Extracts from a blog post by William Dembski

On June 10^th 2016  I published a blog post which included a commentary on a post by “Intelligent Design” guru William Dembski (Pictured). The title of Dembski’s post piqued my interest immediately Viz: Disillusioned with Fundamentalism. It told the story of Dembski’s demise as a lecturer at the fundamentalist leaning Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) in Fort Worth. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; ID guru William Dembski not only gives every impression of being a nice guy with a strong Christian faith but I think the implications of his work deserve serious attention. However, like some of the other nice guys I’ve mentioned in my blogs (see here, here and here) Dembski has ended up getting the rough end of the deal. If my reading of the situation is right then poor Dembski has fallen between two stools: It seems that the respected Baylor Baptist University found him “too fundamentalist” whereas more recently his ex-employer, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) in Fort Worth, Texas found him not fundamentalist enough with the consequence that Dembski has swung away from fundamentalism. (That’s not such a bad thing!). Wiki has an item on the Baylor controversy, but the details of the later contention at SWBTS surfaced on Dembski’s blog.  Should this post of Dembski ever go off-line, I have a copy of it here. 

In this PDF document I reproduce the parts of Dembski’s post that I quoted in my 2016 blog post (In fact this introduction is largely taken from that post but my commentary of 2016 has been removed). As I did not capture all of Dembski’s original blog post it may have become a little disjointed, although I think there is sufficient to tell the story successfully.

The trouble at SWBTS started for Dembski after the publication of his book The End of Christianity, which according to Wiki:

…. argued that a Christian can reconcile an old Earth creationist view with a literal reading of Adam and Eve in the Bible by accepting the scientific consensus of a 4.5 billion year of Earth.[43] He further argued that Noah's flood likely was a phenomenon limited to the Middle East.[44]

In my PDF I reproduce the parts of Dembski’s SWBTS story that I have in my possession. Where I’ve had to interject to join disconnected parts of the story I have used non-italics in a large point size.

Postscript 6/11/2019

Dembski has had his share of censorship and ill-treatment by the liberal-left academic establishment. It is therefore not at all surprising that he should feel pushed toward the right and that we find him defending right-wingers, perhaps even identifying with them. See his posts here and here where he speaks out against the powerful mainstream marginalising the anti-vaxers, Tommy Robinson, Milo Yianopolous and Breitbart. I've no idea whether Dembski sees eye to eye with such people, although that said I think Dembski's experience has lead him to be sceptical of vaccinations: He wrote an email telling Jef Bezos  of Amazon that he is "really getting pissed off" with how Amazon is censoring videos on the vaccination question.. Although I find Robinson, Yianopolous, Breitbart and much anti-vax conspiracy theorism objectionable he may have a valid concern on the subject of censorship by a powerful elite. 

But let's get this straight: Although I have a healthy respect for polarised parties such as Dembski and on the other side people like P Z Myers, the state of cognitive war between them is such that if I had the privilege to meet either of them on the wild web I would make sure my figurative gun was at the ready!