#nature

"Theism holds that God by wisdom created the world. The origin of the world and its subsequent ordering thus results from the designing activity of an intelligent agent—God. Naturalism, on the other hand, allows no place for intelligent agency except at the end of a blind, purposeless material process. Within naturalism, any intelligence is an evolved intelligence. Moreover, the evolutionary process by which any such intelligence developed is itself blind and purposeless. As a consequence, naturalism makes intelligence not a basic creative force within nature but an evolutionary byproduct. In particular, humans are not the crown of creation, not the carefully designed outcome of a purposeful creator, and certainly not creatures made in the image of a benevolent God. Rather, humans are an accident of natural history."

React to this quote

More by William A. Dembski

See all

“Intelligent Design opens the whole possibility of us being created in the image of a benevolent God.”

“The world is a mirror representing the divine life...”

“How a designer gets from thought to thing is, at least in broad strokes, straightforward: A designer conceives a purpose. To accomplish that purpose, the designer forms a plan. To execute the plan, the designer specifies building materials and assembly instructions. Finally, the designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials. What emerges is a designed object, and the designer is successful to the degree that the object fulfills the designer's purpose”

“The fine-tuning of the universe, about which cosmologists make such a to-do, is both complex and specified and readily yields design. So too, Michael Behe's irreducibly complex biochemical systems readily yield design. The complexity-specification criterion demonstrates that design pervades cosmology and biology. Moreover, it is a transcendent design, not reducible to the physical world. Indeed, no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life.”

“I think the opportunity to deal with students and getting them properly oriented on science and theology and the relation between those is going to be important because science has been such an instrument used by the materialists to undermine the Christian faith and religious belief generally.”

“My thesis is that all disciplines find their completion in Christ and cannot be properly understood apart from Christ.”