Bill Dembski

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Freedom, Technology, Education
Only the educated are free — Epictetus

Disillusion with Fundamentalism

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I had the opportunity at the end of this month (May 2016) to update an interview I did four years ago at TheBestSchools.org:

www.thebestschools.org/features/william-dembski-interview/

In the updated interview, I elaborated on my concerns over fundamentalism. Below are the relevant two questions and answers:

Disillusion with Fundamentalism


TBS: In a debate with Christopher Hitchens in 2010, you cite Boethius in saying that goodness is a problem for the atheist in the same way that evil is a problem for the theist. We would like to hear more about both sides of this interesting observation. First, the problem of evil, which is a main topic of your book The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World (B&H Academic, 2009). For the sake of our readers: The “problem of evil” is the apparent incompatibility of evil with the omnipotence and goodness of God. In a nutshell, could you tell us about your personal take on this perennial problem?

WD: My basic line on the problem of evil is the very traditional Christian view that God allows evil temporarily because of the greater good that ultimately results from having allowed it. My entire prepared remarks in the debate with Hitchens are available online. I encourage readers of this interview to look at it. The entire debate is also available here:

What I was dealing with in The End of Christianity is a more narrow problem, namely, how to account for evil within a Christian framework given a reading of Genesis that allows the earth and universe to be billions, rather than merely thousands, of years old. I’m an old-earth creationist, so I accept that the earth and universe are billions of years old. Young-earth creationism, which is the more traditional view, holds that the earth is only thousands of years old.

The reason this divergence between young-earth and old-earth creationists is relevant to the problem of evil is that Christians have traditionally believed that both moral and natural evil are a consequence of the fall of humanity. But natural evil, such as animals killing and parasitizing each other, would predate the arrival of humans on the scene if the earth is old and animal life preceded them. So, how could their suffering be a consequence of human sin and the Fall? My solution is to argue that the Fall had retroactive effects in history (much as the salvation of Christ on the Cross acts not only forward in time to save people now, but also backward in time to save the Old Testament saints).

The book is a piece of speculative theology, and I’m not convinced of all of its details. It’s been interesting, however, to see the reaction in some Christian circles, especially the fundamentalist ones. Ken Ham went ballistic on it, going around the country denouncing me as a heretic, and encouraging people to write to my theological employers to see to it that I get fired for the views I take in it.

At one point in the book, I examine what evolution would look like within the framework I lay out. Now, I’m not an evolutionist. I don’t hold to universal common ancestry. I believe in a real Adam and Eve (i.e., an original human pair) specially created by God apart from primate ancestors. Friends used to joke that my conservativism, both politically and theologically, put me to the right of Attila the Hun. And yet, for merely running the logic of how a retroactive view of the Fall would look from the vantage of Darwinian theory (which I don’t accept), I received email after email calling me a compromiser and someone who has sold out the faith (the emails are really quite remarkable).

There’s a mentality I see prevalent in conservative Christian circles that one can never be quite conservative enough. This got me thinking about fundamentalism and the bane it is. It’s one thing to hold views passionately. It’s another to hold one particular view so dogmatically that all others may not even be discussed, or their logical consequences considered. This worries me about the future of evangelicalism. [Read more…] about Disillusion with Fundamentalism

The Limitations of Our Time

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I usually like to start the workday with reading the lectionary, which includes readings from the Psalter, the Old Testament or Apocrypha, the New Testament (non-Gospels), and the Gospels. Additionally, on some days, there is a brief account of a saint who is celebrated that day along with a prayer remembering that saint (sometimes more than one saint is commemorated on a given day).

The other day, Edward Demby and Henry Delany were commemorated. Here was the prayer that was offered at their inspiration:

Loving God, we offer thanks for the ministries of Edward Thomas Demby and Henry Beard Delany, bishops of thy Church who, though limited by segregation, served faithfully to thy honor and glory. Assist us, we pray, to break through the limitations of our own time, that we may minister in obedience to Jesus Christ; who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

I like the phrase “limitations of our own time.” The phrase does not excuse the faults of our time, or of any time for that matter. Indeed, the two men commemorated here can rightly be said to have transcended the limitations of their time. [Read more…] about The Limitations of Our Time

Is Listening the Same as Reading?

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I have a special-needs son and often have to watch him outside, as when we go for a walk together or drive around in my pickup (he loves to go for car rides). As a result, I’m often listening to books from Audible on my iPhone when I’m with my son.

These books can be quite interesting, so I sometimes discuss them with friends and colleagues. When I’m in the middle of listening to such a book, I often tell the person I’m speaking with that I’m “reading” such-and-such a book. But am I really reading it? Would it be more accurate to say the I’m listening to the book on my iPhone?

Accuracy is fine as far as it goes, but I’m no fan of scrupulous accuracy. So I don’t feel any compunction when I tell people I’m reading a book when I’m listening to it being read. That said, the distinction between going through a book by listening to it versus actually running one’s eyes over the text and extracting the information from it that way is interesting and one I’d like to explore in this article briefly. [Read more…] about Is Listening the Same as Reading?

Tribeca Film Festival cancels the film Vaxxed

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A week or so ago Robert De Niro was still supporting the showing of Vaxxed at the Tribeca Film Festival. Then last weekend he pulled the plug.

De Niro and his wife Grace have a son with autism. So do I. By unhappy coincidence, our son John’s cogitive capacities collapsed after a round of vaccinations when he was two.

“Vaccines are safe and effective.” That’s the mantra we continuously hear from Big Pharma as well as the same skeptics who over the years have been implacable foes of ID.

I’m not sure the precise role that vaccines played in my son John’s problems. He has a twin who received the same vaccines, but was unaffected. So if vaccines played a causal role in John’s autism, there must have been other predisposing factors.

My own sense is that vaccines pulled the trigger in our son John’s case. At the very least, I would thus have liked to see Tribeca allow Vaxxed to be shown and its content to be freely discussed.

But the pro-vaccine forces see it as a moral mission to suppress discussion of this topic. Andrew Wakefield, the director of Vaxxed, we are repeatedly told has been thoroughly discredited (discredited by interests incentivized to see him discredited).

I feel for Robert De Niro. He wanted to see Vaxxed get a hearing. But the pressure he faced for withdrawing the film must have been enormous. I saw a similar move a decade ago when the ID film The Privileged Planet was to be shown at the Smithsonian. The uproar against it was enormous.

I have not seen Vaxxed, but I look forward to seeing it. Click here for the film’s website.

Del Bigtree, the film’s producer, had an interesting interview, which was made before the film was nixed by Tribeca:

Remembering Leo Kadanoff

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Leo-KadanoffOn October 26th, 2015, I received an email from a colleague of my former dissertation supervisor, Leo Kadanoff, informing me that Leo had died that morning. It’s now several weeks since his passing, but I still would like to pay my respects to him here at this blog.

I came to know Leo as a math graduate student in 1987. It was an uncertain time in my mathematical education. I had finished my qualifying work and spent a semester doing research in probability at Cornell in the fall of 1986. Back at the University of Chicago at the start of 1987, I was looking for a dissertation problem with which to get my PhD and move on.

Patrick Billingsley, who was the main probabilist in the UofC math department at the time, was no longer at the top of his game, having, as he put it to me, “run out of steam,” and then turned to acting as what appeared to be his primary interest (he was quite accomplished locally in the Chicago theater, and one can see him with small roles in various Hollywood films from the 1980s, notably THE BODYGUARD and SOMEWHERE IN TIME).

Given my interest in probability theory, I was therefore looking for someone at the University of Chicago to supplement my work with Patrick Billingsley, someone who was at the top of his game and used probability as an essential component in a cutting-edge research program. That, as it turned out, proved to be Leo Kadanoff. When I defended my dissertation in the spring of 1988, Patrick Billingsley and Leo Kadanoff were joint dissertation supervisors. [Read more…] about Remembering Leo Kadanoff

Political Correctness Inventory

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THE POLITICAL CORRECTNESS INVENTORY (PCI)

How politically correct (PC) are you? The Political Correctness Inventory (PCI) will help you to answer that question. On it, you will find pairs of statements representing the politically correct and politically incorrect position on a broad range of contemporary issues, all the way from sex and education to politics and science.

What does it mean to be PC? It means to adhere to the belief system shared by the most intelligent, influential, and attractive people in America today. By taking this test, you will find out how closely your own thinking matches that of the smartest opinion-makers in our nation’s universities and the most captivating taste-makers in Hollywood and the media. [Read more…] about Political Correctness Inventory