Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "In an episode of the animated television series The Simpsons, Marge tries to tell her husband Homer that she is pregnant with their third child..." (more)
Key Phrases: abiotic infusion, detectability question, criterion attributes design, Richard Dawkins, Michael Behe, Beth Shemesh (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Einstein once remarked that the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." This statement, quoted by William Dembski, is a way of summarizing intelligent design theory, which argues that it is possible to find evidence for design in the universe. The author of The Design Inference (a scholarly exploration of this topic published by Cambridge University Press) in this book aims to show the lay reader "how detecting design within the universe, and especially against the backdrop of biology and biochemistry, unseats naturalism"--and above all Darwin's expulsion of design in his theory of evolution.

Intelligent Design is organized into three parts: the first part gives an introduction to design and shows how modernity--science in the last two centuries--has undermined our intuition of this truth. The second and central part of the book examines "the philosophical and scientific basis for intelligent design." The final part shows how "science and theology relate coherently and how intelligent design establishes the crucial link between the two." This suggests that Dembski is not simply rejecting Darwin and naturalism on fundamentalist or biblical grounds. While grounded in faith, he wishes to show how "God's design is accessible to scientific inquiry." As such, the book should be of interest to all thinking believers. --Doug Thorpe

From Publishers Weekly

Until recently, the argument for designAthat nature (especially living organisms) shows the hand of an intelligent artificerAwas generally viewed as an abandoned relic of the pre-Darwinian past. Dembski and his colleagues at the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture have worked over the past decade to rehabilitate the concept of "intelligent design" not only as a plank of natural theology but as a theoretical resource within science. This collection of essays represents Dembski's efforts to remedy the conceptual fuzziness and lack of empirical content that plagued older versions of the design argument. Dembski recasts design as a problem in information theory, of empirically detecting the "complex specified information" that we attribute to intelligent causes. Although design inferences in biology or cosmology are obviously controversial, Dembski aims to normalize them by comparison to similar inferences routinely made in cryptography, forensic science and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)Athe latter being an especially effective counterexample to the claim that detecting unknown intelligences is impermissible as a scientific project. The book also presents more theologically oriented essays, including an especially astute analysis of the demise of British natural theology and an evocative (if unsympathetic) description of what Dembski sees as the "religious" character of scientific naturalism. Other material interspersed throughout the collection is less clearly related to intelligent design but gives a sense of Dembski's overall theological perspective. Readers who are principally interested in intelligent design itself, or who do not share the authors' theological interests, may find this distracting. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: InterVarsity Press; 1ST edition (October 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0830815813
• ISBN-13: 978-0830815814
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (70 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #887,654 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Finally got around to reading this, June 13, 2008

By	Marion Delgado (Eugene OR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology (Paperback)

A lot of water over the dam by now. I will just say as a mathematician and a deist, I am unimpressed. There's no humility. The "theistic evolutionists" Dembski condemns (not in this book, that came later) are impressive because they communicate a sense of honesty you just do not ever get from Dembski. He reminds me strongly of statistics obfuscator Bjorn Lomborg and also, frankly, of the radical sociobiologist Steven Pinker - unconcerned with science, in it for the polemics.

This is a polemic. It's neither science nor theology. It's a pamphlet for the culture wars. I would write a longer review but Scott Ryan above hit every single note I would have and more, so it'd be redundant.

Two, not one, stars, though, because it's not the worst thing this mendacious hack has written, by a long shot. It has sections of merit.

169 of 246 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Best yet from Dembski, December 13, 1999

By	Mickey McCaffrey (Cambridge, England) - See all my reviews

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!

17 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Is the glass half full or half empty?, August 25, 2000

By	Jonathan M. Mason "jm_1951" (Punta Gorda, FL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.