Rating: 
Summary: Bad wine in both bottles
Review: The author begins with biblical semiology (i.e., prophesy) and a defense of miracles (which already disqualifies the text as scientific), as well as a tendentious and loaded reappraisal of "naturalism". And it goes bad from there. Apparently, our philosopher hasn't heard of "begging the question", which is, BTW, a logical FALLACY. The book is purely and simply propaganda. I was hoping for something that would allow me to at least respect the position. I am, however, even more scared to death of these folks.
Rating: 
Summary: What we don't know ! Now how should we find out ?
Review: The essence of intelligent design is simple and compelling, and Dembski is possibly its best advocate. Since it *seems* unlikely that natural processes can possibly cobble together an extraordinary information code such found in DNA, then we're left with a terrible explanatory gap. Dembski and his intelligent design colleagues come into that gap with the idea that a supreme intelligence in nature must have designed it, while others following the materialist natural tradition have persistent tried to find natural processes that might somehow have accomplished the same feat. The success of intelligent design theory and the political movement behind reveals how difficult it is for any of us to comprehend the immense challenge that God or nature had in 'designing' such a thing as life. We are left with the tough decision of guessing whether Darwinian processes are really sufficient to bring life into being (science being a tentative exploration afterall), and relying on our deep assumptions about nature, the theological assumption of a supreme being or the naturalistic assumption of a purely material universe that seems devoid of meaning. The place where intelligence design seems to me to go astray is not seeing intelligence in nature (for surely it is there in some sense !) but where it tries to displace naturalism as the foundation of scientific explanations. In shiftnig explanation to existing intelligence that performs sudden miraculous acts rather than comprehensible 'algorithmic' processes over time, Dembki's philosophy seemingly leaves us without the very foundation of the scientific method in some ways. But that part is actually a task more directly taken on by Phillip Johnson and his "wedge" strategy than by Dembski. Dembski focuses more on the miracle of information codes arising in nature. Several reviewers compared Intelligent Design creation theorist Dembski with complexity evolution theorist Stuart Kauffman, and that's very good. I'd like to skip the preliminaries and go right to the punch line. Dembski and Kauffman both point out that we don't really know how evolution/origins works in nature, and both come up with different versions of alternatives to orthodox natural selection theory. Although I strongly suspect that natural selection does operate in nature, and that species do change over time, I also agree that both men make a persuasive point that we don't really understand exactly how it all happens yet, how "order" (Kauffman), or "complex specified information" (Dembski) actually arises in nature. The difference is first that Dembski's theory is more intuitive, refined, and in some ways, more persuasive, while Kauffman's is more rough and speculative, and requires not one but at least two scientific heresies, in both evolutionary biology and thermodynamics. One reviewer correctly pointed out that no extant theory of self-organization completely explains the chemical evolution of the cellular information storage mechanisms, while Dembski's version of intelligent design does. Kauffman points that out in his "Investigations," and admits readily that we simply don't know the answers yet. The key question is how we respond to this level of scientific uncertainty about the scope and limitations of the natural selection theory of origins. One approach is rough science, the other is a refined philosophical mixture of science and theology. So the second difference is the difference that makes a difference, as they say. Kauffman's work is science, as in being provisional and generating testable and disconfirmable hypotheses. If there is any doubt of that, the tone and content of his "Investigations" make it quite clear. Dembski's work is good philosophy and heavy scholarly research. However, when the rubber hits the road, it simply isn't science as we as scientists have come to define science. It is founded at its root on articles of faith as an explanation for complex specified information, and cannot be disconfirmed by evidence. That's fine and dandy for a theologian, and works for some philosophers as well (Ayn Rand comes to mind). But is that really where we want science and religion to head, to end up having to "prove" God, and to found our science on articles of (Christian) faith instead of provisional theory ? I'm not so sure that all members of other religions would be as happy with this objectification of Christian faith as many Christians seem to be. It could be that Dembski's version of creation is generic enough to satisfy other faiths ? Or that his is right and theirs is wrong ? But the whole thing seems a little fishy to me from both a scientific and spiritual perspective. In other words, even if Dembski is right, which is of course possible, intelligent design is not a scientific theory. Thus making a splendid and intelligent contribution to all the rest of the excellent but theologicaly misleading "God of the Bible is proven by science" literature, indirectly showing why science and spirituality are separate domains of human life and should remain so, to avoid doing inadvertent violence to both.
Rating:
Summary: This book is supposed to be intelligent???
Review: This book introduces the theory of "intelligent design creationism" (IDC) to a lay readership, but it is fairly dense in some places and requires careful reading.
Dembski says IDC is 3 things: a scientific research program investigating the effects of intelligent causes; an intellectual movement challenging Darwinism; and a way of understanding divine action. Interestingly, Dembski does not cite a single published scientific study utilizing IDC concepts in biology. What kind of research program is it that doesn't perform or publish any actual research???
Chs. 2 and 3 review the place of miracles and design in the history of philosophy. These were interesting chapters, especially Spinoza's epistemological critique of miracles as a "God of the gaps" kind of reasoning. Dembski denies that IDC involves GOTG reasoning, but IDC looks tailor-made to serve as the bull's eye for Spinoza's withering critique.
The meat of the book is Chs. 4 thru 6, exposing evolution's alleged flaws and highlighting IDC's alleged strengths, but Dembski must be a vegetarian, cause there's precious little meat here. Apparently the flaws of evolution consist of the fact that there are still important issues that have not been resolved yet. (GOTG???) But why that requires us to abandon evolution is never explained. There are important, unresolved issues in the theories of gravity, medicine, and mathematics too, but few people demand that we abandon those disciplines. Why treat evolution differently? Dembski never explains.
Dembski uses the word "rigorous" over a dozen times to characterize IDC, but merely claiming to be rigorous is not the same thing as actually being rigorous. Dembski's claims seem to rest on a single scientist, Michael Behe, and on a single concept, irreducible complexity (IC). But placing all of his intellectual eggs in Behe's basket is risky, not rigorous. As my review of Darwin's Black Box reports, Behe`s concept of IC is obviously unworkable.
For example, Dembski recommends that "knock out" experiments be done to help increase knowledge of IC systems. (One protein is "knocked out" of a complex system to test what happens next.) The problem is that many such experiments have already been done, and they've been a disaster for Behe and IC. Supposedly "irreducible" systems frequently still work fine, even with dozens of parts missing, exactly the opposite of what Behe claims!
With Behe "knocked out," Dembski's empirical support for IDC vanishes, and he is left with nothing but analogies, and even those do more harm than good.
Dembski's first analogy, a hypothetical SETI broadcast of the prime numbers from 2 to 100, supposedly shows that "designed" information is similar to biological information. But the SETI numbers are all lined up neatly, in perfect order. Analogizing that to the helter-skelter arrangement of DNA hardly shows equivalent signs of design. Quite the opposite, the obvious DIS-similarity indicates that biological information is different from "designed" information.
Dembski's next analogy, that a rat making its way through a long maze without making a single wrong turn demonstrates the same sort of intelligence that we see in biological information, backfires too, since millions of extinct species demonstrate that there have been millions of "wrong turns" in the history of life. (Perhaps the designer got lost???)
Dembski is finally reduced to claiming, "Because God is intimately involved with the world moment by moment, there is no question that God interacts with the world." In other words, the pretense of empirical evidence is abandoned, the claim of scientific rigor is forgotten, and the proof of IDC turns out to be nothing more than the assumption that it is true. Can you spell C-I-R-C-U-L-A-R?
Interestingly, in Chapters 4 and 7 Dembski makes it very clear that he considers the young-earth creationists (YEC) completely ridiculous. Dembski openly rejects the literal meaning of Genesis 1 and 2 and insists that modern interpretations of Genesis must accommodate modern scientific knowledge, like the Big Bang and billions of years. YECs won't like that!
Members of other religions are likely to be just as unhappy. Dembski calls Greek and Hindu religious beliefs "pathetic."
Dembski's intolerance is worrisome, since his theory seems to be linked to definite political goals. According to Dembski, if humans are in fact designed, then we are probably hard-wired with psychosocial constraints which should NOT be transgressed. Dembski says many modern attitudes and behaviors undermine human flourishing, and says IDC "promises" to reinvigorate natural law conceptions of social ethics and eliminate those attitudes and behaviors.
That promise sounds more like a threat. Clearly Dembski thinks IDC should lead to social engineering based on his personal interpretation of the Bible; but idiosyncratic ideas for Bible-based social engineering have been tried before, in Nazi Germany, America's racist South , and apartheid South Africa, for example. The results were not good.
Hitler argued in Mein Kampf that it was morally wrong under his idiosyncratic view of the Bible to educate blacks, a position that other creationists still endorse today. Is this the kind of social engineering that Dembski has in mind?
If blacks are genetically inferior because of the Hamitic curse, as many Christian creationists, including Henry Morris, propose, then it is morally defensible, if not required, to deny blacks promotions to positions of responsibility. Is this the kind of social engineering that Dembski has in mind?
The Bible and related books also teach us about God's design for women in society, mostly in roles subservient to men. Is relegating women to second class status the kind of social engineering that Dembski has in mind? Osama bin Laden and the Taliban tried that in Afghanistan, with poor results.
In short, Dembski's book is interesting, but not good. His negative complaints about evolution are trivial. His positive claims for IDC are laughable. Social engineering plans based on idiosyncratic hallucinations about "God's will" are a menace.
Blacks, women, and other minorities should be concerned about this book. Professional biologists will laugh at its amateurishness. Neo-Nazis and KKK members will love it. Take your pick.
Rating: 
Summary: Breaking a deal between science and theology
Review: William Dembski's book on Intelligent Design is particularly welcome. I am glad he has developed the thoughts he advanced on his Design Inference. I think this book is much more interesting, because it is more easy to understand, and also because it gives us the chance of meeting a competent and profound thinker, making the best out of his strong and diversified academic background. The Design Inference is a strong basis for intelligent design, altough too technical for most of us. William Dembski's book comes at a time when the scientific community seem to be stuck in front ot the wall of "rocks of ages". They seem to be facing "mount impossible". The present darwinian paradign seems to be insuficient of dealing with a whole lot of difficult problems: the origins of the prebiotic soup, the origins of life and the DNA code; the transition from micro to macroevolution, the generation and flow of complex specified information, the cambrian explosion, the "black holes" in the fossil record, the irreducible complexity of molecular machines, the abundant antropic coincidences, the fine-tuning of the universe, the implausible and undesireble social, moral and political consequences of darwinism. Motivated by a sterile and unhelpful "ideological design" of promoting metaphysical naturalism, an agenda that seems to be much more more political and social than scientific, the darwinian scientific establishment adopts something like the following "leit-motive": "I ain't got a witness, and I can't prove it, but that's my story and I am sticking to it". Other retorical strategies are: "naturalism of the gaps", "just-so stories", "fact-free science", along with an intriguing version of Occam's razor that Richard Dawkins, competent and talented as he is, helped to popularize, and that comes down to: "while we can keep on speculating about naturalistic causes to matter and life, we will keep ignoring all the evidence of intelligent design, no matter how strong and compelling, even if we have to engage in scientific acrobatics". Darwinists really need a good after shave. The sense of frustration and exaustion is present, overwhelming and is becoming unbearable.In this light, William Dembski, Michael Behe, Charles Taxton, Phillip Johnson, and many others, are new and fresh voices that we should listen to. This book on inteliigent design sugested to me that: 1) matter, mutations and natural selection have not been capable of accounting for the informational diversity and richness of the cosmos and life; to stick to the darwinian paradigm without trying new paths of research may turn out to be bad and unwise science. 2) Since complex specified information is part of the form and structure of reality, its study has nothing supernatural about it. 3) Information in nature explains the rational correspondence between objective reality and subjective perception that makes science plausible and renders understanding possible. 4)Information and design in nature should encourage us to connect to THE WORD that humanity has always suspected is out there. 5) William Dembski proposal of an epistemic mutual support between science and theology can be good for all of us (bring in more people to this discussion, and help us to transcend premodern religious obscurantism, modern scientific obscurantism, and postmodern nihilist obscurantism. Leaving deconstruction behind, along with the selfish genes that usually associate with it, intelligent design can point us back to the all-time WORD, the "light that shines in the darkness" and that gives true meaning to the "Enlightment Project". As a law professor, I would like to help mediating this deal between science and theology.
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