I’m another who actually changed my mind. I was a big fan of Dawkins, Dennett and the like - I even shared their disdain for SJ Gould as being a heretic from the true Darwinian faith. I remember when “Darwin’s Black Box” came out in 1996, I didn’t bother to read it, instead relying on reviews that told me Behe had been conclusively debunked, nothing to see here, etc.
It was finally a philosophical crisis - the inability to accept that meaning could arise from meaninglessness - that led me to seriously investigate Christianity, which surprised me (who had read all the standard deconstructionist popular Bibile scholarship by that time) with it’s basis in pretty solid historical evidence. Of course, I was in a bind, since it seemed clear that one could not accept the materialist world of Darwin and the claims of Christianity (or, for that matter, any worldview that involved transcendence - not even a nontheistic Buddhist can really agree with Darwinism, despite what Sam Harris seems to think). Oddly enough, one of the key helpers in resolving this conundrum was Ken Miller. “Finding Darwin’s God” was like a bridge - it convinced me that one need not accept a hard-and-fast materialism, especially in the age of the Quantum, to maintain a rational, scientific view of the universe.
Of course, once I was no longer committed to absolutist materialism, I could look at some of the facts of biology without needing to fit them into a materialist “story”. And once you do that, Darwinism starts to look really, really silly. Every time I tracked down what was supposed to be some knock-down, drag-out proof of the NeoDarwinian synthesis, I found massive question begging and sheer self-delusion. Actually reading Behe, and then rereading his critics, I found that despite their huffing and puffing, they were unable to seriously refute a single one of his claims.
So I guess I would have to half agree, half disagree: the facts do speak, but only to those prepared to listen…
I can definitely relate.
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