A recent article published by a news outlet linked to the intelligent design think tank Discovery Institute caught my eye. The article was lengthy, debunking the claims of an evolutionary paper, but parts of it left me wondering if parts of the ID movement are slowly moving in the direction of aspects of creation science.
Don’t get me wrong here. The ID movement is still not aligned with creation science in any way. Most of them are old-earth advocates and some even advocate for a form of guided evolution. They are not creationists in any way. Yet, when I read their literature, sometimes I can’t help but see similarities between what they are discovering and what creationists have said for decades.
This article, in particular, is about African cichlids. Cichlids are a type of broadly diverse fish which are popular among aquarists for their bold colors and even bolder personalities. They have been a perennial topic of discussion for Darwinian advocates because in Africa, there are tons of cichlid species and they exhibit diverse behaviors, colors and habitats. This has led to them being promoted by some evolutionists as a key part of the Darwinian dogma. However, ID proponents are having none of it. The article is fantastic, and I’d recommend reading it. I have linked it below.
For those of you who won’t read the article, let me briefly summarize it here. It hammers the Darwinians for claiming that a new species is an evidence for evolution when no one knows what a species is. I’ve covered that topic before but its nice to see the ID people get it. The article further debunks the idea that speciation is anything new.
However, my focus for this is not to point out that the ID people are kicking the daylights out of the evolutionists. While that is true, it’s not the purpose of this blog. However, a statement in the article intrigued me. Rather it is a statement referring back to Dr. Michael Behe’s recent book Darwin Devolves. Apparently, Behe believes that evolution has an “edge” to it, beyond which it cannot create new variation. That’s an argument that creationists have used, albeit with different terminology, for decades. Limits to variation works well with a creation model, and is often cited as both a challenge to evolution, and as part of the mechanism of speciation.
Behe could have stopped there and I would have been surprised. However, according to the article, he went even further. Apparently, in his most recent book, Behe advocates that the edge of evolution, as he calls it, is at about the family level of classification. Ring any bells? It should. This is about the level of classification that creationists have postulated the created kind to be for the last several decades. Behe is making a creationist argument, whether he knows it or not.
This ID article goes even further, taking on the myth that evolution is upward change. In this section it, again, sounds like something a creationist would have written. “None of these papers talks about new functions arising by mutation, having been selected by positive natural selection because of some exciting new function, organ, or trait that didn’t exist before.” That is a direct quote from the article but it may as well be a quote from the Answers in genesis website. The ID people are catching up with the creationists. Maybe one of these days they will recognize they are wrong about the age of the earth and admit that the Bible is true. I’m not holding my breath, but it would be nice.
That the ID people are coming to the same conclusions as creationists is not a surprise. They are doing research into what science actually is and drawing honest conclusions. Creationists should not be surprised by Behe and others echoing our views. When carefully examined, all science proclaims the truth of Scripture. Therefore we should not be surprised when honest scientists who don’t agree with us stumble on Biblical conclusions. While the ID people are not on our side, and go to great lengths to distance themselves from us, it is nice to know that, if you follow science to an honest conclusion it does always brings you back to the Bible.
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