My Favorite Nutball - Michael Behe

I tend to forget how distasteful thinking about Michael Behe is for me. I go for months without thinking about the religious pap he panders to the uneducated public. Every few months Behe rears his furry head in a public forum to express his religious beliefs again, but always his beliefs are clothed in pseudoscience. Take his latest effort, he just completed three unsuccessful days trying to convince a judge that his pet theory, Intelligent Design, was in fact good science. I don’t think he convinced anybody (other than those already blinded by faith).

The meta story behind Behe is telling: A Christian becomes a biology scientist and then discovers that science conflicts with his supernatural belief structures – He concocts a cover story that is un-provable and un-testable. He backs his cover story with NO peer review, yet still claims it is science. He does not speak up until after he cannot be fired – he stands alone defending theory-that-is-not-a-theory against the scientific community while claiming to be a intellectual revolutionary fighting against the establishment.

Behe is actually intellectually dishonest – his theory is a religion. His aim is to dumb down our students with his own version of biblical creation. I am sure there would be a special place in hell for this man…. if I believed in hell that is. Failing hell, can we please just bend the rules some and fire him? He should not be teaching. His own colleagues at Lehigh University think him a fool - they have publicly distanced themselves for his Intelligent Design and Michael Behe.

How did Behe’s testimony go in Harrisburg – reporters and bloggers tell of three days of testimony where Behe was shown to have adapted a older discredited creationists message to become the New Intelligent Design theory. Behe was forced to admit the his work had never been peer reviewed and that it could not pass even a cursory scientific test. It was apparent that Behe took his belief in God and developed a theory that he could apply to science based on the assumption that God was in the creation process. Of course – his work is fiction, maybe it should be taught as such.