Science Quote by Michael Behe

Science isn’t a parlor trick with a bouncer at the door, Behe insists; it’s an inquiry that shouldn’t be policed by “arbitrary rules.” The line works because it frames methodological standards not as hard-won safeguards but as a kind of bureaucratic prejudice. “Permitted” is the tell: it casts mainstream scientific practice as a gatekeeping regime, where certain answers are disallowed before the evidence is even heard. That rhetorical move flips the usual power dynamic. Instead of critics asking Behe to meet science’s burden of proof, Behe suggests science has quietly moved the goalposts to exclude whole categories of explanation.

The context matters. Behe is best known as a leading figure in intelligent design, arguing that some biological structures are too complex to have arisen through unguided evolution. His opponents respond that science, by design, restricts itself to naturalistic explanations because those can be tested, falsified, and shared across communities without appealing to private revelation. Behe’s sentence targets that boundary line, implying it’s a philosophical preference masquerading as rigor.

The subtext is strategic: if methodological naturalism is “arbitrary,” then intelligent design can present itself not as a religious import but as a wrongly excluded hypothesis. The quote’s punch comes from its populist suspicion of institutions: the idea that experts enforce rules to protect an orthodoxy. It’s a savvy critique of scientific culture’s blind spots, even as it sidesteps why those “rules” exist in the first place: not to ration permissible ideas, but to keep explanations tethered to evidence that anyone, believer or skeptic, can interrogate.