William Dembski

Background

William Dembski (b. 1960) is an American mathematician, philosopher, and theologian, a leading figure of the Intelligent-Design movement and the theorist of specified complexity — the second of ID's two proposed markers of design. Holding doctorates in mathematics and philosophy, Dembski supplied the movement's conceptual machinery in The Design Inference (1998), attempting to formalize the intuition that events both highly improbable and matching an independently given pattern reliably signal intelligence.

His primary works are copyright-locked and absent from this public-domain corpus; his position is reconstructed from the Stanford Encyclopedia's secondary treatment. Where Michael Behe argues from biochemistry, Dembski argues from probability theory and information, foregrounding what the SEP calls the "mind-reflective aspects of nature."

Positions held in this wiki

• Intelligent Design as a Scientific Program — the "explanatory filter": design is "the set-theoretic complement of the disjunction law-or-chance," these three modes being treated as "mutually exclusive and exhaustive" (SEP 'Creationism' §9, quoting Dembski 1998b: 98). His Contact illustration distinguishes a merely complex coin-sequence from a prime-number sequence that "embodies a suitable pattern."
• The Origin of Life — argues some biological steps are "so improbable that one would not rationally expect them to occur even once in a volume the size of the visible universe" (SEP 'Fine-Tuning' §1.3).
• Methodological Naturalism — Scope and Limits — with Behe, the scientific program of the theistic-science position.

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: The Design Inference (1998) is not ingested (copyright-locked). The filter and the specified-complexity criterion are preserved in SEP 'Creationism' §9 and SEP 'Teleological Arguments' §4.2. See meta/ingestion-queue.md.

Principal critics

• David Hume — ancestor of the objection that design, chance, and law are not cleanly separable modes of explanation.
• Michael Ruse / mainstream critics — press that the filter's exhaustiveness fails because "in real life" a chance event may also be law-governed, so design does not follow from the elimination of the other two (SEP 'Creationism' §10).

See also

• Michael Behe — the biochemical "irreducible complexity" complement.
• Phillip E. Johnson — the movement's legal-rhetorical strategist.