Top 40 William A. Dembski Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “In God becoming human in Jesus Christ, God has established solidarity with the human condition.”

— William A. Dembski

2. “As long as the wrong people hold power, how can the right political climate even arise?”

— William A. Dembski

3. “I believe God created the world for a purpose. The Designer of intelligent design is, ultimately, the Christian God.”

— William A. Dembski

4. “Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.”

— William A. Dembski

5. “Natural selection certainly operates. It explains how bacteria will gain antibiotic resistance; it will explain how insects get insecticide resistance, but it doesn’t explain how you get bacteria or insects in the first place.”

— William A. Dembski

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

— William A. Dembski

7. “The mechanical philosophy was ever blind to this fact. Intelligent design, on the other hand, readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.”

— William A. Dembski

8. “The atheist is cheating whenever he makes a moral judgment, acting as though it has an objective reference, when his philosophy in fact precludes it.”

— William A. Dembski

9. “In a fallen world, the only currency of love is suffering. Indeed, the only way to tell how much one person loves another is by what that person is willing to endure for the other.”

— William A. Dembski

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

— William A. Dembski

11. “As a biblical inerrantist, I believe that what the Bible teaches is true and bow to the text, including its teaching about the Flood and its universality.”

— William A. Dembski

12. “Because we don’t see the evil destroyed now and thus experience the suffering that evil inevitably inflicts, we are tempted to doubt God’s existence and goodness.”

— William A. Dembski

13. “There is an immediate payoff to intelligent design: it destroys the atheistic legacy of Darwinian evolution. Intelligent design makes it impossible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

— William A. Dembski

14. “Intelligent design is a modest position theologically and philosophically. It attributes the complexity and diversity of life to intelligence, but does not identify that intelligence with the God of any religious faith or philosophical system.”

— William A. Dembski

15. “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.”

— William A. Dembski

16. “In short, the problem of evil starts when creatures think God is evil for “cramping their style.” The impulse of our modern secular culture to cast off restraint wherever possible finds its root here.”

— William A. Dembski

17. “The wrong people will do everything in their power to guarantee that the wrong political climate will continue. It seems, then, that the wrong people ensure the wrong political climate and the wrong political climate ensures the wrong people. How then to break free of this vicious circle?”

— William A. Dembski

18. “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.”

— William A. Dembski

19. “Wrong people are wrong not because of their faults but because of their presumed virtues.”

— William A. Dembski

20. “Design theorists are no friends of theistic evolution.”

— William A. Dembski

21. “If you have no authority to legislate my freedoms, then I’m truly free, at least from you.”

— William A. Dembski

22. “The problem of good as it faces the atheist is this: Nature, which is the nuts-and-bolts reality for the atheist, has no values and thus can offer no grounding for good and evil. Values on the atheist view are subjective and contingent.”

— William A. Dembski

23. “The problem with merely writing so that you can be understood is that the wrong people, in advancing their agendas, are only too ready to misunderstand you. Writing so that you cannot be misunderstood anticipates and preempts those who would willfully distort what you are trying to say.”

— William A. Dembski

24. “The fundamental claim of intelligent design is straightforward and easily intelligible: namely, there are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence.”

— William A. Dembski

25. “Without a unified political climate of opinion, there is little or no political profit in doing the right thing.”

— William A. Dembski

26. “As far as design theorists are concerned, theistic evolution is American evangelicalism’s ill-conceived accommodation to Darwinism .”

— William A. Dembski

27. “This is really an opportunity to mobilize a new generation of scholars and pastors not just to equip the saints but also to engage the culture and reclaim it for Christ. That’s really what is driving me.”

— William A. Dembski

28. “God does not hinder the exercise of human freedom but rather anticipates its consequences.”

— William A. Dembski

29. “Materialism is adept at transforming illusions of possibility into settled verities.”

— William A. Dembski

30. “Government has a legitimate sphere of operation. The problem arises when that sphere continually expands, encompassing areas where government lacks legitimacy.”

— William A. Dembski

31. “Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners do not have a clue about him.”

— William A. Dembski

32. “Intelligent design, unlike creationism, is a science in its own right and can stand on its own feet.”

— William A. Dembski

33. “Insofar as explanation fails to account for some salient fact, it is incomplete and its parsimony can no longer rightly be regarded as an asset. Indeed, the key failing of materialism, as we shall see, is that its parsimony is purchased at the cost of misrepresenting reality.”

— William A. Dembski

34. “Thus, in its relation to Christianity, intelligent design should be viewed as a ground-clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual rubbish that for generations has kept Christianity from receiving serious consideration.”

— William A. Dembski

35. “Being as Communion is the final book in a trilogy. The two earlier books were The Design Inference and No Free Lunch.”

— William A. Dembski

36. “The violence described in the Old Testament was endemic to the ancient Near East and remains endemic to much of the world today. Although our refined Western sensibilities recoil from these violent passages, in fact the Old Testament is to be credited for presenting the human condition in all its starkness.”

— William A. Dembski

37. “Precisely because intelligent design does not turn the study of biological origins into a Bible-science controversy, intelligent design is a position around which Christians of all stripes can unite.”

— William A. Dembski

38. “Because government has tremendous power, it attracts people who are eager to game the system, obtaining by force of law what they could never achieve through consensus.”

— William A. Dembski

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

— William A. Dembski

40. “Any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient.”

— William A. Dembski

41. “Whenever explaining an event, we must choose from three competing modes of explanation. These are regularity, chance, and design... To attribute an event to design is to say that it cannot reasonably be referred to either regularity or chance.”

— William A. Dembski

42. “The promise of the Christian faith is that this life presages a glorious new life that will make present pains seem negligible:.”

— William A. Dembski

43. “Virtually every discipline and endeavor is presently under a naturalistic pall.”

— William A. Dembski

44. “The power to veto or negate is the power of free will. Free will is “free won’t.”9 This connects neatly with information theory, which, as we will see, characterizes information as a reduction or ruling out of possibilities. To be informed that something is the case is to be informed that other things are not the case. Information says yes to some things by saying no to others. Free will is the power of no.”

— William A. Dembski

45. “What I propose, then, is a strategy for interrogating the Darwinists to, as it were, squeeze the truth out of them.”

— William A. Dembski

46. “The scientific picture of the world championed since the Enlightenment is not just wrong but massively wrong. Indeed entire fields of inquiry, especially in the human sciences, will need to be rethought from the ground up in terms of intelligent design.”

— William A. Dembski

47. “The material world, as conceived by materialists, however, is continually confused with reality as such.”

— William A. Dembski

48. “The question rather is how we should do science and theology in light of the impending collapse of Enlightenment rationalism and scientific naturalism. These ideologies are on the way out. They are on the way out.”

— William A. Dembski