William A. Dembski

pink-flower-growth-stages-from-seed-to-bloom-representing-bu-1174081471-stockpack-adobestock
Pink Flower Growth Stages: From Seed to Bloom, Representing Business Growth, Career Success, and Life's Journey. Concept Image for Marketing, Investment, and Sustainable Growth.
Image Credit: avissarahmanita - Adobe Stock

Designed for Living

Does God exist? You can answer that question in at least two ways, including, notably, “yes.” But how do you argue for that particular answer?

A new cottage industry among the religiously minded is the re-articulation of the so-called “cosmological argument” for the existence of God. Its proofs work backward. They start with visible creation and reason that it can only be the work of an uncreated First Cause. Such proofs were once compelling to educated people. Now the average college graduate can do without them. He doesn’t know exactly why this is so; he simply believes that Darwin and Stephen Hawking have somehow managed to explain creation without reference to a Creator.

Darwin and Hawking, of course, have done no such thing. Science can never answer the question: Why is there something rather than nothing? The universe is a massive fact that does not account for its existence and — some would say, following Goedel’s incompleteness theorems — cannot do so. This does not stop certain astrophysicists from trying to generate whole universes from mathematical equations. But a mathematical model does not tell us why there is a universe to describe in the first place.

If we cannot so easily dismiss the brute fact of the universe, neither can we ignore its appearance of having been designed. As one staunchly atheistic 20th-century astronomer put it: “A common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.” How do you get around such a “common sense” interpretation? Darwin supplied the answer: Any “design” in nature is only apparent, the work of blind mechanisms. All you need to produce the bombardier beetle, for example, is random variations directed by natural selection — and a lot of time.

Read More ›
business-and-entrepreneurship-symposium-speaker-giving-a-talk-at-business-meeting-audience-in-conference-hall-rear-view-of-unrecognized-participant-in-audience-stockpack-adobe-stock.jpg
Business and entrepreneurship symposium. Speaker giving a talk at business meeting. Audience in conference hall. Rear view of unrecognized participant in audience.
Licensed from Adobe Stock

Design & the Discriminating Public

Evolution has enormous purchase on the public imagination, and it’s easy to understand why. Just peek into the average living room where toddlers everywhere are sitting wide-eyed before videos like The Land Before Time series. This series offers nothing less than an excursion into evolution. Colorful one-celled organisms arise in a blue-green primeval ocean, where they “change again and again,” Read More ›

close-up-beautiful-one-blue-bird-feather-on-a-bokeh-pattern-background-for-design-texture-stockpack-adobe-stock.jpg
Close up Beautiful one blue Bird feather on a bokeh.  Pattern background for design texture.
Licensed from Adobe Stock

Intelligent Design Theory

In this scientific age, it is impossible to quarantine the claims of science. They invariably leak into other cultural domains. So we should attend to what scientists tell us. Sometimes it is quite important. For instance, in The Meaning of Evolution, George Gaylord Simpson repeats what is surely the “official” dogma of the contemporary scientific guild: “Man is the result Read More ›

In God’s Country:

http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2000-12-14/feature2.html/page1.html In the beginning, there was a bang. A very big bang. Nothing exploded into something. Quarks and leptons collided violently in an intense fireball of plasma. As the plasma expanded and cooled, the collisions became less violent, and particles joined together to form protons and neutrons and electrons, then nuclei and atoms and molecules. Huge clouds of these particles Read More ›

It’s perilous to ponder the design of the universe

Professor William A. Dembski, 40, does not show his face at Baylor University in Waco, Tex., all that often anymore. “That’s a very hostile environment over there,” he told United Press International. “I go to the library and use the athletic facilities, but I work from home.” Baylor calls itself the world’s largest Baptist university with 18,000 students. So why Read More ›

Intelligence by Design:

Biologists might consider Darwin’s theory of evolution to be well- established. But Phillip Johnson considers it nothing less than a fraud. The Berkeley, Calif.-based lawyer has spent the past few years challenging what he considers to be the fallacies in Darwinian theory. “Most scientists are fair-minded,” Johnson said. “But they deal with only a limited sphere – their own experiments Read More ›

‘Intelligent design’ center at Baylor gains support from review committee

A controversial center at Baylor University researching the idea that life was created through “intelligent design” instead of evolution should be allowed to continue its work, an external review committee said Tuesday. The committee recommended that a faculty advisory committee be appointed to try to improve the academic center’s relationship with the rest of the university. It also recommended that Read More ›

Polanyi committee suggests compromise:

A report issued by the peer review committee appointed to evaluate the credibility and legitimacy of the Michael Polanyi Center was finally released Tuesday morning, stating that despite controversy, it found the Center’s research legitimate. The committee, composed of eight respected scholars from all over the country and led by Dr. William F. Cooper, recommended that the university should “foster Read More ›

Unintelligent Designs:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2000/143/11.0.html Several months ago we reported on the efforts of faculty at Baylor University to shut down the recently founded Michael Polanyi Center for Complexity, Information, and Design. The center, established by administrative fiat at the behest of Baylor President Robert B. Sloan, Jr., under the auspices of the university’s Institute for Faith and Learning, came under fire in part Read More ›

Statement of the Cranach Institute

The Cranach Institute wishes to express its dismay at the decision to remove William Dembski as Director of the Michael Polanyi Center (Metanews, 10/19/2000). Shortly before this announcement, we learned that the committee appointed to evaluate the status of the Center upheld the importance and legitimacy of Dr. Dembski’s work, while calling on the Center to be redefined in its Read More ›