Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a new series by William Dembski, adapted from his Substack. This is the third post. Find the full series so far here, “My Personal History with Information.”
In this series so far, I’ve discussed the ideas of A. E. Wilder-Smith (1915–1995) about information and his efforts to advance a design argument based on information. That’s not just because he deeply influenced me. He also influenced others in my circle (though at the time I didn’t know they would be in my circle). Take Dean Kenyon, who went on to become a prominent intelligent design proponent and even co-authored an intelligent design textbook, Of Pandas and People. Kenyon along with Gary Steinman had written Biochemical Predestination (1969), in its day regarded as the most significant attempt to account for the origin of life in purely naturalistic terms.
A Sharp Critique
In the 1970s, a student gave Kenyon Wilder-Smith’s The Creation of Life, which sharply criticized Kenyon and Steinman’s argument in Biochemical Predestination (both authors as well as the book itself are extensively cited in Wilder-Smith’s 1970 book). Finding himself unable to refute Wilder-Smith’s criticisms, Kenyon abandoned his purely naturalistic account of the origin of life and from there went on to embrace intelligent design.
By strange coincidence, in just the last few weeks I was introduced to someone who as an undergrad took Kenyon’s course on the origin of life at San Francisco State University in the mid 1970s — in fact the very class where he announced that he no longer accepted the naturalistic views he had defended in Biochemical Predestination. At the same time, Kenyon announced that he now accepted a design alternative. Instantly, according to my new friend who was there, the class size dropped from 200 to 50.
The Mystery of Life’s Origin
Charles Thaxton, along with Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen, wrote what arguably was the first official book of the intelligent design movement. Titled The Mystery of Life’s Origin, it was published in 1984 by the secular publisher Philosophical Library through the sponsorship of Jon Buell’s Foundation for Thought and Ethics. Wilder-Smith’s presence is felt in that book. Thaxton et al. argue that chemistry and energy flows cannot account for the origin of the information content of living systems. The book, in its selected readings (bibliography) at the end, explicitly references Wilder-Smith’s The Creation of Life. Though not making a full-fledged argument for intelligent design based on information, The Mystery of Life’s Origin does in the epilogue raise intelligence as a legitimate hypothesis for explaining life’s origin, along with other hypotheses. Note that an updated and expanded edition of this book appeared in 2020.
Last, I’ll mention Matti Leisola, the Finnish chemist and intelligent design proponent. Influenced in his own thinking about design by Wilder-Smith, he assumed the role of a disseminator of Wilder-Smith’s ideas. As he writes in his autobiography just published by Inkwell Press:
We met Professor Wilder-Smith. I had read his book, Man’s Origin — Man’s Destiny, and it had significantly shaped my thinking. Before travelling to Switzerland, I wrote to him, and he invited our group to his home on the shore of Lake Thun… He wanted to spend a vacation in Finland with his family, and just over a month later, this was arranged. I introduced him to the Professor of Biochemistry, and we met with the rector of the University of Helsinki, who invited Wilder-Smith to give guest lectures.
(Recently I announced the publication of Matti’s autobiography, for which I wrote the foreword, on my Substack.)
The Biggest Impression
For me personally, Wilder-Smith made the biggest impression through his lectures, which back in the early and mid 1980s were mainly available to me on cassette tapes, a technology long since supplanted. I remember listening to one or two of the lectures on information repeatedly in my room at International House on the campus of the University of Chicago as a graduate student in mathematics. Looking back, I would say Wilder-Smith’s intuitions were spot on. Fleshing out his arguments, however, would need to wait until the intelligent design movement came into its own and could bring more powerful methods to bear on the questions he was raising.
Next, “My Mathematical Development: Probability and Improbability.“