Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone

Dembski can be observed quote mining Dawkins and making some ironic statements in a recent posting on UncommenDescent.

WAD wrote:

What’s Your Favorite Dawkins Quote?

Quotes like “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” and “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose” are right up there, but my all-time favorite is “Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory, we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.” (All these quotes are from The Blind Watchmaker.)

It’s comforting that evolutionary theory is in the capable hands of rigorous empirical scientists like Dawkins.

As opposed to ‘rigorous empirical scientists’ like Dembski he probable means? Of course there are some interesting problems with his ‘logic’. First of all Dawkins is among thousands if not tens of thousands of capable scientists who move evolutionary theory forward. What does ID have to offer? Poof….

But Dembski himself can be observed making some very interesting claims, worthy of an ‘empirical scientist’…

WAD wrote:

As for your example, I’m not going to take the bait. You’re asking me to play a game: “Provide as much detail in terms of possible causal mechanisms for your ID position as I do for my Darwinian position.” ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it’s not ID’s task to match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories. If ID is correct and an intelligence is responsible and indispensable for certain structures, then it makes no sense to try to ape your method of connecting the dots. True, there may be dots to be connected. But there may also be fundamental discontinuities, and with IC systems that is what ID is discovering.

Source

From Wiki Quotes

WAD wrote:

“I’ve just gotten kind of blase about submitting things to journals where you often wait two years to get things into print,” he says. “And I find I can actually get the turnaround faster by writing a book and getting the ideas expressed there. My books sell well. I get a royalty. And the material gets read more.”

  • -William Dembski in The Chronicle of Higher Education Dec. 21, 2001

Or in Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology (1999), Dembski can be observed making the following comments

WAD wrote:

“If we take seriously the word-flesh Christology of Chalcedon (i.e. the doctrine that Christ is fully human and fully divine) and view Christ as the telos toward which God is drawing the whole of creation, then any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient.”

“Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners do not have a clue about him.” p. 210

“My thesis is that all disciplines find their completion in Christ and cannot be properly understood apart from Christ.” p. 206

Or the following quotes

WAD wrote:

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

  • Science Test, Church & State Magazine, July/August 2000.

WAD wrote:

“Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory (Dembski 1999, 84).

The “let he who is without sin, cast the first stone” story in the Bible would have been an important lesson to some ID proponents.