This item is not eligible for Amazon Prime, but millions of other items are. Join Amazon Prime today. Already a member? Sign in.
|
|||||||||
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe (Proceedings of the Wethersfield Institute) by Michael J. Behe  (33)
$11.21
|
The Design Revolution: Answering The Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design by William A. Dembski (64)
$16.46
|
Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution is Wrong by Jonathan Wells  (188)
$16.95
|
The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery by Guillermo Gonzalez  (63)
$19.77
|
Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing by John Wilson (41)
$18.00
|
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
"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.
"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.
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
|
