How to be an Intellectually Fulfilled Atheist (Or Not) » (2)

William A. Dembski is a Senior Fellow with the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including the first book on intelligent design to be published by a major university press, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge University Press, 1998). He has seven earned degrees, including two doctorates, one in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago, the other in mathematics from University of Chicago. His work has been featured on the front page of the New York Times and he has appeared on numerous radio and television broadcasts, including ABC’s Nightline and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. Bill and his wife, Jana, live in Central Texas with their daughter and twin boys.

Jonathan Wells is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He holds a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkeley, and a PhD. in Religious Studies from Yale University. He has worked as a postdoctoral research biologist at the University of California at Berkeley and the supervisor of a medical laboratory in Fairfield, California, and he has taught biology at California State University in Hayward. He is the author numerous articles and several books including Icons of Evolution, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design.

“Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin,” writes Richard Dawkins, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”  This little book shows that atheism must seek intellectual fulfillment elsewhere decisively demonstrating the need for intelligence in explaining life’s origin. This is the best overview of why traditional origin-of-life research has crashed and burned and why intelligent design is necessary to explain the high-tech engineering inside the cell. It is no longer possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist because life's origin requires an intelligent cause—this book shows why.

WHAT MAKES THE BOOK UNIQUE FROM OTHERS ON THE TOPIC?   

Coverage, brevity, and accessibility: It accurately and comprehensively surveys contemporary origin of life research, shows that attempts to rule out intelligence fail conclusively, and does so in a way that the average reader can understand. It demonstrates that atheism has no scientific basis, but instead is an ideology based on a speculative faith in the power of matter to do all its own creating.

Introduction Atheism's Quest for Intellectual Fulfillment

1 The Problem of Life's Origin 1

2 A Batch of Red Herrings 7

3 Spontaneous Generation 11

4 Oparin's Hypothesis 17

5 The Miller-Urey Experiment 25

6 Primitive Undersea Simulation Experiments 29

7 Free Oxygen 33

8 Reversible Reactions 37

9 Interfering Cross-Reactions 39

10 Racemic Mixtures 41

11 The Synthesis of Polymers 45

12 The Humpty-Dumpty Problem 51

13 Harnessing the Sun 55

14 The Proteinoid World 57

15 The RNA World 63

16 Self-Organizing Worlds 69

17 Molecular Darwinism 77

18 When All Else Fails - Panspermia 83

19 The Medium and the Message 85

20 The God of the Gaps 91

21 Cellular Engineering 97

22 Irreducible Complexity 101

23 Conservation of Information 103

24 Thinking Outside the Box 107

25 A Reasonable Hypothesis 111

Epilogue: Atheism as a Speculative Faith 115

Notes 117