Detecting Intelligent Design

One major assumption behind the intelligent design movement is that we can tell what objects are a product of design just by examining them. Obviously this is true for something like a watch—which is exactly the reason that William Paley used it in his famous watchmaker analogy. But we don't know that a watch is designed because it's complex or "specified." We know it's designed because we know that humans make watches and we have no evidence that they could form by a natural process.

Intuitively, though, we tend to think we'll always know design when we see it. For instance, the ridges on this stone pottery found in British Columbia clearly indicates that it was spun on a lathe, and holes have been drilled through the center:

Clearly, this pottery must have come from an ancient civilization... except it's not pottery, and these objects are naturally-occurring. They're carbonate concretions formed through a complex geological process, although objects like these really were misinterpreted as artifacts by pseudoscientific writer Graham Hancock.

Okay, so we're zero-for-one. Next is a charming, picturesque ring of mushrooms planted as decoration in a city park...

...by which I mean, a fairy ring created as a natural result of an interconnected underground network of mycelia. Cultures of the past came up with many fanciful explanations for this phenomenon—generally involving the intervention of fairies, elves or some other intelligent agent.

All right, let's try this again. What about these cement pylons? This group of carefully shaped hexagonal bricks could serve not only as a protection from the erosion produced by incoming waves, but also as a staircase up to the shore.

Nope. These are basalt columns in the Giant's Causeway, caused by the rapid cooling of thick lava flows. Curses, foiled again.

Okay, here's the last one. This has got to be intelligently made, right? I mean, just look at those clean right angles. These are obviously the remnants of an ancient building, or some type of crop irrigation system:

...Or maybe it's tessellated pavement on the coast of Tasmania, created by a rare combination of stress cracks and erosion facilitated by the accumulation of salt crystals. Dammit, this design detection business is harder than it looks.

Of course the creationi—er, intelligent design supporters—may retort that these phenomena are simple compared to the incredible complexity of biological systems. But what I've provided here is just a proof of concept, showing that phenomena that appear to be thoughtfully designed for a specific purpose can undeniably be the result of natural forces. The crucial thing to remember is that life has a complexity-building mechanism that blows the ones displayed here out of the water: natural selection.

Those Pesky Craters

Young earth creationists have a pretty serious problem. They're burdened with the task of explaining how all of this...

Yes, those are all craters on the moon.

...happened in just 6,000 years. We see craters like these on most solid bodies in our solar system, but for the sake of simplicity let's focus just on lunar craters for now. These craters demonstrate that our world is old in two ways. First, there's the evidence from sheer numbers. There are an estimated 300,000 craters larger than 1 kilometer on the near side of the moon alone—and the far side actually has significantly more. Based on the rate of such impacts, they must have taken place over hundreds of millions of years.

Then there's the evidence from big craters. The largest confirmed crater in the solar system is the massive South Pole–Aitken Basin, which is shown in dark blue on the right of the picture above. It measures an astonishing 2500 km (1600 mi) across. That's equal to the distance from San Diego to Memphis, from Dallas to Boston, or from Paris to Moscow. Had an impact of this caliber occurred while humans were alive, its effects would surely have been visible from earth, so why is there no mention of it in the historical record?

In addition, some craters on earth are also quite large, although tectonic activity makes them harder to find. The Chicxulub crater on the coast of Mexico is over 180 km (110 mi) across, and may have been responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. This impact would have resulted in worldwide earthquakes, wildfires, volcanic eruptions and kilometers-high tsunamis, filled the atmosphere with thick dust and broiled the planet’s surface. And that's not even the biggest crater. The largest one known, the Vredefort crater in South Africa (at right), is nearly 300 km (180 mi) across, so its effects would probably have been significantly worse. If impacts like these all occurred in the last few thousand years, isn't it strange that we have no human record for any of them?

There's not much YECs can do to effectively respond to these facts. Here's how Henry Morris, the father of modern creationism, tried to explain lunar craters in his book The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth:

"[T]he possibility is at least open that the fractures and scars on the moon and Mars, the shattered remnants of an erstwhile planet that became the asteroids, the peculiar rings of Saturn, the meteorite swarms, and other such features that somehow seem alien to a "very good" universe as God must have created it may have been acquired later. Perhaps they reflect some kind of heavenly catastrophe associated either with Satan's primeval rebellion or his continuing battle against Michael and his angels."

That's right, folks. The man largely responsible responsible for popularizing creationism in 20th century America believed that craters on the moon may have been caused by an outer space battle between angels and demons.

Nowadays, YECs make the (only slightly less silly) claim that these impacts, while caused by real asteroids, were made during Creation Week, the Fall or the Flood. What they always conveniently fail to mention, however, is why. They could argue that the impacts on earth might be some form of divine punishment. But what possible reason could God have for hurling asteroids at the moon and even distant planets? Such actions would not have affected us in any way.

The truth is that most believers in a young earth never even consider the implications of phenomena as simple and obvious as impact craters. The few that do can only offer explanations that are both ridiculous and inadequate, letting their faith fill in the rest.

LY5: Why Creationism Isn't Taught

Like one of my previous posts, this one is inspired by the subreddit r/ExplainLikeImFive, which attempts to give useful explanations to complex issues on a grade-school level. What's surprising is that these explanations are fun to give, and well-written ones are fun to read even if you're already familiar with the topic. Some people might find them condescending, but personally I think they're endearing and often astonishingly accessible.

To most non-creationists it's pretty clear why creationism has no place in public schools, but here are the reasons, explained like you're five.

*     *     *

There are two basic reasons why creationism isn't taught in public schools.

The first reason is that creationism is a religious belief. It says that the universe and all life on earth was created by God. But in America, one of our guiding concepts is separation of church and state, meaning that the government is not allowed to endorse religion—including in public schools, which are run by the government. Some creationists decided that they wanted to make their ideas look like they weren't religious, so they came up with intelligent design (ID).

ID says that the universe and all life on earth was created by some very powerful being, but doesn't speculate on what that being might be. But here's the problem: most of the major ID supporters are Christians who are trying to use it to promote Christianity. It's basically just religious creationism in disguise, which is exactly what a judge ruled in an important 2005 court case. But what if ID weren't being pushed for that reason? Then it wouldn't necessarily be religious, so could we teach it in schools?

That brings us to our second reason: even leaving the issue of religion aside, creationism (including ID) can't be taught because it isn't scientific. A scientific theory needs to be testable. It needs to make specific predictions about what we should expect to see if it were true, and it needs to be capable of being proven wrong if we don't see those things.

But without some details about this intelligent being—its traits and behavior—we have no way of predicting what kind of impact it would make on the world. And let's say we do make up a prediction: maybe a designer would create the best possible life forms. If this is proven wrong (say, by poor design), ID supporters can just say that maybe the designer behaved some other way instead. The "best" solution that supporters have come up with is probably specified complexity, but that's not saying much: it's a vague, deeply flawed attempt at telling apart designed and undesigned objects that has never actually been useful in practice.

So there we have it: creationism isn't taught because it's both religious and unscientific. Many people naively think that we should be "teach both sides" in the interest of "fairness," but that would be no more "fair" to students than teaching astrology in an astronomy class. Of course, the creationist movement could be mentioned as a historical footnote in a course on world religions or American politics, but that's a different matter. As far as the science classroom goes, it's been rejected twice over, and rightly so.

Why Creationists Should Drop the Issue

Just fill in the quote marks around
"museum" using your imagination.

As a child of about ten, I enthusiastically embraced young earth creationism because at the time I thought it gave me concrete support for what I believed. A few years ago I became curious about what evolution supporters had to say about various issues, and I was blown away at how much sense it all made. It took a long time for me to eventually deconvert from Christianity, but the evolution/creation issue was one of the major factors that caused me to start questioning my faith.

Here's the deal: creationism is obviously wrong, and that should be enough reason to stop promoting it. But for creationists themselves, who can't see the evidence staring them right in the face, there's a more pragmatic reason not to try and press this issue. Nearly all creationists in the West are also fundamentalist Christians, and thus presumably consider saving souls to be more important than promoting what they think is the correct view of our origins. Evangelism is paramount; creationism is an important but still peripheral side issue.

I think that such creationists are doing more harm than good, even from their own perspective. There are many others like me, former creationists whose discovery of the real science behind our origins led us to wonder what else we had been lied to about. Unfortunately much of my evidence is anecdotal—I've heard and read a great many stories about people like these—but based on one informal poll, "science-based reasoning" was the number-one factor that led to people to leave the faith.

By promoting creationism as the only valid interpretation of the Bible and demonizing evolution as "atheistic," creationists are creating what many (especially theistic evolutionists) see as a false dichotomy. This leads people who reject creationism to reject their religion wholesale rather than adopting a more liberal form of it. Personally, I have my own reasons for finding theistic evolution unsatisfactory, but who knows? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe millions of people are marching straight into hell because they switched quickly from conservative Christianity to atheism, with creationists unwittingly holding open the gates.

So from their own point of view, creationists should probably stop pushing so hard. And from mine? It's true that I find their alternate narrative irritatingly immune to reality and hate to see people taken in by it. However, I do appreciate them helping to create a fast track from fundamentalism to unbelief, allowing millions to neatly avoid the vague and wishy-washy quagmire that is liberal religion. Even if creationists refuse to drop the issue, though, I think it will slowly fade away whether they like it or not. Although public opinion is moving at a snail's pace, science is gradually prevailing.

Can Creationism Be Falsified or Not?

How is it that evolution supporters can claim creationism is unfalsifiable, but then turn around and attempt to falsify it? This is a common complaint among intelligent design (ID) proponents and other creationists, and on the surface it seems to have some weight. Aren't the evolutionists being unfair? Well, the short answer is no. The long answer is a bit more nuanced.

Here's the main problem evolutionists encounter when dealing with this question: whether or not creationism/ID can be falsified depends on how specifically they define their god or "intelligent agent."

Irreducible Complexity
Let's take the following issue, for instance: If ID is unfalsifiable, how can scientists claim to have falsified proposed examples of irreducible complexity (IC)? To see why scientists are in fact perfectly justified in doing so, let's look at the claims of ID and IC more closely. ID states roughly, "Life was created by an intelligent designer." IC states roughly, "Biological systems exist that could not be created naturally through the iterative addition of parts."

The first thing to note is that IC isn't so much an attempt to prove ID as it is an attempt to disprove naturalistic evolution. But more importantly, ID does not by any means require IC. If the concept became so bankrupt that even IDists had to abandon it, they would just claim that a designer (for some reason) created only life that could also have been created via step-by-step addition. Thus if IC is falsified, the larger thesis of ID would be a bit weaker but still quite intact.

IC (or at least alleged examples of it) can be falsified; ID as commonly argued cannot. There's no contradiction here: it's simply the case that an unfalsifiable argument contains a falsifiable (and in this case only somewhat related) sub-argument.

Poor Design

Let's use the argument from poor design as another example. Many critics reasonably assume that an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good creator would design his creation as skillfully as possible. Well, we know of many instances of suboptimal design in nature—the eye and the vermiform appendix are two examples that can be found in humans. So the God hypothesis has been falsified, right?

Not if the creationists have anything to say about it. Those attempting to go the secular ID route will simply claim that (for some reason) the designer didn't make creatures as flawless as he could have. Those of the more fundamentalist bent will often claim that suboptimal design is the result of sin "entering the world" as a result Adam and Eve's disobedience to God. Either way, an entire class of counterexamples has been conveniently explained away.

The Miracle Retreat
Young-earth creationism is a treasure trove of falsified claims. Biology, geology, cosmology and many other fields of science have shown that the earth and universe are many thousands of times older than YECs require. But at any point, all they have to do is resort to supernatural intervention as an explanation, and their worldview becomes instantly untouchable. Fossil record getting you down? Just say the devil planted the bones there to fool you, or that God put them there to test your faith!

The Omphalos hypothesis takes this to an extreme: maybe God created the universe with the appearance of age in the most intricate detail. From geological formations to starlight to the ancient junkyard of genes in each of our cells, God could have set everything up so that the universe appears to be 14 billion years old even if it's only a few thousand. If a YEC accepts this possibility, no mountain of empirical evidence could budge them from their position.

So, is creationism unfalsifiable? It depends. In some cases we can falsify components without affecting the falsifiability of the whole. And we can attempt to falsify the rest. However, creationists can respond by either defining the creator as vaguely as possible or claiming that he used miracles to simulate the evidence. Their ability to move the goalposts at will demonstrates that their position is unfalsifiable in practice.

Ken Ham's Really Dumb Question

In fact, it's one of the dumbest creationist arguments – and that's saying something. Ken Ham, the president of Answers in Genesis, loves to ask "Were you there?" in the face of the evidence for evolution. The idea is that evolutionists can only infer evolution from our current information, but creationists have an eyewitness to support creation: God was there, and he tells us how it happened in the Bible. Here's Ham indoctrinating a crowd of children with this ridiculous argument. He's trained them sickeningly well.

There are two gigantic problems with Ham's question. First, it severely underestimates the power of indirect empirical evidence. Just because we have to infer a conclusion doesn't mean the evidence used to do so can't be extremely reliable. If we have many pieces of evidence at a crime scene (blood, fingerprints, clothing fibers, etc.) at a crime scene all matching one murder suspect, that person is quite rightly convicted. The myriad converging lines of evidence for evolution mirror this scenario quite well. And in fact, the eyewitness testimony that Ham values so highly is notoriously fallible.

The second massive problem with Ham's argument is that it severely overestimates the reliability of the Bible. We don't have direct eyewitness testimony from God about creation; we have an ancient book written by people who claim to be speaking on God's behalf. As I wrote in this post, claims must be weighed in light of the quality of the source, not just the quality of the source's alleged source. And our source, as it turns out, is terrible: the Bible's errors, contradictions and atrocities make it highly unlikely that it was authored by an omniscient, omnibenevolent God.

I'll summarize by paraphrasing a response to Ham's question that I particularly like, which goes as follows:

Creationist: How do you know evolution happened? Were you there?

Evolutionist: I didn't need to be there. We have strong evidence from archaeology, biogeography, embryology, genetics and other fields that it happened. What evidence do you have for your position?

Creationist: God was there, and he wrote about it in his book!

Evolutionist: You mean the book riddled with evils, errors and inconsistencies? Do you have any evidence that God wrote it? If not, how do you know that he did? Were you there?

Creationism Notes Refuted, Part 4

Last time I covered arguments favoring YEC and intelligent design. In this final installment I'll deal with alleged scientific persecution and the "evils" of evolution—much of which comes from the anti-evolution, pro-ID propaganda film Expelled.

Scientific "Persecution"

I first want to stress that if IDists could provide solid evidence for their views, they would be accepted by the scientific community. But when scientists do bad science, they have to deal with the consequences. I doubt that even IDists would object to such punishment for promoting geocentrism or perpetual motion devices based on faulty evidence, and the same principle applies here.

Notes: Richard Sternberg was fired for publishing an ID article.

Answer: No he wasn't. He had turned in a letter of resignation 6 months beforehand, and even then he still remained on at both of his jobs.

N: Caroline Crocker was fired just for mentioning ID in the classroom.

A: Doubly wrong. She taught several completely discredited creationist claims as fact, and she wasn't fired despite having misrepresented evolution.

N: Baylor shut down Robert Marks' research site due to his link to ID.

A: A blatant distortion of the truth. The site itself had ID material that Baylor didn't want to associate itself with. They even tried to negotiate with Marks, but things didn't work out, so he simply moved his site to another server.

N: Guillermo Gonzalez was denied tenure due to his work in ID.

A: There's no clear evidence that this is the case—lack of scientific publication is a more likely explanation—and even if ID was the reason, that's perfectly appropriate if his work on that topic was flawed.

N: Pamela Winnick was fired by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette just for covering ID.

A: Once again, doubly wrong. She didn't just cover ID, she uncritically portrayed it as a credible, scientific movement. And not only is there no evidence she was fired for that reason, but she continues to occasionally write for the paper.

N: The Discovery Institute only wants to fairly discuss the issues.

A: As the wedge document showed, their agenda is to promote Christianity by teaching creationism under a different name.

Random Evolution Criticism

N: According to Dr. Egnor, evolution is irrelevant in the field of medicine.

A: As some winners of the essay contest Egnor was responding to pointed out, evolution is important in medicine for understanding phenomena such as antibiotic resistance, genetic disorders and vestigial features, and supports the use of animal testing and epidemiological techniques.

N: The Miller–Urey experiment didn't create life.

A: That was never their intention. What the experiment actually did was create many of the amino acids essential for life. And one paper concluded that the amino acids created in this and similar experiments appeared more often in the oldest parts of the genome.

N: Natural selection can only reduce information, not add it.

A: A truly baffling claim that ignores the very mutations that natural selection acts upon. For example, one major source of added information is the accidental duplication of genes.

Evolution as "Evil"

This entire section is a giant pile of association fallacies. Allegations that evolution is associated with bad things have no bearing on whether or not it's true. And many of the allegations are false anyway.

N: Evolution is bad because it promotes eugenics.

A: Anyone trying to use evolution to support eugenics commits the fallacious appeal to nature. Evolution describes the way the world is, not the way it ought to be. Darwin himself condemned eugenics as resulting in "overwhelming evil." On top of that, much of eugenics is based on bad biology, and the concept is quite compatible with creationism.

N: Evolution removes all basis for morality.

A: This is completely nonsensical. Evolution says absolutely nothing about morality one way or another. This objection even seems to ignore the existence of theistic evolutionists—do creationists think they have no basis for morality either?

N: Evolution is the basis of humanism, racism and communism.

A: So much BS condensed into so little space. Racism predates evolution by millennia, and if anything, evolution is an argument against racism since humans are so genetically similar. Marx did compare the struggle between classes to the struggles in nature, but that was about it. The Communist Manifesto made no mention of evolution and was published 11 years before The Origin of Species. And it has absolutely nothing to do with humanism—I'm not even sure what the argument could be made here.

N: Humanists teach that humans are supreme beings.

A: Ohhh... okay then. I see. One teensy problem, though: neither humanism nor evolution teaches that humans are "supreme." If anything, evolution is against this view: humans don't represent a pinnacle, but are simply one out of millions of species that have existed in the past, exist currently, and will exist in the future. Humanists value human characteristics such as reason and focus on human problems, but generally don't say humans are inherently superior. It's worth noting that humanism isn't necessarily secular—for example, Christian humanism exists as well.

N: Columbine shooter Eric Harris wore a shirt that said "natural selection."

A: One tragically misguided student says precisely nothing about the validity of evolution. If anything, this is an argument for teaching more carefully in schools that natural selection describes what is, not what should be.

N: A biology textbook says that humans are animals and are related to earthworms.

A: Both of those statements are true, but they hold no more negative implications than the Bible's teaching that we were made from dust.

N: Roe v. Wade ruled that the unborn aren't people, resulting in 45 million abortions.

A: First of all, this has nothing to do with evolution. Second, it only ruled that abortion is legal until the fetus is viable (at 6–7 months). And third, the body miscarries naturally extremely often—perhaps God doesn't care so much about the unborn after all.

N: Darwin thought inbreeding would result in better genes.

A: Just the opposite: because he married his cousin, he often worried about the negative effects of inbreeding on his children.

N: Darwin said that more civilized races would exterminate less civilized ones.

A: He also explicitly condemned such extermination. True, Darwin held some racist views, but so did nearly everyone in the mid-1800s—even Lincoln, the Great Emancipator himself, said that he wasn't in favor of racial equality and believed that whites were superior to blacks. Darwin was in fact far less racist than most, arguing that human races were all one species and strongly opposing slavery.

Evolution and Hitler Were Bestest Pals!

This fallacy is so common that it has its own nickname: reductio ad Hitlerum. The bottom line is that all of this is irrelevant to the truth of evolution, but even so, such statements are often highly misleading and deserve to be cleared up.

N: Hitler and the Nazis used evolution to further their views.

A: Not nearly as much as creationists would have us believe. Sure, they abused a few concepts here and there, but they did the same thing with other scientific fields. They also banned writings about "the false scientific enlightenment of Darwinism," and much of their motivation was religious.

N: Hitler's Mein Kampf promoted evolution.

A: The text is freely available for scrutiny here. It mentions biological evolution only rarely, and in fact promotes God and Christianity to a far greater extent.

N: Hitler hated Christianity and called it a "fatal, seductive lie."

A: This is totally irrelevant to evolution. And to take this quote on its own ignores Hitler's complex and seemingly contradictory views towards religion. For example, he also privately said that "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so."

N: Hitler said, "Let me control the textbooks and I will control the state."

A: Obviously textbooks will tend to influence people, but this is a good thing if they reflect reality—and the teaching of evolution is based upon mountains of verifiable evidence. In contrast, creationists have repeatedly tried to pollute the textbooks with ridiculous falsehoods, including many of the lies I have debunked throughout this series.

...Whew!

That's it for these notes. I must say that I learned a lot while researching these claims—especially about the extent to which creationists are willing to distort the truth in order to peddle their madness. I'm sure that most of the people who teach this stuff are true believers who aren't even aware of their massive biases, but there are almost certainly some creationists who willingly tell lies, believing it a small price to pay to advance their agenda.

Creationism Notes Refuted, Part 3

The previous section of notes covered dinosaurs, dating methods, and the age of the earth. Next up are arguments in favor of young earth creationism and intelligent design.

Young Earth "Evidence"

These claims are generally meant to line up various measurements of the age of the earth with the time of the flood.

Notes: The Sahara is growing too fast (it's about 4,000 years old)!

Answer: The desert itself is young, but not the earth.

N: Methuselah, the world's oldest tree, is just 4,300 years old!

A: Wrong on multiple levels. It's older than that, it's not the oldest, and individual trees are the least of YEC's problems.

N: The Great Barrier Reef is under 4,200 years old!

A: No, no, no. It's way older than that, and once again it's not even the oldest.

N: Oceans could get from fresh to saltwater in under 5,000 years!

A: Nope. And even if they could, millions of freshwater species would have to very quickly evolve a tolerance to saltwater.

N: Stalactites in Carlsbad Caverns could have grown really fast!

A: Wow, they're using a lot of Hovind's stuff. Anyway, nope.

N: Earth's continents would erode away in just 14 million years!

A: Yeah, totally... as long as new land masses were never formed ever.

N: The first writing is 5,000 years old, fully developed, and found in Mesopotamia!

A: So they've taken to proudly admitting problems with their worldview now? Their precious flood was supposedly about 650 years later than that. And even leaving that aside, they're still completely dead wrong.

N: The Chinese calendar starts in 2700 BC!

A: Look, it should be obvious that this is terrible evidence, but in case it isn't, here's a link.

N: Who did Cain marry? His sister, of course! Problem solved!

A: Except that such tiny population sizes create a huge genetic bottleneck that we could easily observe today. The post-flood starting population of 6 (Noah and his wife had no more children) is an even more recent issue.

Design Arguments

Most of these are arguments take the form "I don't know how it happened, so it couldn't have happened." This is fallacious because it assumes we will never figure out how something happened—a very poor assumption given that scientists are constantly learning more about the world around them. Unlike incredulously asking questions, doing real science takes time, especially since there are so many evolved features to study. And even so, many of the examples below already have plausible explanations.

N: The bombardier beetle's chemical system couldn't have evolved.

A: Yes, it could. One model for how it could have come about is given here.

N: The woodpecker's tongue couldn't have evolved.

A: Yes, it could. This claim stems from a misunderstanding of woodpecker anatomy.

N: The gecko's suction cups couldn't have evolved.

A: First, they're actually tiny hairs called setae. Second, I don't know how they evolved, but it doesn't seem all that difficult. Creationists seem to think that tiny things are harder to evolve, perhaps because it would be difficult for us to make them due to our size. But evolutionary processes have no "size" and thus work just as well on a small scale.

N: Spiders' different types of webbing... couldn't have evolved?

A: It wasn't quite clear what was meant by this. Certainly various web-spinning strategies evolved and diversified to fill different environmental niches, though. It even seems that spiders themselves diversified based on differences in silk. Here is an entire book on the subject.

N: Ears couldn't have evolved.

A: Not only could they have evolved, but we have detailed fossil evidence of how mammalian ears evolved from reptilian ones.

N: Eyes couldn't have evolved.

A: Not only could they have evolved, but a model for their evolution was proposed 150 years ago in The Origin of Species.

N: Lizard "salt sneeze" glands... couldn't have evolved?

A: Again, not quite sure what was meant here. Here is a book chapter on salt gland evolution, though.

Intelligent Design

N: Intelligent design (ID) bases its assumptions on science, not the Bible.

A: ID is unscientific because it is unfalsifiable and does not propose any testable hypotheses; its nebulous designer can be molded to fit any set of facts. Furthermore, most of its proponents are creationists who are merely hiding their religious motivations in order to appear legitimate.

N: Michael Behe has found irreducibly complex (IC) systems.

A: First, many of the systems he's claimed to be IC are not—that is, they can have parts removed and retain partial function. And second, paradoxical as it may seem, even truly IC systems (as Behe defines the term) can evolve in multiple ways. See here for a great list of articles on the subject, and here for a 10-minute YouTube video efficiently summarizing the problems with IC.

N: The bacterial flagellum is IC and thus couldn't have evolved.

A: Yes, it could. It probably began as a Type III secretion system. One possible model is summarized with this graphic.

N: Entirely new structures like wings and eyes couldn't have evolved.

A: The reasoning behind this is unclear. In general, though, either they're created from scratch (e.g. eyes began as patches of light-sensitive cells), or new features are added to existing structures (e.g. wings are modified theropod forelimbs, and feathers likely evolved from scales).

N: DNA is a complex code and couldn't have evolved.

A: It most likely came from RNA, which in turn came from even simpler molecules.

N: Specified complexity suggests an intelligent agent.

A: This idea basically ignores the proposed mechanisms for abiogenesis and evolution altogether. Many have criticized this concept as flawed or even incoherent.

N: SETI searches for recognizable patterns of signals as a sign of intelligence.

A: One huge problem with this analogy is that there is no known mechanism by which such signals could be generated naturally.

That's all for this batch. The next one will thankfully be the last.