Other people have pointed out the theological and scientific flaws in Intelligent Design theory. After listening to Michael Behe debate with Michael Reiss for Premier Radio on Monday afternoon I think I have found two more.

The first is particular to Behe. At one point, he said that all of the things that seem to him evidence of ID could have been produced by the operation of natural laws, however improbably. But in that case, what is all the fuss about? Why would acceptance of his theory then constitute the greatest scientific revolution in history, as both he and Michael Reiss later agreed it would? What right do we have to demand that Science should reveal a universe that seems to us probable?

But the second objection is deeper and seems to reveal an almost logical contradiction in his position.

When Behe is not claiming that it might all have happened according to the regular operation of the laws of nature, the claim is that there are things which the regular operation of the laws of nature cannot explain, and that science can or has already established what they are. This is the point of his examples of bacterial flagella and similar biological mechanisms, which he claims could not have arisen through the normal workings of Darwinian evolution.

Now I don't have a problem with the notion that there are things that science cannot wholly explain. But this is not a purely scientific conclusion, any more than the opposing position is. Science comes into the judgement, but so do philosophy, history and doubtless other considerations. The general point here is science on its own cannot determine the boundaries of what may be scientifically knowable. Science can only demonstrate that it can't yet understand something. Even that overstates the case: science can prove it doesn't now explain something; the "yet" or the "never" is added by humans, not using the scientific method.

So Behe wants science to do something it just can't, and which no amount of scientific progress would enable the scientific method to do. In this, it seems to me that Intelligent Design is yet another form of scientism, or what Marilynne Robinson calls "parascience" -- something which uses the prestige of science to tell stories quite outside its competence. This is a reproach usually aimed at atheist ideologies. If Intelligent Design has contributed anything to human knowledge, is the discovery that religious people can play that game too.