William Dembski

From CreationWiki, the encyclopedia of creation science

William Dembski

William A. Dembski is a mathematician, philosopher, and an advocate of intelligent design. He is currently a research professor in philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas. He was formerly the Carl F. H. Henry Professor of Science and Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Before that he was an associate research professor in the conceptual foundations of science at Baylor University (1999-2005).

Since 1996 he has been a senior fellow with Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture in Seattle. He is also the executive director of the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (iscid.org). Since the summer of 2007, his technical research on intelligent design has been done under the auspices of The Evolutionary Informatics Lab, run by Robert Marks, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University.

Dr. Dembski previously taught at Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Dallas. He has done postdoctoral work in mathematics at MIT, in physics at the University of Chicago, and in computer science at Princeton University. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago where he earned a B.A. in psychology, an M.S. in statistics, and a Ph.D. 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.

In May 2006 it was announced that Dr. Kurt Wise would take over from Dembski as director of the Center for Theology and Science at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.[1]

Dr. Dembski has held National Science Foundation graduate and postdoctoral fellowships. He has published articles in mathematics, philosophy, and theology journals and is the author/editor of seven books.

It may be important to note that William Dembski does not consider himself a creationist:

"Given this account of creationism, am I a creationist? No. I do not regard Genesis as a scientific text. I have no vested theological interest in the age of the earth or the universe. I find the arguments of geologists persuasive when they argue for an earth that is 4.5 billion years old. What’s more, I find the arguments of astrophysicists persuasive when they argue for a universe that is approximately 14 billion years old. I believe they got it right. Even so, I refuse to be dogmatic here. I’m willing to listen to arguments to the contrary. Yet to date I’ve found none of the arguments for a young earth or a young universe convincing. Nature, as far as I’m concerned, has an integrity that enables it to be understood without recourse to revelatory texts. That said, I believe that nature points beyond itself to a transcendent reality, and that that reality is simultaneously reflected in a different idiom by the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments." [2]

Publications

Dr. Dembski's most recent book is a coedited collection with Michael Ruse for Cambridge University Press titled Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA.

The Design Revolution 334 page Hardcover.
Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology 312 page Paperback. 2002.
Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing - a series of essays by various authors, edited by Dembski
Intelligent Design Coming Clean Appeared as Metaviews 098 (www.meta-list.org). 17 November 2000. Approximately 15,505 words.
The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities (Cambridge University Press, 1998) - Dembski examines the design argument in a post-Darwinian context and analyzes the connections linking chance, probability, and intelligent causation.
No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) This sequel to The Design Inference critiques Darwinian and other naturalistic accounts of evolution.
Irreducible Complexity Revisited by William A. Dembski. PCID Volume 3.1, November 2004.