Steve Fuller Responds to Norman Levitt's Review of Science V. Religion?

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I CONFESS THAT I AM NOT ENTIRELY convinced that Norman Levitt has read Science v. Religion? What passes as a review of the book consists of a smattering of his own preoccupations that make passing contact with things I say, sandwiched between boilerplate versions of his now trademark fulminations. At no point does he state, let alone answer, the fundamental thesis of the book, namely, the centrality of intelligent design in motivating the scientific enterprise, in terms of which Darwin's theory of evolution is a historical aberration. (That much should be apparent from the book's subtitle: Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution.) The book is not meant as a detailed defense of the versions of ID put forward by Dembski and Behe, but rather an attempt to show that there is much more to their ideas and instincts than the intellectually claustrophobic discussion to date would suggest.

Consider Levitt's treatment of what I say about complexity, which indeed figures in a title of a chapter in my book, though at most five pages are of direct relevance to his concerns. First, I claim that it is impossible to design a true random number generator because it is ultimately possible to infer the algorithm. Levitt responds that in practice …