Dembski's new job
Specified complexity at Good Math, Bad Math
William Dembski and the explanatory filter
Thomas Woodward's Doubts about Darwin lauds the
explanatory filter, William Dembski's method for detecting intelligent design. Woodward claims that Dembski's filter became the central heuristic framework for the detection of intelligent design in any phenomenon or object (pg. 135).
Woodward further remarks (pg. 177) Behe briefly explains the explanatory filter and compares it favorably with the greatest intellectual advances in the history of humankind. On pg. 178 he waxes that Rob Koons describes Dembski (on a book jacket) as the Isaac Newton of information theory, and since this is the Age of Information, that makes Dembski one of the most important thinkers of our time.
Is the explanatory filter a central heuristic? Citation Index shows only two references to explanatory filter in academic literature over the past 15 years:
1. Nichols R
Scientific content, testability, and the vacuity of Intelligent Design theory
AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 77 (4): 591-611 FAL 2003
2. Wilkins JS, Elsberry WR
The advantages of theft over toil: The design inference and arguing from ignorance
BIOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY 16 (5): 711-724 NOV 2001
Neither reference shares Woodward's enthusiasm. If the explanatory filter is a central heuristic, it is so only among the faithful.
Christianity Today, which made Doubts about Darwin a Book of the Year, is generally more impressed by rhetoric than by science. See Edward Larson's review in Christianity Today.