William A. Dembski

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Dembski at the University of California, Berkeley in 2006

William Albert "Bill" Dembski (born July 8, 1960 in Chicago ) is an American mathematician , philosopher and theologian . Dembski is known as a representative of intelligent design . Its key message is that specified complexity can serve as a verification criterion for intelligent design .

Life

Dembski grew up as a Catholic . He was the only child of a biology professor who accepted evolution . He left college at the age of 17 and worked in his mother's art shop. He says that he originally had no relationship with Christianity , but that during his "difficult phase of life" he resorted to the Bible and creationist literature to understand the world. He did not accept the teachings of the Young Earth creationists, but their criticism of the theory of evolution appealed to him.

“Still, it was their literature that first got me thinking about how unlikely it is to create biological complexity and how to approach this problem scientifically. A. E. Wilder-Smith was particularly important to me in this regard. Strictly working out one's intuitive ideas about information has provided the impetus for much of my research. "

At the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC), he began to study again. There he earned a bachelor's degree in psychology in 1981 , a master's degree in statistics in 1983 and a master's degree in mathematics in 1985. In 1988 he received his PhD in mathematics in Chicago with Patrick Billingsley ( Chaos, Uniform Probability, and Weak Convergence ). On postdoctoral fellowships he worked in mathematics for the National Science Foundation until 1991, and then in 1992-1993 in the history and philosophy of science at Northwestern University. He earned a master's degree in philosophy in 1993 and a doctorate in philosophy, both from UIC, and a master's degree in theology, also in 1996, from Princeton Theological Seminary, a ministerial training facility run by the Presbyterian Church .

In 1999, on the initiative of Robert Sloan, Rector at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, Dembski became director of the newly established Michael Polanyi Center . Since this center was founded by Rector Sloan without the usual consultation of the faculty and many members of the faculty feared for the reputation of the university because of the "intelligent design think tank", both Dembski and the new institute quickly became the target of strong criticism. After the faculty senate voted 26-2 in favor of dissolving the Michael Polanyi Center, Rector R. Sloan set up a review committee made up of scientists from outside Baylor University. The reviewers recommended that the Michael Polanyi Center be opened in the Baylor Institute for Faith and Learning and that the inappropriate use of the name "Michael Polanyi" end. Dembski, however, saw the expert report as a triumph for " Intelligent Design " and at the same time accused his colleagues of dogmatic suppression of his work, which led to a scandal. Against Dembski, some colleagues accused him of being a “creationist with a magic hat”. This was followed by his removal from office of director and the suspension of the institute in October 2000.

Since June 1, 2006, Dembski has been Professor of Philosophy at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas , which is maintained by the Southern Baptist Convention .

Creationism advocate

Dembski believes that it is statistically unlikely that natural selection could produce the extraordinary diversity of life . This point of view crystallized at a conference on randomness at Ohio State University in 1988, where statistician Persi Diaconis concluded: “We know what randomness is not. We don't know what it is. ”Dembski calls this event the catalyst for his subsequent work on design. As a result, he hypothesized that randomness is a derived term that can only be understood with recourse to design , as the more fundamental term. He presented these thoughts in 1991 in his paper "Randomness by Design", which appeared in the magazine Noûs . These thoughts led him to his concept of specified complexity , which he developed in the book The Design Inference , a revision of his dissertation in philosophy.

In 1998 Dembski published his first book, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities , in which he did not, as in his later books, openly propagate intelligent design as the origin of the universe, but rather a rather hypothetical treatise on the possibilities of design detection offers. This book became the best-selling philosophical textbook by the publisher, Cambridge University Press. Another book's title, Mere Creation , is a reference to C. S. Lewis ' book Mere Christianity ( sorry, I'm a Christian ). In No Free Lunch , Dembski deals with the alleged consequences of the No Free Lunch theorems from the theory of combinatorial optimization for the “theory of specified complexity” he propagated. David Wolpert, who discovered the no-free lunch theorems together with MacCready, commented on Dembski's work with the words: "I say Dembski 'attempts to' turn this trick because despite his invoking the NFL theorems, his arguments are fatally informal and imprecise. Like monographs on any philosophical topic in the first category, Dembski's is written in jello. There simply is not enough that is firm in his text, not sufficient precision of formulation, to allow one to declare unambiguously 'right' or 'wrong 'when reading through the argument. All one can do is squint, furrow one's brows, and then shrug. " The philosopher Robert Koons, on the other hand, a fellow of the neo-creationist Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture , called Dembski the " Isaac Newton " of information theory. His concept was criticized by computer scientist Jeffrey Shallit and marine biologist Wesley R. Elsberry .

Dembski is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Science and Culture, a division of the Christian-conservative Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, and Executive Director of the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID), one of the United States' 2003 as "non- profit organization "registered intelligent design think tanks.

In 2016 he publicly retired from the intelligent design community.

Fonts (selection)

  • The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities , Cambridge University Press, 1998
  • Mere Creation , InterVarsity Press, 1998
  • Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology , InterVarsity Press, 1999
  • Unapologetic Apologetics: Meeting the Challenges of Theological Studies (with Jay Wesley Richards), InterVarsity Press, 2001
  • No Free Lunch , Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002
  • The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design , InterVarsity Press, 2004
  • The Design of Life , 2008 (with Jonathan Wells)
  • The Patristic Understanding of Creation , Erasmus Press, 2008 (with Wayne J. Downs and Ms. Justin BA Frederick)
  • Understanding Intelligent Design (with Sean McDowell), Harvest House Publishers, 2008
  • The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World , Nashville, Tennessee: B&H Publishing, 2009

literature

  • Robert Pennock: Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism . MIT, 1999
  • Robert Pennock: Intelligent Design Creationism and its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives . MIT, 2001

Web links (in English)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ designinference.com ( Memento from July 29, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  2. ↑ designinference.com (PDF; 179 kB) 2002.10
  3. ↑ designinference.com (PDF; 280 kB) 2002.09
  4. ^ David H. Wolpert : Review of William Dembski's "No Free Lunch" . In: Mathematical Reviews . October 31, 2002, MR1884094 ( authorization required [accessed September 17, 2016]). Freely accessible preliminary version: talkreason.org , accessed on April 26, 2011.
  5. ↑ Wesley Elsberry , Jeffrey Shallit : Information theory, evolutionary computation, and Dembski's “complex specified information” . In: Synthesis . tape 178 , no. 2 , January 2011, p. 237-270 , doi : 10.1007 / s11229-009-9542-8 . Freely accessible preliminary version (2003): talkreason.org (PDF file; 535 kB).
  6. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento from September 2, 2017 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Dembski, William A.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dembski, William Albert; Dembski, Bill
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician, philosopher, and theologian
DATE OF BIRTH July 8, 1960
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago , Illinois , USA