Understanding Intelligent Design

Dembski, William A., and Sean McDowell. Understanding Intelligent Design. Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2008. $13.99.

I must confess a previous general dislike for scientific things. This was not really driven by my religious convictions but is more complicated. Some of the contributing factors include: a high school chemistry teacher who taught nothing, another high school teacher (this time physics) who knew so little math that his students routinely had to correct his grading mistakes, my resulting ignorance of many scientific concepts, my love and study of history (probably a right-brain versus left-brain issue), as well as the feeling that much of the "truths" that I, and all of society along with me, was being fed were in fact incompatible with biblical Christianity and the realities of the world.

That said, I am now engaging myself in reading designed to catch myself up on science related to the Intelligent Design debate. I saw the movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" last year, and I've been in some interesting discussions on the issue. I have an inner conviction about the truth, but I've lacked the scientific knowledge to be effective in debate. So, this book, as the title might suggest, is the first step for me. I realize that my book choices are biases, but I have not yet found any book that tries to take seriously the claims of ID and defeat them with scientific evidence. If such a book exists or is written, I will read it. As it stands, the establishment scientific community is making a concerted effort to simply ignore ID in the hopes that it will just disappear.

On to the book...

Dembski (a major light in the ID movement) and McDowell are trying to make accessible to the average reader the aspects of the ID debate and present, in basic, understandable form, the evidence for ID and against Darwinian evolution. They make clear early on that they have no issue with natural selection or evolution as the means to explain variation within the population of a species. The problem is with natural selection-driven evolution as the explanation of the origin of life or as the mechanism for one species coming from another. They also show that ID is not some neo-fundamentalist attempt to subvert science in order to establish a theocracy (a common claim) but is actually a big-tent movement, including Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and agnostics and with room for everything from young-earth creationists to people who believe in divinely guided evolution.

The central problem seems to be that, given what we now know about the cell and DNA, no material process is know to exist that can explain (with a reasonable mathematical probability, which Dembski very conservatively puts at no less than 1 in 10 to the 150th power - the universal probability bound) the information necessary to give rise to even the most simple of life forms. Thus, since we can detect design (forensic science and the SETI program are just two of many such examples), this book states that ID provides scientific proof, mainly in the fields of probability and information sciences but related to biology, geology, cosmology, physics, chemistry, and other major areas of study, that is best understood to point to an outside super designer.

There are also many proofs given for ID and against evolution. These are quite convincing, especially the many examples of the tricks pro-evolution scientists have had to pull to maintain their theory. I won't catalogue them here, but you should definitely take a look.

The book is well-written and achieves its goal of providing a basis for general understanding of the subject. It also points to further resources for study in one of its appendices. At only a little over 200 pages, it is a quick read. The drawback of this is that it is clear that further reading is necessary to graduate to anything more than a casual discussion of ID.

Finally, I would like to point out what the authors also emphasize in their first chapter. This debate really is important to the larger worldview debate. If Darwinian evolution, based on naturalism, is true, then Christianity is necessarily false. That simple fact makes this subject something truly important for Christians to study, understand, and speak up about.