These have been peculiar times for the Intelligence Design community.

Two weeks ago, the teenage son of Michael Behe, biochemist of Darwin’s Black Box fame and main spearhead of the ID movement, outed himself as an atheist. Even more dramatically, the trigger of his de-conversion was the bestselling anti-theistic book of one of his father’s nemesis, Richard Dawkins.

Now, William Dembski is being exposed as a potential closet Young-Earth Creationist.

Over at Panda’s Thumb, there’s an analysis of statements by Dembski that were paraphrased in a response to a negative review of his latest book on theodicy. The conclusion is sound; Dembski considers that Gen 1-11 consists of true historical narratives. Up to this point, biblical inerrantism and a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis themselves are positions that Old-Earth Creationists also claim to defend, although I concur with the fundamentalists in that they are the correct ones exegetically. For biblical literalists, Moses’ speech acts in the early chapters of Genesis are standard assertions, descriptions of events, no significant allegorical content is implied or intended. OECs happen to fudge implausible meanings and stretch the polysemy of hebrew vocabulary in order to accomodate a standard cosmological timeline and avoid a fantasy worldwide catastrophism. Dembski happens to be very clear in not compromising his biblical literalism with a local interpretation of the Noachian Deluge:

In any case, not only Genesis 6-9 but also Jesus in Matthew 24 and Peter in Second Peter seem clearly to teach that the Flood was universal. 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.

The package of absurdities that biblical literalists consider to be factual goes well beyond a couple of naked primates born without parents and floating prehistorical zoos managed by eight people during the course of a year. There’s also the talking serpent, the talking donkey, the giant-king Og, genocider angels, hordes of zombies and many other fictitious creatures ontologically on par with what you usually find in a Dungeons&Dragons book. Bill Dembski by default believes in all this baloney, and we have other examples of his vice of gullibility.

As a Westerner, I feel deeply ashamed that a man as highly educated and intelligent as William Dembski accepts Iron Age semitic mythology as fact in place of the precious accrued collective knowledge and thinking tools developed by his culture. His academic work is a parody of science.

Concerning this case, biologist PZ Myers described Dembski as an “honest lunatic”. I wouldn’t be so sure about his honesty. Honesty is a virtuous character trait supposed to be globally stable, causally efficient over the behavior of the agent and temporally enduring.

Dembski has consistently exposed for nearly two decades an acceptance of mainstream cosmology, astrophysics and geology on affairs of the natural timeline of the Universe and tried to distance himself in practice from “scientific creationists” (oxymoron).

Either he is a liar, in which case he is dishonest, or he engaged in a major belief revision over a short period of time, in which case he is at best intellectually imprudent. We’re talking about an enormously extensive worldview change, an elaborate distortion of how one sees the past. From a local flood of considerable size to a global flood, the change in surface area is greater by a factor of over one thousand.

One way to understand this dramatic transformation of his belief systems would be the case in which he accepted a foundationalist theory of justification based on the personal revelation of the Holy Spirit as more epistemically authoritative than an evidentialist theory of justification. If the Book of Nature and the Book of God mismatch, by default the scientists are wrong. All empirical inquiry is therefore biased to the pre-determined content of presuppositional apologetics. Creationist ministries such as ICR and AiG are very explicit on this.

Here’s the catch; if Dembski is a sincere presuppositionalist biblical inerrantist, he’s no longer in the game of asking for evidence of how bacterial flagella could evolve neodarwinially from a Type-III secretion system since a priori, anything that could be offered to justify these claims would be false. His demands would never be satisfied in principle and he would be only fooling around asking for evidence. He’d be out of the arena of scientific discourse and practice.

If he isn’t fooling around, he’s either incoherent and compartmentalizes the principles he chooses to justify his knowledge or he’s not really the presuppositionalist biblical literalist he believes to be. By the same token, anytime he makes a claim such as that the major animal phyla appeared suddenly with fully functional front-loaded bauplans in the Cambrian Explosion, he’s engaging in the language game of “make believe” since if he’s indeed a YEC, he doesn’t regard the Cambrian Explosion as an actual historical event.

Resorting to the tactic of keeping a foundationalist epistemology based on personal revelation to matters of faith and evidentialism to matters of empirical fact results in automatic failure since Christianity is filled with empirical claims originating in the scriptures, traditions and practices. The Book of God is superposed with the Book of Nature. I state that methodological naturalism is false and at best, useless, and Dembski couldn’t agree more with that, as stamped on his book Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology.

Really stupid beliefs that threaten the dignity of our hard-earned intellectual achievements deserve our mockery.