[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Is it possible to empirically detect design and living systems? Hi, I'm Brian Miller, your host for this episode of ID the Future. Today, I begin a two part conversation with Dr. William Dempsky about his landmark book the Design Inference. First edition was published in 1998. A newly revised and expanded edition of the book has been published by Discovery Institute Press Academic to mark the volume's 25th anniversary. A noted mathematician and philosopher, Dr. Dempsky is a founding and senior Fellow with Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture and Distinguished Fellow with the institute's Walter Bradley center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Dempsky is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he earned a bachelor's in psychology and a doctorate in philosophy. He also received a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1988 and a Master Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1996. He has held National Science foundation graduate and postdoctoral fellowships. Dr. Dempsky is published in the peer reviewed mathematics, engineering, biology, philosophy, and theology literature. He is the author or editor of more than 25 books. His most recent books relating to Intelligent Design include 2000 and Fourteen's Being as Communion, a Metaphysics of Information evolutionary informatics in 2017, which he coauthored with Robert Marx and Winston Yewart, and a new second edition of the Design Inference, coauthored with Winston Ewart. Dr. Dempsky, welcome to ID of the Future.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: It's great to be with you, Brian.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: In part one of this interview, I thought we'd focus on the history behind the design detection framework and how the design inference initially came about. In the second episode, we'll focus on the details of this new second edition and what sets it apart from the original edition. And I have to say I have been looking forward to this interview because I read through your second edition and absolutely loved the book. So I want to begin by simply asking, what inspired you originally to research a general method for detecting design?
[00:02:36] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good question. It goes back, I would say, to about 1988, when I was just finishing my dissertation in mathematics. I had some time on my hands. I had been doing just some straight up probability theory for my dissertation, and I was looking at the question of randomness and then connections with computing theory and cryptography. And there was a statistician at Stanford named Percy Diaconus who was holding a conference, an interdisciplinary conference on randomness at Ohio State. The co convener of that conference was Harvey Friedman, a well known logician. And so you had computer scientists, economists, philosophers, psychologists, and others who were represented at that conference. And the idea was to try to get a handle on what is the nature of randomness. And this is at a time of ferment in physics with the whole business of nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory.
Computers were just getting powerful enough to track these nonlinear dynamical systems to produce pretty pictures based on them. And so this was a question for the.
So I attended the conference. It was about a five day event. And at the end of it, Percy Diconus summed it up by saying, we know what randomness isn't, we don't know what it is. And so it ended a bit on a thud. There were no conference proceedings. And the intuition, though, behind that statement, we know what randomness isn't, we don't know what it is.
The idea there is randomness suggests some sort of disarray, patternlessness.
And once you see a pattern there, then it's no longer random. So you might be looking at something that looks like a Rorschach ink block, but then suddenly you see it's a skull or it's a woman in a mirror or something. We've all seen these sorts of illusions where it looks like it could be random, but then once you see the pattern, it's non random. And there's an asymmetry between randomness and non randomnEss. Once you see the pattern, once you see that it's non random, it can't go back to being random again unless you have amnesia. But typically, once you see what's there, it's no longer random. So that was the problem. That was where the conference left. And I ended up, about two years later, publishing an article which I titled Randomness by Design.
And the idea there was that randomness is inherently parasitic on design. You see, I think from a materialistic point of view, randomness is fundamental. And then design intelligence is something that emerges out of basically chaotic chance processes. But what I did is I flipped the problem and I said, something is random only as long as it breaks a set of patterns. And once something then matches, once an event matches one of those patterns, it can no longer be considered random. So that was the idea. Relativized randomness to patterns, and thus to design in some sense. But in a sense, that paper was agnostic about, well, design. It wasn't really saying these patterns were the result of intelligence. They could be anything. And so the follow up paper that I wrote was, I published the Randomness by design in a philosophy journal Noose. Then a follow up it was, paper was to be called when Chance precludes Chance. And there I was looking, okay, well, then, what are the sorts of patterns that in practice we use to defeat chance and actually infer design? And so this was a preliminary stab at this. This was also around 1991, and the paper came back from the reviewers at synthesis and says, there's a good paper in here, but it needs to be developed further. Well, developing it further took a lot of time, and that eventually became the design inference. But that's where it really started. It was a fundamental analysis of randomness, and that work got me some notice. There was a big eight volume encyclopedia of Philosophy done by Rutledge, published in 1998, and I was asked to do the article on Randomness for that publication.
But that's the backstory. That's kind of the problematic, as philosophers would say, that got me into this.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: Well, how did that actually lead to the book, the design inference? What was that path?
[00:07:39] Speaker A: Yeah, well, from there, that's a good question. What is the path?
I published that article in News, which was a very well regarded philosophy journal. I would say probably in the English speaking world. It may have been among the top three philosophy journals. I'd also published right around pretty much at the same time a critique of artificial intelligence for perspectives on Science and Christian faith, the American Scientific Affiliation Journal. And I was really going solo. I was working on toward a second PhD in philosophy.
There was no intelligent design colleagues that I knew.
I felt, though, that there was something important about this question of design, that it still had life in it, and that if it could be revived, it could do a lot of good in reversing so much of the secularism and materialism of our age.
That was a motivation, and I mean, the motivation still needs to be shored up with rigorous thinking, and that's what I intended to do. But just as a little backdrop, my first postdoc in mathematics was at MIT. And I remember looking at those buildings and the names of some of the great scientists inscribed. And it just struck me how Christianity and belief in God had just come to seem non consequential in the circles where I traveled. And I was wondering, what would it take to give Christian belief, faith in God, purpose in nature, give it some brass tax, make it something that needs to be taken seriously again? And so science seemed to be an avenue to do that. In any case, I'd written these two articles, one for news, randomness by design, the other a critique of artificial intelligence from the perspectives on Science and Christian faith. I think Steve Meyer read the one and Paul Nelson the other. I think Paul may have read the one in noose. And they were at the time looking to do a book to put design on a rigorous scientific foundation. They were looking to get a mathematician or somebody with math skills. They initially wanted to get Charlie Thaxton, who had written co authored Mystery of life's origin, but he was unavailable. And so when they saw that I had been writing this and also in that perspectives on Science and Christian faith, as I said, I was going solo. They gave me about 150 word bio to write. And I thought, well, I'm just going to run up my interest on design on a flagpole.
So I said some things about my educational background. Then I said that I'm hoping to revive the design argument and put it on a rigorous scientific basis. Something along those lines. Anyway, when Steve Meyer and Paul Nelson came aware of that, they enlisted me. And so that was really my entree into the whole intelligent design community. And so the intention was for us to write a joint book. And then the design inference, laying out this method of design detection was to be the first part of a three author book which would then, as it were, pass the baton to Paul and Steve as they would deal with the actual biology. Well, that book, at least in that form, never happened. So the years passed. I think Steve and Paul, we all got busy with things. I mean, the design movement was starting to get going. And so I ended up as a grad student, actually in theology at the time, thinking I had a dissertation on the logic of conditionals that got stalled. And I had worked with one advisor, he left the program. Another advisor, he left the program. Third advisor, he fell ill with depression. Fourth advisor, she never really got behind it. And so finally I gave up on that dissertation, was a seminary student, and then wrote it my second year as a seminary student, a dissertation. I thought, okay, I'm just going to play to my strengths and write up what I was planning on doing for that book with Steve and Paul. That didn't seem like it was going to get off the.
So I wrote it as a doctoral dissertation. It got accepted immediately and even won a dissertation award. And from that randomness conference, I'd actually met the chief editor for Cambridge University Press for that Cambridge monograph series in which the design inference appeared. So once it was a dissertation that was accepted, I contacted that person, this was Brian Skirms, and said, hey, I'd like to submit this work to your monograph series.
Everything was providentially held together and it was accepted and then finally published with Cambridge University Press in 1998.
[00:13:07] Speaker B: Now, could you share a little bit about the significance of the publisher. And could you talk a little bit about the peer review process your book went through before it was published?
[00:13:17] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a good question, because when the design inference came out and my association with intelligent design became clear, there are a lot of people who wanted to discredit that book. And one of the ways to try to discredit it is to say, well, it's just a book. What you really need to do is publish a peer reviewed paper in the relevant literature. But this was a monograph series. So the design inference, eliminating chance through small probabilities, appeared in Cambridge studies in Probability induction and decision theory. So it's a monograph series. And monographs are basically journal articles that are too long to appear in journals, so they become their own books, and that's what the design inference was. So it was a research monograph. Brian Skirms was the academic editor for that series. There was also Cambridge University Press, had offices in New York City. And so there you had a business editor. That was Terrence Moore at the time, but Brian Scurms oversaw it. And as with any peer reviewed journal article, it has to go to referees. And so there were three referees that he contacted to review the book.
One was overwhelmingly positive, another was, on balance, positive. And then the third referee was, I would say, probably more negative than positive, but did say the introduction reads well, is interesting, and people only read introductions anyway, so it seemed as though he wouldn't have a problem if it was published. But anyway, so Brian Skirms, the lead, the editor over the whole series, decided at that point it was his call. I mean, he could have nixed it, but he didn't. And he did give me some places to make changes and improvements. So the referees had provided some input, and so there was quite a bit of revision from the dissertation, as happens when dissertations get published. So that was all, I think, the revisions, 97 97. And then it appeared, I think it was early fall of 1998.
[00:15:38] Speaker B: Oh, that's a fascinating story. And usually these dramas have wonderful twists and turns, but I'm going to just take a little bit of a side issue and talk about another major book that was published, which was Darwin's Origin of Species, because it was published in 1859, and with it really ushered in an era of more atheistic ideology and what might be called philosophical materialism that continued through the 20th century. In his book, the Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins summed up his bold Darwinian perspective. Biology is a study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for purpose. And the book was really significant because I read it when I was in college, and it convinced me that essentially religion was a psychological crutch and I was simply an act of nature. But fortunately, I'd read other works, like Michael Dennen's book that helped to convince me that that claim was false. So in terms of your book, how did the design inference also help to reverse this thinking?
[00:16:39] Speaker A: Yeah, that's an interesting question. The design inference, pitting it against Dawkins, the blind Watchmaker. Actually, I read the blind Watchmaker in the late eighty s, and it was one of the key things I read that actually spurred the design inference I mentioned earlier about my paper, randomness by design. But it was, in reading Dawkins, I think some mistakes are just silly, and there's not much to be learned from them. But Dawkins had a lot of the right intuitions. He just ended up in the wrong place. So this notion of what is it that identifies intelligence in the design inference, it was specified in probability. Later I would call it specified complexity. But Dawkins has that notion of specified complexity in the blind watchmaker, but he doesn't take it to the right place. Basically, specified complexity is kind of this illusion of improbability. But when you understand what the Darwinian mechanism is doing, then things really aren't improbable. No design inference kicks in. But he allows, in a sense, that if the probabilities really were that bad, he'll say, you can only allow so much luck in a scientific theory.
If probabilities really did get so small, then something like design would be in evidence. So I would say what I was doing in the design inference was in a dialectical conversation with Darwin and Dawkins. And whereas Darwin and Dawkins needed that every aspect of biology be undesigned, it was enough for me to say, okay, is there a method for reliably detecting design? And if that method is applied to biological systems, some biological systems, could it reliably tell us that we are dealing with an effective intelligence? And I would say, there's the method, and there's the application of the method. The method, I would say, is rock solid. The application of the method to biology, it takes a lot of work, because biological systems are complicated. Doing the probabilistic analysis, it takes some work, especially because the probabilities need to factor in natural selection. But this work of mine on the design inference arose in conversation with that of Dawkins and Darwin.
[00:19:16] Speaker B: Now, how was your book initially received.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: The design inference when it came out for a brief window.
It was well received.
I was on the job market in philosophy. I was being interviewed. I think Princeton and Notre Dame was looking at me, some other schools, I ended up getting on the shortlist, and I think even the short short list for Notre Dame ended up giving a job talk there. But at the end of the day, this was too unorthodox. But on the mean, it was regarded as a valuable contribution. If you look at just some of the endorsements that the book got, for instance, from Bill Wimsat, a philosopher of biology at University of Chicago, I mean, he puts it in glowing terms that this is the most sophisticated analysis of randomness, that it examines design in a post Darwinian context. Context. Another reviewer or endorser says he sees this as truly groundbreaking book. So that was a lot of the reaction I got. So I was basking in the glow, but it was a brief glow because in the book itself, in the first edition, I didn't really apply this design inferential method to biology.
I was looking at other areas, cryptography, forensic science, search for extraterrestrial intelligence, data falsification, things like that. Archaeology. Is that a burial mound or is it an actual, or is it a randomly transformed mound? But the thing is, very shortly after I published the Design Inference in 1998, I published and edited an anthology titled Mere Creation, which had contributions by people like J. P. Morland, Walter Bradley, Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson. And then the following year, I had a book, Intelligent Design the Bridge between Science and theology with Intervarsity Press, which won their Christianity today's best book in, I think, Christianity and Culture, or something like that, society.
Very quickly I put my cards on the table about where I would like these ideas to go.
I think intelligent design is various things. I mean, at its core it's a scientific research program. But the thing is, there are cultural and theological implications of intelligent design, just as there are cultural and theological or anti theological implications of Darwin. I mean, Darwinism. So you'll have somebody like Stephen J. Gould, who would write, ever since Darwin, we know that we were not created in the image of a benevolent God. How does he know that from what purports to be a purely scientific theory? So we draw implications from our scientific work. We try to put together a coherent worldview. So the short answer is, design inference was initially received very well. When people got wind of where I was going with it, that was a bridge too far, and they quickly tried to distance themselves from it.
[00:22:43] Speaker B: What were some of the harsher responses I know you had going through some real challenges. Could you share some of what happened?
[00:22:51] Speaker A: Well, I mean, I was hired, actually, by Baylor to do an intelligent design think tank. And I'd say that was largely on the strength of the design inference. This was 1999, 2000.
It was called the Michael Polani center, and you can find that what happened there on the Web. But we had a big kickoff conference in April of 2002. Nobel laureates, Steven Weinberg from UT Austin, Christian de Dove, chemist who would work in origin of life biology, just very well attended, and people talking on both or even three sides of a given issue. So it was friendly sort of debate format. In any case, within four days of that conference, the faculty Senate voted 27 to two to shut this center down.
And after that, my academic reputation just got hit, one thing after another. So things became just difficult. My academic advancement essentially halted people who had been on my side. William Bill Wimsat, you can actually find his endorsement in an appendix of the second edition, an endorsement for the first edition. A few years later, he writes a forward or no, I think it's an endorsement for a book by Sohotra Sarkar on questioning Darwinism. And then in that says, this book refutes Demsky, who would bring biology back into the Middle Ages. So it's this sort of demonization and just crass, just dismissal, whereas a few years before, I was this ultra sophisticated thinker. So that's emblematic of the sort of stuff I was seeing. And it was as though people could not stand to give these ideas any time of day because it was just too terrible. What would happen to biology and science? Well, what would have been the consequence? Well, Darwinism would be seen as the emperor's clothing that it is. I think that would have been the consequence. And people who put their lot behind it, people don't like to be shown up.
Saving face is a big deal, especially in the academy.
This is the type of stuff I was dealing with, and I used it to keep myself going and keep publishing, you know. So at Baylor, for instance, I will say I'm. I was faculty there. It was a contract faculty from 1999 to 2005. But people would say, what did you teach there? And the fact is I never taught anything there because I was not permitted to teach.
That was it. So it was like, I remember the business school, even some business school. People wanted me to teach a class because evolutionary thinking was getting into business, and the administration shot it down because they just didn't want the controversy associated with me. When I was at Baylor, I won two Christianity Today book prizes. None of that. Nothing no accomplishments of mine ever made it into the sort of advertisements that the university put out to tout their faculty and their accomplishments. So, for all you would have known from the university during my five years there, I did not exist. At least after that conference and after the center that I was hired to found was discontinued.
[00:26:51] Speaker B: Well, I have to say, you always have been one of my heroes, because you're a person who's prioritized the truth over social acceptance. So I commend you for your courage of continuing to do research and continuing to explore these questions despite the opposition. And in line with that comment, you've written many other books. So, for instance, you wrote no free lunch. You wrote being is communion. Could you talk about how those books built upon the ideas of the design inference?
[00:27:23] Speaker A: Yeah, no free lunch. I mean, design inference generated a big literature response. And so this was a way of responding to objections and also making the application to biology explicit. It was a quickly written book. It was a long book, but it was quickly written.
I could say that design inference two, the second edition, takes what's best in no free lunch and really makes it much better and makes the application to biology much more rigorous. But the work on conservation of information, this was something that initially, I mooted the idea of conservation of information in no free lunch, that book. But it was more of a qualitative treatment. And then in subsequent years, it's got a quantitative treatment where there were actual no free lunch and, well, no free lunch theorems. They were already out there. By conservation of information theorems, we proved those. And so that work was done by.
I initiated that, and then Winston Ewart and Bob Marks played a really pivotal role in that.
[00:28:39] Speaker B: Okay, and could you just quickly summarize, what was the basic argument in the design inference?
[00:28:47] Speaker A: The idea in the design inference is that small probabilities can be used to eliminate chance and infer design if those small probabilities are combined with a pattern. But it has to be a particular type of pattern. It's what I call a specification. And the easiest way I have of illustrating that is if you think of an arrow being shot at a large wall, the arrowhead is very small. The wall is so large, you can't help but hit it. But the precise place where that arrow Lands is going to be highly improbable. Now, consider two types of patterns. One where you fix a target, and then you shoot at the target, and the arrows hit the bullseye squarely each time. In that case, our natural inference is to say that the Archer, assume the archer is standing far away is a skilled archer. So there's a design inference that's drawn. On the other hand, there can be patterns that are artificial, that are read off of the event. So let's say I shoot the arrow at the wall, and every time the arrow lands, then I get out my bucket of paint and paint a target around the arrow so that the arrow is squarely in the bullseye. Now, you have a pattern, small probability match, but it's not the type of match that will tell you anything about the event being designed. And so it's getting the right sorts of patterns. Now that what I just described with an arrow and a target, that's standard statistical significance testing. It's setting up a rejection region in advance of an experiment. And so the challenge, though, was really to generalize those types of patterns that, in the presence of small probability, will allow you to infer design.
The reason that was important is because I did have my eye on origin of life and subsequent history of life. And the thing is, the patterns, we discover these patterns after the fact, they're already there, like the target that's put up there after the arrowhead lands. So how do we know that when we are looking at a pattern that matches up with a small probability event, that it's not just something that's factitious, that's artificial, that we're just making up, that we're imposing, but in some sense, it's an objectively independently given pattern, so that when you get that match, you can rightly infer design. So that was the challenge to come up with, really. I think it's in some ways, at the heart of the design inference is a theory of specification, the types of patterns that, in the presence of small probability, allow us to infer design.
[00:31:37] Speaker B: Now, when did you realize that you needed to write a second edition? What inspired you to do so?
[00:31:42] Speaker A: The second edition is something that I'd been wanting to do for a long time. I mean, I think this book could have been written probably 15 years ago, maybe 13 years ago.
The thing is, we were actually planning on folding in, conservation of information into this book, and then it just got too big. So in that case, it would have had to be done subsequently, but probably could have been done ten or seven years ago. But I've been wanting to do it for a long time. What really, perhaps one of the main things that stood in the way was the sense that my publisher, Cambridge University Press, was not behind the book. So when it was first published, the publisher was behind it. It did very well, for them, for what it was. I mean, as a monograph in Cambridge studies and probability induction, decision theory, it was not going to be a New York Times bestseller, so that you could just take as a given. But for what it was, it sold very well. I'm told it was the best selling monograph of that type for five years. And so, given the success of it as a publication, I approached the business editor, Terrence Moore in New York, and said, hey, I'd like to do a sequel. Can I get a contract to do that? And he said, you're going to need to give us the most controversial chapters. And I should warn you that even if it gets accepted on this side of the Atlantic, there are one or two biologists on the Cambridge Syndicate in the UK, across the pond, who will probably not endorse it, who will deep six it. So he was kind enough to warn me what I would be facing.
So that's why, actually, no free lunch was a book that I was going to write for Cambridge University Press. I ended up publishing it with Roman and Littlefield instead. But once that happened, I did publish another book with Cambridge later, but it was an anthology with Michael Ruse called Debating Design that came out in 2004. But once that happened, an exchange like that, you know, that things are soured.
And so I just never thought I wanted to do a second edition. But it's like, do I really want to deal with these editors and have to justify doing a second edition? And so it was just kind of nagging in the back of my mind. I was staying busy with other things, but the thought that it really needed a second edition, that there was a lot that needed to be cleaned up, there were a lot of criticisms that I responded to in other publications, and that it would be good to just tie all of that together. That was very much in my thinking. But again, knowing that the publisher was not behind the book, I thought, what's the point? But then finally, in 2020, on a lark, I decided, I'm just going to track down. Terrence Moore had died of cancer shortly after our exchange. I didn't know who was running, who were the relevant editors were at the press, but I tracked them down. And then I wrote them an email and said, I would like to get the rights to the design inference back. And within a week, they gave me the rights back.
I'm not sure what to think of. It's like, there's the door, please exit it.
We're glad to separate from you. But whatever their rationale, I had the rights back. And at that point, I was energized to work on the second edition.
So that work did it. It was really all of 2022, and then half of 2023 or more were devoted to rewriting it. And not just rewriting it, but expanding it, working with Winston Youart as a co author. So it was a lot of work. I mean, the original was 88,000 words. The second edition is over 180,000 words. Now, that does include some endorsements and a foreword. But even so, it's essentially twice the length. And I would say the actual text from the original is probably only about 30,000 words or so. So it's in many ways really a new book.
[00:36:20] Speaker B: Well, that was a really helpful background of what inspired you to write the second edition. And we'll end the conversation here for the moment. But in the second part, we'll focus on the details of the second edition of the Design Inference. Bill, thank you so much for your time.
[00:36:36] Speaker A: My pleasure.
[00:36:38] Speaker B: Learn more and get a copy of the new second
[email protected]. That's th e designinference.com for idthefuture. I'm Brian Miller. Thanks for listening.
[00:36:54] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
