Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #210990 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 312 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"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 summarising 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 organised 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 questioning believers. --Doug Thorpe

Customer Reviews

Interesting theme, but no bridge is built.
William Dembski is one of the great names in the Intelligent Design-movement. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematics and philosophy, and have earned grades in theology an psychology. When such a man writes a book and call it "Intelligent Design - The bridge between science & theology" I had great expectations that he had succeeded in making this important bridge.

I think you can read this book in at least two ways. One, as an introduction to how the leading people behind this movement think, and for such a presentation I give the book 4 stars. Dembski is very good at using interesting parables to illustrate his arguments.

But as a bridge between science and theology it is totally failing. And that is sad because the probability for Intelligent Design is in fact high as Dembski shows us, but Dembski mess it up through most of his book. As science I give this book 1 star and end up with a compromise at 2 stars.

Dembski uses much space to general logic. As to show that if you have two similar books containing the same Shakespeare-play, these two books doesn't have any more information together than one of the books alone. OK. And so what? After pages with such stuff you begin to be impatience and wonder how and when will all this logical stuff be used to prove Intelligent Design? And then, as you have waited and waited, Dembski finally writes that it is not space in this chapter (and not in other chapters either)to explain the Big Bang by his Intelligent Design theories. What a disappointment. Couldn't he instead have skipped some of the logic? But after a while you understand that Dembski actually lacks any intentions to reveal the most basic things that normally should have concerned Intelligent Design. He claims that intelligence leaves behind a characteristic signature in nature, and that these signatures are observable. Why can't he tell us what this observable signatures are? He writes that God's fingerprints in nature are imperically detectible. But how? Why wont he tell us?

Dembski writes that something is made by intelligence when it can show both complexity and specification. Ink spelt on a paper can show some complexity in pattern, but it is not specified before the ink spells letters and words with meaning. He then uses this criteria for intelligent design in nature, and call it science and a proof of Intelligent Design when nature is both complex and specified. But can you prove God this way? I think you only can believe in Intelligent Design, and that a strong probability for God never fully can prove Him anyway. Even Jesus said that he hadn't seen his Father. How then can Dembski? Dembski does not try to prove God either, he just confirm that God exists because he have seen him in nature as the result of intelligent design. No one can criticise you for believing in an intelligent designer, but if you want to make this believe into science, it is not enough just to call it science, as Dembski does. You have to fullfill certain criteria and rules to call something science. Dembski dosen't follow these rules at all.

Dembski spend much of his time in this book to criticise others for not being scientific, often just because they don't accept Intelligent Design as science. He says that naturalism is metaphysic, and not science based on evidence. If he had used his own definitions he uses on others, the Intelligent Design he presents wouldn't either be scientific.

He neither seems to remember what he wrote some pages earlier. After "proving" that Christ was the Logo by which the world was created, he later writes that Intelligent Design not necessarily must have originated from any specifically god at all. Are you confused like me?

An interesting objection to the kind of Intelligent Design that Dembski presents, namely that God interacts and design the nature all the time, is why then He design crippled people, hiv-virus an so on all the time? Dembski just brush those with such objections off by calling them unscientific. If Dembski instead had advocated that God started it all by "shooting a billiard ball" with a very precision, that interacted with other "balls" that fine-tuned the universe and started the evolution that eventually ended up with the complicated human being, Dembski could have accepted naturalism as well as Intelligent Design, and then nature could have been responsible, at least in some way, for it's mishaps instead of blaming God, as Dembskis theories leads towards, though he denies it.

In this book Dembski claims to represent, among others, the 90 % of the people in the United States who believe that some kind of transcendent force created the world. I believe the same, but fear that books like this more destroy than helps to make a bridge between science and theology.

A spanner in the works

William Dembski's book will undoubtedly provide Christians with just the sort of pseudo-scientific arguments they feel they need to combat the Darwinian bogey men. It will go down well in Christian theological colleges and will be welcomed by those who need to be reassured that, because it is the product of a Divine intelligence, all is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.

But there is a snag, because embedded in the theory of Intelligent Design is a contradiction that is potentially fatal to belief in the Christian gospel. Dembski either does not know of this snag (which he should do) or he chose to ignore it (which he should not have done).

If you believe in an infinitely powerful and wise creator who stands apart from the universe, you are presented with a choice. Either you believe in a theistic God who intervenes in human affairs, or you believe in a deistic "intelligent design" God who, having formed the universe out of nothing and issued immutable laws for it to follow, withdraws and leaves it to run on without further intervention. You can't consistently believe in a God who intervenes in human affairs and yet does not intervene.

But here's the problem. Theism reduces God to a flawed creator who has to work miracles to keep his creation running in accordance with his will; while deism reduces God to a less than omniscient architect or designer whose design has resulted and continues to result in wars, starvation and general misery which he can't (or chooses not to) correct.

The contradiction implicit in believing either in an intelligent design God who (we feel) should intervene but doesn't, or a creator god who (we feel) shouldn't have to intervene, but does, is, I think, particularly fatal for the Christian religion, as belief in intelligent design rules out the need for the miracles of divine incarnation and bodily resurrection that are essential to the Gospel story; while belief in a creator who builds into creation original sin, eternal punishment and the need for salvation rules out the possibility of belief that the original design was the product of an omnipotent and omniscient intelligence in the first place.

The problem can be stated as a logical inference that might be expressed as "If design infinitely intelligent, then no requirement for Divine intervention; and if Divine intervention required, then design not infinitely intelligent."

The problem with Dembski's book is that it will reinforce the belief among Christians that that "science" can justify their beliefs. Sadly, the naivety of this belief only serves to discredit evangelists in the eyes of serious thinkers. Christians would do better to put Dembski and his like aside and make a leap of faith 'on the strength of the absurd', as Kierkegaard suggests in Fear and Trembling. Alternatively, they might consider studying Spinoza's argument for God and Nature being self-causing, and one and the same, infinite substance.