The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design

As a professional in the scientific research field, I find this book challenging intellectually and stimulating to myself and my colleagues. The main question for those rejecting ID and embracing its alternative DD (Dumb Determinism, or Deterministic Developmentalism) is: which postulation administers the most satisfactory answer to why of necessity there has been an unbroken, uninterrupted sequential, cumulative increase (Quality and Quality) in useful information in our universe? We deride the notion of Spontaneous Generation (in no-time or like time-lapse photography or fast-forwarding an accelerated video), but have no problem with the identical concept in magnified astronomical time-delay or decelerated super-slo-mo trillions of frames over billions of years? Instantaneous or Spontaneous or Extemporaneous or 'spur of the moment',nope. Extenuaneous, Superannuated, 'spur of the megatemporal', yep. Both ID and DD deal with information creation, identification, evaluation and decisioned opting in or out as functional or non-functional. Both deal with sorting. Both deal with selectivity of data. The other question for DD (that ID answers) is: how does the universe get from a-Necessity to Necessity? How does it get from No-Chance to Chance? Needlessness to Need? Neither Random nor non-Random to either or both?? ID deals with Big Beginning; DD deals with Big Banging. Question for DD: at Absolute Zero pre matter/energy/space-time, what triggered a non-existent 'Bigness' to 'Bangness' status? Before anything was, theoretically there was no chance, no need, no will, no intent, no necessity, no random, no concept of anything, no choices, no options for natural selection to operate from, no nature, no selectionability. All of a sudden DD has us take on faith that all this and more came to be 'just because'? DD is all about Progressive Process from nothing to everything, Advantageous Adaptation from simple to complex; extemporaneous evolving from Lesser to Greater; from 'no end in mind' to 'mind in the end'. Is this what we observe in 1st Law of Thermodynamics (nothing of itself can be created or destroyed) and 2nd Law (nothing of itself upgrades its complexity or functionality, but greater degradation the longer the time-devolution- is the fixed rule) as well as the law of diminishing returns (xerox of a xerox of a xerox ad seq.)? If there could be no 'Artificial Intelligence' without superior Human ID, how could there be Human Intelligence without a higher Superiority Order of Intelligization? Can the universe really get the Greater from the Lesser? If AI can't create itself through DD (Natural Selection), how can we hold the creed that DD created itself and its own I.Q. equal or superior who in turn creates AI? Ultimately it all comes down to faith in presented data as personal Control Beliefs dictate should be admitted into one's court: experimentation, observation, experience, intuition, historical inquiry, firsthand eyewitness Exhibit A,B,C,e

I believe this will end up being an important book in the ID movement...but not because it offers any new insights or ID defenses. It doesn't. It also doesn't necessarily discredit naturalistic processes. What this book does is thoroughly catalogs the ID position and demonstrates the "reasonability" of the ID argument when compared to undirected "macro-adaptation" (neo-Darwinism, I guess) as an explanstion for the rise and diversification of life on Earth. "Thinking people" with doubts about naturalism fear not---you will WANT to be on this side of the debate after reading this book. The arguments are presented clearly and fairly---your world view will determine if an event is either "obvious" or "mind-numbingly improbable". I got the strong sense reading the book that Dembski feels ID (as a science...not a philosophy) needs a breakthru (decisive confirmation) in order to progress. This is a high-bar considering how little we really know about the universe (sort of like flatlanders trying to "prove" spheres exist)...but at least it's POSSIBLE (unlike neo-Darwinism which is utterly un-provable). Today I read that an ounce of dried DNA has the information storage capacity of 1 Trillion CDs. Now, a CD is pretty cool, and I'm glad that someone WAY smarter than me invented them. Yet the materialist happily acknowledges that "nature" has randomly produced a substance a mere fraction of the size of a CD with...ummm...a TRILLION times more processing capability. There is something going on here...

Needless to say, the Intelligent Design position has attracted much attention, and a large number of academics, both supporters and critics, in the last few years. Dembski can not respond to every critic in one book but in this 334 page work he does an excellent job responding to many of his critics. No doubt his next book will respond to yet another batch. Even if you disagree with ID, there is much useful information in this well written work. For example, he deals with the realization that DNA is a dynamic structure. The base pairs are always moving (actually vibrating) and holes are constantly opening and closing through the center of the DNA. Every femtosecond changes occur, yet the system is remarkably stable, partly because the cell's repair enzymes find, and repair, flaws along the cell's vast stretches of DNA. Research has now shown that DNA is part of a system that works as a unit, and certain basic parts, mostly complex proteins, must exist for it to function. This is what science research (of which I have been privileged to be a part of) tells us. Darwinism tells us a story based on conjecture and assumption. Dembski shows how and why ID is a superior explanation for what we see in the laboratory. Unfortunately, the Fundamentalist Darwin true believers will do their best to attack this book, but their rhetoric is now often so extreme that they often do not help their cause. Read the book and judge for yourself.

This book really is a stunning accomplishment. Dembski is a real master at organizing a tremendous amount of material and getting straight to the point. The result can be slow going for the non-specialist like myself, but very rewarding. Despite all the desperate attempts to silence ID, they are not going away. Chapter 41 (Peer Review) alone is worth the cover price -- it shows the lengths to which the neo-Darwinian establishment will go to belittle and marginalize any creative attempts to question them. Whatever you think of ID and the debates, this chapter will interest anyone who cares about free speech and about the growing illiberal nature of the academy.Dembski, like several others in the ID movement (see Jonathan Wells, or some of the contributors to Mere Creation), is one of the great intellectual athletes of this generation: a Ph.D. in math from Chicago, another Ph.D. in philosophy; graduate and post doc degrees in theology (Princeton Seminary), computers, biology, etc. from places like Princeton U. and MIT, with a huge corpus of writings. He's a renaissance man who really is able to master several disciplines and show connections between them. That makes his books so fun and engaging even for people without special interest in science. Of all his books, I found this one probably the most engaging, and most able to help me see how ID ties into a larger framework of worldview issues.