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The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design - MP3

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I am simply disheartened by the dearth of actual consideration displayed by many reviewers of this book. One cannot use this book review as a chance to rant about Dembski's past work and call it a book review. The reason of The Design Revolution is to handle the same criticisms that are cited in many of the Amazon reviews of this book. While I will give some of my opinions on the book, I first find it important to address some issues.

For instance, do not review this book if you have not read it. Just because one does not feel that intelligent design (ID) satisfies his/her a priori dogmatisms does not mean that he/she has the right to reject this book, or even intelligent design for that matter. Doing so would be a prime example of apriorism, a logical fallacy. It is surely ironic that virtually all of those here who pass off this book as drivel, without even considering the content of it, do so while practically proclaiming Charles Darwin -- who said that "A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question" -- is correct. Ah, but the critic may reply with some silly "objections."

The easiest way for the fundamentalist Darwinist to evade this attack is to say that there are no facts or arguments behind intelligent design. They use the fact that Dembski is a Christian to constitute their decision to impulsively reject the book as creationist propaganda. This action is not only illogical, it is also intrinsically unscientific, since the act refuses to weigh the evidence supporting their claim that it is creationist propaganda. Once again, this is quite ironic.

In fact, if the critic claiming that ID is biblical/scientific creationism in a tux, a theological enterprise, part of a political agenda, etc., would actually read the book (or even Part 1 of the book), then he/she might find answers quite easily. Of course, honest objections to the book are welcomed by Dembski, since he takes time to respond to many of the objections. However, saying that this book is written for the choir, calling Dembski a religious fundamentalist, declaring the book "thinly disguised Christian blather," and asserting that the book is invalid by saying that Charles Colson, the Watergate felon and the author of the Foreword, is not a scientist are not honest objections. They are logical fallacies (apriorism, argumentum ad lapidem, argumentum ad hominem, and the red herring, to name a few). They display no sign of willingness to search for an answer. Those ignorant objections simply show prior, dogmatic commitments to other ideas, and no amount of books could shake that critic's faith; this person has closed his/her mind.

With all of that said, I will focus on the book. I believe that The Design Revolution definitely achieved Dembski's goal to compile all of the common objections to ID and answer them as completely, yet as briefly, as possible. These answers needed to be somewhat brief in order for Dembski to address as many as possible. I've found that the more complicated questions did require more space, and that was important.

I honestly cannot think of any question about intelligent design that Dembski "evaded," as declared by an earlier reviewer. Perhaps Dembski didn't address every critic of his own work, but he was never under any obligation to answer every critic. Some of the critics here have used the subtitle of the book against Dembski by saying that it should have been "Evading the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design."

However, one particular person favoring such a title change followed his point by saying that Dembski hasn't published a response to many ID critics. Notice that the subtitle does not say, "Answering All of the Critics of William Dembski." Dembski wrote this book so he could publish objections to the theory, not so he could argue with his critics. If you are actually searching for Dembski's replies to specific objections made my specific people, go to his website (www.designinference.com/) to find some of them.

If you are a strict Bible fundamentalist, then this book might not be for you. While someone may say that this book is disguised biblical fundamentalism, Dembski does not even talk about his biblical beliefs. All I know is that he is a Christian. Therefore, for all I know, he could reject much of the Bible. It's not my place, nor is it this book's place, to elaborate on such a thing. However, I do know that Dembski rejects six-day creationism, so strict fundamentalists might reject this book, along with ID, as heresy. However, this act is not supported by logic, and it is very narrow-minded. Fundamentalists should only read this if they are willing to consider ID.

Furthermore, the statement above also applies to fundamentalist Darwinists. Such people cannot be expected to get anything from this book, since they will probably read it while doodling along the margins, merely looking at the pretty words, and cheerfully turning the pages just to say that they read the book. They can then triumphantly drop the book and say that they are still atheist Darwinists after reading the book. This, also, defies reason and is purely unscientific, by any definition.

Therefore, this book is for the honest questioner. If you wonder whether ID is disguised theology, if you think that the religious motivation of ID proponents might render ID unsubstantiated, if you think that the impossibility of optimal design is a true threat to ID, if you have questions about Dembski's acclaimed Explanatory Filter, if you find it strange that science heartily welcomes the search for extraterrestrial intelligence yet vehemently rejects the search for a designer of biological systems, if you ponder the problem of the origin of information (DNA), if you wonder how ID is compatible with naturalism, if you think that the design inference is an argument from ignorance (and are willing to listen to answers), if you think that David Hume concluded all logical talk of a possible designer, or if you just wonder what in the world all of this talk about intelligent design is for, then this is your book. If your mind is open, and if you will read, study, and reflect on the thoughts presented by Dembski -- without any silly, a priori commitments -- then read this book. You will enjoy it.

I will try to consider this book both from the point of view of its importance to the active controversy of Intelligent Design (ID) and Darwinism, and of its success in presenting a convincing point of view.

Dembski is one of the most important leaders in the ID movement at this time. As such, his books need to be read by anyone wanting to be knowledgeable about the controversy. This is the fifth book on ID that I have read, and easily the most substantive. Compared to this, Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial is crude, although considerably more readable. Dembski's style is not excessively academic or jargon-laden; when reading philosophy, one must expect terms like "ontologically subjective." Dembski's style is still rather leaden: after struggling under the burden of it for 200 pages, I felt despair at realizing that there were still 125 pages of text to go.

Dembski presents an elaborate philosophic justification for ID, confronting the arguments of many critics and including the ideas of many supporters. He also lays out both stringent standards to which ID supporters should hold themselves if they are to be taken seriously, a program of projects and a promotional strategy. Many ID supporters discuss a demonized form of Darwinism that makes it a scapegoat for all the discontents of modernity and materialism as if these were the sole invention of Charles Darwin and will disappear if his theory does. Dembski is quite honest in recognizing that these ideas pervade modern thought. Although I think he exaggerates the importance of Darwinism as a linchpin, he argues that once it is destroyed, a project of purging materialism and naturalism from all sciences and humanities is needed.

The book consists of 44 questions about ID, organized into 6 parts. As such, there is a certain amount of repetition so that each discussion can mostly stand on its own; I did not find it excessive. Occasionally, for somewhat more complex issues, there are references to other chapters. Dembski is not always consistent: sometimes he recognizes the difference between an idea being not proven and proving that the idea is invalid. For example, he rightly argues that Darwinism cannot dismiss ID on the grounds that although they cannot explain something, they are confident that they can explain it in the future. On the other hand, he only intermittently concedes that this is not the same thing as proving that Darwinism will never be able to produce an explanation. At other points, he argues that he can positively prove that Darwinian explanations are impossible, without relying upon arguing from present failures. At some points, he concedes that ID must succeed on its positive merits, not merely by eliminating Darwinism, but in Chapter 36, "The only games in town", he seems to be asserting that it is one or the other, there are no other possibilities. In Chapter 29, he chides Howard Van Till for "playing the prophet" for predicting that materialism will be vindicated in the future, and then plays the prophet himself by predicting that it is ID that will triumph.

There is a bibliography, but no notes. Some citations are given within the text, but these are usually general references to another text. Statements of fact are not supported by much documentation. The index is disappointing in that it only includes proper names. The arrangement of chapters by questions is some help in relocating information, but I would have preferred a more detailed index.

ID makes its bid to be included in public school science curricula chiefly on two claims: first, that it is not tied to religious teachings, and secondly that it is in fact a science. I don't think that Dembski made good on either claim.

One might argue that the inclusion of an introduction by the Christian activist Charles W. Colson might be explained by a desire to appeal to all sides of the ID/Darwinism controversy, and even seen as conciliatory. That does not explain why text explaining ID contains discussions of Christian theology at several points. Most strikingly, in Chapter 22, "Varieties of Naturalism", Dembski devotes the most text to "antisupernaturalism naturalism" as expounded by David Ray Griffen, continuing with its relationship to process theology, and then rebukes it for "deeply unsatisfying theological implications". He then comments that "pragmatic naturalism" is compatible with Christianity. He apparently doesn't care how any form of naturalism may be compatible with any other religion. He is also less than fully frank about "the Wedge", mentioning only Phillip Johnson's book, but ignoring the Discovery Institute document known by that name that has been cited to argue that ID is in fact religiously motivated. He can disavow it if he likes, but it's an important question left unanswered.

Dembski argues that ID can defeat Darwinism on scientific grounds, playing by the empirical rules of science. He argues that certain items in the universe possess an empirically detectable quality called "specified complexity". So where is the protocol for detecting it? He argues that the possession of specified complexity is a strong, even definitive argument for intelligent design. So who did this study, and where is its methodology published? Dembski seems to be claiming that these are currently available: does he mean that they are part of his program of aspirations?

Specified complexity depends in part upon probability and I am somewhat skeptical of our ability to produce meaningful numbers for many cases. One cannot simply assume that the number of possibilities that occur if every quality could vary independent is the correct number: qualities may be interdependent. Then one must know how many potential values there are for each quality. If/then speculations are fine, but I am very skeptical of anyone who attempts to argue definitively, for example, that there is/is not life on other planets based on the single example of our world and our limited knowledge of other stellar systems.

In sum, if one is interested in ID or the controversy, this is a significant book and should be considered. Personally, I'm impressed by his thoroughness and breadth of vision, but I'm not convinced either of ID's validity or its appropriateness to a public school SCIENCE classroom.

For readers wanting critiques of Dembski, his prominence in the ID movement guarantees that most recent books will discuss him. I call the reader's attention to Mark Perakh's somewhat vituperous Unintelligent Design, the first section of which considers Dembski from the perspective of mathematics and information theory, rather than the usual perspectives of biology and general science.

As a professional in the scientific research field, I find this book challenging intellectually and stimulating to myself and my colleagues. The main question for those rejecting ID and embracing its alternative DD (Dumb Determinism, or Deterministic Developmentalism) is: which postulation administers the most satisfactory answer to why of necessity there has been an unbroken, uninterrupted sequential, cumulative increase (Quality and Quality) in useful information in our universe? We deride the notion of Spontaneous Generation (in no-time or like time-lapse photography or fast-forwarding an accelerated video), but have no problem with the identical concept in magnified astronomical time-delay or decelerated super-slo-mo trillions of frames over billions of years? Instantaneous or Spontaneous or Extemporaneous or 'spur of the moment',nope. Extenuaneous, Superannuated, 'spur of the megatemporal', yep.

Both ID and DD deal with information creation, identification, evaluation and decisioned opting in or out as functional or non-functional. Both deal with sorting. Both deal with selectivity of data. The other question for DD (that ID answers) is: how does the universe get from a-Necessity to Necessity? How does it get from No-Chance to Chance? Needlessness to Need? Neither Random nor non-Random to either or both??

ID deals with Big Beginning; DD deals with Big Banging. Question for DD: at Absolute Zero pre matter/energy/space-time, what triggered a non-existent 'Bigness' to 'Bangness' status? Before anything was, theoretically there was no chance, no need, no will, no intent, no necessity, no random, no concept of anything, no choices, no options for natural selection to operate from, no nature, no selectionability. All of a sudden DD has us take on faith that all this and more came to be 'just because'?

DD is all about Progressive Process from nothing to everything, Advantageous Adaptation from simple to complex; extemporaneous evolving from Lesser to Greater; from 'no end in mind' to 'mind in the end'. Is this what we observe in 1st Law of Thermodynamics (nothing of itself can be created or destroyed) and 2nd Law (nothing of itself upgrades its complexity or functionality, but greater degradation the longer the time-devolution- is the fixed rule) as well as the law of diminishing returns (xerox of a xerox of a xerox ad seq.)?

If there could be no 'Artificial Intelligence' without superior Human ID, how could there be Human Intelligence without a higher Superiority Order of Intelligization? Can the universe really get the Greater from the Lesser? If AI can't create itself through DD (Natural Selection), how can we hold the creed that DD created itself and its own I.Q. equal or superior who in turn creates AI?

Ultimately it all comes down to faith in presented data as personal Control Beliefs dictate should be admitted into one's court: experimentation, observation, experience, intuition, historical inquiry, firsthand eyewitness Exhibit A,B,C,etc. Both ID and DD present their cases. After a preponderance of the evidence, which is the most compelling?

This book settles with: ID - Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. The other side makes their Intellectual Selection: DD - Doubt a Reasonable Beyond.

This book really is a stunning accomplishment. Dembski is a real master at organizing a tremendous amount of material and getting straight to the point. The result can be slow going for the non-specialist like myself, but very rewarding.

Despite all the desperate attempts to silence ID, they are not going away. Chapter 41 (Peer Review) alone is worth the cover price -- it shows the lengths to which the neo-Darwinian establishment will go to belittle and marginalize any creative attempts to question them. Whatever you think of ID and the debates, this chapter will interest anyone who cares about free speech and about the growing illiberal nature of the academy.

Dembski, like several others in the ID movement (see Jonathan Wells, or some of the contributors to Mere Creation), is one of the great intellectual athletes of this generation: a Ph.D. in math from Chicago, another Ph.D. in philosophy; graduate and post doc degrees in theology (Princeton Seminary), computers, biology, etc. from places like Princeton U. and MIT, with a huge corpus of writings. He's a renaissance man who really is able to master several disciplines and show connections between them. That makes his books so fun and engaging even for people without special interest in science.

Of all his books, I found this one probably the most engaging, and most able to help me see how ID ties into a larger framework of worldview issues.

People read books on intelligent design and evolution from one of two motives that I can see: to reinforce their worldview, or to understand their opponent for the purpose of dismantling his position. There may be a few reading from curiosity but they are obviously in the minority as anyone can see from the reviews of books on design and evolution. The readers either give five stars or one star to these kinds of books, which is absurd. The stars are being awarded on the basis of subject, not merit as literature or craftsmanship. I read this book because as I look around the world it seems like it is designed. I wanted to read scientifically sound logic to support my observations. This book does do that and does it well. But I don't give it five stars because it lacks passion and style. While I don't want an arrogant, puffed up, counter puncher to the condescending style of Richard Dawkins, I would like to see some flair and maybe a competitive edge. But that's just me.

Dembski manages to explain things in relatively understandable scientific language so a non scientist has a chance of comprehension, and his arguments are cogent and tight, without the feel of a preacher hiding in there somewhere. I found it to be fair, mature, intelligent, and unemotional. While I'd like see at least a hint of panache, maybe some humor, or a cuss word or two, I imagine one has to write on these subjects like an academician to have credibility among scientists. At least I did get through this one, unlike some of the stodgy, stilted, esoteric, self-indulgence some of these guys hand out that has to be read with a hammer and chisel applied to the impenetrable vocabulary. But I never really got a sense of to whom Dembski was writing. It seems to be "just written" and then tossed out to whoever. Maybe that is as it should be, but his voice didn't seem like it was talking to me. If all you want is to hear good solid arguments for intelligent design, and have the definition of intelligent design clarified, then this is the book for you. While not as fun as Dawkins, Dembski is clear and convincing.

Needless to say, the Intelligent Design position has attracted much attention, and a large number of academics, both supporters and critics, in the last few years. Dembski can not respond to every critic in one book but in this 334 page work he does an excellent job responding to many of his critics. No doubt his next book will respond to yet another batch. Even if you disagree with ID, there is much useful information in this well written work. For example, he deals with the realization that DNA is a dynamic structure. The base pairs are always moving (actually vibrating) and holes are constantly opening and closing through the center of the DNA. Every femtosecond changes occur, yet the system is remarkably stable, partly because the cell's repair enzymes find, and repair, flaws along the cell's vast stretches of DNA. Research has now shown that DNA is part of a system that works as a unit, and certain basic parts, mostly complex proteins, must exist for it to function. This is what science research (of which I have been privileged to be a part of) tells us. Darwinism tells us a story based on conjecture and assumption. Dembski shows how and why ID is a superior explanation for what we see in the laboratory. Unfortunately, the Fundamentalist Darwin true believers will do their best to attack this book, but their rhetoric is now often so extreme that they often do not help their cause. Read the book and judge for yourself.

I believe this will end up being an important book in the ID movement...but not because it offers any new insights or ID defenses. It doesn't. It also doesn't necessarily discredit naturalistic processes. What this book does is thoroughly catalogs the ID position and demonstrates the "reasonability" of the ID argument when compared to undirected "macro-adaptation" (neo-Darwinism, I guess) as an explanstion for the rise and diversification of life on Earth. "Thinking people" with doubts about naturalism fear not---you will WANT to be on this side of the debate after reading this book. The arguments are presented clearly and fairly---your world view will determine if an event is either "obvious" or "mind-numbingly improbable". I got the strong sense reading the book that Dembski feels ID (as a science...not a philosophy) needs a breakthru (decisive confirmation) in order to progress. This is a high-bar considering how little we really know about the universe (sort of like flatlanders trying to "prove" spheres exist)...but at least it's POSSIBLE (unlike neo-Darwinism which is utterly un-provable). Today I read that an ounce of dried DNA has the information storage capacity of 1 Trillion CDs. Now, a CD is pretty cool, and I'm glad that someone WAY smarter than me invented them. Yet the materialist happily acknowledges that "nature" has randomly produced a substance a mere fraction of the size of a CD with...ummm...a TRILLION times more processing capability. There is something going on here...

Dembski outlines in a diligent manner the fundamentals of this movement. This would be a hard book to swallow for those who have been indoctrinated in public schooling their entire life. If you are able to see how we ourselves design, construct, scrutinize, optimize and perfect what we do as scientists and chemists in a laboratory setting (I myself received my PhD in Chemistry and work at a government lab here in DC) and any other setting for that matter (i.e. architecture, art, math, etc), you should be able to put 2 and 2 together and see why such a rationality makes perfect sense. But again, it's not for those who believe in the religion of naturalistic science with a blind faith that is above scrutiny. If you aren't able to doubt or question or struggle with your own "faith" and belief system, it is unlikely you will be able to read through this entire book. But I would challenge you to do so.

It is puzzling to me that today in the information age, confusion abounds about the nature of intelligent design. It is not a conceptually difficult idea that is claimed, and yet misrepresentations abound. Dembski's book, therefore, is invaluable at setting the record straight. It consists of 44 short chapters, each of which is only 6-8 pages long and deals with a specific question that he has encountered about intelligent design. Taken as a whole, the intelligent design position is sharply clarified and in so doing, the main objections often simply melt away. Now of course, intelligent design may yet prove to be false, but the key claims cannot be engaged until it is clear what they are.

The main objection about intelligent design is that is an argument from ignorance, falling into god-of-the-gaps thinking by invoking divine action at every point where science at the moment doesn't have an explanation. What intelligent design actually claims is the following:
1. Intelligent agents sometimes leave empirical indicators, or fingerprints, in the world; examples include Mt. Rushmore, written texts, soundwaves carrying vocal communication. On the basis of these indicators we can infer intelligent rather than natural causation. This much is uncontroversial, but it gets controversial when we get to the second claim:
2. The natural world has such empirical indicators of intelligence. There is, in the natural world, in those domains that are properly the study of natural science, observable, empirical evidence of intelligence.

Dembski clarifies this idea further by formalizing it into an argument consisting of three premisses and a conclusion:
Premise 1: Certain biological systems exhibit a feature called specified complexity.
Premise 2: Evolutionary biology does not know how biological systems with that feature originated.
Premise 3: In everday experience we know that intelligent agency has the causal power to produce systems that exhibit specified complexity. Many things produced by human intelligent designers exhibit this feature - for example, the internal combustion engine.
Conclusion: Therefore, biological systems that exhibit specified complexity are likely to be designed.

Premise 3 is the crucial connecting premise that is left out by people who say that ID is just an argument from ignorance (we don't know how it happened, therefore God did it). Design theorists, in attributing design to systems that exhibit specified complexity, are simply doing what scientists do generally, which is to attempt to formulate a causally adequate explanation for the phenomenon in question. Specified complexity is a marker for the presence of information, and our uniform and repeated experience is that information always comes from minds, from intelligence, and not from unguided natural processes. Thus when one makes a design inference one is not arguing from ignorance, but making a positive case based on what we do know, employing standard scientific reasoning by making an inference to the best explanation.

An example from the movie "Contact" shows that this kind of reasoning is already accepted within the scientific community. Jodie Foster's character was an astronomer working for the SETI program (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). She picked up a signal from outer space that she concluded was not noise but came from an intelligence. What was it that allowed her to come to that conclusion? It was just this: Was the signal random? No. Was it merely ordered? No. What allowed her to infer intelligence was that the signal contained the first twenty prime numbers in a row. Now, not only is that improbable (or complex), but there's a way to specify that sequence independently of the fact that it's the one she picked up; namely we already know that the prime numbers are a special set of numbers. Thus the conjunction of improbability and independent specifiability indicated the presence of specified complexity, a marker for intelligence which in turn our uniform experience tells us always comes from minds.

Now why is it that a SETI researcher hasn't stopped doing science when she concludes that the scientific evidence is best explained by intelligent design, but a scientist is accused of doing just that when the focus is shifted from outer space to molecular biology, and an identical reasoning process leads to a design inference?

Intelligent design is revolutionary because it looks at reality in an entirely new way. In the nineteenth century when Darwin formulated his theory it was thought that there were two fundamental entitites in nature - matter and energy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century we recognize there is a third fundamental entity - information, that is not reducible to either matter or energy. How do we know this? If you hold up two computer disks, one blank, and the other filled with software, and you ask the question, what is the difference in mass between these two as a result of the difference in information content, the answer of course is zero. That is because information is a massless entity; it is immaterial. You can no more explain the origin of information by materialistic explanations than you can the written text on a page by the laws of the chemistry of ink and paper.

Evolutionary biology is faulty because it tries to make natural causes do the work of intelligent causes. But intelligent design does not throw out the whole of evolutionary biology and satisfy itself by merely pointing out instances of design. No, it adds to the explanatory toolbox of science that Darwinism untilizes; it does not take away from it. It still sees a role for natural causes, but it does not inflate that role beyond what the evidence indicates. The relationship between ID and Darwinism is something like that between Einstein's theory of relativity and the Newtonian mechanics it replaced. Einstein's theory did not make Newtonian mechanics worthless, it just greatly limited its scope of applicability. ID is not looking to reinvent the wheel, but just to have the conceptual tools to deal with the flow of information in biological systems that Darwinism lacks.

by Donald McLaughlin

When Charles Darwin penned his "Origin of Species" 150 years ago, he knew that there would be controversy over his assigning to purely natural causes what up until that time most people had credited to the work of a designer. Indeed, most academics and scientists of that era would have credited the origin of biological life to the work of a supernatural Designer. Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection changed all that. And here we are 150 years later, and the debate is still ongoing in spite of statements from within Darwinian circles that the debate ended 150 years ago. To co-opt a quip from Mark Twain, rumors of the death of design in biology are greatly exaggerated.

Plain evidence for the interest in design and design arguments can be found in the wealth of books and websites dedicated to explaining design concepts, exposing weaknesses in evolutionary theory, and conceptualizing means of detecting design in biological systems. These books and articles are, for the most part, written by legitimate scientists who see scientific problems with the theory of evolution and see scientific promise in intelligent design. For those familiar with this ongoing debate, the name of William Dembski will not be unfamiliar. He has been on the forefront of the public debate and his several books and articles are often referenced, both favorably and unfavorably, depending on one's point of view on the issue.

His latest entry, "The Design Revolution" presents in one volume all the major concepts of Intelligent Design and the objections raised against them by critics, and argues for their inclusion as bona fide science. He succeeds admirably on all fronts. Readers of Dembski's other works will recognize many of the arguments presented in this volume. But this book is not merely a selected anthology of Dembski's other works. Rather, TDR brings together all of the major arguments for and against ID in one easy to follow volume, neatly laid out in 44 short chapters which are grouped into six topical sections. Each section deals with an overall theme of the ID arguments and each chapter deals with a specific question drawn mostly from actual criticisms that ID skeptics have leveled against ID.

While Dembski's draws a number of his arguments from his other books and articles, they are not just lifted wholesale and dropped into this volume. In many instances he elaborates or elucidates those arguments and makes them more accessible to a general reader. For those unfamiliar with the debate, TDR provides a clear and concise introduction to the major arguments and their implications for evolution, design and science.

For fair-minded readers, this book should, but likely won't, put an end to the debate over the scientific status of ID. Every major argument used by those opposed to including ID within science and science curriculum is presented and refuted in this volume. The conclusion to be drawn from reading this book is that there is no good argument or scientific reason to keep ID from attaining full scientific status. That, of course, doesn't guarantee ID's success as a scientific endeavor, but it does mean that, as Dembski effectively argues in this book, there are no good scientific or philosophical reasons to restrict ID from science and science curriculum.

While ID skeptics and critics will no doubt continue to voice opposition to including ID within science, this book makes it far more difficult for them to rehash the same tired arguments they've used in the past. Dembski has done a masterful job of sweeping the decks clear of those objections. Let the revolution begin.