Being as Communion Quotes

“The material world, as conceived by materialists, however, is continually confused with reality as such.”
― William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information

“Insofar as explanation fails to account for some salient fact, it is incomplete and its parsimony can no longer rightly be regarded as an asset. Indeed, the key failing of materialism, as we shall see, is that its parsimony is purchased at the cost of misrepresenting reality.”
― William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information

“Materialism is adept at transforming illusions of possibility into settled verities.”
― William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information

“On materialist principles, our minds are limited to the material constitution of our brains (minds transcending brains are simply not an option for materialism), and our brains are simply more complicated arrangements of balls going down inclined planes and coins being tossed. Thus we are not in control, we are not free.”
― William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information

“my atheism is a conviction not based on evidence, though it leads me to seek a certain kind of solution to the evident inadequacy of materialism.”
― William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information

“The power to veto or negate is the power of free will. Free will is “free won’t.”9 This connects neatly with information theory, which, as we will see, characterizes information as a reduction or ruling out of possibilities. To be informed that something is the case is to be informed that other things are not the case. Information says yes to some things by saying no to others. Free will is the power of no.”
― William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information

“To exist is to be in communion, and to be in communion is to exchange information. Accordingly, the fundamental science, indeed the science that needs to ground all other sciences, is a theory of communication, and not, as is widely supposed, an atomistic, reductionistic, and mechanistic science of particles or other mindless entities, which then need to be built up to ever greater orders of complexity by equally mindless principles of association, known as natural laws or algorithms or emergent properties or principles of self-organization.2 Within such a theory of communication, the proper object of study is not particles, but the information that passes between entities—entities in turn defined by their ability to communicate information.”
― William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information

“Being as Communion is the final book in a trilogy. The two earlier books were The Design Inference and No Free Lunch.”
― William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information

“in our materialist culture, such alternate forms of knowledge, whatever they might be, tend to undergo a materialist reduction. This is simply a sociological fact about how knowledge in our culture is viewed: the world, whatever else it may be, is composed of matter, and it is best understood in materialist terms. This, overwhelmingly, is the received opinion. Accordingly, many thinkers will claim that science (a science whose main task is to study and understand matter) constitutes our best form of knowledge. Of course, the very claim that science is our best form of knowledge is itself nonscientific. No scientific experiment or scientific theory can define what science is. In fact, what constitutes science is not written in stone but has been continually negotiated for more than two millennia (scientists, or natural philosophers as they used to be called, have been around at least that long).”
― William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information