Mere Creation; Science, Faith & Intelligent Design

For over a century, the scientific establishment has ignored challenges to the theory of evolution. But in the last decade such complacency about its scientific and philosophical foundations has been shaken. As cracks in the Darwinian edifice havebegun to appear, many are asking whether a defensible alternative exists.In response to this growing crisis, a movement has emerged among scholars exploring the possibility of intelligent design as an explanatory theory in scientific descriptions ofthe universe. As Michael Behe has proposed in his landmark Darwin's Black Box, at the cellular level there appears to be a high level of irreducible complexity that suggests design.In this book Behe is joined by eighteen other expert academics trained in mathematics, mechanical engineering, philosophy, physical anthropology, physics, astrophysics, biology, ecology and evolutionary biology to investigate the prospects for this emerging school of thought. Challenging the reigning ideology of materialistic naturalism on both scientific and philosophical grounds, these scholars press the case for a radical rethinknig of established evolutionary assumptions.

William Dembski (Ph.D., mathematics, University of Chicago; Ph.D., philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago) is senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. He has previously taught at Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Dallas. He has done postdoctoral work in mathematics at MIT, in physics at the University of Chicago, and in computer science at Princeton University, and he has been a National Science Foundation doctoral and postdoctoral fellow. Dembski has written numerous scholarly articles and is the author of the critically acclaimed The Design Inference (Cambridge), Intelligent Design (InterVarsity Press) and No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence (Rowman and Littlefield).