Explaining the concept of Intelligent Design, William Dembski compared it to looking at Mount Rushmore, the national memorial located in South Dakota that displays the granite faces of four American presidents.
William DembskiFrom looking at the monument, it’s unmistakable that there was a designer or architecture behind the massive sculpture, said Dembski, the Carl F. H. Henry Professor of Science and Theology at Southern Baptist Seminary. Dembski, a noted Intelligent Design proponent, was keynote speaker for a convocation at Midwestern Baptist Seminary.
“Wind and erosion did not create that rock face,” he said. “It required an intelligence. In this case, we know who the intelligence was. It was an eccentric artist named Gutzon Borglum.”
Intelligent Design, the scientific movement that has aroused debate and court battles across the nation and in school systems, is simply the “study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence,” he said.
“You see patterns all over the place that are best explained as a result of intelligence,” he said, pointing to Mount Rushmore as well as Stonehenge, an ancient circle of stones located in England.
“We have no idea who was responsible for it (Stonehenge). And yet the configuration of those rocks also decisively implicates design,” he said.
Scientists seeking to make the case for Intelligent Design, he said, are exploring living organisms in order to find patterns of design that can’t be explained by the slow, gradual, step-by-step changes of an organism’s development cited by evolutionary theory.
“The question is, ‘Can we look in biological systems and find evidence of design there?’ – and not just the appearance of design but actual design,” he said.
One of the most exciting areas for this research, he said, is being done in molecular biology – and in particular, the single cell.
“Inside the cell, there’s really been a revolution in molecular biology in the last 30 years,” he said. “We need high-tech engineering principles and knowledge to even understand what’s going on inside the cell.”
With the rapid advancement of science and technology, scientists now can look into the world of the cell – something Charles Darwin, writing in the late 1800s, was not able to do – and examine it on a molecular level, Dembski said.
Dembski believes that as more research is published in support of Intelligent Design, “this whole materialistic worldview will come tumbling down.”
The key, he said, is the inadequacy of evolution’s “creation story,” or account for how the world began.
“If your worldview starts with a problematic origin story, everything else is going to be infected,” he said. “I think this is what we’ve seen with this materialistic worldview.”
Intelligent Design, Dembski said, does not, and cannot, replace the gospel. “Intelligent Design is not the gospel,” he said. “If you want the gospel, read Luke. Read the gospels. The gospels will tell you about Christ and redemption in him.”