Intelligent Design ( Report) - Book Report/Review Example

The first chapter attempts to describe the problems of the logic of evolution and atheism. First, the author describes a scene from the television show The Simpsons in which Homer asks for an recognition to an answer of a prayer to be the lack of an answer at all. People generally think of messages from God as burning bushes, fiery angels, or other miraculous events. Dembski goes on to explain how no message can't be viewed as proof of a lack of God, and he goes on to compare this idea to the way that people infer a lack of design in the sciences.

People tend to ignore aspects of biology that point to design because the scientists working on these issues don't want to believe in the implications of designed biological organisms. Dembski states that this tendency should be discouraged and that science should recognize the "divine finger" found in nature. The fourth chapter takes on the issue of naturalism. He argues against naturalistic explanations used in evolution, and states that the cure for such ideas can be found in intelligent design.

He also makes his view known that he doesn't see intelligent design as just being theistic evolution. . He first discusses the nature, the ways, and the reasons for why design was removed from science. He also discusses the two main ideas behind intelligent design in this chapter, irreducible complexity and specified complexity. The first idea, irreducible complexity, was first posited by Michael Behe in his book Darwin's Black Box. It is one way to counter evolution, it states that there are structures in nature, such as the bacterium's flagellum, that are too complex and could not have evolved through natural selection.

The idea of specified complexity is Dembski's own term, and it states that there are structures found in nature that are specific, that they satisfy independently given patterns, and that they are complex, that they would be difficult to reproduce by random chance. This is another argument against natural selection. The sixth chapter discusses intelligent design as a theory of information. Another opposition to natural selection that Dembski makes is that he states that information cannot arise from chaos, and he states that the way natural selection works requires the information of complex structures to arise from the chaos of randomness in natural selection.

This law is referred to as the law of the conservation of information. The information argument cannot be dismissed, he states, and science needs to incorporate this idea. After discussing various ways in which information can and cannot be created, Dembski then goes on to state a way that evolutionary biology should be reconceptualized. The intended audience of the book is non-academics. It was intended to be written in a way that it did not require the reader to have a familiarity in complex mathematics, historical evolutionary debates, or