DR
William A. Dembski is the Carl F. H. Henry Professor of Science and Theology at Southern Seminary in Louisville, KY. He is also a senior fellow with
Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. He has been hailed by his Intelligent Design Creationist (IDC) peers as the 'Isaac Newton of information theory'.
By all accounts Bill Dembski is a nice enough guy with a great sense of humor. But like many Discovery Institute personnel, Demsbki is part PR front man and part motivational speaker. And so he along with the rest of the IDCists tends to tailor his statements based on what will best 'sell to the crowd at hand'. In front of secular audiences he stresses the science as his motive, in front of religious groups he stands firm on his faith. My friend Ed Brayton rounded up these quotes to illustrate this puzzling inconsistency:
"I could make my peace with Darwinism if I had to, and I'm sufficiently theologically astute to do the fancy footwork, but it's the science itself that I don't think holds up." 2/03/06 at the Greer-Heard forum (Source).
"I think at a fundamental level, in terms of what drives me in this is that I think God's glory is being robbed by these naturalistic approaches to biological evolution, creation, the origin of the world, the origin of biological complexity and diversity. When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God's glory is getting robbed...And so there is a cultural war here. --attributed to Bill Dembski at a church in Waco, Texas on March 7, 2004
Dembski has proposed an Explanatory Filter (EF) method for detecting Intelligent Design based on mathematics which he argues will actually test directly for ID and which, he seems to imply or others claim for him, will never make a false positive conclusion. (Note how this diverges from legitimate research into the detection of non-human design such as SETI, which makes no such sweeping statements about false positives.)
The Explanatory Filter is often couched in as much dazzling mathematical notation as he can apparently muster, but thanks to many volunteers who have dissected his methodology we can handily cut through the morass of scary notation and state Dembski's EF in simplified and elegant terms.
It's a two station flow chart. The two stations are:
1. Is the object complex?
2. Is the object statistically unlikely to exist, beyond the odds of 10^150 to 1?
The problem is that proponents for the EF steadfastly refuse to provide the standardization by which the details of likelihood and complexity can be calculated for objects of various kinds. And when asked to test objects in which the design origin is unknown or concealed, Dembski refuses to cooperate or even provide results. Panda's Thumb contributor and National Center for Science Education Information Project Director DR Wesley Elsberry provided the following feedback for this article:
Dembski has never published any example of the full and successful application of his technical "design inference" method, whether you consider the one in The Design Inference or the revised method in chapter 2 of No Free Lunch. He has analyzed toy problems that don't meet the 1e-150 "universal small probability" that Dembski uses to dismiss toy problems utilized by his critics. He has skimped and only made a partial analysis of the bacterial flagellum in chapter 5 of No Free Lunch, failing to give a "specification" that meets the criteria of chapter 2, and also failing to pose any evolutionary hypothesis for elimination.
Since Dembski holds doctorates in both mathematics and philosophy one would think he is at least familiar with the scientific method and the peer review process. And, as he is also the frequent recipient of criticism from research microbiologist and molecular biochemists, one might reasonably infer that this avoidance is intentional on his part. But intentional or not, it would be quite a stretch to think that Dembski holds in his mind the most amazing, stunning discovery in the history of mankind, AKA the detection of non human intelligence (let alone the existence of a Creator entity), but cannot be bothered to lay out the details of the theory or allow open verification.
Recommended Comments: Tom Ames, Fred in Vermont, tarheelian51, Paul Rosenberg, weslberr