Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a new series by William Dembski, adapted from his Substack. This is the ninth post. Find the full series so far here, “My Personal History with Information.”
Regarding my doctoral studies in philosophy, I had gone to the University of Illinois at Chicago to work with the philosopher of science Paul Teller, the son of Ed Teller. In applying to this philosophy grad program, I didn’t know that Teller was in the midst of a divorce and would be leaving after my first year (spring 1990) for UC Irvine. After his departure, I took a dissertation on the logic of conditionals that I had already begun and moved it over to another philosopher there. But he left after my second year (1991) for the University of Pittsburgh. I then switched the dissertation, which was largely completed in 1992, to a third supervisor. He stayed put, but fell ill with depression, and so was unable to continue supervising me.
The Rock of Sisyphus
That left still one doctoral supervisor to go. Soon after my third supervisor fell ill, I was doing a postdoctoral fellowship in philosophy at Northwestern University, just north of Chicago, in the philosophy of science with Arthur Fine and David Hull (for the academic year 1992–93). This was a prestigious fellowship and I got it on the promise that my dissertation was essentially finished. But the fourth person who took over my dissertation on the logic of conditionals never got on board with the project. Everybody else on the committee was fine with it. But as the academic year 1992–93 came to a close, I was without a dissertation and without job prospects except teaching at smaller institutions with crushing teaching loads as I was trying to complete a dissertation. Indeed, the dissertation on the logic of conditionals came to seems like the rock of Sisyphus.
I decided therefore to put the dissertation on hold for a year and clear my head by attending Princeton Theological Seminary. I had done a postdoc in computer science in the fall of 1990 at Princeton University. The university and the seminary are separate institutions but across the street from each other. As it was, I still had a year on an NSF math postdoc, which I had put on hold and resumed after my first year in grad school in philosophy. At Princeton in 1990, I got to know the seminary. I had a deep interest in theology, and so, rather than jump year-by-year from one temporary philosophy teaching position to another until I could finish my philosophy doctorate, I decided to pursue an M.Div., a professional ministerial degree, at Princeton Theological Seminary, while also trying to jump start my dissertation.
I thought I would have more time to work on the dissertation as a full-time student than as a full-time faculty member, and I was proved right. The M.Div. also proved crucial as my mainstream academic job prospects in subsequent years dried up on account of my work advancing intelligent design. The M.Div. allowed me to teach at seminaries, and I ended up teaching at three of them.
At Princeton Seminary, I was still in touch with Steve Meyer and Paul Nelson as well as the ever-widening circle of ID movement, including such figures as Phil Johnson, Mike Behe, Jonathan Wells, and Doug Axe. Steve, Paul, and I had a grant from the Pascal Centre in Canada to research and write the book on design that we had been planning, one that would go beyond the natural theology of William Paley and bring design squarely into modern science where it could challenge naturalistic forms of evolution, notably Darwinism. I was initially going to write a few chapters for it on design detection, with Steve and Paul then filling out the rest of the book. But as I kept thinking and writing on this topic, it became clear that there was a whole book here of its own, and not just a portion of a larger book.
The Design Inference
In the summer after my first year in seminary (the M.Div. is a three-year program), I therefore decided to scrap my former dissertation on the logic of conditionals and write up my work on design detection and inferences as my philosophy dissertation. I worked intensively for 13 months on this project while also taking a full seminary course load. (Tidbit: I wrote the dissertation entirely in J. Gresham Machen’s old room in Alexander Hall.) That fall of 1995, I submitted the new dissertation, titled The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities, to my supervisor, Dorothy Grover, the philosopher who had shot down my previous dissertation on the logic of conditionals. This time she got behind the project.
I defended in December of 1995. Besides my committee, Paul Nelson showed up at the dissertation defense, along with University of Chicago philosophy professors David Malament and Bill Wimsatt. We all went to a Greek restaurant afterward. I officially graduated the following year, and the dissertation won the “1996 Outstanding Dissertation Award in Fine Arts and Humanities.” One of the philosophers, as I recall, remarked that this was the best dissertation they had seen in 15 or 20 years.
Specification and Small Probability
In the dissertation, and then in its revised form for publication with Cambridge University Press in 1998, the terms “specification” and “small probability” appear, but not the term “specified complexity.” The connection between the two was clear to me, with greater complexity indicating a greater number of bits to characterize an item in question and thus smaller probability for the item in question to result by chance. And specification was then the type of pattern that in the presence of improbability triggered a design inference.
Specified complexity was therefore getting at something information-theoretic. And yet in The Design Inference, I was not thinking primarily in terms of information. Rather, I saw the design inference as an extension of Fisherian significance testing where the rejection region to eliminate chance was not necessarily given in advance (as with Fisher) but could also be identified after the fact provided that the rejection region constituted a specification, which I characterized in terms of what I called a tractability condition, and which technically was a Kolmogorov-type minimum description condition.
(A brief digression is in order here. Fisherian significance testing provides a widely accepted model for statistical rationality. Some early critics of The Design Inference rejected my work in this book because they adopted an alternative model of statistical rationality, known as Bayesianism. As it is, there is no fundamental conflict between the two. They can be reconciled, and in the second edition of The Design Inference, Winston Ewert and I show how this can be done — see section 5.7.)
The design inference was after all an inference. It hinged on a convergence between some low probability event and a match between that event and an independently reconstructible pattern, its independent reconstructibility being that it was easy to state or think up, and thus from a mathematical vantage it required a quantifiably short description.
Next, “The Evolution of Specified Complexity.”