Michael Behe\'s son is an atheist (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, August 28, 2011, 12:39 (4815 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: He is going to college to become a philosopher-http://thehumanist.org/september-october-2011/the-humanist-interview-with-leo-behe/-I find this article quite moving, as it brings back memories of long ago. As a child, you trust in authority ... your parents, your teachers and, if you're exposed to it, all the paraphernalia associated with religion. It was when I hit puberty ... or rather, puberty hit me ... that I became aware of the fallibility of them all. I was lucky enough to have loving, kind-hearted parents, and a fine education, but I felt bitter disillusionment when I realized that the self-important and often grim certainties of the synagogue were based on ancient texts that could only have been written by humans as fallible as myself and all those around me. I feel the same profound scepticism when current circumstances compel me to go to church. I could see no evidence of a loving God in a world still recovering from a devastating war (among my earliest memories is of the air-raid shelter at the side of our little semi-detached house in suburban London), and I became a teenage atheist. -It was not until my late teens that I read The Origin of Species, which knocked me for six. I'd expected this book to provide the ultimate evidence that there was no God and no need for a God, but on the contrary I found several mentions of the Creator ... as if his existence was actually taken for granted. This was a shock. My edition (I still have it) is undated, and it appears that at least some of these references were added on, perhaps to appease Darwin's wife, who was religious. But as I discovered later, Darwin finished up as an agnostic, and denied ever having been an atheist. Besides, there were already other pointers: comments such as this one, on the evolution of the eye:-"How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life first originated." (Difficulties on Theory).-This rang loud alarm bells in my youthful mind. The theory of common descent was wonderfully logical, and breathtakingly simple, as was the theory of natural selection. But neither concept explained origins. "Natural selection," he wrote in the same chapter, "can do nothing until favourable variations chance to occur." Atheism, I reasoned at my tender age, therefore depends on chance origins and chance variations. It took a lot of swallowing then, and it takes a lot of swallowing now. The huge advances in our knowledge of genetics seem to me to confirm the main elements of Darwin's theory, although the gradualism he insisted on has to be in serious doubt. Epigenetics suggests astonishing capabilities of adaptation to changing environments, which may even be found to explain certain innovations, but this mind-numbingly complex mechanism can only function within existing creatures, and so the concept of evolution through generations is in no way affected. We are not discovering WHETHER evolution happens, but HOW it happens.-Like Leo Behe, I decided to try a different approach in my quest for truth, so I went to see the oh so wise Senior Tutor at my Cambridge college and told him I wanted to read philosophy. He asked me why, and when I told him, he gave me a reading list. "Come back when you've read these books," he said, "and if you still want to read philosophy, I'll give you the green light." (Or words to that effect.) I wish I could remember the titles, but it was all so long ago. I read the books. And they took me not one inch further in my quest for truth. So I did not read philosophy. Maybe Leo will follow the same route.-The agnosticism I embraced in my very late teens has not changed, which may be a sign of my early maturity or my subsequent immaturity. I have, though, tempered my resentment towards religion ... though not towards its absurd ceremoniousness, dogmas and intolerance ... because it seems to me that whatever force it is that brought us to life is ungraspable. Religions I take to be metaphors for that force, and as we cannot understand it, we reduce it to terms that we CAN understand ... the "stories" towards which Kent and others are so rightly (in my view) sceptical. To rely on those ancient writings is no more sensible than to believe that those who govern us today are blessed with infinite knowledge and wisdom. However, there may be grains of truth in all the religions, and there may be dimensions of existence beyond those that our limited range allows us to perceive. Anyone who has experienced the profound mysteries of consciousness, love, creativity, oneness will recognize that there is something that transcends our material selves and our material universe. What that something is we shall probably never know.