Here is an email I just received. See my recommended list below:
Dear Professor Dembski:
My name is SNIP. I am a doctoral student in the philosophy
program at SNIP. I am writing to you because I have recently become
interested in some of the arguments being put forth under the intelligent
design banner, but there is, what seems to me to be a vast amount of
literature springing up, and I’m finding it difficult to navigate through
it all.Since there’s so much hostility to the view, I’m not really comfortable
discussing the topic with most of the folks in my department. The last
thing I need right now is to be labeled as a “fanatic” of some sort. Thus,
I figured I’d go straight to the horse’s mouth, so to speak.So, I’m wondering what you would recommend to the student who has a strong
background in analytic philosophy/logic but hasn’t read much within this
area other than some of the more superfical critiques (the typical “but
its not science” mixed with “just read Hume”). I already own your “The
Design Inference” along with Behe’s “Darwin’s Black Box”, but admit to
having given them each only a cursory glance at this point. Of the other
material available, which, on your view, is most important for the
educated reader?Additionally, I suspect there are probably a number of other graduate
students in my shoes. That is, they see ID as an interesting (maybe even
intuitive) alternative, but are nervous about expressing such views within
their respective departments, for fear of being alienated or losing
faculty support. Thus, I think something like a public “philosophically
educated beginner’s guide to ID” might be warranted. Maybe you could post
a list of this sort on your blog? If you did I would certainly appreciate
it, although I’d not want to be mentioned therein due to some of the fears
expressed above.Thanks very much,
SNIP
Here’s my list to start the ball rolling:
- Ben Wiker, Moral Darwinism (IVP)
- Bill Dembski, The Design Revolution (IVP)
- Angus Menuge, Agents Under Fire (Rowman & Littlefield)
- Michael Rea, World without Design (Oxford)
- William Lane Craig & JP Moreland (eds.), Naturalism: A Critical Analysis (Routledge)
- Del Ratzsch, Nature, Design, and Science (SUNY)
- Neil Manson (ed.), God and Design (Routledge)
- Thomas Reid, Lectures on Natural Theology (UPA, edited by Elmer Duncan)