Customer Reviews

Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(23)

 

 

Dembski, the intellectual leader of the Intelligent Design movement (which the British media, under, no doubt, the beady eye of Richard Dawkins, refuse even to mention) provides an accessible and fluent account of his main ideas. There is no technical or mathematical treatment herein which may have put people off buying his monograph 'The Design Inference'. Those who have followed Dembski's work over the past few years will recognise much that is familiar; there's nothing startlingly new here for them, but they will still welcome this masterly overview. For others this is the best introduction to Demsbki's work, as of this time.

Because this book overtly links Science AND Theology, Dembski does address religious, and specifically Christian, questions such as the existence of miracles, the Biblical use of signs etc.

I must respond to the previous reviewer,' a reader' in Nederland, who by referring to the books 'authors' (Behe simply provides the foreword), patently displays that he has not read the book, which is pretty typical. Many of the points he raises are dealt with and are shown not to meet the 'complex specified information' criterion.

In closing, I might mention that the book is well produced and shouldn't literally fall apart like so many books nowadays!

I really wanted to like this book, and there are parts of it with which I agree at least in principle. But in the end I can't give it more than three stars.

There are two main reasons for this, both having to do with what William Dembski believes himself to be arguing.

First: The news in this book is supposed to be Dembski's notion of "specified complexity." This is made to sound much more innovative than it is, and few mathematicians are likely to be impressed by Dembski's alleged originality here. The idea is just that when we see patterns rather than apparent chaos, and we find that we can describe the pattern independently, we don't attribute the phenomenon in question to chance; we know there must be something more to it.

But as an argument for "intelligent design," this is an _ignoratio elenchi_. There's no evolutionist in the world who thinks complex biological structures developed by sheer chance, just as there's no cosmologist in the world who would propose _randomness_ as the sole alternative to divine intervention as the origin of the cosmos. Every one of Dembski's ideological opponents would argue that "specified complexity" -- in pretty much any non-question-begging way Dembski wants to define it -- is _exactly_ what evolution-by-natural-selection produces, and Dembski hasn't even begun to show this to be false.

So if there were anything new in Dembski's argument, it would have to be, not his notion of "specified complexity," but his claim that order and information can't arise from chaos. But you'll look in vain for any argument to this effect.

You'll also look in vain for any admission that scientists _always_ look for order and almost _never_ attribute it to "design." Dembski's examples are chosen to suggest the opposite: we know that watches were made by watchmakers; we know (or would know) that patterned signals from outer space come from alien intelligences rather than from random bursts of cosmic rays. But we also know that, say, the circumference of a circle is _always_ precisely pi times its diameter, and no scientist in the world would take this as conclusive evidence of "design" -- just of "intelligibility," which even Dembski himself is (properly) careful to _distinguish_ from "design."

So when all is said and done, we still haven't got a way to distinguish the "specified complexity" that results from intelligent design from the "specified complexity" that results from simple intelligibility. (There _is_ a cosmological argument that intelligibility itself implies an underlying intelligence, but Dembski doesn't give it. See Hugo Meynell's _The Intelligible Universe_, which I favorably reviewed a long time ago.) Maybe _The Design Inference_ covers this stuff better than this book does; at any rate Dembski keeps referring us to that book for all the arguments he isn't going to bother offering in this one, making sure to let us know that it's all very technical. But I find this sort of thing tiresome and full of handwaving.

Which brings us to the second problem, where Dembski's handwaving gets a whole lot worse. It's pretty disingenuous to claim that "intelligent design" isn't specifically Christian, and then write an entire book on the presumption that atheism and Christianity are the only two alternatives. Hasn't Dembski heard of any other theistic religions? (Hint: One of them starts with J, and Jesus himself was raised in it. And it believes the universe to be the product of intelligent design just as surely as Dembski's religion does.)

But somehow, when Dembski wants to indulge in tub-thumping Christian triumphalism, all those other versions of theism never bother making an appearance. This probably won't bother any Christian triumphalists among his readership, but it should bother anybody who takes seriously his claim that belief in "intelligent design" doesn't commit anyone to Christianity.

And boy, do the hands start waving when we learn that "Christ is the completion of science"! First we receive a fairly good exposition of the way the set of real numbers completes the set of rational numbers. (But even for this, the lay reader is referred in a footnote, not to a helpful introductory book, but to Walter Rudin's excellent but hardly elementary _Principles of Mathematical Analysis_. Really. How many lay readers are going to go look this one up? If Dembski had wanted to be helpful and enlightening rather than impressive and technically forbidding, wasn't there some other more elementary source to which he could have referred?)

And this is offered as an analogy for the way Christ completes science. The analogy is never explained, so Dembski's target audience will presumably just nod their heads. Readers with mathematical backgrounds, however, may have a different reaction. So may philosophers, who will probably recognize that one can perfectly well believe in the _logos_ without identifying it with "Christ."

In general, Dembski's philosophical sophistication is not great (yes, yes, I know he has a Ph.D. in the field). Here again, I think we're supposed to be impressed rather than enlightened, as when he makes a brief and general remark about naturalistic philosophers "like" John Searle and David Malet Armstrong, and then refers us in a footnote (in the _same_ footnote) to _The Construction of Social Reality_ and _Universals: An Opinionated Introduction_ without bothering to explain what _either_ philosopher argues in _either_ of these books. Good thing I'd already read them; I'd never have learned anything about them from Dembski.

His scientific sophistication isn't exactly on display either. For a book that's supposed to provide a "bridge between science and theology," there sure isn't much science in it. And if Dembski wants to show us how to distinguish design from simple order, he really, _really_ needs to get down to cases.

He's also very dismissive of what he likes to call "enlightenment rationalism," as distinguished, one presumes, from his own Christian rationalism. This sometimes lead to odd results, as when he remarks in a footnote (regarding those silly rationalists and their desire for "neat, self-contained explanations") that "Christ always destroys our neat categories." Really? Like "Christian" vs. "non-Christian"? Or like "design" vs. "accident"?

Yawn. I'm at least a quasi-theist (of the "panentheist" variety) myself, I'm generally very favorable to critiques of Darwinism (which, you understand, is not to say that I think they _succeed_, but that I think well-founded criticism is helpful to the scientific enterprise), and I do think the cosmos is best understood philosophically as the activity of a single absolute mind that I have no objection to calling divine. But based on the quality of argumentation and exposition I found here, I don't think I'll be reading _The Design Inference_ any time soon.

This is a better book than I was anticipating, but it failed to convince me that there is any science at all in the (sadly) growing "discipline" of intelligent design. In the preface, Dembski makes a telling comment (which I paraphrase): "As Christians, we know God designed the universe..." (or something very similar to that). I challenge anyone to explain to me how someone who knows the answer to his problem before he even begins his analysis is a scientist. But it gets better from there. Chapter 4 seems to be the most focused section of the book, as it is here that Dembski criticises the methodological naturalist worldview that underlies essentially all present-day science (and does a surprisingly good job, despite the obvious theistic baggage he carries throughout the book). But from there, Dembski's arguments collapse when he defines "specified complexity", which consists of three components: contingency, specification, and complexity. Complexity he defines strictly in terms of probability; a system is complex insofar as it has a low probability of having occurred by chance. I'll ignore the many fatal problems with this conception of complexity and instead point out the fact that Dembski has just contradicted himself: by invoking probability to "detect design", he in effect summons the same methodological naturalism he spent an entire chapter berating (because probability is not simply a product of logic, like pure mathematics; probability is a set of laws deduced through observation and employed with the explicit assumption that those laws can be used inductively to explain further observations). It appears Dembski will happily embrace a naturalist worldview when it suits his intended purposes. The final few chapters of the book nail the coffin shut by rounding off his analysis of specified complexity with discussions of Christian theology, and how science is completed "through Christ," crushing any doubt as to whether or not Dembski's motives are more religious and political than scientific. I must give Dembski credit for trying to inject some modicum of critical thinking into religious descriptions of astronomy, evolution, and the origin of life. But with as many flawed assumptions and contradictions as this book contains, it's fairly obvious that intelligent design isn't truly about critical thinking at all.

Most of the creationist literature consists of retreaded arguments that have long since ceased to be taken seriously. The arguments from minimum complexity or variations on the blind watchmaker argument have been around for 150 years. These arguments pose a minimum level problem for biologists and are no argument in favor of anything, let alone the Judeo-Christian God of Genesis.

Dembski and his fellow advocates of intelligent design have at least come up with a new theory and Dembski is at his best when he discusses information theory as it relates to intelligent design of the universe. Briefly stated, Dembski's theory is that a purely naturalistic system, such as evolution cannot create information, therefore the existence of information in DNA and throughout the living world implies an intelligent creator who imparted that information. Demski actually does a great job of making this sound compelling. However, see Skeptical Inquirer, Marh/April 2001 issue for a critique of his theory.

While Dembski's information theory has a certain attraction to it, the theory does little to compell one to adopt the Judeo-Christian deity of Genesis. Indeed, information theory would seem to argue for the deist position, that a deity set the universe in motion and then let it proceed according to the naturalistic laws by which it was created.

Indeed, one is struck by the gulf that separates Dembski's discussion of information theory and his discussion of miracles, Moses and the Bible. Dembski is attempting a "bridge" between science and theology, but in the end what he wants is to shoehorn Genesis into contempory biological science.

If you are interested in current creationist theory, this book is as good as it gets. He is head and shoulders above Philip E. Johnson and other creationist writers. However, for a complete picture, also read Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker or The Selfish Gene. For a critique of creationism, try Robert T. Pennocks Tower of Babel and for an introduction to the history of creationist thought in America (Creationism is an American development) read Darwinism Comes to America by Roland L. Numbers.

The thing about this intelligent design question is whether like Dr. Johnson, I believe it was, who commented that the thing about a woman preaching was not whether it was done well, but that one was surprised to see it done at all.

O.K. such sentiments are outdated, but coming to "intelligent design" you are either in the camp that believes that intelligent design would have done a much better job (my point of view) or in Dembski's camp, that is so amazed by the statistical unlikelihood of life existing at all that the existence of a designer (intelligent or otherwise) is taken almost for granted.

It is rather hard for me to believe, for example,that an intelligent designer would have created the human race in such a way that large numbers of women and babies would die in agony in childbirth when the child's head was greater in diameter than the opening in the pelvis. Only man-made techniques for sterile surgery have made the ubiquitous C-section available to almost all, at least in the developed world. Now the book of Genesis offers an explanation for this conundrum of pelvic disproportion--the doctrine of original sin and a God punishing woman for leading man astray. I would be interested to hear the intelligent design explanation of this phenomenon.

But Dembski has used his knowledge of mathematics to demonstrate to his satisfaction that there must have been an intelligent designer. Well, maybe not an intelligent designer, but a well meaning, if incompetent designer.

Maybe so, but he has failed to convince me that the intelligent design theory is the one that best fits the facts, and I have to conclude the the scientific part of his research has been affected by his religious beliefs, or the beliefs of those in his environment.

Is it design or is it chance? Most of the things we meet in life don't provide much of a mystery in this regard. Wine glasses are designed. Wine stains are not. A suspension bridge is designed. A natural bridge is just a big hole in a big rock. But asking this question with regard to living organisms, the Universe as a whole, or Jackson Pollock paintings has brought us over a century of bitter (and embittering) conflict. In this volume, Dembski attempts to provide criteria which we can use regardless of personal preference to determine whether an object (particularly an organism) is designed or not. Finally, someone is attempting to move the debate beyond the "is not/is too" state of discourse where it has been trapped by proponents of both sides of the argument since the day that Darwin bagged his first finch. For this, we should all be grateful.

Unfortunately, the operative word here is *attempting*. According to Dembski, if an object exhibits contingency, complexity, and specification, we can be sure it was designed. Otherwise, it came about by chance (wine stain) or by a never to be known intelligence mimicking chance (Pollock painting). I don't have space here to go into detail on all three criteria so I will concentrate on the most problematic: specification. If four of us are playing poker and one guy gets 4 aces three hands in a row, we can be pretty sure that he got them by design (i.e. cheating) and not by chance. Why? Because his 4 aces, in addition to being improbable, match an important, previously *specified* pattern. The problem is: can we apply this same criterion to biological systems? Can we say that an eye, for instance, is specified in the same way that a winning poker hand is specified? One problem with trying to do this is that the rules of poker were laid down decades before your gambling buddy got his 4 aces. The pattern was specified and then was actualized much later. But the eye has been around for millenia already. It would seem a little late to be trying to objectively set a specifying pattern for an eye. Dembski counters this objection with the point that a specifying pattern does not always have to precede the object under study. Cryptologists, for instance, are certain that a code has a pattern even though they might not know the pattern yet. I find this a very intriguing suggestion. But I can't see where Dembski spells out how it applies to biological systems.

This problem with specificity is important. Before, creationsists and non-creationists were yelling "Is designed!" "Is not!". If Demski cannot give us a clear meaning to "specification", our judgements on this aspect of design will remain subjective and the best we can hope for is that the same people will now be yelling "Is specified!" "Is not!".

So, Dembski offers some intriguing ideas. I hope to see future work in which they are better "specified" (sorry) to the point where Dembski achieves his goal of providing an objective framework for discussing design in nature. But it hasn't happened here.

One positive note: Dembski closes the book with an appendix in which he pretty much knocks the legs out from under the most common objections voiced against including design considerations in science. If you don't read anything else in the book, read the appendix. Now, I look forward to watching Dembski knock the legs out from under the objection I have raised here.

In Intelligent Design, William Dembski makes his revolutionary insights on detecting design, first articulated in The Design Inference (Cambridge, 1998), accessible to the general reader. (He even opens with Homer Simpson!) But he also develops his ideas more broadly, perhaps most importantly by connecting his notion of specified complexity with a robust form of information. By doing so, he refutes the shallow claim that laws of self-organization can generate the relevant kind of complexity needed to explain biology. Since he spends his entire chapter six on the subject, only a reviewer who didn't bother to read the book could complain that he ignores the work of complexity theorists such as Stuart Kauffman and others. Dembski is intimately conversant with these works, and offers the best refutation to date of the aspirations of complexity and self-organizational theory. Periodic order, easily explained by self-organizational scenarios, isn't the aperiodic, information-rich complexity we have before us in DNA and biological systems. Self-organization explains what doesn't need explaining. When a critical reviewer fails to engage Dembski's concept of "specified complexity" and deal with his actual arguments, one should assume that the putative "reviewer" is either unacqainted with, or unwilling to confront the devastating case Dembski makes against materialism. In future years, his work will be recorded in the intellectual history of the late 20th century. Let's hope there's also some mention of the snide and ineffectual responses it initially received.

This book has really opened my eyes. I now believe that Intelligent Design is a legitimate field of scientific study, and is extremely promising for both scientists and believers. I knew virtually nothing of this idea before reading this book. However, I had read quite extensively (for a non-academic, anyway) among many scientists/authors challenged by Dembski in this book--Darwin, Dawkins, Dennett, Kauffman, and various researchers within the Sante Fe Institute. I had read their work in a very sympathetic manner and found their work quite compelling. However, Dr. Dembski has issued a challenge to their lines of thought that simply cannot be ignored. In fact, in this book's appendix, Dembski carefully lists all major objections to design theory and skillfully defends against each.

I read through the other reviews and find fault with every one of the more negative reviews. To counter a few of them ... This book wasn't meant to be complete or final. Dembski previously published a much more detailed and thorough work; this book is meant for an audience who needs a simpler introduction. Dembski clearly is laying the groundwork for future work in a new approach in scientific inquiry. He hardly asserts to have all the answers or to have proven anything beyond refuting. Attempting to confuse this book with "Christian fundamentalism" is just lazy.

I am a professional engineer. Engineers understand design about as well as any profession--maybe better than most. Dembski's insights into design are solid. I had suspected before that many scientists see design as something "less than" science, but never questioned why. Dembski has revealed what I see as an ugly bias, a close-mindedness in some scientists, that surely can only obstruct their view of the truth. It's about time science (scientists) opened its eyes. I believe Dembski and his colleagues are doing revolutionary work. If you're at all intrigued by the topic of this book--buy it and read it.

I picked up the book after taking part in a few debates over Evolution and ID.

The book for what it is about is written well. Dembski is trying to reach a reader base with little or no science background. This is shown by his ample usage of analogies.

If you are science minded you might not like this book as the analogies can annoy when you are looking for testing data.

Many claims have been lobbed at ID. One in particular as it is the attempt to install theism into science. Dembski says it is not and yet he does a great deal talking about God and Jesus Christ. One thing I did notice is when he used "creator" when trying to explain the designer is not God; it is always written as "Creator."

The first part of the book talks about the rise of Naturalism and the removing of theism from science. He does make a few questionable claims (IMHO) about Huxley and Naturalism. Naturalism was basically created to abolish the need to be accountable for Sin(page 100).

One thing I was looking for was more examples of how ID really works with evolution. It was lacking in those aspects. Mainly analogies rather then hard data.

Overall the book gives you insight in to Dembski's thinking. If you are going to get involved in the Evolution/ID fight, then you have to read things like this as it does a diservice to simply dismiss something without having read their cliams.

If you are a Creationist, nothing I write will matter, so work hard to understand all the arguments in this book, so you can bring them out when debating "Evil-utionists"! We will fear you.

For those who know a little about the evolution-creation debate, don't bother with this. The book is pretentious hand-waving, question-begging and unsupported assertions from start to finish, just as y'all knew it would be.

For those who were wondering if there is some intellectually defensible formulation of Design in nature that can be defined so as to be tested, detectable and validated by the methods of scientific inquiry, then this is the book for you!

Along with Michael Behe, Dembski has done some--albeit much less-- real academic work. His degrees are from real Universities, not Bible Colleges like Liberty U. or Bob Jones.

The core of the book lays out Dembski's definiton of and apsirations for his own contribution to Creationist jargon: "Complex Specified Information" (CSI). Sandwiched between amateurish attempts at Christian apologetics and attacks on Naturalism (please learn the difference between methodological naturalism and ontological naturalism, it would cease to raise questions in our minds about the rigour of your PhD in Philosophy), Dembski proposes crtieria of "complexity" and "specification" , the latter of which depends on the existence of a sentient being capable of ascribing "meaning" or "purpose" to objects in the world. Put me in mind of the "Madonna in a tortilla" stories that come out of South America and Mexico from time to time, but I digress.

His argument for design rests on the upper bound of probability (an admittedly generous 10^-150) that these criteria can co-exist in an undesigned structure.

This is followed by many tedious pages of logical and statistical hand-waving which, I understand reached a mathematical crescendo in a book called the "Design Inference".

The problems with all this don't require following the math, although this last does lend a thin veneer of intellectual gravitas to the proceedings.

Dembski is unable to show that his criteia for CSI have any traction outside of his contrived examples of scrabble tiles and binary number sequences. The assumptions he makes for his attempt to calculate the probability for the assembly of the flagellum display a level of biological naivete with respect to evolution that makes Hoyles "747 in a junkyard tornado" seem by comparison to be a meticulous model of abiogenesis. His nods to Behe's soundly discredited notion of "irreducible complexity" (see the Kitzmiller trial transcripts or reviews of his book by real scientists) will impress only the True Believers who know the Creationist bumper sticker slogans.

The major flaw with this whole program is that Dembski has no positive or negative controls with which to validate his CSI detector. In fact he has yet to my knowledge to publish a single exhaustive application of his calculations to any object the real world. He would need to show that there are undesigned structures which appear designed, but for the application of his God-detector, and that there are clearly designed structures that yield clearly positive results.

The absurdity of using a detector to validate its own operation needs no further comment, but this is in fact the basis of Dembski's programme!

The writing is tedious and pedantic. It did however expose me to the best that ID has to offer, outside of Behe, who at least has the sense to cherry-pick his examples, and to make concessions where the evidence forces him to. I look forward to seeing how small his Designer gets as the gaps narrow.