Better in their words…

Darwinism: Scientific Inference of Philosophical Preference?, co-edited by Steve Meyer, Jon Buell, and myself, was just released through Inkwell Press using its amazing book production technology (https://inkwell.net — I encourage authors to try it!).

Source: (2) Darwinism: Scientific Inference or Philosophical Preference?

BILL DEMBSKI OCT 5, 2026

Darwinism: Scientific Inference of Philosophical Preference?, co-edited by Steve Meyer, Jon Buell, and myself, was just released through Inkwell Press using its amazing book production technology (https://inkwell.net — I encourage authors to try it!). This book is available at Amazon: hardback, paperback, and ebook. With a new preface (see below), it reprints the proceedings of the classic symposium on ID versus Darwinism from the early 1990s.
Book Description
At Southern Methodist University in March 1992, scientists and philosophers gathered to examine the conceptual basis of Darwinian evolution. Titled Darwinism: Scientific Inference or Philosophical Preference? this symposium became a landmark exchange between Phillip E. Johnson and Michael Ruse, as well as between respective supporters of intelligent design and Darwinian naturalism. Notably, it brought together for the first time Michael Behe, William Dembski, and Stephen Meyer, who in subsequent years became leading proponents of intelligent design. Matching papers and rebuttals, participants debated whether unguided material processes can explain life’s complexity and whether philosophical bias limits scientific openness to design. The proceedings, first published in 1994 as Darwinism: Science or Philosophy? marked the intellectual coalescence of what quickly would become the Intelligent Design movement. This 2026 republication restores the symposium’s original title and context, inviting readers to reconsider this pivotal moment in the modern dialogue over the nature and limits of science. 

On March 26–28, 1992, scientists and philosophers assembled at Southern Methodist University for an event whose title posed a provocative question: Darwinism—Scientific Inference or Philosophical Preference? At first glance, it appeared to be one more entry in the long sequence of creation–evolution debates. Yet the tone, structure, and consequences of this symposium proved different. Here, arguably for the first time in modern academic life, critics and defenders of Darwinian theory met under conditions of civility, mutual respect, and serious philosophical and scientific reflection. The resulting proceedings, published two years later as Darwinism: Science or Philosophy? became a foundational text in the emergence and conceptual development of the theory of intelligent design, which would come to dominate discussions over teleology in biology through the closing years of the twentieth century and into the new millennium.
The symposium’s success owed much to the convergence of three organizers—Jon Buell of the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, Stephen Sternberg of Christian Leadership Ministries, and Thomas E. Woodward of the C. S. Lewis Society—each of whom recognized that Phillip E. Johnson’s Darwin on Trial, published the previous year in 1991, had opened a fresh chapter in the discussion of biological origins. Johnson’s legal precision, accessible style, and skill in assessing argument and evidence (his specialty was criminal law) had rekindled questions that many assumed long settled: whether Darwinian evolution explains biological complexity because incontrovertible scientific evidence supports it or because philosophical naturalism requires it. Their shared vision was to put this question to the test in open dialogue, not polemic.
Organizing such an encounter in 1992 required courage and diplomacy. The scientific mainstream regarded creation-evolution debates as exhibitions of bad faith. Most mainstream scientists assumed any challenge to Darwinism must conceal religious motives. In fact, up until this event, defenders of Darwinism saw such debates as pitting religion against science—casting religion or faith as the automatic loser. This symposium, by contrast, contended that the debate over Darwinism is a science versus science debate, and yet where what counts as science depends critically on philosophical presuppositions about the nature of science. Darwinists have traditionally argued that science must be naturalistic, ruling out any appeal to intelligent causation. But who makes the rules for what can and cannot count as science? Strictly speaking, such questions are not questions of science but rather of the philosophy of science. 
Against this backdrop, Buell, Sternberg, and Woodward were able to secure a distinguished roster from both sides. On the Darwinian side stood philosopher of biology Michael Ruse, alongside zoologist Arthur M. Shapiro, neuroscientist Frederick Grinnell, and biologists Leslie K. Johnson and K. John Morrow Jr. On the critical side were Johnson himself, alongside philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer, biochemist Michael J. Behe, mathematician-philosopher William A. Dembski, philosopher Peter van Inwagen, and geneticist David L. Wilcox. The diversity of credentials and disciplines guaranteed that no simple “science versus religion” dichotomy in the framing of the discussions would suffice.
In this symposium, Johnson was the star. His book Darwin on Trial, published the year before, set the terms for the symposium. Symposium participants were either for his position (or at least sympathetic to it) or against it. But this book did not appear out of nowhere. Before its publication in 1991, Johnson had carefully laid the groundwork for its reception. Johnson had come to doubt Darwinism during the academic year 1987–88, when he was doing sabbatical research studying torts in England. He had seen both Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker (published 1986) and Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (published 1985) in the show window of a bookstore, bought both books, and became so intrigued that he devoted the bulk of his intellectual energies during that sabbatical to evolution. At that time, Johnson also had Stephen Meyer as a conversation partner, who was at Cambridge working on a doctorate in the philosophy of science focused on the origin of life. 
By the middle of 1988, Johnson was circulating a working draft of what became Darwin on Trial. That summer, Stephen Meyer attended a conference in Tacoma, Washington titled The Sources of Information Content in DNA. The conference was convened by Charles Thaxton, the lead author of The Mystery of Life’s Origin, an early seminal book advancing the idea of intelligent design. Meyer carried a copy of Johnson’s early draft and shared it with several conferees including Thaxton and Paul Nelson, then a doctoral student in the philosophy of biology at the University of Chicago.
The next year, at the Spring Systematics Symposium at the Field Museum in Chicago (May 13, 1989), Bill Dembski got to hear Stephen Jay Gould, Will Provine, and Michael Ruse. At that same meeting, he met several biologists attending this event from Calvin College (now Calvin University), which was a three-hour car ride from the Field Museum. They were all abuzz regarding some UC Berkeley law professor who was taking on Darwin. One of them even sent Dembski a paper copy of Johnson’s typescript by mail (this was before pdfs that could be sent electronically). 
At the end of 1989, Johnson attended a three-day closed-door conference at the Jesuit Campion Center outside Boston titled “Science and Creationism in Public Schools.” In attendance at this meeting were historian of science Owen Gingerich as well as paleontologists David Raup and Stephen Jay Gould, along with others. At this event, Johnson and Gould staged an unrehearsed debate in which Johnson laid out his case against Darwinism. Asked about it later, Gould said he hardly remembered it. But Johnson saw it as “one of the pivotal events” in convincing him that he could successfully take on Darwinian evolution and that his arguments could withstand the scrutiny of evolutionists. Indeed, as Johnson would later share with his close colleagues in the intelligent design movement, he came to this meeting thinking that he may find himself overmatched, but instead came away thinking how weak indeed the case was for Darwinian evolution.
When Darwin on Trial was published in 1991, the ground had therefore been well prepared for its reception. Published jointly by Regnery and InterVarsity, both publishers were surprised and pleased with the book’s sales. It didn’t hurt that Johnson was a professor at the prestigious University of California at Berkeley School of Law. Nor did it hurt that he was brilliant (e.g., first in his law school class at the University of Chicago and then a clerk for United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren). Also, he was great in public debate, able to think quickly on his feet. 
But although Johnson knew he could handle himself well in debate with evolutionists, he recognized the need for a cross-disciplinary team if his critique of Darwinian evolution was going to be not just an irritant to Darwinists but the beachhead in a titanic struggle to replace the Darwinian paradigm with a new design-based paradigm. The SMU symposium gave Johnson the confidence such a replacement paradigm was feasible. A year later, come 1993, he organized a private meeting in Pajaro Dunes outside San Francisco with a dozen or so scientists and philosophers who would become central to the intelligent design movement, including not just Behe, Meyer, and Dembski from the SMU symposium but also Jonathan Wells, Paul Nelson, and Douglas Axe. As the 1990s unfolded, Johnson role became that of talent spotter, recruiter, and key strategist of the intelligent design movement. But the SMU symposium was the start. 
At the symposium’s heart lay the following key question: Is Darwinism a compelling empirically based inference, or does it depend on an a prioricommitment to metaphysical naturalism? If the latter, then the claim that “Darwinism is science” conceals circular reasoning: Darwinism is true because science, by definition, considers only naturalistic causes, and Darwinism is the only fully naturalistic explanation on the table for discussion. Johnson termed this view the “blind watchmaker thesis,” borrowing Richard Dawkins’s image of life evolving by the mindless, purposeless mechanism of natural selection. Johnson challenged whether this thesis had been empirically confirmed—or whether it instead depended crucially on a metaphysical boundary marker that excluded design by fiat.
Michael Ruse, the symposium’s chief respondent, argued that science must be methodologically naturalistic: it explains phenomena by reference to law-bound regularities, not divine interventions. To abandon that rule would be to abandon science itself. Stephen Meyer countered that the historical sciences differ from experimental physics: they reconstruct singular past events and therefore must remain open to all causes adequate to the effects in question—including intelligent agency if warranted by the evidence. Their exchange distilled a philosophical tension that continues to shape contemporary debates about design, consciousness, and the limits of scientific explanation.
Johnson later recalled that the opening sessions began with cautious formality and mutual suspicion. Yet as discussion proceeded, participants found unexpected goodwill. Even the sharpest exchanges between Johnson and Ruse—reprinted here as the centerpiece of this symposium—were punctuated with humor and respect. By the close of the second day, conversation flowed easily at meals and receptions. In an academic climate often dominated by caricature, the SMU symposium demonstrated that reasoned dissent on ultimate questions could be both rigorous and congenial. Johnson would later call it “perhaps even an historic event,” for it re-opened space in the academy for substantive critique of Darwinism.
The proceedings followed a thesis–response–reply structure that encouraged precision. Behe’s paper on the functional isolation of protein classes foreshadowed recent experimental work establishing precisely such isolation in so-called “sequence space.” It also foreshadowed what Behe would later call “irreducible complexity” as applied to molecular machines. Dembski’s “The Incompleteness of Scientific Naturalism” anticipated his later ideas about specified complexity in mathematically framing the design inference. Meyer’s essay challenged the explanatory adequacy of laws in historical reconstruction—a line that matured into his work on the legitimacy of invoking intelligent design to explain the origin of biological information. Van Inwagen, a philosopher of formidable analytic rigor, voiced doubts about Darwinism’s metaphysical reach. Grinnell, Morrow, and Shapiro defended methodological naturalism, arguing that science’s power lies precisely in its self-limitation to naturalistic causes. The resulting dialectic yielded not consensus but improved clarity, underscoring the twilight zone between empirical evidence and philosophical presupposition.
The early 1990s marked a transition point in the discussion of origins. The Scopes Trial of 1925 had framed the issue as science versus Scripture; the “creation science” movement of the 1970s and 1980s sought, at least in part, to defend Genesis by scientific means, but with limited success in the wider culture and defeat in the courts (Michael Ruse was a star witness in McLean v. Arkansas, commonly known as the Arkansas Creation Trial). 
The SMU symposium inaugurated a third phase—one free of biblical literalism and anchored in philosophical analysis and scientific rigor. Its participants asked not what the Bible teaches but how science articulates and defends its explanatory boundaries. In that respect, the meeting prefigured the intelligent design movement’s defining strategy: to critique naturalism on epistemological rather than theological grounds and to show naturalism’s failure as an adequate basis for the natural sciences, and the study of biological origins, in particular. From this small gathering would grow institutions, research programs, and public debates that continue to influence education, philosophy, and science. For instance, Johnson, Meyer, Behe, and Dembski—key participants at the SMU symposium—were pivotal in 1996 in founding Discovery Institute’s initiative for intelligent design research—what today is called Discovery’s Center for Science and Culture. 
More than three decades later, the questions first articulated at the SMU symposium remain urgent. Advances in molecular biology, information theory, and cosmology have only intensified reflection on whether material causes alone suffice to explain the origin of complex information-rich structures. Meanwhile, advances in the philosophy of science continue to vindicate the symposium’s insistence that science is a human enterprise shaped by metaphysical commitments. The rediscovery of these proceedings reminds readers that the modern controversy over design did not begin on talk shows or in courtrooms but in sober academic dialogue among experts willing to listen to each other.
Republishing Darwinism: Scientific Inference or Philosophical Preference? in 2026 serves both historical and intellectual purposes. Historically, it preserves a snapshot of a pivotal moment—the birth of an alternative research community that sought to reopen foundational questions about biological origins. Intellectually, it offers a model for how such questions can be pursued with rigor and without rancor (unfortunately, a model often forgotten in subsequent years). The tone of mutual respect achieved at SMU stands as a rebuke to the polarization that later marred some public discussions of evolution. Readers today, whether sympathetic or skeptical of design, can benefit from revisiting an exchange in which each side stated its case at full strength and with evident integrity.
It would be a mistake to read these papers merely as relics of an early skirmish. They are, rather, primary documents in the continuing exploration of Darwinian evolution’s epistemic foundations. When Grinnell insists that “only naturalistic explanations can become part of science,” and when Ruse argues that science must explain by unbroken natural law, they articulate a narrow understanding of science. When Johnson and Meyer challenge that restriction, they ask whether the boundary of science may not justifiably be enlarged. The ensuing dialogue defines the field in which subsequent work by Behe, Dembski, and Meyer would unfold. 
As we read these pages now in an age of genomics and artificial intelligence, the symposium’s underlying dilemma persists: can a worldview that defines reality as wholly materialistic account for the informational richness of life and the rational capacities of the minds that study it? The SMU participants did not definitively answer that question, but they modeled how to ask and approach it. Their work underscores that progress in understanding nature requires not only data but also reflection on the assumptions that govern our interpretation of data.
Credit is due to the many who made the 1992 symposium possible. Certainly thanks are due to Buell, Sternberg, and Woodward, its key organizers. Obviously, thanks are due to the participants, scholars willing to risk discredit and misunderstanding. Buell, who passed on in 2020, deserves special mention, as it was his Foundation for Thought and Ethics that published they symposium proceedings back in 1994. He oversaw all aspects of the publication of the original edition and remains an editor of this edition. Thanks are also due to Virginia Hearn, who helped copyedit the original symposium proceedings. Finally, we want to dedicate this volume to Phillip Johnson (1940–2019) and Michael Ruse (1940–2024), whose wit, courage, and spirit of inquiry animated those three spring days in Dallas over thirty years ago. 
Stephen C. Meyer
William A. Dembski


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