue:
Viruses in general are “utterly mysterious” to advocates of a “Darwinian process” because “there is no good theory at all for how any virus came about,” Behe said, adding that the most reasonable explanation for viruses is an intelligent creator.
Verily, it is indeed the most reasonable explanation. Here’s more:
Ebola’s existence doesn’t suggest an evil creator “any more than an automobile shows malevolent intent,” Behe said. “Automobiles can be used and sometimes they cause problems, crashing and killing their drivers or running into people. But the machine itself is good.”
That’s very comforting. Then the Baptist Press switches to a different expert:
“Ultimately, unlike those with a biblical worldview, secular humanists have no clear moral basis to put themselves at risk to help the downtrodden, sick, and infirm,” Andrew Fabich, a microbiologist at Liberty University, wrote. “If we are just the product of random chance processes over time, as Darwinian evolution asserts, then why not let the sick die off so the strong will survive? However, since we are not the byproducts of random chance processes, we should conduct ourselves altogether differently.”
Fabich urged Christians with medical training to pray about travelling to Ebola-stricken areas to provide care and said all followers of Jesus should pray for the sick.
That’s very good advice. There’s much more in the article, so we recommend that you click over there to read it for yourself. Then you’ll know all you need to know about Ebola. You won’t get this information from those creepy Darwinists!
Copyright © 2014. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
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The Sensuous Curmudgeon 
One wonders what Behe will say if (let’s hope this doesn’t happen) Ebola does mutate into an airborne form. Bubonic plague does it from time to time. When it did so in 1348, the result was the Black Death.
Right, the f…ing creationists want to pray about Ebola. That should be a big help. Meanwhile, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) are actually doing something for the people who are affected by Ebola, and I bet most of them are not creationists. By the way, if the creationists’ sky fairy invented Ebola, that alone is an excellent reason to dislike the chap.
Brain hurts. A Gish Gallop of an article. “Ebola’s existence doesn’t suggest an evil creator” got that? But the solution … “all followers of Jesus should pray for the sick.”
So one is praying to the creator of said virus to help the people it is hurting. But he isn’t evil? I try to hang on to my shred of belief in god until I encounter crap like this.
I thought he said intelligent design was equivalent to astrology? Same goes for his depth of understanding of viruses and ebola.
Are applications being taken for Pat Robertson’s replacement? It reads like Behe is trying hard to capture Pat’s uniquely out of touch with everything kind of approach.
Blabtist Press reports—
I think this stance reveals just how far out of touch with reality Beeheehee actually is. Automobiles do not procreate by endangering the health and/or life of a living host through infecting it. Moreover, the Discorrhoids are forever bleating about the validity of their practice of inferring an intelligent designer from all sorts of instances of apparent design in nature, so how does it suddenly become illegitimate when playing their own game by inferring some broad-strokes attributes of their ostensible designer from the nature of the design? That would be attributes other than intelligence, which they themselves are eager to infer.
Consistency and coherency appear not to be part of the Discorrhoids’ conceptual tool kit.
On what day of Creation Week where viruses created?
Where in the Bible is there any mention of anything like viruses or prokaryotes or eukaryotes other than animals and plants?
Behe has suggested that one of the possibilities for Intelligent Designer would be a demiurge. What has he to say about the Pope’s recent disclaimer of God as being a “demiurge or magician”?
@ Tom S. Probably on the same day as the mechanisms of Programmed Cell Death. Since there was no death in the Garden of Eden before Adam & Eve sinned, the original creation had no need for them. So, way after the sixth day.
@Jason:
TomS was being sarcastic with “Creation Week.” He knows that Behe has been on record for at least 20 years as conceding not only ~4 billion years of life, but the whole common descent thing. Unlike the YECs and OECs who think that “kinds” popped up independently, Behe just thinks that the designer “intervenes” on occasion to move molecules around in the cell. In fact the only time he was clear as to when the designer might have intervened, was a brief note in “Darwin’s Black Box” (1996) where he speculated that all “designs” needed for all descendent species were “front loaded” into the ancestral cell, but “turned off” until needed.
Behe rarely mentions that, let alone elaborates – or heaven forbid actually tests it in his lab – because he knows that most of his fans won’t like that any more than they like “Darwinism.” But his critics rarely if ever take him to task on that, so he’s quite safe peddling his snake oil where and when he wants.
Eric Lipps: “One wonders what Behe will say if (let’s hope this doesn’t happen) Ebola does mutate into an airborne form.”
What else? Move the goal posts.
Con-Tester considers the Disco-Tooters’ problem in
It’s almost too facile to point out to them that, from their own premises, one could build a strong case that G.O.D. (The Grand Ole Designer) utterly despises life given the vast array of dreadful fates individual living organisms can face.
Why, for the life of me, should the believers be praying if Ebola is the work of their intelligent creator? Are they second guessing their all knowing god?
@makagutu
This is God’s way of getting people to pray, which is good for them anyway. It isn’t as if God needs our prayers, it’s we who need to pray. After all, any of our deeds are worthless, being such undeserving sinners. Or something like that.
TomS,
This is confusing. The same believer prays telling god to let his will be done, how can they turn around and say Ebola is not god’s will?
@Megs: That’s the thing, isn’t it? Once you allow a casual stroll down the highway of untestable speculation and freeform interpretation to count as science, you might as well sign up as a card-carrying postmodernist/New Ager. For all we know, life as we are familiar with it could be a particularly nasty supergalactic kid’s science-and-sociology-project-in-one. That would make the designer a spoilt brat and/or a deceiver without a shred of anything that we would recognise as empathy or compassion. And if our revulsion for cruelty and suffering is an integral part of that supposed design (which it surely must be, for how else would we come we by it?), then the designer, whatever their nature, is at minimum unutterably cruel by foisting such needless suffering on their design, either by design or by deception.
Of course, the Discorrhoids have such speculations covered by speculatively asserting with great assurance that we cannot know who or what their designer(s) is/are/was/were. Stripped of its confident rhetoric and pleasant-things-about-Ol’-Grandy-only-please conjecturing, it’s quite obviously a steaming pile of bovine ordure.
Perfect example of how religion turns you stupid!!
He is a trained biologist but because he is also a religious nut, he rejects the science and becomes a ‘Liar4gawd’ as everything he stated is wrong.
“In addition to providing the only viable explanation of Ebola, a Christian worldview inspires more compassion for Ebola victims than a Darwinist perspective, commentators have noted.”
Let’s take a look at what Christian “compassion” means in practice. Let’s leave aside for the moment the relentless Christian threats to murder gays, atheists, communists, those living in communist countries, witches, children growing up on coca farms, and the whole Muslim world. Let’s just stick to the topic of this article, Ebola, and Christian “compassion.”
Todd Kincannon is a pro-life, conservative Christian. He’s also the former head of the Creepublican Party in South Carolina, and a Tealiban militant. He sent out many tweets on the compassionate, Christian response to Ebola. Here’s one.
The protocol for a positive Ebola test should be immediate humane execution followed by sanitization of the whole area.
He sent many tweets about proper “compassionate” policies for executing Ebola victims, such as napalming villages with, I’m sure, Christian napalm. Here are some choice ones:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/10/former-sc-gop-director-execute-anyone-who-comes-into-contact-with-ebola-its-just-math
You can find many other tweets on the internet from the former head of the SC GOP, such as his defense of Creepublican sexual hypocrisy which began with, “Lick my t**nt, b**ch,” but without the *’s.
Given a choice about Christian “compassion”, I’d rather french-kiss an Ebola victim.
A fairly well-known colleague of mine aptly wrote:
There once was a man named Behe
Who decided that nature was ID
He spun quite a tale
En route to his fail
While real scientists said Tee Hee.
Religious ‘scientists’ who tell Americans that Ebola was originally designed for ‘good’ purposes but changed into the deadly virus we see now, are unwittingly basing their conclusion on Darwinian evolution, meseems.
L. Long: “He is a trained biologist but because he is also a religious nut…”
More importantly, he is a radical paranoid authoritarian. In a way he’s far less religious than his arch-nemesis, that ultra-“Darwinist” Ken Miller. Compare:
Miller is a devout Christian who doesn’t pretend to be smart enough to catch God, or some other designer, “hiding in the gaps.” When he does speculate, such as that God nay operate via quantum indeterminacy, he does not pretend that its a testable scientific claim. Behe, in contrast is a Deist at best, which Miller finds too “hands off” for his taste.
If there’s one thing I can say in Behe’s defense, is that, like Miller, he has said many times that he hopes that the designer he claims to have caught is God but is unsure. So that’s the one part where he’s not trying to fool anyone (he certainly is trying to fool people with what evolution supposedly can and cannot do). On the stand at Dover, he admitted that the designer he claims to have caught might no longer exist. So if he really does think he caught God, he is admitting that God could be dead. So he either thinks he caught some hapless delegate, or (more likely) that he didn’t catch any designer, but is just doing what he feels is necessary to save the world.
Hehe in effect asserts that an unknown and unknowable designer poofed the virus into existence, or maybe poofed an earlier virus into existence and modified it to become the ebola virus, at some unknown date by some unknown means, which left no detectible trace and cannot be investigated. (by the way, auto-correct changed Behe to Hehe, which seems completely appropriate, so I’m leaving it). Hehe then asserts that it is the most “reasonable” explanation for viruses. Really? What is the difference between that pile of unknowns and something being “utterly mysterious”. Asserting that something was poofed into existence is entirely equivelent to having “no good theory at all”.
Besides, Wikipedia describes three theories (with their problems), for the origination of viruses. All three are more plausible than the poofing theory Behe advocates.
@FrankJ
Behe once wrote up a short list of possible candidates for the Intelligent Designers, which included “Platonic demiurge”. It is interesting that the Pope explicitly said that God was not a demiurge, which is taken to mean that the Pope was likening creationism to Gnosticism, a charge which we’ve heard before.
@Ed
I’m trying to me generous with Behe’s proposal about front-loading (which BTW reminds me of 18t century Preformationism), but when one proposes a theory which postulates an undetectable event, I cannot see that as any other than Ophalism – not full-blown as “traditional Omphalism”, but as much open to suspicions of deceit by the “designer”.