Few Signs of Intelligence
The Saga of Bill Dembski at Baylor
by Angus J. L. Menuge
William Dembski, a leader in the intelligent design movement, was demoted last fall from his position as director of the newly founded Michael Polanyi Center at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. This action followed concerted efforts earlier in the year by members of Baylor’s faculty to close the center.
An external review committee had been appointed to evaluate the credentials of the center’s work. Despite the hostility of many of its members, the committee eventually found in favor of the legitimacy of Dembski’s research. With reporters on his heels just after the committee report became public, Dembski issued a press release celebrating the vindication of his research and of the center—and the victory gained over his academic adversaries. This enraged many of his critics. It was claimed that Dembski’s action “severely compromised his ability to perform his central administrative duties,” hence his removal from the directorship.
How is it that a highly respected author and leader of the intelligent design movement became persona non grata at the very Christian university that hired him to carry on research in his field in the first place?
From Favor to Furor
William Dembski was already a research fellow for the Seattle-based Discovery Institute when he was approached by Baylor University President Robert Sloan in 1996. Sloan had read some of Dembski’s work and thought that Dembski could help with his project of promoting the integration of faith and learning on campus.
Sloan’s approach to integration was not heavy-handed. He had “resisted the urging of fundamentalists to ‘throw the evolutionists out’ of the biology department, vowing never to bar anyone at Baylor from teaching evolution.”1 In 1999, Sloan was able to establish a center named for Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian chemist who had denied that biological information could be reduced to physics and chemistry.
Dembski and Bruce Gordon were hired and appointed to the center, and they enjoyed a favorable reception. But the honeymoon ended when the Polanyi Center established its website in January 2000. When “other groups with evolution-bashing agendas began linking up their Websites . . . [m]any on the biology faculty flashed back to old culture battles, when such groups had publicly questioned the professors’ integrity.”2
An e-mail frenzy at Baylor spread to other schools. Dembski “was subject to dismissive comments that he was a ‘stealth creationist.’”3 As Gordon has often pointed out, the Michael Polanyi Center never endorsed the connections from other websites. Sadly, many faculty were quite unable (or unwilling) to distinguish work on intelligent design (ID) from old-style creationism. ID merely looks for empirical evidence of design in nature and does not presume to settle the identity of the designer, and it does not start from Scripture or a dogmatic position about the age of the earth.
Despite this setback, the Polanyi Center went ahead and hosted the Nature of Nature conference in April 2000. This conference examined the adequacy of naturalism as a foundation for work in the natural sciences and philosophy. The conference drew a cast of top scholars and scientists from around the world, the majority of whom were critical of ID, favoring either full naturalism or some form of methodological naturalism. Genuine civility was demonstrated as people openly debated deeply held presuppositions. Probably all sides were surprised to learn that the sophistication and intellectual muscle of their opponents far surpassed the stereotypes they feared.
Angus J. L. Menuge is Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University Wisconsin, where he is associate director of the Cranach Institute (www.cranach.org). He has edited three books, including C. S. Lewis: Lightbearer in the Shadowlands, and has recently published Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science (Rowman & Littlefield).
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