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Asking Bill Dembski: Who are your favorite Christian or other theist authors?

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Continuing with James Barham’s The Best Schools interview with design theorist Bill Dembski – who founded this blog – this time on which authors greatly influenced his thinking?

TBS: Who are your favorite Christian or other theist authors? (We define “theism” as belief in a God who created and sustains the world in existence, and who cares about particular human beings.) Which books would you especially recommend to people who would like to learn more about Christianity and/or theism?

WD: G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and C. S. Lewis’ Miracles are high on my list. [Chesterton is pictured at right—ed.] As for learning more about Christianity and theism, I would simply read the Bible. I would also have a look at a classic anthology of Eastern Orthodox spiritual writings called the Philokalia. I very much like Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed. Maimonides had a great intellect.

TBS: Are there any atheist authors whom you enjoy reading or whose work you respect? Are there any philosophical critics of Christianity and/or theism whose work you have found challenging?

WD: I’ve read plenty by Christianity’s critics, but I can’t say I’ve ever had the reaction, “Gee, that really throws me for a loop. Now I’ve got to rethink that whole God business.” I’ve enjoyed reading some atheist authors more as entertainment and cultural commentary (e.g., Bertrand Russell and Christopher Hitchens), but I can’t say I was all that impressed with their arguments. And I’m afraid professional analytic philosophy in general these days leaves me cold, so its atheist practitioners who apply their methods to dismantling theism leave me doubly cold. Sorry I can’t be more of help here, or for that matter on the last question. The type of reading I enjoy most and that stimulates me most is of a problem-solving variety, in which hard questions receive ingenious solutions. I guess I’m a mathematician at heart.

TBS: Has ID turned many atheists into theists or merely satisfied theists’ existing beliefs? What is the apologetic value of ID?

WD: I have plenty of anecdotal evidence for the power of intelligent design to shake atheists out of their dogmatic slumbers and bring them to theism. Indeed, by email and at lectures, I encounter people who claim that my own work on ID has played that role. But it would be interesting to have Barna or Gallup do a professional survey in which ID’s role as a corrective to atheism could more accurately be gauged.

As for the apologetic value of ID, I see it mainly as a ground-clearing operation, getting rid of the obstacles that naturalism has placed in the way of people coming to take the possibility of God as a live option. A reductive Darwinian science has, in my experience, been one of the main obstacles in that regard, at least in Western culture. Hitchens, Dawkins, and Dennett have all looked to Darwin as their patron saint, giving them his blessing to repudiate theism. Dawkins even wrote that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

So, if we think of atheism as a cultural phenomenon that looks to science for backing and if we think of ID as undoing that backing and thus making theism that much more plausible, we have an apologetic rationale for ID.

Next: Where WOULDN’T Dembski send a high school senior to university?

See also: Asking Bill Dembski: What would a school lesson plan for IDconsist of?

Is information a primitive concept, on a par with matter and energy?

Is there any such thing as information in the abstract or is it always information for an agent?

What does Bill Dembski think of David Abel’s “prescriptive information” theory?

Bill Dembski: Two different concepts of what ID is: Internal vs. external teleology
Pressing Bill Dembski on his conception of ID

Dembski on why ID’s struggle is going to be long and hard

Bill Dembski answers, How do we explain bad design?

Bill Dembski on the problem of good

Bill Dembski on young vs. old Earth creationists, and where he stands

Bill Dembski on the Evolutionary Informatics Lab – the one a Baylor dean tried to
shut down

Why Bill Dembski took aim against the Darwin frauds and their enablers #1

Why Bill Dembski took aim against the Darwin frauds and their enablers Part 2

Bill Dembski: The big religious conspiracy revealed #3

Bill Dembski: Evolution “played no role whatever” in his conversion to Christianity #4

So how DID Bill Dembski get interested in intelligent design? #5b – bad influences, it seems

So how DID Bill Dembski get interested in intelligent design? #5a

Bill Dembski: Trouble happens when they find out you mean business

What is Bill Dembski planning to do now?

What difference did Ben Stein’s Expelled film make? Dembski’s surprisingly mixed review

Bill Dembski on the future of intelligent design in science

Comments
I wonder what criteria random chance uses in its disposal of the creation for which it apparently acted as a midwife. Since even the most ardent atheist hasn't yet posited a means whereby nothing could create anything, even by that ordinarily unfailingly-omnipotent magician, random chance. For example, how did random chance decide on the longevity of particular animals and plants? How they would be constituted chemically, morphologically and aesthetically. How does it inspire evathang with life? I think we should be told. So much work to do for poor wee random chance. What chance is it being given, eh? That's what I ask.Axel
July 18, 2012
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I wonder what criteria random chance uses in its disposal of the creation for which it apparently acted as a midwife. Since even the most ardent atheist hasn't yet posited a means whereby nothing could create anything, even by that ordinarily unfailingly-omnipotent magician, random chance. For example, how did random chance decide on the longevity of particular animals and plans? How they would be constituted chemically, morphologically and aesthetically. How does it inspire evathang with life? I think we should be told. So much work to do for poor wee random chance. What chance is it being given, eh? That's what I ask.Axel
July 18, 2012
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“I’ve read plenty by Christianity’s critics, but I can’t say I’ve ever had the reaction, “Gee, that really throws me for a loop. Now I’ve got to rethink that whole God business.” ...which, in the history of science, has to be the biggest scandal of all time, since not only has the logic of physical proofs of theism been established, but the very premises upon which they are founded are now established physics, also. There are plenty of brilliant idiots, capable of flawless logic, but based alas on zany premises, which latter lead him and the gullible reader - to borrow from J M Keynes review of a tome by Hayek - to Bedlam. Both the centrality of the observer and the pursuit of the observer by light at its constant speed, irrespective of the former's speed in the same direction, unambiguously indicate the agency of an omniscient, omnipotent and PERSONAL god. This is surely not a matter of conjecture or even of theorising, but of mathematical certainty.Axel
July 18, 2012
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