Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about William A. Dembski
William A. Dembski Quotes
26 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
The question rather is how we should do science and theology in light of the impending collapse of Enlightenment rationalism and scientific naturalism. These ideologies are on the way out. They are on the way out.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
Virtually every discipline and endeavor is presently under a naturalistic pall.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
Thus, in its relation to Christianity, intelligent design should be viewed as a ground-clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual rubbish that for generations has kept Christianity from receiving serious consideration.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners do not have a clue about him.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
I think the opportunity to deal with students and getting them properly oriented on science and theology and the relation between those is going to be important because science has been such an instrument used by the materialists to undermine the Christian faith and religious belief generally.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
Constrained optimization is the art of compromise between conflicting objectives. This is what design is all about. To find fault with biological design - as Stephen Jay Gould regularly does - because it misses some idealized optimum is therefore gratuitous. Not knowing the objectives of the designer, Gould is in no position to say whether the designer has proposed a faulty compromise among those objectives.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
How a designer gets from thought to thing is, at least in broad strokes, straightforward: (1) A designer conceives a purpose. (2) To accomplish that purpose, the designer forms a plan. (3) To execute the plan, the designer specifies building materials and assembly instructions. (4) Finally, the designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials. What emerges is a designed object, and the designer is successful to the degree that the object fulfills the designer's purpose
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
The world is a mirror representing the divine life...
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
What I propose, then, is a strategy for interrogating the Darwinists to, as it were, squeeze the truth out of them.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
But there are deeper motivations. I think at a fundamental level, in terms of what drives me in this is that I think God's glory is being robbed by these naturalistic approaches to biological evolution, creation, the origin of the world, the origin of biological complexity and diversity. When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God's glory is getting robbed... And so there is a cultural war here. Ultimately I want to see God get the credit for what he's done - and he's not getting it.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
Design theorists are no friends of theistic evolution.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
The fact is that for complex systems like the bacterial flagellum no biologist has or is anywhere close to reconstructing its history in Darwinian terms. Is Darwinian theory therefore falsified? Hardly. I have yet to witness one committed Darwinist concede that any feature of nature might even in principle provide countervailing evidence to Darwinism. In place of such a concession one is instead always treated to an admission of ignorance. Thus it's not that Darwinism has been falsified or disconfirmed, but that we simply don't know enough about the biological system in question and its historical context to determine how the Darwinian mechanism might have produced it.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
The mountains of evidence are already there. The problem is that evidence is itself inherently hermeneutical, influenced by cognitive predispositions to interpret certain types of data as supporting/confirming certain types of conclusions. If one wears materialistic blinders, there can be no evidence for ID hence the constant refrain by people like Barbara Forrest and Eugenie Scott that there is no evidence for ID. There is none for them because they have shut their eyes to it.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
The scientific picture of the world championed since the Enlightenment is not just wrong but massively wrong. Indeed entire fields of inquiry, especially in the human sciences, will need to be rethought from the ground up in terms of intelligent design.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
Intelligent design is eminently falsifiable. Specified complexity in general and irreducible complexity in biology are within the theory of intelligent design the key markers of intelligent agency. If it could be shown that biological systems like the bacterial flagellum that are wonderfully complex, elegant, and integrated could have been formed by a gradual Darwinian process (which by definition is non-telic), then intelligent design would be falsified on the general grounds that one doesn't invoke intelligent causes when purely natural causes will do. In that case Occam's razor finishes off intelligent design quite nicely.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
The fine-tuning of the universe, about which cosmologists make such a to-do, is both complex and specified and readily yields design. So too, Michael Behe's irreducibly complex biochemical systems readily yield design. The complexity-specification criterion demonstrates that design pervades cosmology and biology. Moreover, it is a transcendent design, not reducible to the physical world. Indeed, no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
If we take seriously the word-flesh Christology of Chalcedon (i. e., the doctrine that Christ is fully human and fully divine) and view Christ as the telos toward which God is drawing the whole of creation, then any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
Even many Christians who have been raised and indoctrinated in a secular mindset … will say, 'Look, we're just going to have to accept the science of the day and try to make our peace with it theologically.' … And there is no peace theologically … ultimately with this view [Darwinian evolution]. But they accept it. And so, this idea of intelligent design becomes very threatening.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
This is really an opportunity to mobilize a new generation of scholars and pastors not just to equip the saints but also to engage the culture and reclaim it for Christ. That's really what is driving me.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
As far as design theorists are concerned, theistic evolution is American evangelicalism's ill-conceived accommodation to Darwinism.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
The mechanical philosophy was ever blind to this fact. Intelligent design, on the other hand, readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
And another thing I think we need to be aware of is that not every instance of design we see in nature needs to be directly attributed to God. Certainly as Christians we believe there is an angelic hierarchy - it's not just that there's this physical material world and there's God. There can be various hierarchies of intelligent beings operating, God can work through what can be called derived intelligences - processes which carry out the Divine will, but maybe not perfectly because of the fall.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
Thus, in a crucial way, the Kansas hearings repeat the pattern set by the Scopes Trial, which has been repeated many times since, namely, evolutionists escaped critical scrutiny by not having to undergo cross-examination. In this case, they accomplished the feat by boycotting the hearings. I therefore await the day when the hearings are not voluntary but involve subpoenas that compel evolutionists to be deposed and interrogated at length on their views.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
The fundamental claim of intelligent design is straightforward and easily intelligible: namely, there are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence.
William A. Dembski
Source
Report...
My thesis is that all disciplines find their completion in Christ and cannot be properly understood apart from Christ.
William A. Dembski
1
2
Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
William A. Dembski
Creative Commons
Born:
July 18, 1960
(age 63)
Bio:
William Albert "Bill" Dembski is an American mathematician, philosopher and theologian.
Known for:
Intelligent Design (1999)
The Design Revolution (2004)
Uncommon Dissent (2004)
Most used words:
design
intelligent
designer
christ
complex
darwinian
darwinism
god
evidence
biological
science
complexity
systems
origin
evolution
William A. Dembski on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
William A. Dembski Quotes
William A. Dembski Short Quotes
American Mathematician Quotes
Mathematician Quotes
20th-century Mathematician Quotes
Related People
Michael Behe
American Biochemist
Jonathan Wells
American Biologist
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes