The Design Inference
by William A. Dembski
The Design Inference is scheduled to be published
with Cambridge University Press early August of 1998. It is appearing
in the series Cambridge Studies in Probability, Induction,
and Decision Theory. The inside dustjacket reads as follows:
How can we identify events due to intelligent
causes and distinguish them from events due to undirected natural
causes? If we lack a causal theory, how can we determine whether
an intelligent cause acted? This book presents a reliable method
for detecting intelligent causes: the design inference.
The design inference uncovers intelligent causes
by isolating the key trademark of intelligent causes: specified
events of small probability. Just about anything that happens
is highly improbable, but when a highly improbable event is also
specified (i.e., conforms to an independently given pattern) undirected
natural causes lose their explanatory power. Design inferences
can be found in a range of scientific pursuits from forensic science
to research into the origins of life to the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence.
This challenging and provocative book shows how
incomplete undirected causes are for science and breathes new
life into classical design arguments. It will be read with particular
interest by philosophers of science and religion, other philosophers
concerned with epistemology and logic, probability and complexity
theorists, and statisticians.
"As the century and with it the millennium
come to an end, questions long buried have disinterred themselves
and come clattering back to intellectual life, dragging their
winding sheets behind them. Just what, for example, is the origin
of biological complexity and how is it to be explained? We have
no more idea today than Darwin did in 1859, which is to say no
idea whatsoever. William Dembski's book is not apt to be the last
word on the inference to design, but it will surely be the first.
It is a fine contribution to analysis, clear, sober, informed,
mathematically sophisticated and modest. Those who agree with
its point of view will read it with pleasure, and those who do
not, will ignore it at their peril."
David Berlinski, mathematician,
author of The Tour of the Calculus
The following two endorsements will appear on the back cover:
Dembski has written a sparklingly original book.
Not since David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
has someone taken such a close look at the design argument, but
it is done now in a much broader post-Darwinian context. Now we
proceed with modern characterizations of probability and complexity,
and the results bear fundamentally on notions of randomness and
on strategies for dealing with the explanation of radically improbable
events. We almost forget that design arguments are implicit in
criminal arguments "beyond a reasonable doubt," plagiarism,
phylogenetic inference, cryptography, and a host of other modern
contexts. Dembski's analysis of randomness is the most sophisticated
to be found in the literature, and his discussions are an important
contribution to the theory of explanation, and a timely discussion
of a neglected and unanticipatedly important topic.
William Wimsatt, philosopher of biology, University of Chicago
In my view, Dembski has given us a brilliant study
of the precise connections linking chance, probability, and design.
A lucidly written work of striking insight and originality, The
Design Inference provides significant progress concerning
notoriously difficult questions. I expect this to be one of those
rare books that genuinely transforms its subject.
Jon P. Jarrett, philosopher of physics,
University of Illinois at Chicago
Endorsements of The Design Inference
Detecting design and distinguishing it from natural
causation is one of the things science frequently does, but understanding
of this subject has been impeded by ideological prejudice. William
Dembski's superb analysis brings design theory into mainstream
science. I predict that it will have an enormous influence over
the science and philosophy of the 21st century.
Dembski is one of the most important of the "design"
theorists who are sparking a scientific revolution by legitimating
the concept of intelligent design in science. At some point not
far in the future, scientists will be saying "of course biological
organisms are intelligently designed," and "of course
neo-Darwinism was never more than a pseudoscientific philosophical
ideology like Freudianism and Marxism." When that happens,
William Dembski will deserve a lot of the credit.
Phillip E. Johnson,
professor of law,
University of California at Berkeley,
author of Darwin on Trial
In The Design Inference William Dembski asks,
how do we know that something has been purposely arranged? how
do we know there is a mind behind a particular event? In answer
Dembski constructs the formal logical arguments necessary for
rigorous evaluation of design hypotheses. This book should be
on the shelf of every person who has intuitively grasped that
life and the universe are not the products of chance, but has
thus far lacked the conceptual tools to rigorously defend that
idea.
Michael Behe,
professor of biochemistry, Lehigh University,
author of Darwin's Black Box
The question of whether you can an infer a "designer"
from the study of nature is anathema to many scientists. It seems
to hearken back to a dark and superstitious era, when we invoked
God as a convenient explanation for all we did not know. Without
a systematic, quantitative means for evaluating the evidence,
however, such assertions reflect more a philosophical prejudice
than a statement of science. Through his work on establishing
the complexity-specification criterion, Dr. Dembski is making
a critical step in moving the discussion away from such subjectivity,
and into the realm of rational analysis in the best tradition
of scientific inquiry.
Robert Kaita,
Principal Research Physicist,
Plasma Physics Laboratory,
Princeton University
William Dembski's book The Design Inference
shows, contrary to popular opinion, that design inferences are
NOT unscientific, but are actually employed routinely in several
scientific disciplines. Better yet, Dembski provides clear objective
criteria for inferring design, and thus dispels the myth that
design is inherently arbitrary and subjective. This groundbreaking
book will go a long way toward liberating biology from the straitjacket
of Darwinism and promoting future progress.
Jonathan Wells, Ph.D. (theol.),
Ph.D. (biol.),
Department of Molecular & Cell Biology,
University of California at Berkeley
When we wrote The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing
Current Theories, we pointed out the immense improbabilities
of an accidental origin of life. The inference that this somehow
implies an intelligent designer was reasonable, but too subjective.
In The Design Inference, Dr. William Dembski has provided
a clear conceptual basis for evaluating the significance of such
improbable events as the origin of life. The importance of this
extremely insightful contribution cannot be overstated. I think
this new paradigm will become the norm by which improbable events
can be evaluated in many different areas of scientific investigation
where assessing the possibility of intelligent intervention is
necessary.
Walter Bradley,
professor of mechanical engineering,
Texas A&M,
co-author of
The Mystery of Life's Origin
Dembski's Design Inference is a powerful shot
in the culture wars between naturalism and theism, for it shows
us that the existence of intelligent design is rigorously defensible.
Robert C. Newman, Ph.D. (astrophysics)
Director, Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute
Even the most vociferous critics of the venerable
teleological argument for God's existence (the so-called argument
from design), such as Hume, Kant, and Darwin, have testified to
the intuitive force of that argument. But they have insisted that
the impression of intelligent design in nature, however irresistible,
must be ignored or suppressed because that impression cannot be
given a rigorous formulation. Now a brilliant newcomer, trained
in philosophy, mathematics, and science, claims to have met successfully
the challenge of the critics. Drawing upon design-detection techniques
in such diverse fields as forensic science, artificial intelligence,
cryptography, SETI, intellectual property law, random number generation,
and so forth, William Dembski argues that specified complexity
is a sufficient condition of inferring design and that, moreover,
such specified complexity is evident in nature. Never since the
time of Paley has the teleological argument seemed so compelling.
Both the proponents of natural theology as well as her critics
will be forced to deal with the argument of this ground-breaking
and important book
William Lane Craig, Ph.D. (theol.),
Ph.D. (phil.),
lecturer, apologist, author of numerous books,
co-author of Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford)
Professor Bill Dembski's thesis in The Design
Inference is an important breakthrough in the philosophy of
science, deserves, and will readily command, a broader readership.
I am recommending his book both to my professional colleagues
and to friends and students who are interested in how probable
reason operates in ordinary inferences and in our assumptions
about the nature of science. Dembski's writing is precise, forceful
and appeals both to scholars and to reflective lay readers.
John Angus Campbell,
professor of communications, University of Memphis;
President, American Association for the
Rhetoric of
Science & Technology
Dembski has written the most important book on the
topic of design to appear in living memory. One simply cannot
understand current issues in science and religion without reading
it. It is seminal. It also has the virtue of being what only the
great books are: readable and clear. Anyone interested in science
cannot afford to miss this book.
John Mark Reynolds,
professor of philosophy, Biola University;
Director, Torrey Honors Institute
Dembski's book is a serious and valuable attempt
to evaluate the scientific status of the concept of design. The
oft repeated observation that teleological questions lie beyond
the remit of science has perhaps obscured an important distinction
between the detection of whether there is purpose and the discovery
of that purpose. Although the latter is beyond the remit of science,
Dembski argues in connection with the former, that the fact of
design may be scientifically detectable. His lucid and rigourous
analysis of the design inference based on the concept of specified
complexity deserves to be read by all who have an interest in
this subject.
John Lennox,
professor of mathematics,
University of Wales
The publication of William A. Dembski's The Design
Inference by Cambridge University Press is one of the most
significant events in recent intellectual history. It signals
a breakthrough: the acknowledgement on the part of the academic
and scientific establishment, for the first time in over 60 years,
of the fact that the concept of intelligent design may have a
legitimate role to play in our scientific understanding of nature.
Dembski's pioneering work on the philosophy and theory of information
is something no serious student of the foundations and methodology
of science can afford to ignore. This book will substantially
alter the shape of contemporary discussions about the nature and
presuppositions of science.
Robert Koons,
professor of philosophy,
University of Texas at Austin
ORDERING INFORMATION
The Design Inference
by William A. Dembski
Cambridge Studies in Probability, Induction and Decision Theory
Cambridge University Press
260 pages, hardback, 0-521-62387-1, $54.95 (available
August 1998)
ORDER DIRECTLY FROM CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS:
1-800-872-7423
OR FROM AMAZON BOOKS (www.amazon.com).