William A. Dembski

William A. Dembski
Born	(1960-07-18) July 18, 1960 United States
Era	contemporary philosophy
Main interests	Theology · mathematics · biology · statistics
Notable ideas	Intelligent design · specified complexity

William Albert "Bill" Dembski (born July 18, 1960) is an American mathematician, philosopher, theologian, author, and professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. He is a prominent proponent of intelligent design (ID), well-known for his "specified complexity" argument.

Dembski is the author of many articles and books on intelligent design. ID is the belief that an overarching intelligence as opposed to natural selection is responsible for life. In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a U.S. District Judge ruled that intelligent design is not science but creationism, and members of the press, scientific and education communities have described it as "creationism in disguise" and "junk science". Dembski attempts to use probability mathematics to support his claim that chance mutations and natural selection cannot account for nature's complexity. In his book The Design Inference, Dembski introduced this argument as the "explanatory filter" theory. He followed this up with No Free Lunch, discussing a theorem he claims rules out adaptation by natural selection as the explanation for simple sequence evolution. His fundamental assertion is that "intelligent causation is an irreducible feature of the bio-physical universe, and furthermore that intelligent causation is empirically detectable." Mathematician Jeffrey Shallit and biologist Wesley Elsberry presented a paper refuting Dembski's theories; "Information Theory, Evolutionary Computation, and Dembski’s “Complex Specified Information”".

The question of ID being science or theology was put on trial in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover (USA 2005). The key issue was the assertion that ID is faith-based and "junk science". As such, it was unacceptable curriculum in a publicly funded high school biology course. In Judge Jones' 139-page decision on December 20, 2005, he wrote that "the overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory." (page 43) A controversy arose when Dembski withdrew from giving testimony in the trial and rebuttal witness Shallit was removed from the schedule.

Biography

Childhood and education

Dembski was born in Chicago, Illinois. He was born a Catholic, but later converted to Protestantism. He was the only child of a college biology professor (who accepted and taught evolution). He was educated at the Portsmouth Abbey School, at the time an all-male Catholic preparatory school. In 1988 he delivered one of the school's Dom Luke Child's series of lectures for that year.

Finishing high school a year early, he attended the University of Chicago, but he struggled at it, and dropped out at the age of seventeen to work in his mother's art dealership. He says that he did not initially accept the precepts of Christianity, but during this difficult period he turned to the Bible in an effort to understand the world around him. Later, after becoming an Evangelical Christian, he read creationist literature. However, he did not accept the doctrines of literal creationists, though their criticisms of evolutionary theory did strike a chord in him. He says of Young Earth creationism:

"Nonetheless, it was their literature that first got me thinking about how improbable it is to generate biological complexity and how this problem might be approached scientifically. A.E. Wilder-Smith was particularly important to me in this regard. Making rigorous his intuitive ideas about information has been the impetus for much of my research."

He returned to school at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where he studied psychology (in which he received a B.A. in 1981) and statistics (receiving an M.S. in 1983). He was awarded an M.S. in mathematics in 1985, and a Ph.D., also in mathematics, in 1988, both from the University of Chicago, after which he held a postdoctoral fellowship in mathematics from the National Science Foundation from 1988 until 1991, and another in the history and philosophy of science at Northwestern University from 1992–1993. He was awarded an M.A. in philosophy in 1993, and a Ph.D. in the same subject in 1996, both from UIC, and an M.Div from Princeton Theological Seminary, also in 1996.

Dissatisfied with the "free-swinging academic style" of the Princeton Theological Seminary, Dembski was involved in forming a group known as the "Charles Hodge Society", by and large a group concerned with resurrecting positive evaluations of Old Princeton Theology. The Society organized discussions and informal colloquia, but its primary work centered on reviving Hodge's own journal, the Princeton Theological Review. The PTR primarily wrote from a conservative angle on theological issues of the day. In the Unapologetic Apologetics Dembski claims that "members of the Charles Hodge Society were threatened with two lawsuits for their work on the Princeton Theological Review, threatened with physical violence, accused of racism and sexism, denied funding that other campus groups readily received, had posted signs destroyed and removed, and were explicitly informed by faculty that membership in the Charles Hodge Society jeopardized their academic advancement." Currently, he attends the First Baptist Church in Riesel, Texas.

Early opposition to evolution

Dembski holds that his knowledge of statistics, and general skepticism concerning evolutionary theory, led him to believe that the extraordinary diversity of life was statistically unlikely to have been produced by natural selection. A key turning point for him was reached at a conference on randomness at Ohio State University in 1988, where statistician Persi Diaconis concluded the event by saying, "We know what randomness isn't. We don't know what it is." Dembski cites this event as a catalyst for his subsequent work on design. He concluded that randomness is a derivative notion, which can only be understood in terms of design, a more fundamental concept. He presented these thoughts in his 1991 paper 'Randomness by Design', which appeared in the journal Noûs. These ideas led to his notion of specified complexity, which he developed in The Design Inference, a revision of his Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy.

Lawyer Phillip E. Johnson's first book Darwin on Trial (published in 1991) attracted a group of scholars who shared his view that the exclusion of supernatural explanations by the scientific method was unfair and had led to the Edwards v. Aguillard ruling that teaching creation science in public schools was unconstitutional. Dembski was part of that group at a symposium at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in March 1992, before they came to call themselves "The Wedge". The phrase "intelligent design" had been adopted in 1987 in drafts of the high school textbook Of Pandas and People as a substitute for "creation science" to refer to the idea that there is scientific evidence that life was created through unspecified processes by an intelligent but unidentified designer without infringing the Edwards v. Aguillard ruling, and the textbook had been published in 1989 amidst campaigning by the publisher for the introduction of "intelligent design" into school science classes. Biochemist Michael Behe, another member of "The Wedge", contributed the argument which he subsequently called "irreducible complexity" (IC) to the second edition of Pandas in 1993. The textbook already contained concepts which Dembski elaborated into his doctrine of "specified complexity" (SC) as a supporting element. Dembski's mathematical arguments rest on Behe's assertion that irreducibly complex systems cannot evolve gradually. Dembski's specified complexity rides on Behe's claim, and its validity is dependent on the validity of irreducible complexity.

Discovery Institute

After completing graduate school in 1996, Dembski was unable to secure a university position; from then until 1999 he received what he calls "a standard academic salary" of $40,000 a year as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC). "I was one of the early beneficiaries of Discovery largess," says Dembski. As of 2008, Dembski serves as a senior fellow at the CSC, where he plays a central role in the center's extensive public and political campaigns advancing the concept of intelligent design and its teaching in public schools through its "Teach the Controversy" campaign as part of the institute's wedge strategy.

Baylor University

Michael Polanyi Center controversy

Main article: Michael Polanyi Center

In 1999, Dembski was invited by Robert B. Sloan, President of Baylor University, to establish the Michael Polanyi Center at the university. Named after the Hungarian physical chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), Dembski described it as "the first intelligent design think tank at a research university". Dembski had known Sloan for about three years, having taught Sloan's daughter at a Christian study summer camp not far from Waco, Texas. Sloan was the first Baptist minister to serve as Baylor's president in over 30 years, had read some of Dembski's work and liked it; according to Dembski, Sloan "made it clear that he wanted to get me on the faculty in some way".

The Polanyi Center was established without much publicity in October 1999, initially consisting of two people — Dembski and a like-minded colleague, Bruce L. Gordon, who were hired directly by Sloan without going through the usual channels of a search committee and departmental consultation. The vast majority of Baylor staff did not know of the center's existence until its website went online, and the center stood outside of the existing religion, science, and philosophy departments.

The center's mission, and the lack of consultation with the Baylor faculty, became the immediate subject of controversy. The faculty feared for the university's reputation – it has historically been well-regarded for its contributions to mainstream science – and scientists outside the university questioned whether Baylor had "gone fundamentalist". Faculty members pointed out that the university's existing interdisciplinary Institute for Faith and Learning was already addressing questions about the relationship between science and religion, making the existence of the Polanyi Center somewhat redundant. In April 2000, Dembski hosted a conference on "naturalism in science" sponsored by the Templeton Foundation and the hub of the intelligent design movement, the Discovery Institute, seeking to address the question "Is there anything beyond nature?". Most of the Baylor faculty boycotted the conference.

A few days later, the Baylor faculty senate voted by a margin of 27–2 to ask the administration to dissolve the center and merge it with the Institute for Faith and Learning. President Sloan refused, citing issues of censorship and academic integrity, but agreed to convene an outside committee to review the center. The committee recommended setting up a faculty advisory panel to oversee the science and religion components of the program, dropping the name "Michael Polanyi" and reconstituting the center as part of the Institute for Faith and Learning. These recommendations were accepted in full by the university administration.

In a subsequent press release, Dembski asserted that the committee had given an "unqualified affirmation of my own work on intelligent design", that its report "marks the triumph of intelligent design as a legitimate form of academic inquiry" and that "dogmatic opponents of design who demanded that the Center be shut down have met their Waterloo. Baylor University is to be commended for remaining strong in the face of intolerant assaults on freedom of thought and expression."

Dembski's remarks were criticized by other members of the Baylor faculty, who protested that they were both an unjustified attack on his critics at Baylor and a false assertion that the university endorsed Dembski's controversial views on intelligent design. Charles Weaver, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor and one of the most vocal critics of the Polanyi Center, commented: "In academic arguments, we don't seek utter destruction and defeat of our opponents. We don't talk about Waterloos."

President Sloan asked Dembski to withdraw his press release, but Dembski refused, accusing the university of "intellectual McCarthyism" (borrowing a phrase that Sloan himself had used when they first tried to dissolve the center). He declared that the university's action had been taken "in the utmost of bad faith ... thereby providing the fig leaf of justification for my removal." Professor Michael Beaty, director of the Institute for Faith and Learning, said that Dembski's remarks violated the spirit of cooperation that the committee had advocated and stated that "Dr. Dembski's actions after the release of the report compromised his ability to serve as director." Dembski was removed as the center's director, although he remained an associate research professor until May 2005. He was not asked to teach any courses in that time and instead worked from home, writing books and speaking around the country. "In a sense, Baylor did me a favor," he said. "I had a five-year sabbatical."

Seminary teaching

From 1999 to 2005, he was on the faculty of Baylor University, where he was a focus of attention and controversy. During the academic year 2005-6, he was briefly the Carl F. H. Henry Professor of Theology and Science at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as the first director of the school's new Center for Theology and Science (since replaced by prominent creationist Kurt Wise). The seminary teaches creationism but its professors vary on the details, with most adhering to the Young Earth creationist viewpoint of a relatively recent creation which occurred literally as described in Genesis; Dembski does not hold to Young Earth creationism. On his position at Southern, Dembski also remarked that "Theology is where my ultimate passion is and I think that is where I can uniquely contribute." He left Southern in May 2006. Starting in June 2006 he became a professor in philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. Since taking up a position within Southwestern's School of Theology in June 2006, Dembski has taught a number of courses within its Department of Philosophy of Religion. For some of his courses, he requires that his students promote Intelligent Design on "hostile" websites for course credit. The Southern Baptist Convention operates both seminaries.

In September 2007, the SWBTS hosted a conference on 'Intelligent Design in Business Practice', presented by Dembski, Acton Institute theologian Jay Richards, and three business academics presently or formerly teaching at universities in the Southern United States.

Mims-Pianka controversy

Main article: Mims-Pianka controversy

On April 2, 2006, Dembski stated on his blog that he reported Eric Pianka to the Department of Homeland Security because he and fellow Discovery Institute Fellow Forrest Mims felt that Pianka's speech while accepting the Texas Academy of Sciences Distinguished Scientist of the Year award in 2006 fomented bioterrorism. This resulted in the Federal Bureau of Investigation interviewing Pianka in Austin.

On April 5 Dembski offered a wager concerning Pianka:

I'm willing to wager $1000 with David Hillis that sympathy not just nationally but at UTAustin for Pianka will take a nose dive once his TAS speech goes public. Of course, we need to set the terms of this wager more precisely. But it's a wager easily settled -- Pianka needs merely to make his speech before the TAS public (the actual speech -- not a bowdlerized version of it).

Baylor Evolutionary Informatics Lab controversy

Subsequently in July and August 2007, Dembski played a central role in the formation of the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (EIL), formed by Baylor University Engineering Professor Robert J. Marks II. According to Baylor administration, the EIL website hosted at Baylor was deleted because it violated university policy forbidding professors from creating the impression that their personal views represent Baylor as an institution. Citing other similar Baylor faculty research web sites not explicitly approved by Baylor. Dembski says the website was removed because it dealt with intelligent design. Baylor said they would permit Marks to repost his website on their server, provided a 108 word disclaimer accompany any intelligent design-advancing research to make clear that the work does not represent the university's position. The site now resides on a third-party server and still contains the material advancing intelligent design. Dembski's participation was funded by a $30,000 grant from the Lifeworks Foundation, which is controlled by researcher Brendan Dixon of the Biologic Institute (which has close ties to the Discovery Institute).

Public advocacy

In December 2001, Dembski launched the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design (ISCID), of which he is Executive Director. Dembski is also the editor-in-chief of ISCID's journal, Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design (PCID), which appears to have ceased publication with its November 2005 issue. He has several more books in preparation as well as producing a string of Flash animations mocking his detractors. He is also a member of American Scientific Affiliation, the Evangelical Philosophical Society, and the American Mathematical Society, and is a senior fellow of the Wilberforce Forum.

Dembski frequently gives public talks, principally to religious, pro-ID groups, and creationists. Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross noted that Dembski has not been hesitant in associating with young Earth creationists, such as attending conferences with Carl Baugh. His lectures have been met with criticism by scientists.

Dembski, along with fellow Discovery Institute associates Michael Behe and David Berlinski, "tutored" Ann Coulter on science and evolution for her book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. Approximately one-third of the book is devoted to polemical attacks on evolution, which Coulter, as Dembski often does, terms "Darwinism."

Dembski participated in the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, released in 2008. Dembski told the Southern Baptist Texan that those who need to see the movie are the "parents of children in high school or college, as well as those children themselves, who may think that the biological sciences are a dispassionate search for truth about life but many of whose practitioners see biology, especially evolutionary biology, as an ideological weapon to destroy faith in God." Dembski has appeared on several television shows, including a 2005 interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show with Edward Larson and Ellie Crystal where he said he accepted religion before science.

Writing

See also: The Design Inference, Intelligent Design (book), and List of works on intelligent design

In 1998, Dembski published his first book, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities, which became a Cambridge University Press bestselling philosophical monograph.

In 2002, Dembski published his book No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence. It was No Free Lunch that prompted Dembski's Discovery Institute colleague Robert C. Koons to deem Dembski the "Isaac Newton of information theory." Dembski's work, however, was strongly criticized within the scientific community, which argued that there were a number of major logical inconsistencies and evidential gaps in Dembski's hypothesis. David Wolpert, co-creator of the No Free Lunch Theorem on which Dembski based his book, characterised his arguments as "fatally informal and imprecise," "written in jello," reminiscent of philosophical discussion "in art, music, and literature, as well as much of ethics" rather than of scientific debate.

While fellow intelligent design proponents have praised Dembski's writing effusively, mathematician and critic Mark Perakh has said:

Dembski's style reveals his feelings of self-importance, which is obvious not only from his penchant for introducing pompously named "laws" but also from his categorically claimed conclusions and such estimates of his own results as calling some of them "crucial insight," "profoundly important for science," or "having a huge advantage" over existing concepts.

— Mark Perakh, How Dr. Dembski infers intelligent design

Peer-review controversy

One of the common objections to intelligent design being accepted as valid science is that ID proponents have published no scientific papers in the peer-reviewed scientific literature in support of their conjectures. The ruling in the 2005 Dover trial, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, found that intelligent design had not been tested by the process of being published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal and was not supported by any peer-reviewed research, data or publications. Despite the Dover trial ruling, the Discovery Institute lists Dembski's 1998 book The Design Inference under the heading "Peer-Reviewed Scientific Books Supportive of Intelligent Design Published by Trade Presses or University Presses". The Discovery Institute describes Dembski as a mathematician and philosopher, who includes in his credentials postdoctoral work in physics and in computer science, and a B.A. in psychology.

Computer scientist and number theorist Jeffrey Shallit states in an expert report that despite common claims in the popular and religious press, Dembski is not a scientist by any reasonable standard, has not published any experimental or empirical tests of his claims, submitted his claims to the scrutiny of his peers or published in a scientific journal. In a footnote Shallit states that he does not consider mathematics to be science. Shallit describes Dembski's published mathematical output as "extremely small" for a research mathematician, and remarks that "it is very unlikely that his meagre output would merit tenure at any major university".

Since Shallit's statement, as of May 2010, Dembski has published four peer reviewed papers in information theory venues associated with the IEEE professional society. The papers deal with active information in the context of search for solutions to problems. Quantified active information is introduced in "Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success." A second paper,"Evolutionary Synthesis of Nand Logic: Dissecting a Digital Organism, claims to deconstruct the evolution simulation Avida by uncovering the sources of active information in the program. A third paper discusses the role of Jacob Bernoulli's principle of indifference in the analysis of evolution. The most recent paper, "Efficient Per Query Information Extraction from a Hamming Oracle," calculates the performance of various search algorithms which use the Hamming distance to search for a single string of a certain length in the set of all strings of this length.

Dembski states that his 1998 book The Design Inference has also been peer reviewed. Dembski says: "This book was published by Cambridge University Press and peer-reviewed as part of a distinguished monograph series, Cambridge Studies in Probability, Induction, and Decision Theory". Wesley R. Elsberry contacted the person in charge of the manuscript of The Design Inference at Cambridge University Press, who asserted that the book received “normal” review without being willing to give any detail as to what sort of process was “normal”. In his expert report, Shallit states, "I know that book manuscripts typically do not receive the same sort of scrutiny that research articles do. ...it is not uncommon for a 10-page paper to receive 5 pages or more of comments whereas a book manuscript of 200 pages often receives about the same number...".

'The Inner Life of the Cell' copyright controversy

In November, 2007, a graduate student named S. A. Smith brought an apparent case of wholesale academic misuse of unlicenced content to public attention. She noticed that a video used by Dembski in his lecture was identical to The Inner Life of the Cell animation created by Harvard University and a company called XVIVO. The audio track giving a scientific explanation was stripped off and the video was used with an alternative narration. The matter was brought to the attention of Harvard and XVIVO. David Bolinsky, creator of the video, wrote that Dembski was warned about using the video without permission. Copies of the original video and the re-narrated one are available from The Panda's Thumb, an evolutionary discussion group.

In response to the allegations, Dembski has claimed that he downloaded the video from the Internet, and added a voiceover narration that he deemed appropriate for his audience. According to Dembski, the downloaded version omitted the opening credits but contained the closing credits, which were shown to the audience. However, Smith later documented several instances where images from the Harvard/XVIVO animation were apparently removed from his book The Design of Life but the related footnotes and references were not. indicating that Dembski was already aware that permission had been denied for him to use the animation when he delivered his presentation at the University of Oklahoma.

On April 9, 2008 Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a movie Dembski appears in, was given a cease-and-desist by XVIVO accusing the producers of plagiarism concerning the same video. On the following day, Dembski on his blog, Uncommon Descent, wrote:

I’ve gotten to know the producers quite well. As far as I can tell, they made sure to budget for lawsuits. Also, I know for a fact that they have one of the best intellectual property attorneys in the business. I expect that the producers made their video close enough to the Harvard video to get tongues awagging (Headline: “Harvard University Seeks Injunction Against Ben Stein and EXPELLED” — you think that might generate interest in the movie?), but different enough so that they are unexposed.

It was a nice touch on the producer’s part to use the same music as the XVIVO video. Presumably they got permission from the artist — or is that another possible oversight to explore? But then again, one of the producers was for years in the music business. So most likely they’re covered here as well.

BOTTOM LINE: Before you think the producers of EXPELLED are idiots, you might think that they are chess players who have seen several moves ahead. For instance, have you ever thought who stood to gain the most from the Machine Video featured at UD a week ago?

Views and statements

My thesis is that the disciplines find their completion in Christ and cannot be properly understood apart from Christ ... The point to understand here is that Christ is never an addendum to a scientific theory but always the completion.

— William Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology,

Evolution

Dembski's views on evolution have been a source of considerable controversy within both the mainstream scientific and creationist communities. Dembski does not accept universal common descent. His mainstream scientific critics have accused him of dishonesty in his representation of scientific facts and writing, and he has also been criticised by some in the traditional creationist community for not supporting the "Young Earth" creationist position, though he is also defended on other grounds by the same creationist community.

Science and naturalism

For his part, Dembski has attacked the refusal of mainstream scientists to debate ID proponents in public forums which his critics regard as undeservedly presenting ID and evolution as equally worthwhile hypotheses. He has called for a "vise strategy" (illustrated with a picture of a plush Darwin doll with its head in a vise) in which supporters of evolution would be subpoenaed to appear before such forums:

I'm waiting for the day when the hearings are not voluntary but involve subpoenas in which evolutionists are deposed at length on their views. On that happy day, I can assure you they won't come off looking well.

About Dembski's "vise strategy" Barbara Forrest wrote that when presented the opportunity to put his "vise strategy" into action in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, "Dembski 'escaped critical scrutiny by not having to undergo cross-examination' when he withdrew from the case on June 10." Dembski had been scheduled to be deposed on June 13, the next business day.

Like many other intelligent design advocates, Dembski regards evolution as being an undesirable ideology being promoted by an atheistic liberal elite, rather than it being a factually based scientific theory. He summarises his position:

The elite in our culture are materialistic and atheistic. Intelligent design challenges their materialistic science and materialistic evolutionary theory. If you look at discipline after discipline, it's been evolutionized — medicine, business, religion, literature. [...] If we are right, all these superstructures built on evolution need to be questioned. [...] Intelligent design is the only view opposed to the reductionist materialism that prevails in the academy and in the scientific view the elites of the culture. Most of the unwashed masses, and I count myself among them, believe there's a sense of purpose. We're giving a voice to those people, saying: 'The science backs you up.'

He has also admitted that "So long as methodological naturalism sets the ground rules for how the game of science is to be played, IDT has no chance in Hades" and has made statements that encourage undermining established scientific methodological rules, "The real significance of intelligent design theory and its related movement is the success with which it undermines the materialistic and naturalistic worldview central to the theory of evolution."

Although intelligent design proponents (including Dembski) have made little apparent effort to publish peer-reviewed scientific research to support their hypotheses, in recent years they have made vigorous efforts to promote the teaching of intelligent design in schools. Dembski is a strong supporter of this drive as a means of making young people more receptive to intelligent design:

My commitment is to see intelligent design flourish as a scientific research program. To do that, I need a new generation of scholars willing to consider this, because the older generation is largely hidebound. So I would like to see textbooks, certainly at the college level and even at the high school level, which reframe introductory biology within a design paradigm.

Intelligent designer

See also: Intelligent designer

Dembski has so far failed to explain the origin of the intelligent designer that created the universe, something he argues as unnecessary since such an intelligent designer is likely outside the dimensions of space and time, or to have any of his pro-intelligent design articles published in the peer-reviewed mainstream scientific journals. While intelligent design proponents often claim that such failure to get articles published is due to an alleged pro-evolution bias or conspiracy, Dembski himself has said that he prefers to disseminate his ideas in non-peer-reviewed media: "I've just gotten kind of blase about submitting things to journals where you often wait two years to get things into print. And I find I can actually get the turnaround faster by writing a book and getting the ideas expressed there. My books sell well. I get a royalty. And the material gets read more."

In December 2007, Dembski told Focus on the Family that "The Designer of intelligent design is, ultimately, the Christian God."

Specified complexity

Main article: Specified complexity

Specified complexity is an argument proposed by Dembski and used by him in his works promoting intelligent design. According to Dembski, the concept is intended to formalize a property that singles out patterns that are both specified and complex. Dembski states that specified complexity is a reliable marker of design by an intelligent agent, a central tenet to intelligent design and which Dembski argues for in opposition to modern evolutionary theory. The concept of specified complexity is widely regarded as mathematically unsound and has not been the basis for further independent work in information theory, complexity theory, or biology. Specified complexity is one of the two main arguments used by intelligent design proponents, the other being irreducible complexity. Concerning his work in these two areas, Robert Koons, a Fellow along with Dembski at the Discovery Institute and Dembski's International Society for Complexity, Information and Design, and University of Texas at Austin philosopher dubs Dembski as "the Isaac Newton of information theory."

Intelligent design and Christianity

Dembski's position on intelligent design's relationship with Christianity has been somewhat inconsistent. He has suggested that the "intelligent designer" was not necessarily synonymous with God: "It could be space aliens. There are many possibilities." In other forums, however, he has been very specific about linking intelligent design with a Christian revival through which Christianity can be restored to its formerly pre-eminent place in society, supplanting "materialist" science. Indeed, one of his books is entitled Intelligent Design; the Bridge Between Science and Theology, and in it he states that "The conceptual soundings of the [intelligent design] theory can in the end only be located in Christ". He has expanded on this theme in a 2005 article for the pro-intelligent design designinference.com website:

Not only does intelligent design rid us of this ideology, which suffocates the human spirit, but, in my personal experience, I've found that it opens the path for people to come to Christ. Indeed, once materialism is no longer an option, Christianity again becomes an option. True, there are then also other options. But Christianity is more than able to hold its own once it is seen as a live option. The problem with materialism is that it rules out Christianity so completely that it is not even a live option. Thus, in its relation to Christianity, intelligent design should be viewed as a ground-clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual rubbish that for generations has kept Christianity from receiving serious consideration.

Dembski has also spoken of his motivation for supporting intelligent design in a series of Sunday lectures in the Fellowship Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, the last of which took place on Sunday, March 7, 2004. Answering a question, Dembski said:

I think at a fundamental level, in terms of what drives me in this is that I think God's glory is being robbed by these naturalistic approaches to biological evolution, creation, the origin of the world, the origin of biological complexity and diversity. When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God's glory is getting robbed. [...] And so there is a cultural war here. Ultimately I want to see God get the credit for what he’s done — and he's not getting it.

Intelligent design movement

Dembski sees intelligent design as being a popular movement as well as a scientific hypothesis and claims that it is in the process of dislodging evolution from the public imagination. At the Fourth World Skeptics Conference, held on June 20–June 23, 2002 in Burbank, California, he told the audience that "over the next twenty-five years ID will provide the greatest challenge to skepticism". He asserted that "ID is threatening to be mainstream", and that polls show 90 percent support for the hypothesis, indicating that it has "already becom[e] mainstream within the public themselves". "The usual skeptical retorts are not going to work against ID" and ID "turns the tables on skepticism". Evolution, in his view, "is the ultimate status quo" and "squelches dissent". Young people, who "love rebellion" see that and are attracted to ID as a result. "The public supports intelligent design. The public is tired of being bullied by an intellectual elite". He contends that skeptics resort to rhetoric and "artificially define ID out of science," allowing in only material matters. ID "paints the more appealing world picture", whereas skepticism works by being negative, which "doesn't set well with the public... To most people evolution doesn't provide a compelling view".

Bible code

Dembski has also indicated an interest in the Bible code. In a favorable book review of Jeffrey Satinover's Cracking the Bible Code, Dembski wrote:

At the same time that research in the Bible Code has taken off, research in a seemingly unrelated field has taken off as well, namely, biological design. These two fields are in fact closely related. Indeed, the same highly improbable, independently given patterns that appear as the equidistant letter sequences in the Bible Code appear in biology as functionally integrated ("irreducibly complex") biological systems, of the sort Michael Behe discussed in Darwin’s Black Box.

In that review Dembski also suggested "The philosopher Bertrand Russell was once asked why he didn’t believe in God. He replied, "Not enough evidence." Satinover’s fascination with the Bible Code is that it may provide evidence for God’s existence that would have convinced even a Bertrand Russell."

Faith healing

Dembski took his family to see Todd Bentley, a faith healer, to get his son, who is autistic, a "miraculous healing." In an article for the Baptist Press he recalled disappointment when his son failed to be cured. He then concluded, "Minimal time was given to healing, though plenty was devoted to assaulting our senses with blaring insipid music and even to Bentley promoting and selling his own products (books and CDs)." He wrote that he did not regret the trip and called it an "education," which showed "how easily religion can be abused, in this case to exploit our family. What do we tell our children? I'm still working on that one."

Autism and Vaccines

Main article: Autism_and_vaccines § Safety

Asked about his son who has autism, Dembski said:

"We are still working for his recovery. I think we would attribute at least part of his problems – a big part, I mean, the trigger that really pulled it for him – to a round of vaccines. This is widely disputed in the scientific literature but anecdotes – when you experience the anecdotes – can be quite persuasive and we saw what happened to him after his. It was about at the two year mark and how things just unraveled in his life. We've been working very hard to try to get him back."

Responses to critics

Dembski has stated he employs various strategies to deal with objections to his work before it gets published:

Critics and enemies are useful. The point is to use them effectively. In our case, this is remarkably easy to do. The reason is that our critics are so assured of themselves and of the rightness of their cause. As a result, they rush into print their latest pronouncements against intelligent design when more careful thought, or perhaps even silence, is called for. The Internet, especially now with its blogs (web logs), provides our critics with numerous opportunities for intemperate, indiscreet, and ill-conceived attacks on intelligent design. These can be turned to advantage, and I’ve done so on numerous occasions. I’m not going to give away all my secrets, but one thing I sometimes do is post on the web a chapter or section from a forthcoming book, let the critics descend, and then revise it so that what appears in book form preempts the critics’ objections. An additional advantage with this approach is that I can cite the website on which the objections appear, which typically gives me the last word in the exchange. And even if the critics choose to revise the objections on their website, books are far more permanent and influential than webpages.

Dembski's style in response to his critics (particularly of his mathematical papers) is polemical. For instance, in reply to a critique of the "law of conservation of information" posted on talkreason.org , Dembski states: "I'm not and never have been in the business of offering a strict mathematical proof for the inability of material mechanisms to generate specified complexity", adding later:

Here's a prediction. Erik is a close reader of my work and, despite all his protestations against it, is actually researching its ramifications. I expect he'll be publishing something in the peer-reviewed literature inspired by the ideas of No Free Lunch, though no doubt with the requisite sneers in my direction — if only to help it through the peer-review process.

Another critic, Mark Perakh, is a frequent target of Dembski's:

Mark Perakh, the Boris Yeltsin of higher learning, has weighed in with yet another screed against me (go here). The man is out of his element. I’m still awaiting his detailed critique of "Searching Large Spaces" — does he even understand the relevant math?

Dembski has also shown a hostility for providing a mechanistic explanation for intelligent design theory. In one ISCID exchange Dembski remarked:

You're asking me to play a game: "Provide as much detail in terms of possible causal mechanisms for your ID position as I do for my Darwinian position." ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it's not ID's task to match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories. If ID is correct and an intelligence is responsible and indispensable for certain structures, then it makes no sense to try to ape your method of connecting the dots. True, there may be dots to be connected. But there may also be fundamental discontinuities, and with IC [irreducibly complex] systems that is what ID is discovering.

Dembski's critics maintain that he has yet to provide a means of determining if ID is correct.

In late 2006 Dembski created and published a Flash animation, The Judge Jones School of Law at his intelligent design website, OverwhelmingEvidence.com. In it he originally depicted John E. Jones III, the presiding judge in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, as a flatulent mouthpiece of the ACLU. In an email Dembski, after it was published that he provided the voiceover, offered to let Judge Jones provide his own voice for the animation and to reduce the frequency of flatulence in the animation if Jones agreed to participate. This prompted critics, among them Richard Dawkins, to question Dembski's motive and the scholarliness of such tactics.

On having lent expertise to Ann Coulter for her polemic Godless: The Church of Liberalism on the topics of evolution and intelligent design, Dembski said "I take all responsibility for any errors in those chapters." Subsequently, James Downard in reviewing and criticizing the representation of science in Godless criticized Coulter's favoring of secondary sources over primary sources, saying "she compulsively reads inaccurate antievolutionary sources and accepts them on account of their reinforcement of what she wants to be true." Downard approached Dembski to account for what Downard called "Coulter’s remarkable unfamiliarity with the range of the ID controversy and apparent unawareness of the biogeographical underpinning of speciation, as well as a consistent inattention to any of the available fossil information." Dembski's response was not to take responsibility for the apparent errors made by Coulter but to publish both of Downard's e-mails to his blog, characterizing them as "sheer smarminess" and "entertainment."

Uncommon Descent

In April 2005, Dembski started his personal blog at uncommondescent.com (UD).[8] Dembski has been accused of censoring his critics on UD. One of them, Ed Brayton, said that Dembski as a matter of course removed reasonable criticisms and questions as well as "trackback" links to other blogs where his claims were discussed. Posts by Dembski supporters from the uncommondescent blog have been called trolling at blogs and forums critical of Dembski, notably Dispatches from the Culture Wars. At Dembski's blog those whose comments are in opposition to Dembski's own views but not disruptive have been blocked by Dembski from contributing. Dembski maintained that his blog was not intended as an open forum.

Dembski shut down his blog on December 26, 2005, six days after the conclusion of the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, where it was ruled that presenting intelligent design as an alternative to evolution was a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because intelligent design is not science and is essentially religious in nature.

On January 4, 2006 Dembski announced that the blog would be restarted and run largely by supporters with limited participation from himself and renamed from "Bill Dembski" to "Bill Dembski and Friends" thus becoming a group blog. Many participants at the most notable weblog of intelligent design's critics, The Panda's Thumb, said one of the moderators of Dembski's blog censored any discussion critical of intelligent design.

Personal attacks are not atypical of Dembski's responses to opponents on his blog. For example, Dembski described Jerry Coyne as "The Herman Munster of Evolutionary Theory," citing a purported physical resemblance of the noted biologist to the television character,, while responding to an argument the former had made.

On November 13, 2008 Dembski wrote "After more than three years at the helm, I’m finally stepping down. I expect I’ll still be posting here occasionally, but my energies will go more and more into technical ID research."[9]

Dembski Publications

Books

Sole author

• William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-521-62387-1
• William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology. Downer's Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1999. ISBN 0-8308-2314-X
• William A. Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.) ISBN 0-7425-5810-X
• William A. Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design. Downer's Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8308-2375-1
• William A. Dembski, The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World. Nashville, Tennessee: B&H Publishing, 2009. ISBN 978-080542743-1

Co-author

• William A. Dembski, Jay Richards, George Gilder, Ray Kurzweil, Thomas S. Ray, John Searle, and Michael Denton. Are We Spiritual Machines?: Ray Kurzweil vs. the Critics of Strong A.I. (Discovery Institute, June 6, 2001) ISBN 0-9638654-3-9
• William A. Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Percival Davis, and Dean Kenyon. The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems. Dallas: Foundation for Thought and Ethics, November 19, 2007 ISBN 0-9800213-0-8 (401 pages)
• William A. Dembski and Benjamin Wiker. Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists (InterVarsity Press, July 2002) ISBN 0-8308-2666-1
• William A. Dembski and James M. Kushiner, Signs of Intelligence: Understanding Intelligent Design. Brazos Press (March 1, 2001) ISBN 1-58743-004-5
• William A. Dembski and Jay Wesley Richards. Unapologetic Apologetics: Meeting the Challenges of Theological Studies. Downer's Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8308-1563-5
• William A. Dembski and Sean McDowell, Understanding Intelligent Design: Everything You Need to Know in Plain Language. (Harvest House Publishers, July 1, 2008) ISBN 0-7369-2442-6
• William A. Dembski and Jonathan Wells. How to be an Intellectually Fulfilled Atheist (Or Not). (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, October 28, 2008) ISBN 1-933859-84-9
• William A. Dembski and Jonathan Witt, Intelligent Design Uncensored. (IVP Books, May 2010) ISBN 0-8308-3742-7

As editor or contributor

• William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse (eds), Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA. ISBN 0-521-82949-6
• William A. Dembski (ed). Mere Creation. (Downer's Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1998.) ISBN 0-8308-1515-5
• William A. Dembski and Bruce Gordon. The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2009).
• William A. Dembski, Michael J. Behe and Stephen C. Meyer, Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe, Proceedings of the Wethersfield Institute, vol. 9 San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000. ISBN 0-89870-809-5
• Geoffrey Simmons (Foreword by William Dembski), What Darwin Didn't Know: A Doctor Dissects the Theory of Evolution.(Harvest Publishers, January 1, 2004) ISBN 0-7369-1313-0
• William A. Dembski, Wayne J. Downs, Fr. Justin B.A. Frederick, The Patristic Understanding of Creation: An Anthology of Writings from the Church Fathers on Creation and Design. (Erasmus Press, June 11, 2008) ISBN 0-9815204-0-5

Peer Reviewed Papers

• William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, "Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success," IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics A, Systems and Humans, vol.39, #5, September 2009, pp.1051-1061[10]
• William A. Dembski and R.J. Marks II, "Bernoulli's Principle of Insufficient Reason and Conservation of Information in Computer Search, Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. San Antonio, TX, USA - October 2009, pp. 2647-2652.[11]
• Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski and R.J. Marks II, "Evolutionary Synthesis of Nand Logic: Dissecting a Digital Organism, Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. San Antonio, TX, USA - October 2009, pp. 3047-3053.[12]
• Winston Ewert, George Montañez, William A. Dembski, Robert J. Marks II, "Efficient Per Query Information Extraction from a Hamming Oracle," Proceedings of the the 42nd Meeting of the Southeastern Symposium on System Theory, IEEE, University of Texas at Tyler, March 7-9, 2010, pp.290-297.[13]

See also

• Intelligent design movement

External links

Official

• Design Inference — Dembski's website (with articles)
• William A. Dembski biography from Discovery Institute

Reviews/Analysis of Dembski

• Probability, Statistics, Evolution, and Intelligent Design by Peter Olofsson in Chance, 2008
• Intelligent Design and Mathematical Statistics: A Troubled Alliance by Peter Olofsson in Biology and Philosophy, 2008
• Review of No Free Lunch by Jeffrey Shallit in biosystems
• A free lunch in a mousetrap by Mark Perakh
• William Dembski's treatment of the No Free Lunch theorems is written in jello, a harsh critique of No Free Lunch by David Wolpert, one of the co-originators of the No Free Lunch theorems
• Critique of No Free Lunch by H. Allen Orr from the Boston Review
• Jeffrey Shallit's pre-trial statement on Dembski from Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District
• Dembski’s mathematical achievements Jeffrey Shallit, May, 2004
• How Not To Detect Design: A Review of William A. Dembski's The Design Inference Elliot Sober, 1999
• The Advantages of Theft Over Toil, Wilkins, John S, and Wesley R Elsberry, 2001, unedited version of a paper published in Biology and Philosophy 16 (November):711-724.