William A. Dembski

Founding and Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture, Distinguished Fellow, Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

A noted mathematician and philosopher, William A. Dembski is a Founding and Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture and a Distinguished Fellow with the Institute’s Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. His most recent books relating to intelligent design include Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information (2014), Evolutionary Informatics (2017, co-authored with Robert Marks and Winston Ewert), and the second edition of The Design Inference (2023, co-authored with Winston Ewert).

Dr. Dembski has taught at Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Dallas, and Southwestern Seminary. He has done postdoctoral work in mathematics at MIT, in physics at the University of Chicago, and in computer science at Princeton University. Dr. Dembski was previously an Associate Research Professor in the Conceptual Foundations of Science at Baylor University, where he headed the first intelligent design think-tank at a major research university: The Michael Polanyi Center.

Dr. Dembski is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he earned a bachelor’s in psychology and a doctorate 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.

Dr. Dembski has published in the peer-reviewed mathematics, engineering, biology, philosophy, and theology literature. He is the author/editor of more than 25 books. In The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities (Cambridge University Press, 1998), he examined the design argument in a post-Darwinian context and analyzed the connections linking chance, probability, and intelligent causation. The greatly expanded second edition of that book also critiques naturalistic accounts of evolution.

Dr. Dembski has edited several influential anthologies, including The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith (Harvest, 2021, co-edited with Casey Luskin and Joseph Holden), Biological Information: New Perspectives (World Scientific, 2013, co-edited with Robert Marks, Michael Behe, Bruce Gordon, and John Sanford), The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science (ISI, 2011, co-edited with Bruce Gordon), Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing (ISI, 2004) and Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA (Cambridge University Press, 2004, co-edited with Michael Ruse).

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 has appeared on radio and television. His work has been cited in 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.

Archives

Science, Faith, and Einstein

Einstein’s dictum about thinking for yourself therefore holds for faith as much as for science. It must come before commitment and obedience.

Orwell’s Cold Dystopia is Closer Than We Think

When we speak lies as truth, tyrants come marching in
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him… And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s center. With the feeling that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote: Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. GEORGE ORWELL, 1984 Simple Truths? Back in the early 1990s, I flirted briefly with working for one of the big U.S. intelligence

The War on 2 + 2 = 4

The people weighing in against 2 + 2 = 4 are not mathematicians but in education departments where they teach the teaching of mathematics.

What’s the Relation Between Intelligence and Information?

The fundamental intuition of information as narrowing down possibilities matches up neatly with the concept of intelligence
The key intuition behind the concept of information is the narrowing of possibilities. The more that possibilities are narrowed down, the greater the information. If I tell you I’m on planet Earth, I haven’t conveyed any information because you already knew that (let’s leave aside space travel). If I tell you I’m in the United States, I’ve begun to narrow down where I am in the world. If I tell you I’m in Texas, I’ve narrowed down my location further. If I tell you I’m forty miles north of Dallas, I’ve narrowed my location down even further. As I keep narrowing down my location, I’m providing you with more and more information. Information is therefore, in its essence, exclusionary: the more possibilities are excluded, the greater the information provided. As

Can We Trust Large Language Models? Depends on How Truthful They Are

Just because a piece of tech is highly sophisticated doesn't mean it's more trustworthy
The trust we put in Large Language Models (LLMs) ought to depend on their truthfulness. So how truthful are LLMs? For many routine queries, they seem accurate enough. What’s the capital of North Dakota? To this query, ChatGPT4 just now gave me the answer Bismarck. That’s right. But what about less routine queries? Recently I was exploring the use of design inferences to detect plagiarism and data falsification. Some big academic misconduct cases had in the last 12 months gotten widespread public attention, not least the plagiarism scandal of Harvard president Claudine Gay and the data falsification scandal of Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. These scandals were so damaging to these individuals and their institutions that neither is a university