William A. Dembski Quotes
-
The young earth-solution to reconciling the order of creation with natural history makes good exegetical and theological sense. Indeed, the overwhelming consensus of theologians up through the Reformation held to this view. I myself would adopt it in a heartbeat except that nature seems to present such strong evidence against it.
→ -
My thesis is that all disciplines find their completion in Christ and cannot be properly understood apart from Christ.
→ -
Because we don't see the evil destroyed now and thus experience the suffering that evil inevitably inflicts, we are tempted to doubt God's existence and goodness.
→ -
If we take seriously the word-flesh Christology of Chalcedon (i.e., the doctrine that Christ is fully human and fully divine) and view Christ as the telos toward which God is drawing the whole of creation, then any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient.
→ -
Design theorists are no friends of theistic evolution.
→ -
Intelligent design is a modest position theologically and philosophically. It attributes the complexity and diversity of life to intelligence, but does not identify that intelligence with the God of any religious faith or philosophical system.
→ -
Without a unified political climate of opinion, there is little or no political profit in doing the right thing.
→ -
Wrong people are wrong because they use their freedom to deny it to others.
→ -
The scientific picture of the world championed since the Enlightenment is not just wrong but massively wrong. Indeed entire fields of inquiry, especially in the human sciences, will need to be rethought from the ground up in terms of intelligent design.
→ -
The problem with merely writing so that you can be understood is that the wrong people, in advancing their agendas, are only too ready to misunderstand you. Writing so that you cannot be misunderstood anticipates and preempts those who would willfully distort what you are trying to say.
→ -
Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.
→ -
The wrong people will do everything in their power to guarantee that the wrong political climate will continue. It seems, then, that the wrong people ensure the wrong political climate and the wrong political climate ensures the wrong people. How then to break free of this vicious circle?
→ -
As a biblical inerrantist, I believe that what the Bible teaches is true and bow to the text, including its teaching about the Flood and its universality.
→ -
If you have no authority to legislate my freedoms, then I'm truly free, at least from you.
→ -
The world is a mirror representing the divine life.
→ -
Wrong people are wrong not because of their faults but because of their presumed virtues.
→ -
You have to understand, in the current academic climate, Intelligent Design is like leprosy or heresy in times past. To be tagged as an ID supporter is to become an academic pariah, and this holds even at so-called Christian institutions that place a premium on respectability at the expense of truth and the offense of the Gospel.
→ -
In God becoming human in Jesus Christ, God has established solidarity with the human condition.
→ -
How a designer gets from thought to thing is, at least in broad strokes, straightforward: (1) A designer conceives a purpose. (2) To accomplish that purpose, the designer forms a plan. (3) To execute the plan, the designer specifies building materials and assembly instructions. (4) Finally, the designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials. What emerges is a designed object, and the designer is successful to the degree that the object fulfills the designer's purpose.
→ -
The problem of good as it faces the atheist is this: Nature, which is the nuts-and-bolts reality for the atheist, has no values and thus can offer no grounding for good and evil. Values on the atheist view are subjective and contingent.
→ -
Government has a legitimate sphere of operation. The problem arises when that sphere continually expands, encompassing areas where government lacks legitimacy.
→ -
Intelligent design, unlike creationism, is a science in its own right and can stand on its own feet.
→ -
Naturalism is the view that the physical world is a self-contained system that works by blind, unbroken natural laws. Naturalism doesn't come right out and say there's nothing beyond nature. Rather, it says that nothing beyond nature could have any conceivable relevance to what happens in nature. Naturalism's answer to theism is not atheism but benign neglect. People are welcome to believe in God, though not a God who makes a difference in the natural order.
→ -
As far as design theorists are concerned, theistic evolution is American evangelicalism's ill-conceived accommodation to Darwinism .
→ -
The positive evidence for Darwinism is confined to small-scale evolutionary changes like insects developing insecticide resistance....Evidence like that for insecticide resistance confirms the Darwinian selection mechanism for small-scale changes, but hardly warrants the grand extrapolation that Darwinists want. It is a huge leap going from insects developing insecticide resistance via the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation to the very emergence of insects in the first place by that same mechanism.
→ -
The mechanical philosophy was ever blind to this fact. Intelligent design, on the other hand, readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.
→ -
The atheist is cheating whenever he makes a moral judgment, acting as though it has an objective reference, when his philosophy in fact precludes it.
→ -
The fundamental claim of intelligent design is straightforward and easily intelligible: namely, there are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence.
→ -
Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners do not have a clue about him.
→ -
The question rather is how we should do science and theology in light of the impending collapse of Enlightenment rationalism and scientific naturalism. These ideologies are on the way out. They are on the way out.
→
Related Authors
-
Michael Polanyi Economic Consultant -
-
William Lane Craig Philosopher -
Josh McDowell Writer -
John Searle Philosopher -
Henry M. Morris University Professor -
Hugh Ross Creationist -
-
David Berlinski Educator -
Michael Ruse Philosopher -
Leo Kadanoff Physicist -
Michael Behe Biochemist -
Norman Geisler Philosopher -
Christopher Hitchens Author -
-
Dean H. Kenyon Author -
Kenneth R. Miller Biologist -
Eugenie Scott Anthropologist -
-
Phillip E. Johnson Law professor