That was a nice video by Behe. These terms never cease to fascinate me. The very notion that a man gets paid to be a "philosopher of biology" is pretty fascinating. The plot thickens, ie, what scientists say is getting muddled and they dont understand anymore what they are saying.
When Behe explains irreducible complexity, it would appear to me that folks believe they have "reduced" irreducible complexity by describing even greater underlying complexity. To some, "reduction" is simply describing complexity of any degree. To some, reducing complexity means showing less complexity. Underlying the notion of complexity is the notion of probability and the odds that anything could happen.
If Darwinism were real, shouldnt the process causing evolution become simpler and easier rather than more complicated and attenuated? What exactly do they have going for them? Better descriptions of really complicated stuff and no witnesses from Eden to prove them wrong (other than the Holy Spirit)? The funny thing about all this complexity is that it is seen as convincing based upon the lack of a competing view. In other words, God has to actually create, ex nihilo, a hephalump in Harvard Yard, or there is no deal for ID in the text books.
Quite frankly, I dont think scientists understand what reduction is, except that avoiding "theism" is to be avoided as the first order of business.
How exactly could God compete with evolution? Since he rested on Day Seven, I would say they are probably right about choices for purposes of tenure and getting that endowed chair. God isnt likely to redo days 1 through 6 any time soon. So what that means is there is no competing evidence to fill the vacuum represented in all those similar skeletons spread across the landscape. If God rested on day 7, that means the show is over. What else could you really do to prove evolution is nonsense? The theory depends upon an absence of clarity and available evidence. If you meet a guy named Lazarus, travelling alone, and he tells you he was raised from the dead, how exactly do you verify the story or disprove that the notion that he was just a really sound sleeper?
And that is why a very non-self-critical Darwinism can continue. Defining greater complexity can be argued as an advantage in their quest. All they have to do is philosophize after that, since God's work is done, and EVERYTHING is philosophy after that (or its the Holy Spirit).
Lets assume Adam had a belly button. Apart from all other considerations, how do you prove he didnt have a placenta? Simply by arguing that God wouldnt have wanted a belly bottom on a man that was never fetus? If one really assumes that God is all powerful and can do anything, why not look at the matter from his perspective? Couldnt he just think they were cute with a belly button and make Adam that way. How does knowing about umblical chords and placentas and gestation and all that complicated stuff give you a meaningful answer?
At one time I argued that we know less as time goes on. What we do is define more and more variables and end up with a declining percentage of definition. Yet, if you can define more today than you could the day before, you presume to have made an advance in some ultimate sense, despite the greater increase in variables.
Behe's irreducible complexity is an interesting phrase, since as you note, it is divorced from any notion of ultimacy and salvation. All Behe has done is to say that there is a level of analysis that is just beyond us. That level may retreat below the level of a level of 2 microns or whatever scale accounts for the flagellum, but having described another level below the flagellum doesnt get us closer to life and death issues, or understanding where life came from. All Behe does is tell us we cant have all the answers. That is a far cry from proving there is a God, much less does it tell us how to fellowship with Him.
Behe apparently has modest goals. He wants to end the pretensions about life origins by showing the odds. Many of us latch upon such works as if we have proven God exists, when we have nothing of the sort. At best, we have proven the likelihood of a God, who has perhaps spent all his time since Day 7 in contriving the most improbable series of historical events to keep the Cubs out of the World Series for all eternity. Unfortunately, he failed when it came to the RedSox, whom only demonic forces could explain. In short, an irrelevant God works just fine within the limits of this theory. Meaning that nothing real has been proven.
The Darwinists, being in power, are less circumspect. They seem to think that if you play Bethoven on the sitar without a major scale or backbeat, that this can be called a Rolling Stones tribute band. So, after you dispense with natural selection and random mutation, you are still talking about Darwinism. That is probably because, frankly, it keeps the sky from falling as we avoid the word "god" for another day.
The Darwinist do share with ID proponents a fundamental extrapolation from some data to a much larger idea. The Darwinists point to common morphology as a basis for all sorts of microscopic processes that dont exist -- or at least those processes are really complicated and they understand a really nice (but tiny) sample of the total morass.
