Author: William Dembski

In the March 21st, 2002, edition of The Washington Times [www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20020321-76780268.htm], Sen. Edward Kennedy takes exception to Sen. Rick Santorum’s March 14 Commentary piece, “Illiberal Education in Ohio Schools” [http://asp.washtimes.com/printarticle.asp?action=print&ArticleID=20020314-5].  Santorum, who supports intelligent design, argues that Ohio public schools should be open to teaching it. Kennedy, who has publicly supported the teaching of alternate…

The mathematician George Polya used to quip that if you can’t solve a problem, find an easier problem and solve it. Matt Young seems to have taken Polya’s advice to heart. Young has taken Shannon’s tried-and-true theory of information and shoehorned my notion of specified complexity into it. The shoe no longer fits, and so…

Bernard d’Abrera’s concise atlas of the world’s butterflies is a beautifully produced book with the most stunning photographs of butterflies that I’ve ever seen. Though not intended as a coffee-table book, it could eminently serve that purpose. D’Abrera himself is a world-renowned butterfly and moth expert at the BritishMuseum(Natural History) in London. Over the years…

Part 3. Design by Elimination  The defects in Sober’s likelihood approach are, in my view, so grave that it cannot provide an adequate account of how design hypotheses are inferred. [18] The question remains, however, whether specified complexity can instead provide an adequate account for how design hypotheses are inferred. The worry here centers on…

Let me paint the picture more starkly. Consider an elementary event E.  Suppose initially we see no pattern that gives us reason to expect an intelligent agent produced it. But then, rummaging through our background knowledge, we suddenly see a pattern that signifies design in E. Under a likelihood analysis, the probability of E given…

1. Overview of the Design Inference Darwinbegan his Origin of Species with the commonsense recognition that artificial selection in animal and plant breeding experiments is capable of directing organismal variation. A design-theoretic research program likewise  begins with a commonsense recognition, in this case that humans draw design  inferences routinely in ordinary life, explaining some things…

1. Nature and Art In Book II of the Physics Aristotle remarks, “If the ship-building art were in the wood, it would produce the same results by nature.” Aristotle is here contrasting nature and art. Nature provides the raw materials (here wood); art provides the means for fashioning those materials (here into a ship). For…

 In the case of computer simulations, following the information trail and finding the place where complex specified information was smuggled in is usually not difficult. I predict it will become more difficult in the future as this shell game becomes more sophisticated, involving more shells and quicker movements of the shells. But just as accounts…

 In 1994, I participated at a C. S. Lewis summer conference at Queens’ College, Cambridge. The event was sponsored by the C. S. Lewis Foundation (Redlands, California) and hosted by John Polkinghorne. A portion of the conference was devoted to design, and proponents of design who spoke at the conference including Phillip Johnson, Stephen Meyer,…

There are good and bad reasons to be skeptical of intelligent design. Perhaps the best reason is that intelligent design has yet to establish itself as a thriving scientific research program. Thus far philosophical, theoretical, and foundational concerns have tended to predominate. From the vantage of design advocates, this simply reflects the earliness of the…