Poland's Design Revolution

The prospect and promise of intelligent design in Poland

https://enarche.pl

Preamble

Fundacja En Arche is the premier organization in Poland advancing intelligent design. My main contact there is Dr. Grzegorz Malec, who has been indefatigable in getting the work of American ID theorists, including myself, translated and published in Polish. The reach of this organization is wide. In the last year, it sponsored a debate between Darwinists, including Michael Ruse, and design theorists Michael Behe and Richard Sternberg:

A few months back, Dr. Malec asked me to write a brief essay for their ID journal. I wrote it in English addressing Poland’s design revolution. I withheld publishing it on this side of the Atlantic until it had first appeared in that journal. As it is, my piece has now appeared there translated into Polish: William A. Dembski, "Rewolucja ID w Polsce", in: Grzegorz Malec (ed.), "W poszukiwaniu projektu", t. 2, Fundacja En Arche, Warszawa 2024, p. 21-28. I am therefore sharing it here with my English-speaking readers.

The ID Revolution in Poland

My genealogy shows me to be exactly half Polish and half German. My grandfather Boleslaw Dembski (born 1894) emigrated from Krakow to Chicago, where he married a first-generation Polish girl named Mary Mlinek. My father, also named Boleslaw (though we knew him as William or Bill), was thus born an American citizen. Yet he was completely Polish by blood.

My father visited Germany as a Fulbright Scholar in the mid-1950s, where he met my mother, Ursula Armbruster. Her mother was from Alsace (before it returned to French hands), her father from Swabia. My mother was completely German by blood. She lived just outside Berlin at the end of WW2 and lived in Berlin from 1945 to 1952. Her father after the war worked for the British. She experienced the Berlin Airlift when Stalin blockaded that city.

In 1973, when I was thirteen, my parents and I spent the summer with my German grandmother (near Nuremberg). During that summer, my parents took me in a car to visit relatives from both sides of our family. We first visited my mother’s brother, Albert, and his family in what was then West Berlin. He was a professor of ergonomics at the Technical University of Berlin. I remember driving on the East German autobahn to get to West Berlin, and seeing all the communist propaganda proclaiming that the DDR and USSR would together conquer the world.

We then crossed the Oder river into Poland and visited my father’s cousin Richard and his wife Helen in Warsaw. They were both medical doctors. It struck me how little they earned compared to American doctors, who by contrast were immensely wealthy. Without access to credit and with a fixed government-controlled income, Richard and Helen had to save for fourteen years to afford a Polish-made Fiat automobile. At night, Richard would go outside to remove the windshield wipers from his car so that they wouldn’t be stolen. On that trip to Poland, I also visited the home of Copernicus, the Black Madonna, and Auschwitz.

Why do I recount this personal history? It is to underscore that I have directly or indirectly witnessed many of the mass derangements that have afflicted Western civilization, including Nazism, Communism, and today’s radical progressivism, which flouts traditional morality and with a straight face proclaims that men can bear children. But underlying all these mass derangements is Darwinism and the materialistic forms of evolution that it has inspired, which deny that the physical world and humanity’s place in it gives any evidence of purpose.

Darwin’s legacy is a world without design. A world without design is a world in which humans are an accident of nature, where morality and purpose are illusions that we construct because of their survival value but that in no way reflect the truth of who we are. If we are here through a blind purposeless material process, then any meaning to our existence is one that we in our vain imaginations construct. Any such meaning has no reference point in reality.

Hitler was apt to talk about providence guiding his destiny and that of the German people. Yet it was a providence grounded in a brutal and uncaring nature that valued power over pity. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao put their faith in a dialectical materialist process that guaranteed the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the triumph of the proletariat. Yet if that overthrow required the slaughter of many millions, that was a cost of history they were happy to let others pay. Radical progressives of today arbitrarily divide the world into victims and oppressors. Yet this polarization is a pretext for social control and demonizing those who disagree with the radical progressives.

But none of these destructive projects for humanity could get off the ground without the foundation that Darwin laid in ridding the world of design. Darwinism is the mother of all the mass derangements that currently afflict Western civilization. It is the ultimate mass derangement, giving life to these other mass derangements.

Poland perhaps more than any nation has had to face the full brunt of such mass derangements. Yet despite a long history of much suffering at the hands of enemies that seek to crush the spirit of the Polish people, Poland also knows what it is to be delivered out of these enemies’ hands. King Jan III Sobieski, for instance, took on the seemingly invincible Ottomans and through his courage and skill (and with the help of heaven) showed that the Ottomans could be defeated. He thereby punctured the Ottoman myth of invincibility.

In Western Civilization, Darwinism and the naturalistic worldview it has inspired have likewise been widely advertised as invincible. Those who would see evidence of purpose behind the world are disparaged as ignorant, unsophisticated fools. Darwin’s valiant defenders (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, etc.) view their materialistic worldview as triumphant. For them, anyone who remains unconvinced of this worldview and of Darwin’s pivotal role in advancing it deserves to be excommunicated from intelligent society.

But as is so often the case with those who portray themselves as infallible and invincible, they are merely deluding themselves. Humility is the prime virtue. Without it, we are incapable of learning or growing. Pride, with its self-sufficiency, is the prime vice. It guarantees that we will live a lie. What Darwin’s valiant defenders take to be so well-established, namely, a materialistic view of biological and cosmic evolution, is in fact not well established at all. It is kept alive not by evidence but by its crucial role in preserving a worldview antithetical to design.

Intelligent design, as a scientific and cultural movement, elicits strong reaction from the secular academy and the educated elites not because it is wrong but because it shows its opponents to be wrong—that they have embraced a lie and that their high place as elite intellectuals is undeserved. Indeed, if intelligent design is right, then the secular materialist worldview is not just wrong in details but rather it is misguided through and through. Intelligent design shows the materialist worldview to be infected with dry rot so deep that it cannot be repaired.

Intelligent design threatens the materialist worldview inspired by Darwin by fundamentally changing the terms of the debate. Secularists love to characterize intelligent design as a religious doctrine. Accordingly, we are told that intelligent design is really a form of creationism and thus a theology masquerading as science.

But in fact, intelligent design is a scientific program. Yes, it has religious implications. But so does Darwinism. For instance, the late Stephen Jay Gould remarked that ever since Darwin we know that we were not created in the image of a benevolent God. What is this but a brazenly theological statement, even if it is a denial of conventional theology? Indeed, both theories—intelligent design and Darwinism—are strongly contested because both have profound religious and metaphysical implications.

Where intelligent design gets its teeth, however, is in having a sound scientific basis and thereby in constituting a legitimate scientific theory. It therefore fundamentally changes the terms of the debate over biological origins. Before intelligent design, most of the discussion about design versus Darwin was cast as a religion versus science controversy. Intelligent design transforms the controversy between design and Darwinian evolution into a science versus science controversy.

Rhetorically, this move is powerful—and it is necessary if intelligent design is to have a fair shot at unseating Darwinism. Once it is understood that intelligent design is in fact a fully scientific theory, Darwinian and naturalistic forms of evolution lose their monopoly over the question of biological origins. Secular academics and elites enjoy invalidating intelligent design by definitional fiat, proclaiming it to be religion and thereby excluding it from scientific discussion. Yet as a fully scientific theory, intelligent design deserves—and can demand—a place at the table with all other scientific approaches to biological origins.

What entitles us to say that intelligent design is in fact science? Consider its definition. Intelligent design is the study of evidence in nature that is best explained as the product of intelligence. I’m often asked whether intelligent design is testable. Clearly, any theory that’s truly scientific needs to be testable—it needs to be in contact with empirical evidence that can confirm or disconfirm it. Otherwise, we are talking about a theory that is immune to evidence, and no such theory can be scientific.

Now then, what renders intelligent design testable? It is the discovery of statistically improbable patterns in nature. Let’s leave aside biology for the moment. Consider a SETI researcher, someone engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, examining radio signals from outer space to confirm the existence of an alien intelligence. Is a radio signal that clearly encodes a long sequence of prime numbers the product of design? Such a signal was the premise of Carl Sagan’s novel Contact.

Prime numbers are numbers divisible only by themselves and one. They are mathematically significant. There is no known process in nature that can produce prime numbers. A long sequence of prime numbers is thus highly improbable. Moreover, it matches a salient, mathematically significant pattern well known to mathematicians.

Note that it doesn’t matter if we don’t know the identity of the alien intelligence responsible for the radio signal of prime numbers. Nor do we need to know the precise radio technology that transmitted the signal. Simply from the signal’s pattern and from its improbability (prime numbers do not arise from purely natural forces with anything other than small probability), we can test whether it is indeed a sequence of prime numbers and thus whether it is the product of intelligent design.

My own research over the last thirty years has focused on methods of design detection—what it is that we should be looking for to test whether something is the product of design. My first major work on that topic was a book I published in 1998 with Cambridge University Press titled The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities. Over the years, I’ve elaborated the method of design detection described in that book and extended its scope. Now, twenty-five years later, I’ve written a greatly expanded second edition of that book, enlisting a top-flight computer scientist named Winston Ewert as a co-author. I’m extremely grateful to En Arche for agreeing to translate this second edition into Polish.

Numbers have no emotions and thus don’t care what they’re used for. They can be used to lie, and they can be used to tell the truth. Similarly, methods don’t care what they’re used for. They can be rightly applied to yield truths or they can be misapplied to yield falsehoods. My method of design detection, which I call the design inference, is such a method. When I first proposed this method, many in the academic community were intrigued with it. The method applies insightfully to many areas where humans are the designers: archeology, forensic science, cryptography, etc. It even applies, as we just saw, to non-human designers, such as alien intelligences communicating via radio signals from outer space.

But for materialist scientists, it was completely unacceptable that a method of design detection should be applied to biological origins. As just noted, methods don’t care where they are applied. But what if that method were applied to, for instance, the irreducibly complex systems considered by Michael Behe or the enzymatic protein folds considered by Douglas Axe, both design theorists? And what if applying this method to such systems should convincingly show that they were designed?

My design-inferential method threatened to provide decisive evidence that a materialistic form of evolution could not be the whole story. In particular, it posed a real and present danger to Darwin’s place among the pantheon of scientists. The design inference might dislodge Darwin from his exalted throne. This was a bridge too far for Darwin’s valiant defenders.

Note that the challenge of intelligent design is not to show that every aspect of biology is the product of design. For the committed materialist, it is paramount that every aspect of biology be ultimately the product of a blind, purposeless material process from which design is completely absent. To meet this challenge, as a matter of logic, it is therefore enough to show that some aspects of biology, perhaps even just one, is clearly the product of design and thus beyond the remit of purely material forces.

In challenging my work on design inferences, scientific materialists therefore did not merely argue that applying my method of design detection failed when applied to biology but that it also failed as a method of design detection in general. But their arguments to discredit the design inference do not withstand scrutiny. The method has a solid probabilistic and information-theoretic underpinning, and its applicability of biological systems cannot reasonably be denied.

But don’t take my word of it — judge for yourselves. The second edition of The Design Inference was released November 16, 2023 in the United States. Moreover, the Polish translation of this book is currently in preparation and should soon be out. Unlike the first edition, which largely sidestepped the application of the design-inferential method to biology, this second edition looks closely at how this method applies to biology and how it provides strong evidence that some biological systems are indeed the product of design.

Richard Dawkins began his book The Blind Watchmaker with the claim that biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of being designed for a purpose. The second edition of The Design Inference shows that biology is the study of complicated things that appear to be designed because they actually are designed.

In the United States, we have a saying that if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck. Darwinism from its inception has been an exercise in self-delusion, claiming that things in every way like ducks are in fact not ducks. In particular, Darwinism argues that all the evidence of biology that would suggest design lacks actual design, and that the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection can do all the work of design that our ordinary intuitions suggest would have to be the product of design.

The method of design detection laid out in The Design Inference, especially in the second edition, gives the lie to this delusion. It shows that Emperor Darwin is without clothes. This method does not rule out evolution as such, the gradual transformation of one type of organism into another type of organism. But it shows that whatever the process by which life emerged on Earth, whether by a gradual process of evolution or by a direct infusion of outside information, intelligence played a crucial role in that process.

Intelligent design has come a long way in the more than thirty years since I began work in this area. In the United States, intelligent design continues to face relentless opposition from many mainstream scientists, academics, and media elites. But in other parts of the world, that opposition is giving way to a careful re-analysis of the evidence for design and the evidence against Darwinism.

Poland, with its tradition of resisting tyranny and demanding freedom, may be just the place where a design revolution can take hold and provide a fulcrum for moving the rest of the world to embrace intelligent design, putting finally to rest the dogma that is Darwinism.

I did my doctoral work in mathematics at the University of Chicago in the 1980s. During that time, Antoni Zygmund (1900–1992), one of the great Polish mathematicians from the generation of Stefan Banach (1892–1945), was still on the faculty there. I had the privilege of seeing and talking with Professor Zygmund. His example gave me living proof of the towering achievements of Polish science.

Poland has a great tradition of science. While Isaac Newton is universally regarded as the greatest physicist of all time, it is to the Pole Copernicus that we credit the rise of modern science. Nothing would make me happier than to see the Poland of my ancestry be the place where the modern intelligent design movement attracts the best talent of a younger generation of scientists and becomes the place where Darwin finally meets his match.