Quotes by William A. Dembski

About William A. Dembski:

William Albert "Bill" Dembski is an American mathematician, philosopher and theologian. A proponent of intelligent design (ID), specifically the concept of specified complexity, he serves as of 2013[update] as a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC). In 2012, he taught as the Phillip E. Johnson Research Professor of Science and Culture at the Southern Evangelical Seminary in Matthews, North Carolina near Charlotte.
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Naturalism is the view that the physical world is a self-contained system that works by blind, unbroken natural laws. Naturalism doesn't come right out and say there's nothing beyond nature. Rather, it says that nothing beyond nature could have any c...

William A. Dembski

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 circumsta...

William A. Dembski

The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibili...

William A. Dembski

Whenever explaining an event, we must choose from three competing modes of explanation. These are regularity, chance, and design... To attribute an event to design is to say that it cannot reasonably be referred to either regularity or chance.

William A. Dembski

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 gra...

William A. Dembski

Even if the intelligent design of some structure has been established, it still is a separate question whether a wise, powerful, and beneficent God ought to have designed a complex, information-rich structure one way or another. For the sake of argum...

William A. Dembski

Regardless of one's point of view, it's quite easy to see that Darwinism is not in the same league as the hard sciences. For instance, Darwinists will often compare their theory favorably to Einsteinian physics, claiming that Darwinism is just as wel...

William A. Dembski

Because we don't see the evil destroyed now and thus experience the suffering that evil inevitably inflicts, we are tempted to doubt God's existence and goodness.

William A. Dembski

Wrong people are wrong because they use their freedom to deny it to others.

William A. Dembski

Because government has tremendous power, it attracts people who are eager to game the system, obtaining by force of law what they could never achieve through consensus.

William A. Dembski

Government has a legitimate sphere of operation. The problem arises when that sphere continually expands, encompassing areas where government lacks legitimacy.

William A. Dembski

Give us detailed, testable, mechanistic accounts for the origin of life, the origin of the genetic code, the origin of ubiquitous bio macromolecules and assemblages like the ribosome, and the origin of molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum,...

William A. Dembski

Intelligent design, unlike creationism, is a science in its own right and can stand on its own feet.

William A. Dembski

Precisely because intelligent design does not turn the study of biological origins into a Bible-science controversy, intelligent design is a position around which Christians of all stripes can unite.

William A. Dembski

There is an immediate payoff to intelligent design: it destroys the atheistic legacy of Darwinian evolution. Intelligent design makes it impossible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

William A. Dembski

Intelligent design is a modest position theologically and philosophically. It attributes the complexity and diversity of life to intelligence, but does not identify that intelligence with the God of any religious faith or philosophical system.

William A. Dembski

In God becoming human in Jesus Christ, God has established solidarity with the human condition.

William A. Dembski

The problem of good as it faces the atheist is this: Nature, which is the nuts-and-bolts reality for the atheist, has no values and thus can offer no grounding for good and evil. Values on the atheist view are subjective and contingent.

William A. Dembski

I'm not saying that atheists can't act morally or have moral knowledge. But when I ascribe virtue to an atheist, it's as a theist who sees the atheist as conforming to objective moral values. The atheist, by contrast, has no such basis for morality. ...

William A. Dembski

As long as the wrong people hold power, how can the right political climate even arise?

William A. Dembski

Author Bio

  • NameWilliam A. Dembski
  • DescriptionAmerican intelligent design advocate
  • BornJuly 18, 1960
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionMathematician; Theologian