Dembski-Ruse Debate Continued
R. Albert Mohler, Jr.
August 12, 2005
Beliefnet.com features an exchange of articles between Bill Dembski and Michael Ruse that continues and clarifies the debate. Dembski’s article includes these choice statements:
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. The task for the Christian who accepts intelligent design is therefore to formulate a theology of nature and creation that makes sense of intelligent design in light of one’s Christian faith.
Even so, there is an immediate payoff to intelligent design: it destroys the atheistic legacy of Darwinian evolution. Intelligent design makes it impossible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. This gives intelligent design incredible traction as a tool for apologetics, opening up the God-question to individuals who think that science has buried God.
In his article, Ruse chides Dembski this way: Supposedly, the ID people do not specify what kind of intelligence is involved in getting over the hump of irreducible complexity, but it is pretty clear in their writings that this intelligence is the Christian God. No one thinks that a super-bright grad student on Andromeda is running an experiment here on planet Earth, and that every now and then he or she jiggles things about a bit to see what will happen. Dembski, for one, has been explicit that he sees the designing intelligence as the Logos talked of at the beginning of Saint John’s Gospel. Is Ruse attempting something like an “outing” of Bill Dembski? Dembski is right up-front about his Christian identity and convictions. By Ruse’s logic, only an atheist can truly be an honest proponent of Intelligent Design?
R. Albert Mohler, Jr.
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