Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #721872 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Synopsis
Offers answers to over sixty key questions about intelligent design, with nonspecialists in mind.

Customer Reviews

New Horizons for a Believer
Dembski offers a quick insight on the theory of Intelligent Design. Despite being rather a summary, it tackles the main issues while making the debate interesting.
For a believer (in the "Designer") this book opens new horizons where God was not expected to be present. For example, the idea that God can be playing a role in the Universe, without modifying the rules of nature, through quantum indetermination. This and other powerful proposals give hope for a reconciliation between natural sciences and theology.
For a non-believer, the book will be disquieting, and relatively acid, if her/ his commitment to evolution is strong.

The Truth will come out in the end.
Before reading this book I had the impression from various comments I had read, that William Dembski was some sort of religious fanatic whose views could be dismissed as unworthy of serious consideration. I had not got very far into this book when I realised that here was an intelligent and very clear thinking scientist whose views were such that they ought to be taken very seriously.

Not being either a scientist or a mathematician, there were a few places where I needed to carefully re-read passages to try to understand exactly what was being said, but on the whole the book is written in layman's language. Since reading this book I have read various reviews and articles on the other side of the argument, but have not found any convincing response. Frequently there has been dismissive contempt and that in itself suggests a paucity of reasonable counter argument. The fact that the scientific community is opposed to the publication of papers supporting intelligent design, suggests to me that the implications of it being true, simply cannot be countenanced. If science is meant to be an investigation and search for truth, then there needs to be an openness to both sides of an argument.

I strongly recommend this book. Truth can be suppressed for a time, but in the end like a spring of water it will emerge and will not remain hidden forever.

Dreadful
Over the past few months, I have read a number of books from the so-called "Intelligent Design" supporters, plus several critical commentaries on them. This is, in many ways, by far the worst of those books, and one that took a great effort to read. A major problem is that it is not clear who the audience is supposed to be. The natural audience (non-scientific people who disagree with evolution on religious grounds) will be turned off by the style - never use a short word when two or three longer ones can be substituted, etc. And anyone wanting to learn about the "science of intelligent design" will, of course, find nothing at all. If you are contemplating buying this book to learn more about the debate, spend your money elsewhere.

At least with, say, Johnson, you know what you are getting - no pretence of being scientific, just religiously motivated rhetoric. Dembski, on the other hand, pretends to be scientific, whilst constantly whingeing about how science is done wrong, because it does not support his views. He goes out of his way to insult scientists at every opportunity, accusing them of heinous crimes (such as 'just asserting something without proof'), whilst being guilty of those crimes himself. Same old, same old.

As others have noted elsewhere, and as you might expect, the book does not "answer the toughest questions" about intelligent design. It answers the questions he wants to answer, thus carefully avoiding all the really tough ones (like "what is 'intelligent design' really?"), or pretending to answer them but actually giving evasive answers, or answers to a different (and usually uninteresting) question.

From the reading that I have done elsewhere, even opponents of Dembski and crew say that he is personable, polite, good humoured, in fact an all round 'good chap'. And we know that he is a committed Christian. Nevertheless, the book seems to be intellectually dishonest in the extreme. I can only assume that his religious commitments are such that he believes that he is being honest to some 'higher truth'. For example, he trots out many points (his, or from, say Behe) that have been thoroughly disproved elsewhere, without any apparent embarrassment, as if those points were valid. So it gets very wearing to be told these things time and time again, or to be presented with a 7 or 8 page argument which is based on an statement which has been disproved elsewhere.

Simply dreadful.