William A. Dembski

William Albert Dembski (born July 18, 1960) is an American mathematician, philosopher, and theologian. He was a proponent of intelligent design (ID), a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God. He coined the intelligent design argument of specified complexity.

After earning a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1988 and a second doctorate from the University of Illinois Chicago in philosophy in 1996, Dembski taught as a professor at the Michael Polanyi Center of Baylor University. He was a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from 2006 to 2012, then a professor at Southern Evangelical Seminary from 2012 to 2013. He was also a senior fellow at the Center for Science and Culture (CSC) of the Discovery Institute, but officially retired from intelligent design and resigned from the CSC on September 23, 2016.

Dembski has written books about intelligent design, including The Design Inference (1998), Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology (1999), The Design Revolution (2004), The End of Christianity (2009), and Intelligent Design Uncensored (2010). He has postulated that probability theory can be used to prove both specified complexity and irreducible complexity. The scientific community sees intelligent design—and Dembski's concept of specified complexity—as a form of creationism.