The Design Revolution by William Dembski

I checked this book out of the library recently and just started reading it. I thought I'd post a note whenever I came across something I wanted to comment on.From the forward, by Charles Colson, Watergate felon and, as is true of so many former convicts, born-again Christian: Concerning the last part, at first I scoffed. Evolutionists don't derive their morality from naturalism! But then, I'm not an atheist, so I thought I'd better check. Any evolutionists out there deriving their morality from naturalism? Let us know!This is a position we hear often here: atheists don't believe in God, so therefore they think anything they want to do is okay. But speaking just for myself, morality comes from inside, not from a book. I have never asked myself "What does the Bible say?" on any issue of morality. It always comes down to asking myself, "Is this right or wrong?"--Percy

From the forward by Colson again: To me this seems a misrepresentation. I'm sure there must be a few non-Christian ID advocates, but isn't this for the most part a Christian movement? Isn't Colson painting a false picture that Christians have significant allies from other faiths?Finishing the sentence: Assuming that the most vital questions of the day are issues of faith and morality, I'd have to agree. But if he instead means scientific issues, such as how do we feed the planet's burgeoning population, then evolution proposes, to mention just a couple, selection and genetic modification solutions. Can anyone think of any contributions ID could make on this or other scientific issues?--Percy

Moving on to the Preface by Dembski: But ID does not constitute a scientific revolution, and it doesn't even qualify as science. Like Colson, Dembski is painting a false picture. Everyone is entitled to blow their own horn, but the blare must not drown out the truth.Dembski is trying to make it appear that there is a scientific debate on evolution, but isn't it still true that no papers supporting ID have ever been published in any peer reviewed journal? Those scientists who take an interest do not debate with other scientists about ID, but with Christian ID advocates. And the debates do not take place in letters to journals or at scientific conferences, but at forums set up by Christian advocacy groups.I'm not against puffery per se, and ID is Dembski's pet idea, but this level of misrepresentation appears to go beyond that. He could have perhaps more legitimately charged a conspiracy to keep ID out of the halls of science, but he instead attempts to leave the false impression that ID has some level of scientific status.--PercyThis message has been edited by Percy, 07-23-2004 08:35 AM

Thanks for picking up on this. I included this part of the quote because I intended to comment on it, but I must have gotten sidetracked.I agree, of course, with everything you say. It has had no effect on the way science is practiced. Evidence gathered from experiment and observation is still the foundation of scientific theory, and ID has no evidence. Not only no evidence of God creating anything, but no evidence of God himself. They have no evidence of the process they are advocating, and not even any evidence of the prime mover behind that process. ID is as far from science as anyone could possibly imagine.IDists will often say that the evidence of design is all around us, but they're never to provide an answer answer to the question, "How do you tell when something couldn't possibly have come about by natural processes, and when we just haven't been able to figure it out yet." The history of science is just chock full of supposed supernatural events being given scientific explanations. Of course, I know I'm preaching to the choir when I say this to you, but it's worth mentioning anyway.--Percy

From the Preface: I recognize this argument. Someone used it here a few months ago when arguing for intelligent design, and I have the same answer now that I had then. Archeologists are not seeking signs of intelligent design, but signs of being man-made or of human origin. Archeologists, being human themselves and actually living among communities of humans, and having a specialized educational background, are fairly reliable at identifying signs of human manufacture.IDists, however, are not gods, do not live among a community of gods, and have received no educational training in recognizing the handiwork of gods. They have no everyday nor professional experience at recognizing what has been made by gods and what has occurred naturally.What we do know is that as time goes on, the signs of the work of gods or of God retreat from the everyday toward the rare, far-off, difficult to observe or ambiguous. Where once a burning bush was the sign of God, now it is a micro-biological propellor. And as microbiologists unravel the evolutionary pathways of propellor evolution, ID will have to retreat yet again. Once more tooting his own horn, Dembski seems to believe the "ID revolution" has shaken the halls of science. This couldn't be further from the truth. ID merits no attention, and certainly no anxiety, within scientific circles.But Dembski is right about the broader culture, of course. ID has generated much anxiety among those concerned about science education because the Creationist movement has now latched onto ID as their latest, favorite path into public school science classrooms. Where at one time Creationists wanted coverage of a sanitized Genesis, they now demand coverage of ID.The plain truth is that they really don't care what means are used to cast doubts on evolution. They don't care about the science, they just care about what they perceive as a challenge to their faith. If sanitized Genesis can do it, that's fine by them. But if that doesn't work, then if ID can do it, that's fine by them. And if ID doesn't work, then they'll latch onto whatever comes next, because their professed concern for science is but crocodile tears.--Percy

From the Preface: While reading this I was unsympathetic in the extreme up until the last sentence. Dembski is describing the God I believe in. I'm comfortable with a God who stands outside the natural universe, but it doesn't seem fair that I require members of the evangelical community to do the same. They believe in a personal God who cares about every individual and who involves himself in their lives through the love of his only son Jesus Christ. In my world this love means nothing, and that doesn't seem fair.But I have a slightly different perspective on it. Though it isn't my personal belief, I am amenable to a God who works his will not by subversion of but through natural laws. How he does this is not for us to know, but because everything that happens obeys natural laws, God's presence is not detectable by violations of them.While approaches to faith somewhat along these lines leaves the evangelical free to approach the natural laws of our universe as inviolate while still believing in a loving and caring God, significant problems with a literally inerrant Bible remain, and I see no easy resolution. The Bible relates many violations of natural law, and if God has never subverted natural law then the Bible isn't literally inerrant.So the evangelical is correct that my view of faith and science leaves no room for his God. I guess I have no answer to this quandry.--Percy

Hmmm. But Dembski says, "According to Lewis, naturalism is a toxin that pervades the air we breathe and an infection that has worked its way into our bones." That's pretty negative, but your quotation from Lewis's Miracles doesn't come anywhere close to such a characterization. Is Dembski misrepresenting Lewis's views, or does Lewis come closer to such a characterization elsewhere in his book?--PercyThis message has been edited by Percy, 02-15-2006 01:45 PM

This is so disappointing to hear. It seems that almost every Creationist who reaches prominence does so by playing to the home town crowd, telling them what they want to here, but at the expense of honesty and integrity. When they try to bring their message to non-Creationists their credibility is already exhausted by their history of contradictory and questionable claims.The only prominent Creationist I can think of who has played it pretty straight is Behe. Except for his blind spot regarding irreducible complexity, his approach seems legitimately scientific.Coincidentally, the latest Skeptic magazine arrived in the afternoon mail, and it included a review of the book Unintelligent Design which has a section on Dembski. The author addresses Creationist's tendency to grasp onto the non-negotiable assumption that there is a God who is active in the universe, feeling that it is central to their misplaced views on science. Dembski has this fault in spades, though I haven't commented on that particular paragraph. I'm going to have to be more circumspect on picking paragraphs to comment on, else next year I won't be further than chapter 2, and I'd end up with a hefty library fine. None of us are perfect and we all have our little foibles in our approach to doing science, but this goes way beyond the pale and corrupts everything they do that they call scientific. It's no wonder no Creationist effort has ever made a scientific contribution.--Percy

I don't necessarily disagree, but do we want to take a stance that blames the victim? I don't think we understand the psychology of religious belief, but I think it probably safe to say that a Creationist raised in a Moslem culture would be just as devout and inflexible in his beliefs as he turned out to be in a Christian culture. The level of contradiction contained in those beliefs does not appear to be a factor for most Creationists. As is true for most people, and I include myself, their core beliefs are not open to rational assessment and modification.Speaking about myself, my opinion is that I don't believe what I believe because I'm a better and more logical and rational thinker than Creationists, because debates with them over the years indicates this isn't true, but because that's just how I'm made. Not to be arrogant, but clearly science is right and I am right and Creationists are wrong. But it isn't something I can take credit for, just as others can't take credit for being able to dunk a basketball, multiply 10-digit numbers in their head, or win 38 consecutive times on Jeopardy (and counting).--Percy

More from the Preface: Dembski thinks intelligence is a basic creative force within nature? And the evidence for this? I guess this is one of those Creationist non-negotiable assumptions. Even the field of psychology, one of the softest of the soft sciences, has trouble defining intelligence, but Creationists want intelligence recognized as a force within nature. There's a part of Dembski's argument that makes no sense at all to me. Isn't God supernatural? Then why does Dembski feel the need to include God in the natural scientific universe? A temptation? How about an imperative. We can only study what is apparent to our senses - that's the definition of natural. If you feel it in your heart or see visions in your mind, or if what you see is apparent only to you and no one else, then it isn't really available for scientific study. The alternative would have science accepting everybody's individual testimony without validation or cross-checking. Sounds like a recipe for chaos.--Percy

More from Dembski's preface: Dembski is using intelligible as a synonym for decipherable, rational and consistent and playing it off against intelligence to imply there's a contradiction in the scientific position. This type of approach is common among the Creationist lower tiers, but one would hope that Creationists of reputation wouldn't engage in spurious wordplay. But instead of addressing the relevant concepts Dembski instead obfuscates by trying to confuse the issue.--Percy

More from Dembski's preface: Finally Dembski makes it very clear where he's coming from. He wants scientists to accept evidence that is personal, non-objective and unreplicable. Can any Creationist out there name a successful scientist who operates this way? What scientific discovery ever resulted from this approach?Dembski goes on to discuss why even many theologians are reluctant to accept intelligent design, and attributes this reluctance to theodicy. He spends a couple pages on this, but since this is a theological and not a scientific issue it need not concern us, but at one point he does relevantly say: One might be inclined to give Dembski credit for honesty because this is precisely how many us view intelligent design, but he goes on to say this is a misperception: Anyone out there believe intelligent design isn't motivated by a desire to find a role for God in the universe? The only group who believes this are fundamentalist Christians. Though stated in different terms, this is the old Creationist saw, "More and more scientists are abandoning the antiquated theory of evolution." This is as untrue today as it was when Creationists first began repeating it more than a half century ago.This concludes my comments on the preface.--Percy

I wonder if Dembski ever bothers to define intelligence. I'm beginning to worry that he's satisified just believing he can recognize intelligence without ever defining it. It appears, at least at this point, that Dembski *is* going to sidestep the issue of defining intelligence and instead just define intelligently designed objects. It will be interesting to see just how precise these methods are. Once again Dembski confuses the issue. Forensics and archeology are not seeking evidence of intelligent causes, but of human presence and actions, and are as able to detect a moron as a genius. I can't figure out how he thinks cryptography might be related to detecting intelligence, so I won't comment until he explains. He's correct in mentioning SETI, but it searches for the modulation of information onto radio waves, and I think pretty much everyone grants this requires intelligence.--Percy

From chapter 1, page 34: This is quite a promise. I hope that in the opening sentence that when Dembski says "design" he means intelligent design. He still has a lot of definitions to fill in, but we already know that he's going to define biological systems as complex, and that he's going to equate complexity with design, but one has to wonder how he will distinguish between evolution producing complexity in designs versus intelligence producing similarly complex designs. I hope that when he confidently states he has a method for identifying design in biological systems that he means he can tell the different between natural and intelligent (i.e., artificial) causes.A few paragraphs later on page 35 we have some definitions. He first provides the example of SETI receiving a list of prime numbers from 2 to 101, and he says we must infer that this indicates intelligence: If I picked up this book by accident when intending to pick up a textbook about probability and read the above paragraph, alarm bells would immediately have gone off in my head. "What kind of vague mumbo-jumbo definitions are these for something mathematical?" I would have thought to myself. My point is that these definitions don't raise my suspicions because they come from a book about intelligent design, but because they're inherently suspect.The most obvious problem is with the definitions of contingent and specification. It is not that they're vague, which they are, but that they seem to refer to pretty much the same thing. The explanation for contingent is that the prime sequence is a special set of radio signals, while that for specification is that the prime sequence is special set of mathematical symbols. He could as easily have said the radio signals are specified because it is a special set of radio signals, while the prime sequence is contingent because it is a special set of mathematical symbols. I think he's just created synonyms while adding complexity at the same time! And what about complexity? He says the prime sequence is complex because it is long, but how long is long? His specified complexity is already lacking a bit of specificity! So what is he going to call contingent in biology? Is DNA contingent or specified because the chemical constituents are ordered into DNA and not some other more random chemical? Is messenger RNA contingent? Nucleotides? Ribosomes? Proteins? Amino acids?And we can fully expect that because DNA is ordered into nucleotide sequences that Dembski will say it is contingent and specified, and that because it is long it is complex. Voil! Intelligent design!But perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, he's only just introducing his terms. Perhaps the rigor will increase.--Percy

I got a good distance into Dembski's book and still found nothing of substance. What I was hoping for was an indication of how a connection was established between Dembski's criteria for detecting design and the real world.Seeing no hint that this might be upcoming, I finally spent maybe an hour skimming the rest of the book. He presents his own flavor of information science, but never indicates how it was derived. One significant weakness was his use of word intelligence without ever giving it a satisfactory definition. Another was never applying his information science to a real world example. In the end his terms like specified complexity remained concepts only, and were never provided a mathematical foundation. If he claims to be able to objectively detect design then he should show, at least once, how he does it, but he never does.Without an established connection to the real world through observational and/or experimental approaches, the words of Dembski's terminology are left hanging in space. He has a well defined conceptual framework with no real-world application. I would have hoped to somewhere see a statement like, "The specified complexity of this particular nucleotide chain is 127.4, and since the maximum specified complexity that can be produced naturally is only 98.6, this nucleotide chain must have been designed." But there's nothing like this anywhere, not in Dembski's book, and not in any ID article I've ever read. After all this time, IDists still detect design just as subjectively as Paley: if it looks like it was designed, it was designed.This reminds me a little of my Transcendental Meditation (TM) period. In the early 80's a member of my team was into TM, and a couple other people in the larger group of which my team was a part were also into TM, and they had the local TM center give us a presentation at work. I was awestruck at all the graphs and charts showing the benefits of TM not only to the individual, but to society at large. I guess I'm a sucker for science.I entered the TM program, was given a mantra, and was shown how to meditate. I also joined a class built around a video taped series of lectures by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the leader of the TM movement, the same guy the Beatles followed for a while in the 60's. I wanted to understand the source of the pervasive energy they said that you drew upon when you did TM, and that made levitation possible. Normally I would have been more skeptical, but there were all those graphs and charts, so I went in with a pretty open mind.We watched two tapes per week, with class discussion afterwards, and it was a pretty long series. As the tape numbers gradually climbed I began to wonder when he was going to get to the core scientific foundation of TM. The Maharishi was peeling the onion pretty slowly. As we reached tape 14, tape 15, tape 16, I was becoming concerned that he was never going to get there, and I spoke to the instructor. She assured me that he was going to cover this soon.We finally reached the penultimate tape. It wasn't the last tape, but it was the one where the Maharishi talked about the force. "How do we know that the force exists and that we are connected to it?" he asked rhetorically, and I braced myself for the scientific information. "We know this is so because we can feel it."And that was the end of my dabbling with TM. The meditation techniques are great, the rest is garbage.And in the end, that's how I felt about Dembski's book. He paints a wonderful picture, but there's no connection to the real world, and when you peel the onion, there's nothing there.--Percy