Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a new series by William Dembski, adapted from his Substack. This is the seventh post. Find the full series so far here, “My Personal History with Information.”
In practical terms, perhaps the most important thing that my “Randomness by Design” paper did for me was to put me on the radar of Steve Meyer and Paul Nelson. Before that, I had been flying entirely solo. I had a deep sense of calling that I needed to work on bringing design back into science. But I had no colleagues to talk with about this.
Steve and Paul in 1990–91 wanted to write a book to rehabilitate the design argument in light of modern science and information theory. They had hoped to enlist Charles Thaxton as a third collaborator. But Thaxton was on his way to Prague to help students and faculty at the university there to integrate science and faith. And in any case, Steve and Paul really needed a mathematician.
A Flag Up a Flagpole
I think it was Paul who read “Randomness by Design” and Steve who independently read a critique of strong artificial intelligence by me titled “Converting Matter into Mind,” which appeared in December 1990 in the American Scientific Affiliation’s journal Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. As part of this article, I needed to include a biosketch. In it, I described my desire to reinstate design in science. I was running a flag up a flagpole and hoping someone would see it. And it was seen.
Given these two articles that I had written, Steve and Paul realized I was to be their third musketeer. To get the ball rolling on our joint book project, Steve arranged for us to meet for several weeks in the summer of 1992 in Cambridge, England. This was to get us up to speed on each other’s work and to chart a path forward for a joint book. Steve had finished his philosophy dissertation in 1990 at Cambridge. Paul was still working on his at the University of Chicago. And I was almost finished working on mine at the University of Illinois at Chicago (though really I wasn’t — more on this momentarily).
An Added Bonus
It was a great blessing for me to rub shoulders with Steve and Paul that summer. As an added bonus, the three of us also got to meet Doug Axe, who was in Cambridge at the time and as skeptical of Darwinian naturalism as we were. Doug gave us a seminar on genes and proteins and how Darwinian processes were inadequate to account for them. Steve and Paul were seasoned and well acquainted with the key people trying to understand the role of information in biology and how it could make clear the design in nature. They were also well read in the literature of the time. I was at the time much more an autodidact, though with the needed expertise in mathematics. After that summer, I transitioned from autodidact to professional design theorist.
Next, “An Elevator Pitch About What Information Is.”