William Albert Dembski (born July 18, 1960) is an American mathematician, philosopher, and theologian. He was a proponent of intelligent design (ID), a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God. He coined the intelligent design argument of specified complexity.

After earning a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1988 and a second doctorate from the University of Illinois Chicago in philosophy in 1996, Dembski taught as a professor at the Michael Polanyi Center of Baylor University. He was a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from 2006 to 2012, then a professor at Southern Evangelical Seminary from 2012 to 2013. He was also a senior fellow at the Center for Science and Culture (CSC) of the Discovery Institute, but officially retired from intelligent design and resigned from the CSC on September 23, 2016.

Dembski has written books about intelligent design, including The Design Inference (1998), Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology (1999), The Design Revolution (2004), The End of Christianity (2009), and Intelligent Design Uncensored (2010). He has postulated that probability theory can be used to prove both specified complexity and irreducible complexity. See Chapter 4 of Mere Creation (1998), "Redesigning Science".Dembski 1999, pp. 10, 107 The scientific community sees intelligent design—and Dembski's concept of specified complexity—as a form of creationism.Young & Edis 2004, pp. 1–19, 107–138, 185–196

Early life William Albert Dembski was born in Chicago, Illinois, on July 18, 1960. He was the only child of Catholic parents. His mother, Ursula, was an art dealer, and his father, William J. Dembski, was a professor of evolutionary biology who earned a D.Sc. in biology from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg after studying at the University of Illinois on the GI Bill. Dembski described his mother as having "lost any Christian belief" after she read the works of Hermann Hesse, and his father as a secularist who "was never a dogmatic Darwinist".

While growing up, Dembski was neither particularly religious nor did he question the theory of evolution. He received his first communion at age seven and was confirmed into the Catholic Church at age 13, but recalled that "I rejected many of the standard doctrines, such as the deity of Christ and the reality of hell". After being schooled in Evanston, Illinois, he attended Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island. He finished high school a year early, excelling in math and finishing a calculus course in one summer. In his final year, Dembski marked down his religious affiliation as Hindu in a school questionnaire out of disdain for Catholicism and Christianity as a whole: "I had no intention of returning to Roman Catholicism, or to any form of Christianity for that matter".

After high school, Dembski enrolled at the College of the University of Chicago at age 17 and took advanced courses in mathematics there. Despite achieving higher than a 3.8 grade point average out of 4.0, he dropped out after experiencing personal and social difficulties at the school. He then began working at his mother's oil painting business, during which time he read works on creationism and the Bible. In May 1979, after having previously rejected organized religion, Dembski accepted Christianity and converted.

Education Dembski later returned to college and graduated with honors from the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology in 1981 and a Master of Science in mathematical statistics in 1983. As an undergraduate, he won a memorial prize for the "best undergraduate research paper in psychology" and was awarded a three-year fellowship provided by the National Science Foundation. He then earned a second M.S. in pure mathematics in 1985 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1988. His doctoral dissertation at Chicago, completed under physicist Leo Kadanoff and mathematician Patrick Billingsley, was titled, "Chaos, uniform probability, and weak convergence". While obtaining his doctorate, Dembski taught undergraduate mathematics at the University of Chicago as a lecturer from 1987 to 1988.

After receiving his doctorate in mathematics, Dembski was a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he conducted research in probability theory in 1988. He became a postdoctoral fellow researching chaos theory and probability at the James Franck Institute in 1989, then a research associate in computer science at Princeton University in 1990 studying cryptography and complexity theory. While at Princeton on a NSF Grant, Dembski was supervised by computer scientist Andrew Yao. He then became a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy at Northwestern University, where he taught philosophy of religion, from 1992 to 1993. He returned to the University of Illinois Chicago and obtained a third master's degree, a Master of Arts in philosophy, in 1993.

In 1996, Dembski earned both a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) from Princeton Theological Seminary and his second doctorate, a Ph.D. in philosophy, from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His second doctoral dissertation, completed under Dorothy Grover, was titled, "The design inference: Eliminating chance through small probabilities". The thesis won a university award for the most "outstanding dissertation in fine arts and humanities". Afterwards, Dembski once again became a postdoctoral fellow, this time at the University of Notre Dame, where he taught philosophy and religion from 1996 to 1997.

Career

Discovery Institute

Instead of finding another university position, Dembski became a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Science and Culture (CSC) at the Discovery Institute (DI) in 1996. He was among the center's first class of research fellows and was given the position of "Blaise Pascal Fellow in Probability and Information Sciences". From 1997 to 1999, he was an adjunct assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas. Dembski played a central role in the CSC's extensive public and political campaigns advocating for intelligent design and its teaching in public schools through the "Teach the Controversy" campaign and became a senior fellow at the CSC. But, in September 2016, Dembski resigned from his positions at the CSC and "resigned my formal associations with the ID community". Later, a February 2021 interview in the CSC's blog Evolution News announced "his return to the intelligent design arena".

Baylor University

Michael Polanyi Center controversy

In 1999, Dembski was invited by Robert B. Sloan, the president of Baylor University, to become the executive director at Baylor's new Michael Polanyi Center (named after polymath Michael Polanyi). Dembski described it as "the first intelligent design think tank at a research university". Dembski had first met Sloan in 1996, when he was a teacher at a Christian summer camp near Waco, Texas, where Sloan's daughter was studying. Sloan had read some of Dembski's work and, according to Dembski, "made it clear that he wanted to get me on the faculty in some way". His salary was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

The Polanyi Center was established without much publicity in October 1999, initially consisting of two people: Dembski and a like-minded colleague, Bruce L. Gordon, who were both hired directly by Sloan without going through the usual channels of a search committee and departmental consultation. The majority of Baylor staff did not know of the center's existence until its website went online. The center's mission, and the lack of consultation with the Baylor faculty, became the immediate subject of controversy.

In April 2000, Dembski hosted a conference on "naturalism in science" sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation and the hub of the intelligent design movement, the Discovery Institute, seeking to address the question "Is there anything beyond nature?". A majority of Baylor faculty members boycotted the conference. A few days later, the Baylor faculty senate voted 27–2 to dissolve the center and merge it with Baylor's Institute for Faith and Learning. President Sloan refused, citing issues of censorship and academic integrity, but agreed to convene an outside committee to review the center. The committee recommended setting up a faculty advisory panel to oversee the science and religion components of the program, dropping the name "Michael Polanyi" and reconstituting the center as part of the Institute for Faith and Learning. These recommendations were accepted in full by the university administration.

In a subsequent press release, Dembski asserted that the committee had given an "unqualified affirmation of my own work on intelligent design," that its report "marks the triumph of intelligent design as a legitimate form of academic inquiry" and that "dogmatic opponents of design who demanded the Center be shut down have met their Waterloo. Baylor University is to be commended for remaining strong in the face of intolerant assaults on freedom of thought and expression". Dembski's remarks were criticized by other members of the Baylor faculty, who protested that they were both an unjustified attack on his critics at Baylor and a false assertion that the university endorsed Dembski's controversial views on intelligent design. Charles Weaver, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Baylor, said, "In academic arguments, we don't seek utter destruction and defeat of our opponents. We don't talk about Waterloos."

Dembski was relieved of his position as director by Sloan on October 19, 2000; he remained an associate professor at Baylor's Institute for Faith and Learning. In a statement, Dembski criticized faculty efforts to remove him as "intellectual McCarthyism". Professor Michael Beaty, director of the Institute for Faith and Learning, said that Dembski's remarks violated the spirit of cooperation that the committee had advocated and stated that "Dr. Dembski's actions after the release of the report compromised his ability to serve as director."

Seminary teaching

In 2005, Dembski left Baylor and became the first director of the Center for Theology and Science at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He was also named the school's Carl F. H. Henry Professor of Theology and Science, beginning on June 1, 2005. He left the school in May 2006. In June 2006, he became a professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) in Fort Worth, Texas, and taught a number of courses there in philosophy of religion. In 2012, he moved from SWBTS to Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, and taught as its Phillip E. Johnson Research Professor in Culture and Science until 2013, when he ceased teaching altogether. In 2015, he retired from his position as an academic editor at the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, which he had held since 1997.

Baylor Evolutionary Informatics Lab controversy