Dog Bites Man; Dembski Says Designer is God
William Dembski, in an interview with Focus on the Family:
4. Does your research conclude that God is the Intelligent Designer?
I believe God created the world for a purpose. The Designer of intelligent
design is, ultimately, the Christian God.The focus of my writings is not to try to understand the Christian doctrine
of creation; it’s to try to develop intelligent design as a scientific
program.There’s a big question within the intelligent design community: ‘How did
the design get in there?’ We’re very early in this game in terms of
understanding the history of how the design got implemented. I think a lot
of this is because evolutionary theory has so misled us that we have to
rethink things from the ground up. That’s where we are. There are lots and
lots of questions that are now open to re-examination in light of this new
paradigm.
The assertion that will be of interest is putting these things together:
‘The Designer is the Christian God, and one is wrong to say that “intelligent design” is not solely science.’
Somehow, Dembski and others expect to show up in a courtroom, somewhere, sometime, and convince another judge that this line of doublethink makes sense.
Then there’s the introductory statement:
Leading scientist and mathematician William A. Dembski has devoted years to researching intelligent design.
These guys have no shame. None whatsoever.
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December 16th, 2007 at 7:14 am
You see Wes, you have to consider the weasle word “ultimately”.
This could mean that the designer of the flagellum say was not God, but that THAT designer himself was designed, possibly by another designer…but that ultimately it’s not designers all the way down, but it’s God (Dembski’s God of course) on the bottom (or is it at the top?). And God does not require a designer. Because saying that wouldn’t be scientific.
This intermediate designer(s) is just someone who is maybe supernatural and has the skill set of God, but is not necessarily God.
Do you see the science now and how it has nothing to do with God?
September 12th, 2008 at 6:14 am
I think that the theory of evolution and the Biblical story of how God created the world and created life completely contradict each other and cannot be reconciled. If the theory of evolution is correct, the world and human life have no purpose. If the Biblical story that tells us how God created our world and created human beings tells us the truth, then the other stories in the Bible are also true. All the Biblical stories tell us that God created the world and made human beings with a well defined purpose in mind
September 12th, 2008 at 6:50 am
You might want to brush up on the phrase “secondary causes”. Evolutionary science cannot confirm or deny purposes in the mind of God. If you take Genesis in a literalist interpretation of six 24-hour days of creation between 6 and 20 thousand years ago, then you have a problem, since the evidence says plainly that the world is 4.55 billion years old. The standard literalist interpreter claim is that if Genesis is “false” (that is, not to be understood via the literalist’s interpretation), then none of the rest of the bible can possibly be true, which is different from what you state above. The conclusion does not follow, and plenty of Christians do not require the crutch of literalism for their faith.
September 13th, 2008 at 2:50 am
The word days as it used at the beginning of Genesis does necessarily mean days of 24 hours. In the English language the word days is often used in the meaning of: an indefinite period of time. We can say something was normal in the days of antiquity or in the days of our grandparents or in the days before the second world war.
It stands to reason that for the Bible to be true it can never contradict what has been proved by science.
But the theory of evolution is no science. It is a theory. It has not been proved
September 13th, 2008 at 4:29 am
Literalist interpretation requires all that, to be sure, but other modes of Christian (and Jewish) thought do not, as noted before.
Funny, though, that I talked about the age of the earth, and now you are railing against evolutionary science. To dispute the age of the earth, one has to dispute the basis of absolute age determination. This falls in the realm of physics, and requires the young-earth advocate to deny a number of well-tested matters within that discipline.
Beyond that, evolutionary science certainly is science. Theories are the product of science, being well-tested mechanisms explaining a body of observed data. “Theory” does not mean “just a guess”, as your usage above implies. Science doesn’t operate on the sort of proof common to formal systems such as found in mathematics and propositional logic. Science works on consilience of the available evidence with proposed mechanisms. Many of the issues antievolutionists have with evolutionary science don’t involve the level of theories; denial of basic observations is de rigeur there. For example, the two incompatible responses antievolutionists have to observed instances of speciation are (1) straightforward denial of all such instances and (2) insistence that change does not proceed beyond the level of the “kind”. The second approach is a grudging acknowledgment that the data of such instances is incontrovertible.
From stuff I wrote about a decade ago: