William A. Dembski Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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 intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process.

  William A. Dembski

  Serendipity, Survival, Meat

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• Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.

  William A. Dembski

  Ignorance, Serendipity, Use

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• The atheist is cheating whenever he makes a moral judgment, acting as though it has an objective reference, when his philosophy in fact precludes it.

  William A. Dembski

  Cheating, Atheist, Philosophy

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• 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

  Religious, Philosophical, Intelligent

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• The positive evidence for Darwinism is confined to small-scale evolutionary changes like insects developing insecticide resistance....Evidence like that for insecticide resistance confirms the Darwinian selection mechanism for small-scale changes, but hardly warrants the grand extrapolation that Darwinists want. It is a huge leap going from insects developing insecticide resistance via the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation to the very emergence of insects in the first place by that same mechanism.

  William A. Dembski

  Want, Resistance, Firsts

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• 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, and intelligent design will die a quick and painless death.

  William A. Dembski

  Intelligent, Origin Of Life, Giving

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

  William A. Dembski

  Government, Spheres, Problem

  "Peerless: A Radically Decentralized Digital Monetary Framework". billdembski.com. November 23, 2016.

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• Natural selection certainly operates. It explains how bacteria will gain antibiotic resistance; it will explain how insects get insecticide resistance, but it doesn't explain how you get bacteria or insects in the first place.

  William A. Dembski

  Antibiotics, Bacteria, Gains

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• The scientific picture of the world championed since the Enlightenment is not just wrong but massively wrong. Indeed entire fields of inquiry, especially in the human sciences, will need to be rethought from the ground up in terms of intelligent design.

  William A. Dembski

  Intelligent, Design, Enlightenment

  William A. Dembski (2002). “Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology”, p.224, InterVarsity Press

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• 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. And yet all moral judgments require a basis for morality, some standard of right and wrong.

  William A. Dembski

  Atheist, Morality, Judgment

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• 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 circumstance we would attribute to intelligence.

  William A. Dembski

  Intelligent, Design, Fundamentals

  William A. Dembski (2004). “The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design”, Intervarsity Press

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• Any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient.

  William A. Dembski

  Views, Scary, Christ

  William A. Dembski (2002). “Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology”, p.206, InterVarsity Press

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• 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

  Atheist, Intelligent, Design

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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 conceivable relevance to what happens in nature. Naturalism's answer to theism is not atheism but benign neglect. People are welcome to believe in God, though not a God who makes a difference in the natural order.

  William A. Dembski

  Atheist, Believe, Self

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• As far as design theorists are concerned, theistic evolution is American evangelicalism's ill-conceived accommodation to Darwinism .

  William A. Dembski

  Design, Evolution, Accommodations

  "What Every Theologian Should Know about Creation, Evolution, and Design" by William A. Dembski, www.arn.org. 1996.

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• Wrong people are wrong not because of their faults but because of their presumed virtues.

  William A. Dembski

  People, Faults, Virtue

  "Peerless: A Radically Decentralized Digital Monetary Framework". billdembski.com. November 23, 2016.

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

  William A. Dembski

  Intelligent, Feet, Design

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• 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

  Atheist, Reality, Views

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• If we take seriously the word-flesh Christology of Chalcedon (i.e., the doctrine that Christ is fully human and fully divine) and view Christ as the telos toward which God is drawing the whole of creation, then any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient.

  William A. Dembski

  Drawing, Views, Doctrine

  William A. Dembski (1999). “Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology”, Intervarsity Press

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

  William A. Dembski

  People, Use, Deny

  "Peerless: A Radically Decentralized Digital Monetary Framework". billdembski.com. November 23, 2016.

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• Design theorists are no friends of theistic evolution.

  William A. Dembski

  Design, No Friends, Evolution

  "What Every Theologian Should Know about Creation, Evolution, and Design" by William A. Dembski, www.arn.org. 1996.

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• My thesis is that all disciplines find their completion in Christ and cannot be properly understood apart from Christ.

  William A. Dembski

  Discipline, Christ, Thesis

  William A. Dembski (2002). “Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology”, p.206, InterVarsity Press

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• How a designer gets from thought to thing is, at least in broad strokes, straightforward: (1) A designer conceives a purpose. (2) To accomplish that purpose, the designer forms a plan. (3) To execute the plan, the designer specifies building materials and assembly instructions. (4) Finally, the designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials. What emerges is a designed object, and the designer is successful to the degree that the object fulfills the designer's purpose.

  William A. Dembski

  Successful, Purpose, Degrees

  William A. Dembski (2006). “No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence”, p.11, Rowman & Littlefield

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• 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 gratuitous. Not knowing the objectives of the designer, Gould is in no position to say whether the designer has proposed a faulty compromise among those objectives.

  William A. Dembski

  Art, Knowing, Design

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• 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

  Christian, Intelligent, Design

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