Dembski was born in Chicago, Illinois, the only child of Catholic parents, his mother an art dealer and his father a college professor and lecturer.

His father held a D. Sc in biology from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and taught evolutionary biology ; while growing up Dembski was neither particularly religious nor did he question the theory of evolution.

It was in 1988 at a conference on randomness that Dembski began to believe that there was purpose, order, and design in the universe due to the intervention of a god.

Dissatisfied with what he called the " free-swinging academic style " of the school, Dembski also was involved a group known as the " Charles Hodge Society ".

Dembski holds that his knowledge of statistics and his skepticism concerning evolutionary theory led him to believe that the extraordinary diversity of life was statistically unlikely to have been produced by natural selection.

After completing graduate school in 1996, Dembski was unable to secure a university position ; from then until 1999 he received what he calls " a standard academic salary " of $ 40, 000 a year as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture ( CSC ).

" I was one of the early beneficiaries of Discovery largess ," says Dembski.

In 1999, Dembski was invited by Robert B. Sloan, President of Baylor University, to establish the Michael Polanyi Center at the university.

Sloan was the first Baptist minister to serve as Baylor's president in over 30 years, had read some of Dembski's work and liked it ; according to Dembski, Sloan " made it clear that he wanted to get me on the faculty in some way ".

The Polanyi Center was established without much publicity in October 1999, initially consisting of two people – Dembski and a like-minded colleague, Bruce L. Gordon, who were hired directly by Sloan without going through the usual channels of a search committee and departmental consultation.

" Dembski was removed as the center's director, although he remained an associate research professor until May 2005.

It was co-founded by William A. Dembski, Micah Sparacio and John Bracht.

This they argued was a form of peer review, though not the form typically practiced by journals, which Dembski believes " too often degenerates into a vehicle for censoring novel ideas that break with existing frameworks.

* Ecto the Internet mailing list was created on June 13, 1991 by Jessica Koeppel Dembski out of Rutgers University.

He met Stephen C. Meyer, and through him was introduced to others who were developing what became the wedge strategy, including Michael Denton, Michael Behe and William Dembski, becoming the de facto leader of the group.

In 1999, William Dembski was invited by Baylor University president Robert B. Sloan to form the Michael Polanyi Center, described by Dembski as " the first Intelligent Design think tank at a research university ".

Dembski, although remaining as a research professor until 2005, was given no courses to teach.

For example, critics allege William Dembski gratuitously invokes his laurels by boasting of his correspondence with a Nobel laureate, bragging that one of his books was published in a series whose editors include a Nobel laureate, and exulting that the publisher of the intelligent design book The Mystery of Life's Origin, Philosophical Library Inc., also published books by eight Nobel laureates.

Dembski notes that the term " Law of Conservation of Information " was previously used by Peter Medawar in his book < cite > The Limits of Science </ cite > ( 1984 ) " to describe the weaker claim that deterministic laws cannot produce novel information.

Philosopher and mathematician William A. Dembski was the center's first director

In 1998 Sloan read an article by mathematician, philosopher and intelligent design advocate William Dembski and was impressed.

Sloan invited Dembski to the IFL, whose director Michael Beaty was also impressed by his work and credentials.

As of 2008, Dembski serves as a senior fellow at the CSC, where he plays a central role in the center's extensive public and political campaigns advancing the concept of intelligent design and its teaching in public schools through its " Teach the Controversy " campaign as part of the institute's wedge strategy.

** The Lynching of Bill Dembski ( part 1 ) ( part 2 ) from the American Spectator, November 2000.

Dembski critiques the critiques, and derides the methodological naturalism that, he says, is part of their legacy.

In March 1992, a symposium at Southern Methodist University in Dallas provided the public debut for a small group that included Phillip Johnson, Steven Meyer, William Dembski, and Michael Behe, initiating the wedge strategy that Johnson claims to have worked out by 1991.

Dembski dropped out of school and worked at his mother's art business while reading works on creationism and the Bible.

Finding the creationist works interesting in their challenge of evolution but their literal interpretations lacking, Dembski returned to school at the University of Illinois at Chicago, studying statistics.

Remaining in academia, Dembski ultimately completed an undergraduate degree in psychology ( 1981, University of Illinois at Chicago ) and masters degrees in statistics, mathematics, and philosophy ( 1983, University of Illinois at Chicago ; 1985, University of Chicago ; 1993, University of Illinois at Chicago respectively ), two PhDs, one in mathematics and one in philosophy ( 1988, University of Chicago ; 1996, University of Illinois at Chicago respectively ), and a Master of Divinity in theology at the Princeton Theological Seminary ( 1996 ).

Named after the Hungarian physical chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi ( 1891 – 1976 ), Dembski described it as " the first intelligent design think tank at a research university ".

Dembski had known Sloan for about three years, having taught Sloan's daughter at a Christian study summer camp not far from Waco, Texas.

Dembski never taught a course at Baylor.

Dembski left Baylor on May 31, 2005 to take up a new position at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky as Carl F. H. Henry Professor of Theology and Science.

* Statement by William Dembski on his removal as Directory of the Michael Polanyi Center at Baylor University

** Statement of the Cranach Institute Protesting the Removal of William Dembski as Director of the Michael Polanyi Center at Baylor University

In 2002 he appeared with William A. Dembski at a conference in Texas and has built his more recent web material around ID and Dembski.

* 2004, " Prolegomenon to a General Biology ", in William A. Dembski, Michael Ruse, eds., Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, Cambridge University Press.

Dembski responded with another press release: " Baylor University President Robert Sloan has removed me as director of the Michael Polanyi Center despite his having personally solicited me to come to Baylor and establish the Center as a means of furthering work on intelligent design.

President Sloan asked Dembski to withdraw his press release, but Dembski refused, accusing the university of " intellectual McCarthyism " ( borrowing a phrase that Sloan himself had used when they first tried to dissolve the center ).

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Though only a relatively short walk separated it from my own part of town, its character was wholly foreign to me.

Over and above that, however, was his growing suspicion of Chuck Stober's part in recent events.

Singing into the mirror and his interested eyes, he was pleased to note, when he stripped for his own bath, that he still had the best part of his Italian sun tan.

As he watched the man sit suddenly, a detached part of his mind observed how very difficult it was, really, to knock a man off his feet.

School began in August, the hottest part of the year, and for the first few days Miss Langford was very lenient with the children, letting them play a lot and the new ones sort of get acquainted with one another.

Satisfied at last, and after a few amorous gambits on her part which convinced Delphine that Dandy was capable of learning new arts, she opened the window and called to her liveried driver.

even when the fences became a part of the game -- when a vine-embowered gate-post was the Sleeping Beauty's enchanted castle, or when Rapunzel let down her golden hair from beneath the crocketed spire, even then we paid little heed to those who went by on the path outside.

Was it supposed, perchance, that A & M ( vocational training, that is ) was quite sufficient for the immigrant class which flooded that part of the New England world in the post-Civil War period, the immigrants having been brought in from Southern Europe, to work in the mills, to make up for the labor shortage caused by migration to the West??

The point is that the reactionary, for whatever motive, perceives himself to have been part or a partner of something that extended beyond himself, something which, consequently, he was not able to accept or reject on the basis of subjective preference.

This arrangement was for Copernicus literally monstrous: `` With ( the Ptolemaists ) it is as though an artist were to gather the hands, feet, head and other members for his images from divers models, each part excellently drawn, but not related to a single body ; ;

I fled, however, not from what might have been the natural fear of being unable to disguise from you that the things about my bridegroom -- in the sense you meant the word `` things '' -- which you had been galvanizing yourself to tell me as a painful part of your maternal duty were things which I had already insisted upon finding out for myself ( despite, I may now say, the unspeakable awkwardness of making the discovery on principle, yes, on principle, and in cold blood ) because I was resolved, as a modern woman, not to be a mollycoddle waiting for Life but to seize Life by the throat.

Moreover, because of the particular blot on your family escutcheon through what may only have been one unbridled moment on your grandmother's part, and because you had the lean-to kitchen and trundle bed of your childhood to outgrow, what you obviously most desired with both your conscious and unconscious person, what you bent your whole will, sensibility, and intelligence upon, was to be a lady.

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The word was that this too was part of an economy move on his part.

Platoons of Hearst agents were traveling from state to state in a surprisingly successful search for delegates at the coming convention, and there were charges that money was doing a large part of the persuading.

Trevelyan was at least in part attracted to the period by an almost unconscious desire to take up the story where Macaulay's History Of England had broken off.

As the field on which my tent was pitched was a favorite natural playground for the kids of the neighborhood, I had made many friends among them, taking part in their after-school games and trying desperately to translate Grimm's Fairy Tales into an understandable French as we gathered around the fire in front of the tent.

Sherman felt that his own part in the campaign was skillful and well executed but that the slowness of a part of his army robbed him of the larger fruits of victory.

The Prince took her with him on every tour around the area, and it was rumored he was utilizing her knowledge of Constantinople as part of his espionage network.