Faith Well Grounded

In a blog here late last year, it was floated that Michael Behe can't be trusted because he lied under oath (Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board). Since I have little connection with seeking ID taught in schools, I kind of let it drop there, doing little more than asking the commenter for more details and getting none.

But recently, I picked Behe's 10 year anniversary reprint of "Darwin's Black Box" back up and started the process of a reread. I became curious enough to Google "Michael Behe Lied Under Oath", and boy, did I get an eyeful of responses. It seems that the staunch evolutionists out there have had a field day with that one. Apparently, they still are (see http://www.otmatheist.com/2007/12/20/merry-kitz-mas/).

I'll be quoting from the above link-- even quoting quotes... :)

Siamang (the author of the blog I'm quoting) started with the following quotes from Judge Jones:

**** “Witnesses either testified inconsistently, or lied outright under oath on several occasions,” Jones wrote. “The inescapable truth is that both [Alan] Bonsell and [William] Buckingham lied at their January 3, 2005 depositions. … Bonsell repeatedly failed to testify in a truthful manner. … Defendants have unceasingly attempted in vain to distance themselves from their own actions and statements, which culminated in repetitious, untruthful testimony.”

…

“The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

…

“Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial.”

Then, immediately follows with the editorial statement:

With those words in mind, especially those speaking to the intellectual honesty of the Intelligent Design proponents… I want to talk about one particularly dramatic part of the trial.

Michael Behe is on the stand...

Now, I'm not sure if the author intentionally misled his readers, or if it was merely an unfortunate turn of the keystroke, but it's as if (s)he seeks to tie Behe into the "Witnesses either testified inconsistently, or lied outright under oath on several occasions..." comment. I had to go elsewhere to find actual context and see that the accusation is directed toward the members of the school board, and not the expert witnesses.

So, where was the blatant false witness that Behe is accused of by the naturalist camp? Well... In response to questions about the peer review of "Darwin's Black Box", Behe claims that it was peer reviewed, perhaps even more so than most scientific works.

**** Furthermore, the book was sent out to more scientists than typically review a manuscript. In the typical case, a manuscript that’s going to — that is submitted for a publication in a scientific journal is reviewed just by two reviewers. My book was sent out to five reviewers.

Furthermore, they read it more carefully than most scientists read typical manuscripts that they get to review because they realized that this was a controversial topic. So I think, in fact, my book received much more scrutiny and much more review before publication than the great majority of scientific journal articles.

Siamang's blog then quotes 4 of the 5 peers that reviewed the work and points out that one tentatively endorsed it, three didn't agree with its points and thus rejected it, and the fifth hasn't commented.

So, I ask again... Where is the lie? Behe claimed to have had 5 peer reviews. There were apparently 5 peer reviews. So, I'm confused. Does "peer review" mean that everyone must glowingly praise the work and agree with the findings? Is that what science has become in the post-Darwinian era? (If so, how has the peer review process changed so much from the time a book called "...Origin of Species" was published by a non-scientist theologian whose views flew in the face of the current scientific paradigm?) Seriously, I'm confused. I'm finding a bit of "intellectual dishonesty" here, but not from Behe.

Siamang ends his piece with:

But now we get to the part where something hasn’t changed in the two years since Judge Jones talked about the lies and the duplicity of the ID advocates. Two years after one of Behe’s peer-reviewers revealed that the review was a phone call, and another reviewer called it “the philosophical wanderings of an uniformed (or disingenuous) mind.”

What hasn’t changed?

The Discovery Institute’s website, two years later, still lists Behe’s “Darwin’s Black Box” as a peer-reviewed book.

I guess some things never change.

(Note that the author again seeks to wrongly imply that Behe and the ID expert witnesses were accused of false witness by the judge.)

Um... It was peer reviewed at the time. How else would the quoted reviewer have had such a strong opinion if he had not reviewed it and read it as carefully as Behe claimed? Furthermore, the book has been dissected and carved on for years, so much so that the 10 year anniversary edition has a new appendix just responding to the attempted refutations by his peers.

Too see some of his responses to some of his peer review, go here.

So, I submit that if there is ANY intellectual dishonesty going on, it is done by those filling the internet with rumors and accusations against Behe's character. Like I said, Behe has updated his book to answer his critics. Perhaps those critics would better spend their time tackling the science and not the scientist.

Next, I think I'll blog on Behe's correspondence with science journals while trying to get published-- he has an exchange posted on arn.org. It's pretty eye-opening, actually. Then, I'll be blogging on some points made by Judge Jones in his ruling on Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board that I found (incredible?) interesting.

Until then...

Be blessed.

(Note: **** indicates that I am quoting a quote from the blog. The first is quoting Judge Jones, the second is quoting Behe.)

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