Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a new series by William Dembski, adapted from his Substack. This is the first post. Find the full series so far here, “My Personal History with Information.”
I am currently co-authoring a popular-level book with two colleagues on conservation of information. Following Steve Meyer and Doug Axe, whose books deftly incorporate autobiographical details about their path to discovery, I thought it might help to do the same with our book. Information has been a major theme in my research over the years, and I have a personal history exploring the concept that I can share. To date, my writings on information have focused on exposition. But there can be value in seeing a scientist’s process of discovery, in addition to explaining those discoveries. Hence this series. The history I share here is longer than will go into the book we are doing. I want to be thorough — we can prune later.
Context for my story with information goes back to 1979, when I converted from a New Age eastern pantheism to Christianity. In my coming to Christ, science-faith conflicts were the last thing on my mind. Any presumed conflicts between Genesis and modern science were simply of no concern to me. My dad was a PhD biologist who had taught at the University of Illinois (Navy Pier campus for those with long memories) and the City Colleges of Chicago. He even taught a course on evolution, and I still remember as a teen or pre-teen seeing the textbook for it around the house.
Without a Fundamental Reexamination
My newfound Christian faith occurred without any fundamental reexamination on my part of the relation between science and faith. Nonetheless, a new worldview raises new questions and prompts the search for new answers. I wanted to make sense of my Christian faith, especially in a world often hostile to it. So I started reading widely, shifting from New Age to Christian literature.
On the apologetics front, I enjoyed Francis Schaeffer and John Warwick Montgomery, and later G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis. With regard to faith and science, I read the creationist literature, both young-earth and old-earth. I quickly became a skeptic of naturalistic accounts of life’s origin and its subsequent evolution. The fossil record simply seemed to me too incomplete. The mechanisms of evolution such as natural selection seemed to me too inadequate.
One thing in particular that I read convinced me a naturalistic origin of life was all washed up. It was short. It was the appendix of a book that’s still somewhere on my shelf. I read it in 1980. I was a junior at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle (subsequently renamed University of Illinois at Chicago) doing a psychology undergrad. A student I met in class and at a weekly Campus Crusade meeting recommended a book titled Close Encounters: A Better Explanation, by Clifford Wilson and John Weldon.
As in our day, UFOs and extraterrestrials had back then captured the public imagination (through such films as Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Yet in the appendix to that book, for whatever reason, there was a mathematical argument against life originating by undirected means, which is to say apart from intelligence. The odds were just too much against it. The argument in that book was probabilistic and it irrevocably shifted my thinking, leading me ever after to think it absurd that the chemical constituents of life could organize themselves spontaneously into life.
Where Else Naturalism Failed
Once I had that conviction, the naturalistic blinders were off and the question then arose where else naturalism failed. Naturalism is like a Pandora’s box in that all of scientific explanation must be kept inside it. Once even one area of science comes to seem implausible to naturalistic explanation, all the contents of the box come rushing out and naturalism is no longer a rule that science is obligated to obey. Naturalism at heart is the claim that nature is complete — Carl Sagan’s “the cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” So anything that happens in nature must be the result of things and causes in nature. But nature is under no obligation to follow that directive. It’s easy to come up with counterexamples in which natural causes provide inadequate explanations — where things happen in nature that are beyond the power of nature. Spontaneous remissions, near-death experiences, and psi phenomena — if happening as reported — can fall into this category. That’s why naturalists since antiquity have always argued for fraud or mistaken observation in such cases, and not that the phenomena in question happened as described.
Two Main Approaches
In any case, I continued to read about biological and cosmological origins. In reading the young-earth creationist literature of the time, I found two main approaches. On the one hand, there was a move to treat the Bible as a scientific text and thus to shoehorn the science of the day into its teaching as interpreted within a Genesis literalism. On the other hand, there was the effort to critique naturalistic accounts of biological origins on their own terms and from there to offer a scientifically defensible non-naturalistic alternative without invoking faith or Scripture.
It was the latter approach that intrigued me. Figures at the Institute for Creation Research such as Henry Morris and Duane Gish made some effort in their writings to take this second approach. But it seemed to me their heart was more with taking the first approach (hence their focus more on reinterpreting geology to square with a young earth than in making sense of the design inherent in molecular biology).
Next, “Information in Biology: A Mystery for Naturalism.”