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William A. Dembski has been one of the leading voices of the Intelligent Design movement. He is an associate research professor at Baylor University and a senior fellow with Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture in Seattle. He is also the executive director of the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design. Dr. Dembski has taught at Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Dallas. He has done postdoctoral work in mathematics at MIT, in physics at the University of Chicago, and in computer science at Princeton University. Dembski earned a B.A. in psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago, an M.S. in statistics, and a Ph.D. in philosophy, he also received a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1988 and a master of divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1996.

Dembski's books include The Design Inference, No Free Lunch, Intelligent Design, and most recently The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design.

What is intelligent design, and how did you become a believer and an advocate for the idea?

What intelligent design does is it looks for signs of intelligence. Where it gets controversial is when it starts looking for signs of intelligence in biological systems. What makes it controversial is that if there is actual intelligence or design behind biology, it means that the intelligence is not an evolved intelligence. It's not an intelligence that's the result of blind purposeless material processes, as the Darwinists tell us. That's really what's at stake there.

I'm a mathematician, not a biologist. But in the late '80s, at the height of the chaos theory craze, I attended a conference on randomness at Ohio State University. The point of the conference was to try to understand the nature of randomness. But the conference concluded that we don't know what randomness is, or the way we get at randomness is by knowing what randomness is not. What would happen repeatedly was you'd find something with a pure random but then you'd find the pattern in it. Randomness was always a provisional designation until we found the pattern or design in it. I became something of an expert in the study of randomness, wrote on this, and from there got into the whole question of what are the patterns that we use to defeat randomness and infer design? And that set me on a trajectory I've been on for about 15 years now.

You talk about this being an old idea, what is new that gives it some kind of new impetus?

What it's got are precise criteria for identifying the effects of intelligence. The last time it had real currency was before Darwin. What intelligent design can do is we can get to some sort of generic intelligence and also these sort of intuitive criteria. We can get some precise, logical, mathematical and biological criteria. For instance, Michael Behe has his notion of irreducible complexity. I have a notion of specified complexity. We can start seeing how these ideas apply to actual biological systems.

Once you have identified the effects of intelligence, once you can be confident that you're dealing with a real intelligence in biology, then a host of new questions arise. We're not going to say, biological systems are designed, end of story, now we've proven our point and gone home. Intelligent design is an ambitious scientific program. We want to do more than just identify the effects of intelligence, we want to then work with that and see if we can get biological insights that we couldn't get otherwise.

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March (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48