116 of 132 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Best book by a creationist I have ever read, May 11, 2001
I just finished a two-month reading group consisting of both supporters and critics of Dembski, so I finally feel competent to review this book.
While I am a naturalist and evolutionist, I greatly appreciate the writing of anybody who is intellectually honest and attempts to be rigorous: at least in this book, Dembski shows these traits with flying colors. 'The Design Inference' is Dembski's attempt to formalize valid inferences about design. That is, how can we validly infer, for any event E, that E is the product of intelligent design? Most people make such inferences all the time (how does the average person explain Stonehenge). What is the logical structure of such inferences?
Despite the math, the argument structure is actually quite simple. The way to infer that E is the product of design is to run it through what Dembski calls the 'explanatory filter.' Try to explain event E according to presently known statistical regularities (e.g., Newton's laws). If event E cannot be explained by any such statistical regularity, then it passes through the explanatory filter, and is therefore the product of design.
This argument structure is the first main weakness in Dembski's book. In employing the explanatory filter, TDI elevates an anachronistic fallacy to an imperative. Simply showing that we can't presently explain a phenomenon is not sufficient to show that it can never be explained! In the nineteenth century, the precession of Mercury in its orbit could not be explained in a well-confirmed classical worldview, but to infer design based on that would not be good science. The problems with this kind of reasoning are made clearer when we consider our early ancestors who made poor design arguments about weather patterns and illness that they couldn't explain based on physical principles.
The inferential strategy outlined above sounds rather simple, so where does all the notorious math come in? It comes in as Dembski attempts to quantitatively unpack just how to demonstrate that an event cannot be explained by a statistical regularity. For those who know some statistics, this is essentially a detailed account of how to rationally generate a rejection region in a probability distribution. The formalism emerges because Dembski's account is idiosyncratic, as he tries to show that you can generate a rejection region even *after* you have already observed the event. Most scientists would balk at this, as it would allow you to retroactively put a rejection region over the event, which to put it simply, is cheating (imagine drawing a bull's-eye around a randomly shot arrow and saying that you hit the bull's-eye by skill).
Dembski claims that it is perfectly appropriate to retroactively generate rejection regions if it would have been *possible* to specify the region before the event E actually occurred. For example, say you see someone shoot an arrow that hits a tree at a seemingly random location where there happens to be a worm. Later, however, you find out and that the person was actually hunting worms and was wearing infrared worm-hunting goggles. In such a case, you would rightly conclude that the worm was hit because of skill rather than blind luck. More importantly, it would have been possible to predict that the arrow would land on tree-worms even if you hadn't seen it happen.
While many people in our discussion group disagreed, I think this is a reasonable way to retroactively reject a chance-based explanation. However, I do *not* think that Dembski is simply describing the rejection of a hypothesis. Rather, he is describing the replacement of one hypothesis with a more reasonable alternative (in this example, the alternative to chance is that the person is a skilled worm-hunter). This leads to what I think is the second main weakness in *The Design Inference*: the engine driving the inference is not a positive theory of design, but simply the elimination of other theories. The problem is that this does not seem to conform to how people do (or should) perform design inferences. That is, people don't run through an explanatory filter, eliminating all possible statistical explanations of something, and then end up with 'design' as the last node in an explanatory filter (or explanatory sink, as I like to call it). Rather, people have a *positive theory* of intelligent agents (i.e., things with desires, beliefs, and certain capacities) and they apply this theory (or network of theories) to explain events in the world. Design inferences are not different in kind from explanations of physical, biological, social, or psychological phenomena. It is the development of such a theory and its predictions which should be the focus for Dembski.
A final note: to those interested in the debate about creationism and evolution, caveat emptor. This book contains very little direct discussion of that issue. Rather, it does what should have been done long ago: tries to outline the inferential strategy people should be employing in this debate.
Despite the two main problems outlined above, I still recommend this book to anyone seriously interested in how we make inferences about design, in particular those interested in the creation-evolution debate. While the book does no damage whatsoever to the evolutionist (partly because, as mentioned above, it does not directly address that debate) it at least makes for stimulating, thought-provoking reading. Most importantly, it will direct the creationists to be more rigorous in their arguments about design.
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51 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent argument for design, to polarize believers and non, March 5, 2001
By A Customer
This book will surely please those looking for rational support of Christian faith, and it does have some very strong points throughout. But in the end, believers will enjoy it and non-believers will find it infuriating. Dembski's work has often unfairly been described as 'thinly disguised creationism' because of his political associations, and his associations with all that awful anti-evolution rhetoric among many of his colleagues. However, his work here stands on his own in some ways.
Dembski does come up with good criteria for detecting design in nature. It is in the final step in Dembski's reasoning, how design in nature is to be explained, that reasonable people may well strongly disagree. It is in the question of the role of naturalism in explanations that we find the most difficult sticking point, as a careful analysis of Phillip Johnson's books (such as Wedge of Truth) clearly reveals.
Dembski's work here is clever, careful, and creative. He does an admirable job of deriving reasonable criteria for detecting design in nature according to information theoretic principles. I don't consider this 'junk science' as some have claimed. In the end, of course, Dembski relates his discovery of specified complexity criteria for design with the God of the Bible, an intelligent update of Paley's design argument.
The question to me when I read this was not whether Dembski succeeded in coming up with useful design criteria. I decided that he did indeed. The question for me was whether he also made a convincing argument that Darwinian mechanisms could not have resulted in specified complexity in nature.
The technical issue seems to be this. His argument seems to me to potentially confuse different kinds of information. After deriving his criteria for complex specified information, Dembski tells us that blind processes cannot increase complex specified information, because neither selection nor random mutation add information.
It's a persuasive argument, similar to the argument that Roger Penrose made for consciousness being irreducible to computation. And it suffers from the same weakness, that the systems we are describing are not yet competely enough described to know for certain whether randomness and selection really provide a process that can produce complex specified information. Facing this uncertainty, fans of Darwin of course consider it entirely plausible that randomness plus selection can lead to not only complexity but complex specified information in Dembski's sense. Fans of Dembski will probably find his argument compelling that Darwinian processes can never produce true randomness. And there are a third group, following complexity theory or modern developments in genetics, who find that Darwinian processes can yield complex specified information if suitably enhanced by additional laws of nature.
So Dembski's argument for design in this book seems sound, the question is still, as it always was, whether design can be explained by true novelty arising through Darwinian processes or whether true novelty cannot arise spontaneously in nature.
Understandably, this is a powerful sticking point because it reveals very different views of the inherent structure of nature, either a pre-existing design or an emerging one. In soem ways, this brings to mind our political extremes of the conservative's structured world and the liberal's dynamic free-for-all. Dembski provides us with a useful plank for the conservative religious worldview, though it won't convince those who have assumed all along that the structure of the world is a dynamic, evolving thing. These are very different visions of how the world works.
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102 of 127 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Book destined to endure, September 28, 1999
By A Customer
Despite Eli Chiprout's critical review of The Design Inference, readers can be assured that Dembski stands by his calculation and is prepared to defend it. Chiprout's chief objection seems to be that Dembski's conditional independence condition founders when human agents get into the act. Chiprout may register his complaint, but we should all note that this book and the theories it puts forth have been thoroughly vetted: it was Dembski's doctoral dissertation, it went through a grueling review process with Cambridge University Press, and the author sent preprints to probably fifty or so scholars and academics for comment. No one, and I mean **NO ONE**, corrected Dembski on what Chiprout suggests is an obvious oversight. Long after the dust of criticism settles, The Design Inference will surely stand as an important and enduring advancement in our understanding of the theory of Intelligent Design.
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