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Title: The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design by William A. Dembski, Charles W. Colson ISBN: 0-8308-2375-1 Publisher: Intervarsity Press Pub. Date: February, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A response to fundamentalist Darwin true believers
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Stunning digest of a complicated movement
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Let the Revolution Begin
Comment: by Donald McLaughlin
When Charles Darwin penned his "Origin of Species" 150 years ago, he knew that there would be controversy over his assigning to purely natural causes what up until that time most people had credited to the work of a designer. Indeed, most academics and scientists of that era would have credited the origin of biological life to the work of a supernatural Designer. Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection changed all that. And here we are 150 years later, and the debate is still ongoing in spite of statements from within Darwinian circles that the debate ended 150 years ago. To co-opt a quip from Mark Twain, rumors of the death of design in biology are greatly exaggerated.
Plain evidence for the interest in design and design arguments can be found in the wealth of books and websites dedicated to explaining design concepts, exposing weaknesses in evolutionary theory, and conceptualizing means of detecting design in biological systems. These books and articles are, for the most part, written by legitimate scientists who see scientific problems with the theory of evolution and see scientific promise in intelligent design. For those familiar with this ongoing debate, the name of William Dembski will not be unfamiliar. He has been on the forefront of the public debate and his several books and articles are often referenced, both favorably and unfavorably, depending on one's point of view on the issue.
His latest entry, "The Design Revolution" presents in one volume all the major concepts of Intelligent Design and the objections raised against them by critics, and argues for their inclusion as bona fide science. He succeeds admirably on all fronts. Readers of Dembski's other works will recognize many of the arguments presented in this volume. But this book is not merely a selected anthology of Dembski's other works. Rather, TDR brings together all of the major arguments for and against ID in one easy to follow volume, neatly laid out in 44 short chapters which are grouped into six topical sections. Each section deals with an overall theme of the ID arguments and each chapter deals with a specific question drawn mostly from actual criticisms that ID skeptics have leveled against ID.
While Dembski's draws a number of his arguments from his other books and articles, they are not just lifted wholesale and dropped into this volume. In many instances he elaborates or elucidates those arguments and makes them more accessible to a general reader. For those unfamiliar with the debate, TDR provides a clear and concise introduction to the major arguments and their implications for evolution, design and science.
For fair-minded readers, this book should, but likely won't, put an end to the debate over the scientific status of ID. Every major argument used by those opposed to including ID within science and science curriculum is presented and refuted in this volume. The conclusion to be drawn from reading this book is that there is no good argument or scientific reason to keep ID from attaining full scientific status. That, of course, doesn't guarantee ID's success as a scientific endeavor, but it does mean that, as Dembski effectively argues in this book, there are no good scientific or philosophical reasons to restrict ID from science and science curriculum.
While ID skeptics and critics will no doubt continue to voice opposition to including ID within science, this book makes it far more difficult for them to rehash the same tired arguments they've used in the past. Dembski has done a masterful job of sweeping the decks clear of those objections. Let the revolution begin.
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Title: The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery by Guillermo Gonzalez, Jay Wesley Richards ISBN: 0895260654 Publisher: Regnery Publishing Pub. Date: March, 2004 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: Darwinism, Design, and Public Education (Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series) by John Angus Campbell, Stephen C. Meyer ISBN: 0870136755 Publisher: Michigan State Univ Pr Pub. Date: December, 2003 List Price(USD): $28.95 |
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Title: What Darwin Didn't Know by Geoffrey Simmons, William Dembski ISBN: 0736913130 Publisher: Harvest House Publishers, Inc. Pub. Date: January, 2004 List Price(USD): $12.99 |
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Title: Doubts About Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design by Thomas Woodward, Phillip E. Johnson ISBN: 0801064430 Publisher: Baker Book House Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.99 |
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Title: Debating Design : From Darwin to DNA by William Dembski, Michael Ruse ISBN: 0521829496 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 30 June, 2004 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
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