"Houston Press" December 14, 2000
In God's Country

William Dembski thought Baylor University would be the perfect place to
investigate a scientific alternative to Darwinism. Little did he realize
he would be crucified for his cause.

By Lauren Kern

In the beginning, there was a bang. A very big bang. Nothing exploded into
something. Quarks and leptons collided violently in an intense fireball of
plasma. As the plasma expanded and cooled, the collisions became less
violent, and particles joined together to form protons and neutrons and
electrons, then nuclei and atoms and molecules. Huge clouds of these
particles coalesced into galaxies of stars and planets, still expanding,
always expanding, away from the central point of the explosion. On one
particular planet, in a very ordinary galaxy, molecules somehow formed
living cells. And these cells linked together to become organisms, some of
which had certain genetic mutations that better enabled them to survive
and replicate in the primordial atmosphere. Over the next, oh, billions of
years, the fittest of these organisms evolved into plants and fish and
amphibians and birds and dogs and cats and apes and humans -- all thanks
to the whims of chance and the laws of nature. If the pull of nuclei were
slightly stronger, if the force of gravity were slightly weaker, if the
speed of universal expansion were off just a hair, if the genetic
mutations had been a little bit different, we wouldn't be here.

It's a fanciful story, but it's the best one that modern science has come
up with so far to explain human existence. A small cadre of philosophers,
scientists and mathematicians, however, have come to the conclusion that
it's a little too fanciful, that perhaps there is a better explanation for
the origin and diversity of life, that perhaps that  explanation involves
an intelligent designer, a.k.a. God.

It's not a new argument. Eighteenth-century British natural theologist
William Paley gave the intelligent-design theory its most memorable
metaphor: Happening upon a watch, one would notice that its various parts
work together for a purpose, that the cogs and springs and gears produce
motion, and that the motion is regulated to indicate time. We would infer
from the watch that it was crafted by a watchmaker. Paley argued that
living organisms are more complicated than watches "in a degree which
exceeds all computation," therefore we too must be the products of some
grand watchmaker, an intelligence.

Since the dawn of Darwinism, Paley's watchmaker analogy has been dismissed
as a quaint notion of a much simpler scientific time. Darwin's theory of
natural selection explained that the design we see in nature and in
ourselves is merely an illusion: What appears to be design is not, in
fact, the product of a designer, but the result of a long and undirected
history of evolution in which organisms became better and better adapted
to their environments. Darwin forever separated science and religion.
Religion was a matter of faith; science, a matter of natural causes,
observable fact, empirical evidence. Sure, you could believe in God if you
wanted to, but you certainly couldn't look for him to  reveal himself in
the natural world.=20

But intelligent-design theorists are bringing religion back into the
laboratory, adding bite to Paley's old watchmaker argument, attempting to
show -- with mathematical theories and biological examples -- that a
designer can be empirically detected. This has mainstream scientists
hopping mad and may lead to the most intense battle between science and
religion since the Catholic Church put Galileo under house arrest for
suggesting that the earth was not the center of the universe.=20

The first major skirmish has already taken place at Baylor University,
where William Dembski, a leading proponent of intelligent design, was
demoted from his position as director of a center set up to study the
theory. The last fight may be in your local school board.

William Dembski wasn't always a religious man. The only child of a college
biology professor (who, in fact, didn't question Darwin's theories) and an
art dealer, he spent six days a week at an all-male Catholic preparatory
school in Chicago. He went through the motions at school, but he didn't
buy into Christianity. "Any sort of God who was behind it all, who we were
accountable to, who really cared for us, with whom we could have any
connection, that was just off my radar," Dembski says. That is, until he
came upon his life's first rough spot.

Dembski was always a good student, especially in math. He finished high
school a year early, completing a full course of calculus in just one
summer. The 17-year-old tested into some advanced mathematics courses at
the University of Chicago, but he struggled in them. He was doing average,
but he wasn't used to doing average. He couldn't handle the
disappointment.

Dembski was having trouble outside of class as well. His experiences as an
only child who spent most of his time in the insular world of a boys'
school had not prepared him for college life. His social skills, Dembski
admits, were a bit lacking. He dropped out of school and went to work in
his mother's art dealership business. He built crates, typed letters, but
mostly he just floundered. "It was just not a very happy time in my life,"
he says, "and I guess when you're not very happy, you start looking."

He read the Scriptures, trying to understand the faith. And he read
creationist literature, trying to understand the world around him. He had
always had a sneaking suspicion that Darwinism was an inadequate theory,
and although he could not believe the doctrine of literal creationists,
their criticisms of evolution fueled his active young mind. He went back
to school, studying statistics at the University of Illinois and adding
that knowledge to his developing disbelief in Darwinism. It seemed to him
statistically improbable that natural selection could produce the
diversity of life all around him. Still, he hadn't come up with an
alternative theory.

Then in 1988 he had a eureka moment. At a conference on randomness at Ohio
State University, a statistician concluded the event by saying, "We know
what randomness isn't. We don't know what it is." It made sense to
Dembski. If God is the creator of the universe, then there should be order
in the world, not randomness. Darwinists were having so much trouble
defining the randomness inherent in evolutionary theory because life was
essentially not random. It was designed. And randomness could be
understood only in terms of that design. "That insight really has propelled me all these years,"
Dembski says.

Armed with a Christian faith, Dembski found that he could be happy in the
world of academia. In fact, he's been there ever since his religious
conversion. In all, he has earned a BA in psychology, an MS in statistics
and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Illinois; a Ph.D. in
mathematics from the University of Chicago; and a master of divinity from
Princeton Theological Seminary. He has also done postdoctoral work in
mathematics at MIT, in physics at the University of Chicago and in computer
science at Princeton. But his relationship with academia would not always
be pleasant. Dembski's theories were taking him farther and farther afield
from mainstream science. His mathematics were leading him to the same
place that his faith had. To his colleagues, this wasn't science, it was
religion. We distinguish between intelligent and natural causes every day
-- every time a detective investigates a possible homicide, every time an
archaeologist picks out an arrowhead from a pile of rocks, every time
radio astronomers at the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence listen
for patterns in the noise coming from outer space. In these cases, modern
science doesn't have a problem  assuming some intelligent being is
responsible for the evidence -- a human, even an alien. But if you try to
distinguish between intelligent and natural causes in basic biological
systems, things get a little messier. If you find intelligence in biology,
then who or what was the intelligent designer? It's a question science
doesn't want to pose, let alone answer.

But Dembski contends that if he can codify the process by which we
recognize intelligence in other fields, he can justifiably apply that
process to biology. If he can codify that process, he says, intelligent
design is not a matter of religious belief but a matter of following the
evidence wherever it leads. Such a codification is Dembski's contribution
to the intelligent-design movement, and his claim to fame. It is an
explanatory process that can be used for judging objects, events and
information. It begins by ruling out chance and natural law as
explanations, and then infers design.

The first step in the process is what Dembski calls contingency. In other
words, something that is designed must be compatible with natural law but
not required by it. Something that is required by natural law leaves no
room for the choices inherent in design. It is just following orders.

The second test is for complexity. Here, Dembski turns to the sci-fi movie
Contact, based on a novel by Carl Sagan, for an example. In the movie,
Jodie Foster and her radio astronomer friends at SETI receive a signal of
1,126 beats and pauses representing all the prime numbers from two to 101.
They interpret the signal to be a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence.
But if they had received a sequence of only the first three prime numbers,
they would not have jumped to the same conclusion. Any random radio signal
might happen to emit this sequence by pure chance. Mathematically
speaking, this is a probability argument. The short sequence is simply not complex enough
to be improbable as a result of chance.

But complexity by itself isn't enough. The final filter is for
specification. Any particular sequence of 1,126 beats and pauses is highly
unlikely. The sequence in Contact was special, not just because it was
complex but because it contained an independent pattern: increasing prime
numbers.

Voil=E0. If something is contingent, complex and specified, according to
Dembski, we can infer that it is the product of intelligence. Dembski
calls it the specified-complexity criterion.

The next step for intelligent-design theorists is to apply the criterion
to biological systems. They start small, with bacteria and their proteins,
to keep the probability computations manageable. But the idea is that if
they can prove that life's subsystems are designed, then they can prove
the whole system is designed.

The bacterium's flagellum may be intelligent design's favorite subsystem.
A flagellum is a whiplike outboard motor, complete with an acid-powered
rotary engine, O-rings and a driveshaft. "The scientific community has
come up short with any sort of plausible, detailed explanation of how you
could have gotten something like this by purely natural causes," says
Dembski, "and when you start applying the sort of methods that I've
developed, it clearly indicates design."

A flagellum is compatible with natural law but not required by it; after
all, there are bacteria without flagella. It is specified in the sense
that its pattern of parts performs a specific function. And it is complex,
not just in the sense of its machinelike combination of parts but also in
the improbability of its arising by chance. In fact, Michael Behe, the
biochemist who most famously made the case for design in the bacterial
flagellum, contends that it would be virtually impossible for the motor to
come about by mutation and natural selection.

Behe calls the flagellum an irreducibly complex system. In other words,
its parts are so interrelated that if one part were taken away, the entire
system wouldn't work. A mousetrap, for instance, is irreducibly complex.
Take away the platform, the hammer, the spring, the catch or the holding
bar, and it is impossible to construct a working mousetrap. Similarly, if
you take away any one of the 50 proteins required in the bacterial
flagellum, the motor ceases to work. Behe's argument is that the flagellum
is too complex to arise in one single mutation and then be acted upon by
natural selection, and that the undirected nature of the Darwinian
mechanism could not support a gradual accumulation of the necessary
proteins. Just one of these proteins offers no survival and reproductive
advantage. How could nature know to preserve it for future generations?
How could nature know that the bacterium was in the process of building
itself a motor?

Dembski is looking to apply his specified-complexity theory on an even
more microscopic scale than the bacterial flagellum: that of DNA. The
precise sequence of nucleotides in DNA conveys the information necessary
to build proteins. The origin of this information has become the Holy
Grail of origin-of-life biology. Mainstream science is looking for an
algorithm or a natural law to account for it, but Dembski says that this
DNA encoding is complex, specified information if ever there was any --
and thus indicative of  intelligent design. Natural causes cannot
originate information, Dembski argues via his complicated mathematical
proof, the Law of Conservation of Information. It's a somewhat circular
argument: Natural laws and algorithms cannot create complex, specified
information, because they cannot create anything that is not required by
natural law. Chance can generate complex, unspecified information or
simple, specified information, but not information that is both complex
and specified.

It is for this law that Rob Koons, an associate professor of philosophy at
the University of Texas, calls Dembski the "Isaac Newton of information
theory." It may be that intelligent design will revolutionize science just
like Newtonian physics did. It may also be that this is just the perfect
way to evangelize a generation of Americans who put their faith in science
without entirely understanding it.

William Dembski met Baylor University President Robert Sloan in the summer
of 1996, when he was teaching Sloan's daughter at a Christian study summer
camp not far from Waco. Sloan, who is the first Baptist minister to serve=20
as Baylor's president in over 30 years, had read some of Dembski's work.
"He liked my stuff," Dembski recalls. "He made it clear that he wanted to
get me on the faculty in some way."

Three years later the president offered Dembski not just a position at
Baylor but a whole center dedicated to studying the relationship between
science and religion, and to furthering Dembski's own work in intelligent
design. It would be named after Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian chemist who
questioned the idea that the world could be explained by just natural
laws. It was a big step for intelligent design, the first center of its
kind at a major research university, a huge inroad into mainstream
academia.

The Polanyi Center was established quietly in October 1999. Dembski and his
like-minded colleague Bruce Gordon were hired outside the traditional
academic channels of a search committee and departmental consultation.
Dembski says that he did meet with some faculty, both before and after
Baylor hired him. But the vast majority was unaware of the existence of
the center until its Web site went on-line and scientists outside the
university began sending incredulous e-mails to their colleagues at
Baylor. What, they asked, was this? Had Baylor gone fundamentalist? Would they be teaching
creation science instead of evolution in their biology classrooms? The
Baylor scientists, already  sensitive to their university's religious
mission, were now the laughingstock of the scientific community, and they
didn't like it.

"When you say Baylor now, people are going to go, "Oh, yeah, they have
that creationist center,' " says Charles Weaver, a professor of psychology
and neuroscience at Baylor and one of the most outspoken critics of the
Polanyi Center. "We fought that as a city for a long time: "Waco. Oh, you
guys are the crazy ones with Koresh.' " He worries that the Polanyi Center
and Dembski's association with the intelligent-design movement will
discourage promising premed students and respected faculty from coming to
Baylor.

Baylor Provost Donald Schmeltekopf defends the university's actions by
pointing out that there are more and more people in academia interested in
questioning the naturalistic assumptions of the scientific establishment
and that Dembski is one of the most visible among them. "We thought it
would be an interesting thing for Baylor to get into the conversation and
to be a participant," he says.

But Weaver says Baylor faculty members have been asking these questions
about the relationship between science and religion for years in the
school's interdisciplinary Institute for Faith and Learning. "The
inference that some of us have drawn is that we must have come up with
answers that aren't those we were expected to come up with," says Weaver,
who is a Presbyterian elder. "My faith background is one of asking lots of
questions and living with a lot of doubts, and those may not be qualities
that are valued at Baylor anymore. It may be that those of us with
certainties are better adapted for the environment."

In any case, Schmeltekopf's conversation was about to turn into an=20
argument, and a nasty one at that. In April, Dembski's Polanyi Center
hosted a conference on naturalism sponsored by the Discovery Institute, a
conservative think tank where Dembski is a fellow, and the Templeton
Foundation, whose monies have gone a long way to bankroll the
intelligent-design movement. The conference sought to answer a very
unusual question: Is there anything beyond nature? An impressive
collection of scientists from all over the world attended the conference,
among them Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg. Of course,
Weinberg titled his presentation "No," a straightforward answer to the
conference's central  question. And other speakers announced that they
were going to give their honoraria to organizations that promote the study
of evolution in schools.

Baylor faculty, by and large, boycotted the conference altogether. But
that wasn't all. Just days after the naturalism conference, the faculty
senate voted 27-2 to dismantle Dembski's center. If there was to be a
center studying the intersection of science and religion at Baylor, they
held, it should be rebuilt from the ground up -- with faculty input. In an
editorial published in the Houston Chronicle, President Sloan charged that
this uproar over faculty input was a cover for the real issue: the
substance of the work being done by the center. "In my experience," he
wrote, "people often object to "the way things were done' as a rhetorical
substitute for what was done." Sloan refused to dissolve the Polanyi
Center, citing issues of censorship and academic integrity.

He hit the nail on the head. A lack of input might have annoyed the
faculty, but it was the center's promotion of intelligent design that made
them angry. Dembski claims to be doing science, a science that hopes to
question the very validity of naturalism and give Darwinism a backseat to
design. And that is something that Baylor's mainstream scientists cannot
abide. "You can always look at something and say, "That's something that
God did,' " says Weaver. "Well, what can I do to prove you wrong?If I
can't prove your theory incorrect, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's wrong,
but it means it's not science."

Weaver says that intelligent design is little more than an ego trip. How
do we know a biological system has been intelligently designed? Because
it's designed the way we would have designed it, in a way that we can
understand it. "That's a nice little egotistical thing, isn't it?" he
says. "It's designed to make us feel more comfortable. We do best when we
believe ourselves to be at the pinnacle of creation. And it doesn't have
much to do with theology; it has much more to do with our insecurity as a
species."

Intelligent design has been completely ignored in professional literature,
Weaver says. No real scientists take it seriously. "Dembski's got a whole
long list of places where he's written articles and published books, and
none of them are peer-reviewed. They're not done in scientifically or
philosophically respectable places," Weaver says. "We judge things in the
academic world not by how many books are sold at Waldenbooks," but by what
a scientist's peers think of his work. Dembski's peers in mainstream
science have hardly even dignified him with a response. The famous Harvard
paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who visited Baylor in the wake of the
Polanyi Center controversy, dismissed intelligent design as nothing more
than modern-day creationism.

But Charles Garner, an organic chemistry professor at Baylor who says he
prays with students when they come to him with problems and criticizes
evolutionary theory in class, argues that it would be virtually impossible
to get intelligent-design articles peer-reviewed fairly by a
pro-evolution  scientific establishment. "Remember," he says, "you're
going to be upsetting people's worldviews with this stuff."

Sloan wouldn't shut down the center, but he had no problem holding
Dembski's work up to the light of peer review, especially if it would help
smooth things over with the faculty. He assembled a group of nine
biologists, philosophers, science historians and theologians -- primarily
from other universities -- to look into the legitimacy of the center and
intelligent design. Dembski was furious. The Baylor administration knew
his work; he was hired because of it. Now, they were going to risk his
academic reputation with a very public review by scholars he wasn't even
sure were qualified to assess his work. "The peer review committee, from
my perspective, was called for purely political motives, to assuage the
angry faculty," he says, "but in doing that they put me in the frying
pan."

Surprisingly, Dembski emerged relatively unscathed. The review committee
recommended an advisory committee to oversee Baylor's science and religion
program, and removed the Polanyi name from the center (even though Dembski
claims he cleared the use of the name with Polanyi's son). But ultimately
the outside scholars concluded that "research on the logical structure of
mathematical arguments for intelligent design have a legitimate claim to a
place in the current discussions of the relations of religion and
science."

Dembski was ecstatic. He issued a press release that stated in part:
"Dogmatic opponents of design who demanded the Center be shut down have
met their Waterloo. Baylor University is to be commended for remaining
strong in the face of intolerant assaults on freedom of thought and
expression."

Any progress that the review committee had made in soothing faculty
concerns was undone in the space of two sentences. These were fighting
words. "In academic arguments," says Weaver, "we don't seek utter
destruction and defeat of our opponents. We don't talk about Waterloos."

The Baylor administration gave Dembski a chance to retract, or
"contextualize," his comments, and when he refused, he was demoted. They
cited a lack of "collegiality" that compromised his ability to serve as
director of the center. The center that had no name now had no leader
either. "We certainly didn't demote him because of positions he has
taken," says Schmeltekopf. "That had nothing to do with it. We just had to
move forward here."

It's true. Dembski was not demoted because of his positions. He was
demoted because his positions had become a political hot potato.=20

Initially Dembski thought that if an intelligent-design center could be
successful anywhere, it would be at Baylor. Now, he thinks that if an
intelligent-design center could be successful at Baylor, it could succeed
anywhere. "I think what you've got at Baylor is this whole history of the
Southern Baptists with this moderate-fundamentalist controversy and
split," Dembski says. "And Baylor is -- I didn't fully realize this -- the
bastion for the moderates where anything that smacks of fundamentalism,
creationism, just sends people through the roof."

Baylor may be the bastion of Baptist moderates, but some of these
moderates have accused President Sloan of leaning toward the
fundamentalist end of the spectrum. It is certainly difficult to see how
his administration could have been blind to the fact that intelligent
design comes with a political agenda that is far from moderate. The very
way in which it formulates its scientific questions seeks to tear apart
the Darwinian underpinnings that influence our laws, our public policies,
our economic systems, our psychological theories, our schools, our sense
of who we are -- in short, our entire worldview. If there is a designer, do we have obligations to
that designer? What are they? Do we have an intrinsic sense of morality?
Have we been designed to operate best within certain constraints? "Every
scientific discipline is going to have to be rethought if Darwinism and
naturalism are thrown seriously into question," says Dembski. "I think the implications are huge."

If the science is sound, then perhaps we should be willing to rework our
worldviews. But Baylor certainly was not willing to lead the way. "One of
the things we were very clear about from the beginning," says
Schmeltekopf, "was that the work of Dembski and Gordon did not have
underneath it a political agenda of some kind; that is, to get into
textbook wars and creationist politics and that kind of thing."

To that end, Baylor administrators pressured Dembski not to attend a May
bipartisan congressional briefing by the Discovery Institute, co-hosted,
incidentally, by Houston's own Representative Sheila Jackson Lee.
Dembski's colleagues presented the case for intelligent design and how it
could help resolve the debate over the teaching of origins in public
schools.

Dembski was surprised by Baylor's limitation of his "academic freedom." He
had made no secret of his association with the Discovery Institute, which
considers the "wedge strategy" one of its primary projects. The wedge
strategy is a term coined by Phillip Johnson, godfather of intelligent
design and author of the popular Darwin On Trial. The metaphor portrays
mainstream science as a seemingly impenetrable log that can be cracked
with the sharp edge of a wedge. The sharp edge of the Discovery
Institute's wedge is designed to separate modern science's naturalistic bias from scientific
fact. Once this crack has been made, Johnson can pound in the thicker
parts of the wedge -- including intelligent design, its cultural
implications and even the Bible -- until eventually the log of mainstream
science is split wide open. Johnson considers Dembski to be a key wedge
figure.

Dembski also makes no bones about his personal position on textbooks. "My
commitment is to see intelligent design flourish as a scientific research
program," he says. "To do that, I need a new generation of scholars
willing to consider this, because the older generation is largely
hidebound. So I would like to see textbooks, certainly at the college
level and even at the high school level, which reframe introductory
biology within a design paradigm." He doesn't, however, want to legislate
these ideas. "I think
they're powerful enough that once they get in circulation, they'll win on
their own."

He might be right. Academia may not be embracing intelligent design, but
the general public, it seems, is primed for it. Gallup polls over the last
decade have shown that only about 10 percent of Americans believe in the
scientists' definition of evolution via strictly chance mutation and
natural selection. Nearly everyone else believes that God created life,
either directly or by guiding the process of evolution. Last year in
Kansas, the state school board voted 6-4 to no longer include evolution in
statewide science tests. Intelligent design will likely prove to be a popular theory
for the majority of Americans, especially because the theory can be
applied to many faiths. Even though most intelligent-design researchers,
like Dembski, come from a Christian  background, the theory itself only
detects a designer, it doesn't presume to know anything about that
designer. Hence, Jews, Muslims, even agnostics, are signing on.

Sitting at the dining room table in his ranch-style home just outside of
Waco, William Dembski looks more like a scientist than a minister. He's
thin and stern, with a long, narrow face that mumbles through complicated
mathematical theory without taking a breath. Every so often, he loses his
train of thought and apologizes, saying he is quite tired. One assumes the
exhaustion is a product of the ordeal at Baylor, but then a screaming
toddler, recently awakened from her nap, comes running into the room to
attach herself to her father's leg. Hot on the toddler's heels is
Dembski's wife, her belly swollen with twins that will be born any day
now. It is clear that the late nights are a result of concerns much closer
to the heart.

Dembski spends most of his time at home with his family these days, even
though he still has a five-year contract as an associate research
professor at Baylor. He doesn't like going to the university's campus.
He's much more comfortable here, surrounded by his stretch of land that
came complete with a horse and a fishing pond. It's the perfect place to
ponder life's great questions, at least when the toddler is asleep. And
center or no center, there is still much work to do.

"What if science itself is coming to the place where it says we got some
things wrong and, in fact, things that we ended up dismissing in religion
now have to be taken seriously?" he asks. What if "that intelligence in
the world that your religious faith is talking about has an ally?" What
if?

From houstonpress.com 2000 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.

Oryginal:
http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2000-12-14/feature2.html/page1.html

http://www.houstonpress.com/letters/

Are we an officially Athiest nation?

It has been said that the United States is, or was, a Christian nation. Of
course, since our founding we have practiced freedom of religion, not
establishing any denomination as the official national church. In recent
years, however, the doctrine of "separation of Church and State" has been
used to sweep even mention of religious thoughts or sayings
from all sorts of public venues entirely.

Have we become, in practice if not in letter, an officially atheist
nation?

In the feature article "In God's Country," Originally published by Houston
Press December 14, 2000
(http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2000-12-14/feature2.html/page1.html)
Lauren Kern examined the possibility that the success of the scientific
effort to show intelligent design in nature will "tear apart the Darwinian
underpinnings that influence our laws," and have other upsetting effects.

Pardon me, but has the atheistic Darwinian mindset so permeated our
country that people overlook the fact that our laws predate Darwin? Our
laws still bear the traces of their roots in theology. If you wish for
examples of countries that have attempted to purge religion from land or
use Darwinian principles as a foundation, look to the pre-Darwinian but
non-theistic government of the bloody French Revolution, or to the=20
Darwinian-influenced communist regimes.

It is true that other countries may be less religious than ours and still
have many good aspects, but the founders of our country knew that this
diverse group of people, with this form of government, could not long last
without a citizenry that was both educated and respectful of their
Creator.

Dembski's work may shake up our modern view of things, but such efforts to
restore intellectual respect to the belief in God as the Creator may also
be the only way to keep our nation from destruction.

Sincerely,
David L. Bump