Intelligent Design – The Bridge Between Science Theology

About the Book

Voted a Book of the Year by Christianity Today The Intelligent Design movement is three things:

• a scientific research program for investigating intelligent causes
• an intellectual movement that challenges naturalistic evolutionary theories
• a way of understanding divine action

Although the fast-growing movement has gained considerable grassroots support, many scientists and theologians remain skeptical about its merits. Scientists worry that it's bad science (merely creationism in disguise) and theologians worry that it's bad theology (misunderstanding divine action). In this book William Dembski addresses these concerns and brilliantly argues that intelligent design provides a crucial link between science and theology. Various chapters creatively and powerfully address intelligent discernment of divine action in nature, why the significane of miracles should be reconsidered, and the demise and unanswered questions of British natural theology. Effectively challenging the hegemony of naturalism and reinstating design within science, Dembski shows how intelligent design can be unpacked as a theory of information. Intelligent Design is a pivotal, synthesizing work from a thinker whom Phillip Johnson calls "one of the most important of the design theorists who are sparking a scientific revolution by legitimating the concept of intelligent design in science."

Table of Contents:

Foreword by Michael Behe

Preface

Part 1: Historical Beginnings
1. Recognizing the Divine Finger
1.1 Homer Simpson's Prayer
1.2 Signs in Decision-Making
1.3 Ordinary Versus Extraordinary Signs
1.4 Moses and Pharoah
1.5 The Philistines and the Ark
1.6 The Sign of the Resurrection
1.7 In Defense of Premodernity
2. The Critique of Miracles
2.1 Miracles as Evidence for Faith
2.2 Spinoza's Rejection of Miracles
2.3 Schleiermacher's Assimilation of Spinoza
2.4 Unpacking Schleiermacher's Naturalistic Critique
2.5 Critiquing the Naturalistic Critique
2.6 The Significane of the Naturalistic Critique
3. The Demise of British Natural Theology
3.1 Pauli's Sneer
3.2 From Contrivance to Natural Law
3.3 From Natural Law to Agnosticism
3.4 Darwin and His Theory
3.5 Design and Miracles
3.6 The Presupposition of Positivism

Part 2: A Theory of Design
4. Naturalism Its Cure
4.1 Nature and Creation
4.2 The Root of Idolatry
4.3 Naturalism Within Western Culture
4.4 The Cure: Intelligent Design
4.5 Not Theistic Evolution
4.6 The Importance of Definitions
4.7 A New Generation of Scholars
5. Reinstating Design Within Science
5.1 Design's Departure from Science
5.2 Why Reinstate Design?
5.3 The Complexity-Specification Criterion
5.4 Specification
5.5 False Negatives and False Positives
5.6 Why the Criterion Works
5.7 Irreducible Complexity
5.8 So What?
6. Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information
6.1 Complex Specified Information
6.2 Generating Information via Law
6.3 Generating Information via Chance
6.4 Generating Information via Law and Chance
6.5 The Law of Conservation of Information
6.6 Applying the Theory to Evolutionary Biology
6.7 Reconceptualizing Evolutionary Biology

Part 3: Bridging Science Theology
7. Science Theology in Mutual Support
7.1 Two Windows on Reality
7.2 Epistemic Support
7.3 Rational Compulsion
7.4 Explanatory Power
7.5 The Big Bang and Divine Creation
7.6 Christ as the Completion of Science
8. The Act of Creation
8.1 Creation as a Divine Gift
8.2 Naturalism's Challenge to Creation
8.3 Computational Reductionism
8.4 Our Empirical Selves Versus Our Actual Selves
8.5 The Resurgence of Design
8.6 The Creation of the World
8.7 The Intelligibility of the World
8.8 Creativity, Divine and Human

Appendix: Objections to Design
A.1 The God of the Gaps
A.2 Intentionality Versus Design
A.3 Scientific Creationism
A.4 But Is It Science?
A.5 Dysteleology
A.6 Just an Anthropic Coincidence
A.7 Applying the Math to Biology
A.8 David Hume's Objections
A.9 Mundane Versus Trancendant Designers

Notes

Index

About the Author :

William Dembski (Ph.D., mathematics, University of Chicago; Ph.D., philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago) is senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.He has previously taught at Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Dallas. He has done postdoctoral work in mathematics at MIT, in physics at the University of Chicago, and in computer science at Princeton University, and he has been a National Science Foundation doctoral and postdoctoral fellow. Dembski has written numerous scholarly articles and is the author of the critically acclaimed The Design Inference (Cambridge), Intelligent Design (InterVarsity Press) and No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence (Rowman and Littlefield).

Behe earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University. Behe's research focuses on the structure and function of chromatin and has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. In his book Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (Free Press), Behe argues that the irreducible complexity of cellular biochemical systems shows that they were designed by an intelligent agent. Darwin's Black Box has been reviewed in Science, Nature, New Scientist, National Review, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. It was selected as Christianity Today's 1996 Book of the Year. Behe is a member of the Biophysical Society and the American Society for Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. He is also a fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture.

Review :
"An important book that deserves a wide audience." "Dembski has done a fine job of putting the ID and specified-complexity pieces of the puzzle in layman's terms." " '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."