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RI: What impact has Michael Denton's book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis [Adler & Adler, 1986] played in your journey?
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Behe: As a Roman Catholic I was always taught that God made life, and how He made it was up to Him. I was taught that the best scientific answer, so far, for how God made life was Darwinian evolution. That made sense to me, so I never gave evolution much of a thought. I was taught in my undergraduate years and graduate studies in biochemistry that all of these fantastically intricate systems that I was learning about were the result of Darwinian evolution. I had a thesis to complete, so I didn't think much about it.
However, in 1987 or so, I read Evolution: A Theory in Crisis by Michael Denton. It startled me because he said there were huge and unaddressed problems with evolutionary theory.
In fact, there was a very good chance the theory was incorrect; it could not really describe how life came to be. When I read [Denton's] book, I got mad; I was upset because I realized much of my world view was not based on science, but rather on people saying, "Well, yes, this is the way it happened. Don't worry about it. Maybe you don't know how it happened, but somebody else does."
Well, reading Denton's book made me realize that nobody else knew about the problems. And from then on I became increasingly interested in it. I looked in my own field of biochemistry and in the National Academy of Sciences and the Journal of Molecular Biology and places like that for research that might say how these biochemical systems were gradually put together. I rapidly found out that there were no such papers. So, over time I developed the idea that in fact these systems were the result of intelligent design.
http://www.origins.org/mc/resources/ri9602/behe.html
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