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Signs of Intelligence: Understanding Intelligent Design
Fourteen brief and accessible essays by key players in the intelligent design movement.
224 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2001
2 people are currently reading
139 people want to read
About the author
William A. Dembski
53 books119 followersA mathematician and philosopher, Dr. William Dembski has 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. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago where he earned a B.A. in psychology, an M.S. in statistics, and a Ph.D. in philosophy, he also received a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1988 and a master of divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1996. He has held National Science Foundation graduate and postdoctoral fellowships. He is the recipient of a $100,000 Templeton research grant. In 2005 he received Texas A&M’s Trotter Prize.
Dr. Dembski has published articles in mathematics, engineering, philosophy, and theology journals and is the author/editor of over twenty books.
His most comprehensive treatment of intelligent design to date, co-authored with Jonathan Wells, is titled The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems.
As interest in intelligent design has grown in the wider culture, Dr. Dembski has assumed the role of public intellectual. In addition to lecturing around the world at colleges and universities, he is frequently interviewed on the radio and television. His work has been cited in numerous newspaper and magazine articles, including three front page stories in the New York Times as well as the August 15, 2005 Time magazine cover story on intelligent design. He has appeared on the BBC, NPR (Diane Rehm, etc.), PBS (Inside the Law with Jack Ford; Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson), CSPAN2, CNN, Fox News, ABC Nightline, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Dr. Dembski has published articles in mathematics, engineering, philosophy, and theology journals and is the author/editor of over twenty books.
His most comprehensive treatment of intelligent design to date, co-authored with Jonathan Wells, is titled The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems.
As interest in intelligent design has grown in the wider culture, Dr. Dembski has assumed the role of public intellectual. In addition to lecturing around the world at colleges and universities, he is frequently interviewed on the radio and television. His work has been cited in numerous newspaper and magazine articles, including three front page stories in the New York Times as well as the August 15, 2005 Time magazine cover story on intelligent design. He has appeared on the BBC, NPR (Diane Rehm, etc.), PBS (Inside the Law with Jack Ford; Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson), CSPAN2, CNN, Fox News, ABC Nightline, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 18, 2014
In the book Dembski and Kushiner have assembled a collection of judicious and eloquent essays representing the often-misunderstood intelligent design movement. The part I of the collection focuses on introducing intelligent design concepts and addressing general philosophical objections; Part II (composing about two-thirds of the book) includes more technical issues and examples of how design comes into play in scientific subfields such as cosmology, developmental biology and information theory. This collection reflects a maturing movement that is aware of its critics, more focused in its goals and mindful of the need to transmit its message to a non specialist audience even as it appears for a hearing in the scientific community.
The book stresses the issue of Darwinism very well, explaining its main point and encouraging further research as well as providing important answers to many of the Darwinism questions and contradictions. Nevertheless I would like to see a more clear and explicit chapter on creationism in a biblical standpoint.
The main issue for me is that the book provides some very critical apologetics answers to some fearful questions and contradictions from Darwinism. We are generally scary, specially those with less capacity on biology and sciences as a whole. Therefore William A. Dembski and James M. Kushiner did a very good job in gathering all these information in a single book. I have gained a lot reading this book and feel more secure to talk and argue about Darwinism and evolution.
Hope to use the informations gathered in this material to encourage young people to face Darwinism and evolution of a firm scriptural conviction.
The book stresses the issue of Darwinism very well, explaining its main point and encouraging further research as well as providing important answers to many of the Darwinism questions and contradictions. Nevertheless I would like to see a more clear and explicit chapter on creationism in a biblical standpoint.
The main issue for me is that the book provides some very critical apologetics answers to some fearful questions and contradictions from Darwinism. We are generally scary, specially those with less capacity on biology and sciences as a whole. Therefore William A. Dembski and James M. Kushiner did a very good job in gathering all these information in a single book. I have gained a lot reading this book and feel more secure to talk and argue about Darwinism and evolution.
Hope to use the informations gathered in this material to encourage young people to face Darwinism and evolution of a firm scriptural conviction.
October 14, 2024
THE REPUBLICATION OF A JOURNAL ISSUE WITH A VARIETY OF “ID” CONTRIBUTORS
Editor William Albert Dembski (born 1960) is a key figure in the "Intelligent Design" movement, who is a professor at the Southern Evangelical Seminary and a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute.
This 2001 book contains fourteen essays by writers such as Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, and others, including Dembski himself.
Kushiner explained in the Preface, “[This book] is the result of a modest project conceived in 1998 by Bill Dembski and me while attending a conference … celebrating the centennial of the birth of C.S. Lewis… Because of our common interest in the subject, Bill and I agreed at Cambridge to publish more than a dozen articles on intelligent design by various authors from different fields in … Touchstone… Later, due to a growing demand for reprints of that issue, it became apparent that a more durable book edition was warranted… this book version features a new article to Bruce Gordon and a substantial new introduction by Dembski.”
Dembski said in his Introduction, “why then place the adjective ‘intelligent’ in front of the noun ‘design’? Doesn’t ‘design’ already include the idea of intelligent agency, so that juxtaposing the two becomes redundant? No, because intelligent design needs to be distinguished from ‘apparent design’ on the one hand and ‘optimal design’ on the other. Apparent design refers to something that looks designed but really isn’t. Optimal design is perfect design and hence cannot exist except in some idealized realm … Unlike intelligent design, apparent and optimal design empty design of practical significance.” (Pg. 8)
He also acknowledges, “Design by intelligent agency does not preclude evil. A torture chamber replete with instruments of torture is designed, and the evil of its designer does nothing to undercut the torture chamber’s design. The existence of design is distinct from the morality, esthetics, goodness, optimality, or perfection of design.” (Pg. 9-10)
He also admits, “Intelligent design is scientifically unobjectionable. Whether it is theologically objectionable is another matter. More often than we would like, design in nature has gotten perverted. But the perversity of design---dysteleology---is not explained by issuing blanket denials of design, but by accepting the reality of design and meeting the problem of evil head on. The problem of evil is a theological problem. To force a resolution of this problem by reducing all design in nature to apparent design is an evasion. It avoids the scientific challenge posed by intelligent design. It also avoids the hard work of faith, whose task is to focus on the light of God’s truth and thereby dispel evil’s shadows.” (Pg. 11-12)
He suggests, “Whether intelligent design is the theory that ultimately overturns Darwinism is not the issue facing scientists. The issue is whether the scientific community is willing to eschew dogmatism and admit as a live possibility that even its most cherished views might be wrong. Scientists have been wrong in the past and will continue to be wrong, both about niggling details and about broad conceptual matters. Darwinism is one scientific theory that attempts to account for the history of life, but it is not the only scientific theory that could possibly account for it. It is a widely disputed theory, one that is facing ever more trenchant criticisms and that, like any other scientific theory, needs periodical reality checks.” (Pg. 16-17)
Phillip Johnson explains the controversial “wedge” strategy: “The metaphor of a wedge portrays the modernist scientific and intellectual world, with its materialist assumptions, as a thick and seemingly impenetrable log. Such a log can be split wide open, however, if you can find a crack and pound the sharp edge of a wedge into it. There are a number of inviting cracks in modernism, but probably the most important one involves the huge gap between the materialist and empiricist definitions of science. My own writing and speaking represents the sharp edge of this wedge. I make the first penetration, seeking always only to legitimate a line of inquiry rather than to win a debate, measuring success by the number of significant thinkers I draw into the discussion, rather than by the conclusions that they draw for the present.” (Pg. 38)
Patrick Henry Reardon is critical of Robert Pennock’s book Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism, which ‘introduces not a shred of new evidence in support of Darwinism, unless under that heading we include his puerile remarks about the variety of sexual postures employed by other primates as confirmation of their biohistorical relationship to human beings. Largely ignoring the strong arguments advanced against Darwinism from the direction of biochemistry and microbiology, Pennock spent most of his efforts on the purely rhetorical and deceptive task of painting intelligent design theorists as simply a new species of creation scientists.” (Pg. 78)
Michael Behe states, “To many Christians, the problem with Darwin’s theory is in the single word ‘random.’ Ever since the theory was first proposed, persons antagonistic to the church, including some prominent scientists, have aggressively asserted that the randomness is not merely epistemic; it is ontological. In other words, they claim that science sees no purpose in living things because there is not purpose, and therefore there is no God. For example, the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins has remarked that ‘The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pointless indifference.’ Clearly such assertions go well beyond the domain of science.” (Pg. 92)
Stephen Meyer points out, “When Stanley Miller conducted his experiment simulating the production of amino acids on the early Earth, he presupposed that the Earth’s atmosphere was composed of a mixture of what chemists call reducing gases, such as methane, ammonia, and hydrogen. He also assumed that the Earth’s atmosphere contained virtually no free oxygen. In the years following Miller’s experiment, however, new geochemical evidence made it clear that the assumptions that Oparin and Miller had made about the early atmosphere could not be justified. Instead, evidence strongly suggested that neutral gases… predominated in the early atmosphere… Moreover, even a small amount of atmospheric oxygen will quench the production of biological building blocks and cause any biomolecules otherwise present to degrade rapidly.” (Pg. 105)
Jonathan Wells says about famous “peppered moth” evidence: “In the 1970s, however, biologists noticed that the proportions of light and dark moths in the wild did not correlate with bark color, and in the 1980s they learned that peppered moths to not normally rest on tree trunks. So the evidence for natural selection has been discredited, and the relevance of industrial melanism to evolution is in doubt.” (Pg. 123)
This book will be of most use to readers as a broad “introduction” to a variety of writers on Intelligent Design; those wanting more “detailed” explanations should turn to the more lengthy books written by the individual authors.
Editor William Albert Dembski (born 1960) is a key figure in the "Intelligent Design" movement, who is a professor at the Southern Evangelical Seminary and a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute.
This 2001 book contains fourteen essays by writers such as Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, and others, including Dembski himself.
Kushiner explained in the Preface, “[This book] is the result of a modest project conceived in 1998 by Bill Dembski and me while attending a conference … celebrating the centennial of the birth of C.S. Lewis… Because of our common interest in the subject, Bill and I agreed at Cambridge to publish more than a dozen articles on intelligent design by various authors from different fields in … Touchstone… Later, due to a growing demand for reprints of that issue, it became apparent that a more durable book edition was warranted… this book version features a new article to Bruce Gordon and a substantial new introduction by Dembski.”
Dembski said in his Introduction, “why then place the adjective ‘intelligent’ in front of the noun ‘design’? Doesn’t ‘design’ already include the idea of intelligent agency, so that juxtaposing the two becomes redundant? No, because intelligent design needs to be distinguished from ‘apparent design’ on the one hand and ‘optimal design’ on the other. Apparent design refers to something that looks designed but really isn’t. Optimal design is perfect design and hence cannot exist except in some idealized realm … Unlike intelligent design, apparent and optimal design empty design of practical significance.” (Pg. 8)
He also acknowledges, “Design by intelligent agency does not preclude evil. A torture chamber replete with instruments of torture is designed, and the evil of its designer does nothing to undercut the torture chamber’s design. The existence of design is distinct from the morality, esthetics, goodness, optimality, or perfection of design.” (Pg. 9-10)
He also admits, “Intelligent design is scientifically unobjectionable. Whether it is theologically objectionable is another matter. More often than we would like, design in nature has gotten perverted. But the perversity of design---dysteleology---is not explained by issuing blanket denials of design, but by accepting the reality of design and meeting the problem of evil head on. The problem of evil is a theological problem. To force a resolution of this problem by reducing all design in nature to apparent design is an evasion. It avoids the scientific challenge posed by intelligent design. It also avoids the hard work of faith, whose task is to focus on the light of God’s truth and thereby dispel evil’s shadows.” (Pg. 11-12)
He suggests, “Whether intelligent design is the theory that ultimately overturns Darwinism is not the issue facing scientists. The issue is whether the scientific community is willing to eschew dogmatism and admit as a live possibility that even its most cherished views might be wrong. Scientists have been wrong in the past and will continue to be wrong, both about niggling details and about broad conceptual matters. Darwinism is one scientific theory that attempts to account for the history of life, but it is not the only scientific theory that could possibly account for it. It is a widely disputed theory, one that is facing ever more trenchant criticisms and that, like any other scientific theory, needs periodical reality checks.” (Pg. 16-17)
Phillip Johnson explains the controversial “wedge” strategy: “The metaphor of a wedge portrays the modernist scientific and intellectual world, with its materialist assumptions, as a thick and seemingly impenetrable log. Such a log can be split wide open, however, if you can find a crack and pound the sharp edge of a wedge into it. There are a number of inviting cracks in modernism, but probably the most important one involves the huge gap between the materialist and empiricist definitions of science. My own writing and speaking represents the sharp edge of this wedge. I make the first penetration, seeking always only to legitimate a line of inquiry rather than to win a debate, measuring success by the number of significant thinkers I draw into the discussion, rather than by the conclusions that they draw for the present.” (Pg. 38)
Patrick Henry Reardon is critical of Robert Pennock’s book Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism, which ‘introduces not a shred of new evidence in support of Darwinism, unless under that heading we include his puerile remarks about the variety of sexual postures employed by other primates as confirmation of their biohistorical relationship to human beings. Largely ignoring the strong arguments advanced against Darwinism from the direction of biochemistry and microbiology, Pennock spent most of his efforts on the purely rhetorical and deceptive task of painting intelligent design theorists as simply a new species of creation scientists.” (Pg. 78)
Michael Behe states, “To many Christians, the problem with Darwin’s theory is in the single word ‘random.’ Ever since the theory was first proposed, persons antagonistic to the church, including some prominent scientists, have aggressively asserted that the randomness is not merely epistemic; it is ontological. In other words, they claim that science sees no purpose in living things because there is not purpose, and therefore there is no God. For example, the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins has remarked that ‘The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pointless indifference.’ Clearly such assertions go well beyond the domain of science.” (Pg. 92)
Stephen Meyer points out, “When Stanley Miller conducted his experiment simulating the production of amino acids on the early Earth, he presupposed that the Earth’s atmosphere was composed of a mixture of what chemists call reducing gases, such as methane, ammonia, and hydrogen. He also assumed that the Earth’s atmosphere contained virtually no free oxygen. In the years following Miller’s experiment, however, new geochemical evidence made it clear that the assumptions that Oparin and Miller had made about the early atmosphere could not be justified. Instead, evidence strongly suggested that neutral gases… predominated in the early atmosphere… Moreover, even a small amount of atmospheric oxygen will quench the production of biological building blocks and cause any biomolecules otherwise present to degrade rapidly.” (Pg. 105)
Jonathan Wells says about famous “peppered moth” evidence: “In the 1970s, however, biologists noticed that the proportions of light and dark moths in the wild did not correlate with bark color, and in the 1980s they learned that peppered moths to not normally rest on tree trunks. So the evidence for natural selection has been discredited, and the relevance of industrial melanism to evolution is in doubt.” (Pg. 123)
This book will be of most use to readers as a broad “introduction” to a variety of writers on Intelligent Design; those wanting more “detailed” explanations should turn to the more lengthy books written by the individual authors.
June 14, 2013
I consider these men to be the Galileo's of today. The world will look back on the 19th and 20th centuries as the real Dark Ages, when people believed that the universe was a product of random chance and unintelligent processes.
I especially enjoyed Stephen Meyer's work on DNA sequencing, and William Dembski's rigorous analysis of design inferences. Fantastic science. Shame on the current scientific community for their unscientific philosophical commitment to metaphysical naturalism, which actually hinders science rather than promotes it.
I especially enjoyed Stephen Meyer's work on DNA sequencing, and William Dembski's rigorous analysis of design inferences. Fantastic science. Shame on the current scientific community for their unscientific philosophical commitment to metaphysical naturalism, which actually hinders science rather than promotes it.
January 6, 2013
This is a nice brief primer for understanding how intelligent design is defined and constructed scientifically. The various chapters are written by a variety of authors and from a variety of backgrounds, which makes the definition and implementation of intelligent design very cohesive.
March 23, 2008
A plausible look at an alternative theory of origins.
April 28, 2018
A good book on the intelligent design position on origins.
May 29, 2008
The book does what it does on the cover - it helps you understand intelligent design. It helps you understand that it's just new bottles for old snake oil. Talk.Origins exists - go read it.
If you have to see this particular train-wreck in action, do as I did - buy it second-hand off Amazon.
If you have to see this particular train-wreck in action, do as I did - buy it second-hand off Amazon.
May 22, 2010
This book was a compilation of essays by most of the forerunners in intelligent design theory. I found it a bit redundant, but a few of the essays really stood out. I especially enjoyed Walter L. Bradley's The "Just So" Universe: The Fine-Tuning of Constants and Conditions in the Cosmos. Of course, Michael Behe always writes a clear and engaging piece, so I enjoyed that too.
December 11, 2008
A friend of mine generously shipped this book for me. I've only browsed portions of it, and must say I am not impressed by the "arguments"... But even so--and this is important--it's a very interesting collection of essays concerning the whole "pro et con Darwinism--and intelligent design."
December 27, 2009
A good overview of the state of the discipline of I.D. Most essays were not new to me because of other reading, but some were very helpful in new info. Particularly chapts. 5, 10, 12. All were good, h
September 11, 2008
I'm not very good with science and usually I stay away from it. But I read this as a discipline and actually enjoyed it. It's pretty approachable for a science book.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews