William A. Dembski > Quotes

“The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process.”
― William A. Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design

“Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.”
― William A. Dembski

“The fundamental claim of intelligent design is straightforward and easily intelligible: namely, there are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence.”
― William A. Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design

“Even if we have a reliable criterion for detecting design, and even if that criterion tells us that biological systems are designed, it seems that determining a biological system to be designed is akin to shrugging our shoulders and saying God did it. The fear is that admitting design as an explanation will stifle scientific inquiry, that scientists will stop investigating difficult problems because they have a sufficient explanation already.

But design is not a science stopper. Indeed, design can foster inquiry where traditional evolutionary approaches obstruct it. Consider the term "junk DNA." Implicit in this term is the view that because the genome of an organism has been cobbled together through a long, undirected evolutionary process, the genome is a patchwork of which only limited portions are essential to the organism. Thus on an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function. And indeed, the most recent findings suggest that designating DNA as "junk" merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. For instance, in a recent issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, John Bodnar describes how "non-coding DNA in eukaryotic genomes encodes a language which programs organismal growth and development." Design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages it.

Or consider vestigial organs that later are found to have a function after all. Evolutionary biology texts often cite the human coccyx as a "vestigial structure" that hearkens back to vertebrate ancestors with tails. Yet if one looks at a recent edition of Gray’s Anatomy, one finds that the coccyx is a crucial point of contact with muscles that attach to the pelvic floor. The phrase "vestigial structure" often merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. The human appendix, formerly thought to be vestigial, is now known to be a functioning component of the immune system.”
― William A. Dembski

“Johnson is a radical skeptic, insisting, in the best Socratic tradition, that everything be put on the table for examination. By contrast, most skeptics opposed to him are selective skeptics, applying their skepticism to the things they dislike (notably religion) and refusing to apply their skepticism to the things they do like (notably Darwinism). On two occasions I’ve urged Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine, to put me on its editorial board as the resident skeptic of Darwinism. Though Shermer and I know each other and are quite friendly, he never got back to me about joining his editorial board.”
― William A. Dembski

“Whenever explaining an event, we must choose from three competing modes of explanation. These are regularity, chance, and design... To attribute an event to design is to say that it cannot reasonably be referred to either regularity or chance.”
― William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities

“The material world, as conceived by materialists, however, is continually confused with reality as such.”
― William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information

“To establish evolutionary interrelatedness invariably requires exhibiting similarities between organisms. Within Darwinism, there's only one way to connect such similarities, and that's through descent with modification driven by the Darwinian mechanism. But within a design-theoretic framework, this possibility, though not precluded, is also not the only game in town. It's possible for descent with modification instead to be driven by telic processes inherent in nature (and thus by a form of design). Alternatively, it's possible that the similarities are not due to descent at all but result from a similarity of conception, just as designed objects like your TV, radio, and computer share common components because designers frequently recycle ideas and parts. Teasing apart the effects of intelligent and natural causation is one of the key questions confronting a design-theoretic research program. Unlike Darwinism, therefore, intelligent design has no immediate and easy answer to the question of common descent.

Darwinists necessarily see this as a bad thing and as a regression to ignorance. From the design theorists' perspective, however, frank admissions of ignorance are much to be preferred to overconfident claims to knowledge that in the end cannot be adequately justified. Despite advertisements to the contrary, science is not a juggernaut that relentlessly pushes back the frontiers of knowledge. Rather, science is an interconnected web of theoretical and factual claims about the world that are constantly being revised and for which changes in one portion of the web can induce radical changes in another. In particular, science regularly confronts the problem of having to retract claims that it once confidently asserted.”
― William A. Dembski

“Constrained optimization is the art of compromise between conflicting objectives. This is what design is all about. To find fault with biological design - as Stephen Jay Gould regularly does - because it misses some idealized optimum is therefore gratuitous. Not knowing the objectives of the designer, Gould is in no position to say whether the designer has proposed a faulty compromise among those objectives.”
― William A. Dembski, Signs of Intelligence: Understanding Intelligent Design

“Even if the intelligent design of some structure has been established, it still is a separate question whether a wise, powerful, and beneficent God ought to have designed a complex, information-rich structure one way or another. For the sake of argument, let's grant that certain designed structures are not simply, as Gould put it, "odd" or "funny," but even cruel. What of it? Philosophical theology has abundant resources for dealing with the problem of evil, maintaining a God who is both omnipotent and benevolent in the face of evil.”
― William A. Dembski, Signs of Intelligence: Understanding Intelligent Design

“Naturalism is the view that the physical world is a self-contained system that works by blind, unbroken natural laws. Naturalism doesn't come right out and say there's nothing beyond nature. Rather, it says that nothing beyond nature could have any conceivable relevance to what happens in nature. Naturalism's answer to theism is not atheism but benign neglect. People are welcome to believe in God, though not a God who makes a difference in the natural order.”
― William A. Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design

“Regardless of one's point of view, it's quite easy to see that Darwinism is not in the same league as the hard sciences. For instance, Darwinists will often compare their theory favorably to Einsteinian physics, claiming that Darwinism is just as well established as general relativity. Yet how many physicists, while arguing for the truth of Einsteinian physics, will claim that general relativity is as well established as Darwin’s theory? Zero.”
― William A. Dembski, Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing

“In a fallen world, the only currency of love is suffering. Indeed, the only way to tell how much one person loves another is by what that person is willing to endure for the other.”
― William A. Dembski, The End of Christianity

“God does not hinder the exercise of human freedom but rather anticipates its consequences.”
― William A. Dembski, The End of Christianity

“Insofar as explanation fails to account for some salient fact, it is incomplete and its parsimony can no longer rightly be regarded as an asset. Indeed, the key failing of materialism, as we shall see, is that its parsimony is purchased at the cost of misrepresenting reality.”
― William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information

“Materialism is adept at transforming illusions of possibility into settled verities.”
― William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information

“To exist is to be in communion, and to be in communion is to exchange information. Accordingly, the fundamental science, indeed the science that needs to ground all other sciences, is a theory of communication, and not, as is widely supposed, an atomistic, reductionistic, and mechanistic science of particles or other mindless entities, which then need to be built up to ever greater orders of complexity by equally mindless principles of association, known as natural laws or algorithms or emergent properties or principles of self-organization.2 Within such a theory of communication, the proper object of study is not particles, but the information that passes between entities—entities in turn defined by their ability to communicate information.”
― William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information

“my atheism is a conviction not based on evidence, though it leads me to seek a certain kind of solution to the evident inadequacy of materialism.”
― William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information

“theology requires metaphors and concepts that come from our understanding of nature and therefore from science.”
― William A. Dembski, The End of Christianity

“God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.”
― William A. Dembski, The End of Christianity

“The promise of the Christian faith is that this life presages a glorious new life that will make present pains seem negligible:”
― William A. Dembski, The End of Christianity

“humanity is the gatekeeper through which evil passes into the world. In this metaphor, the Fall becomes the failure of the gatekeeper to maintain proper control of the gate.”
― William A. Dembski, The End of Christianity

“The violence described in the Old Testament was endemic to the ancient Near East and remains endemic to much of the world today. Although our refined Western sensibilities recoil from these violent passages, in fact the Old Testament is to be credited for presenting the human condition in all its starkness”
― William A. Dembski, The End of Christianity

“The power to veto or negate is the power of free will. Free will is “free won’t.”9 This connects neatly with information theory, which, as we will see, characterizes information as a reduction or ruling out of possibilities. To be informed that something is the case is to be informed that other things are not the case. Information says yes to some things by saying no to others. Free will is the power of no.”
― William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information

“Being as Communion is the final book in a trilogy. The two earlier books were The Design Inference and No Free Lunch.”
― William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information

“In short, the problem of evil starts when creatures think God is evil for “cramping their style.” The impulse of our modern secular culture to cast off restraint wherever possible finds its root here.”
― William A. Dembski, The End of Christianity

“Christian philosophy has, like the Hebrew, uniformly attributed moral and physical evil to the action of created free will. Man has himself brought about the evil from which he suffers by transgressing the law of God, on obedience to which his happiness depended. . . . The errors of mankind, mistaking the true conditions of its own well-being, have been the cause of moral and physical evil.28”
― William A. Dembski, The End of Christianity

“On materialist principles, our minds are limited to the material constitution of our brains (minds transcending brains are simply not an option for materialism), and our brains are simply more complicated arrangements of balls going down inclined planes and coins being tossed. Thus we are not in control, we are not free.”
― William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information

“in our materialist culture, such alternate forms of knowledge, whatever they might be, tend to undergo a materialist reduction. This is simply a sociological fact about how knowledge in our culture is viewed: the world, whatever else it may be, is composed of matter, and it is best understood in materialist terms. This, overwhelmingly, is the received opinion. Accordingly, many thinkers will claim that science (a science whose main task is to study and understand matter) constitutes our best form of knowledge. Of course, the very claim that science is our best form of knowledge is itself nonscientific. No scientific experiment or scientific theory can define what science is. In fact, what constitutes science is not written in stone but has been continually negotiated for more than two millennia (scientists, or natural philosophers as they used to be called, have been around at least that long).”
― William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information

“Yet, unlike the causal specificity that obtains for microevolutionary processes, origin-of-life researchers have yet to specify the chemical pathways that supposedly originated life. For instance, Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, admits that “no serious scientist would currently claim that a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life is at hand.”5 Self-organizational theorist Stuart Kauffman is bolder yet: “Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on the earth some 3.45 billion years ago is a fool or a knave. Nobody knows.”
― William A. Dembski, Tough-Minded Christianity: Honoring the Legacy of John Warwick Montgomery