- September 4, 2012
- Posted by: essay
- Category: Free essays
This essay is aimed to review the paper “Intelligent design” by William B. Dembski. William Albert Dembski is a mathematician, theologian, and professor of philosophy; in the paper he considers the notion of intelligent design, analyzes whether it can be testable and compares the arguments and statements of intelligent design with natural theology. For me, the favorite part of the paper was the last third of it (last 4 passages, exactly); Dembski considers the implications of intelligent design and explains the neat and argumentative outlook of intelligent design supporters: “A natural theologian might point to nature and say, ”˜Clearly, the designer of this ecosystem prized variety over neatness’; A design theorist attempting to do actual design-theoretic research on that ecosystem might reply ”˜Although that’s an intriguing theological possibility, as a design theorist I need to keep focused on the informational pathways capable of producing that variety’”. The conclusion is also impressive; Dembski shows a new outlook to religion: “By showing that design is indispensable to the scientific understanding of the natural world, intelligent design is reinvigorating the design argument and at the same time overturning the widespread misconception that the only tenable form of religious belief is one that treats purpose, intelligence, and wisdom as byproducts of unintelligent material processes”.
The least favorite was the middle part of the article; there are statements which cannot be considered a scientific outlook: “the marvelous adaptations of means to ends in organisms (like the intricacy of the human eye with its capacity for vision) ensure that organisms are the product of an intelligence”, and “Behe defines a system as irreducibly complex if it consists of several interrelated parts for which removing even one part renders the system’s basic function unrecoverable; for Behe, irreducible complexity is a sure indicator of design”. In my opinion, such “conclusions” are logically wrong and are not based on demonstrable facts or reasoning.
If I decided to choose this topic for a research paper, the main reason for choosing would be the balanced and logical approach to analyzing the complexity of surrounding world, and the unusually scientific view of religion with reasonable argumentation. Other sources for such research may be the works of philosophers such as Kant and Descartes, and in modern works of naturalists dealing with theological aspects.