Intelligent design is an international enterprise, spanning continents and speaking to people in many languages and across diverse platforms. I was delighted recently, for example, to see our colleague Casey Luskin in dialogue with Muslim YouTubers, here in the U.S. and in the U.K. Our Summer Seminars have a whole program, the International Seminar on Intelligent Design (July 10-12, 2025), giving evidence that ID education can’t be contained by the United States. And so forth. 

Among our partners around the world, one of the finest, doing some of the most impressive work, is the En Arche Foundation in Poland. Their book translations include work by Stephen Meyer, Michael Denton, Michael Behe, Michael Flannery, plus some fun surprises like two volumes of highlights from Evolution News and NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Last week they published a Polish translation of the new second edition of The Design Inference, by Dembski and Ewert. For the occasion, we received this from Dr. Grzegorz Malec, the head of scientific affairs at En Arche:

I have the honor to inform you that the Polish translation of William Dembski and Winston Ewert’s The Design Inference is now available. The translation was prepared by Dariusz Sagan, who spent years analyzing the methodological and philosophical aspects of intelligent design theory. I am glad to have contributed to this enterprise, serving as the editor of the Polish translation. 

This book could not have been published without the efforts of the En Arche Foundation. The Foundation was established in 2018, and since then, it has published dozens of book translations for Polish readers, explaining what the theory of intelligent design is (and what it isn’t).

I think that no matter your longitude and latitude, the most popular argument against this theory is the same — namely that ID cannot be treated as a scientific enterprise because it doesn’t use scientific tools to detect design, so all its conclusions have to be based on religious belief. We are used to this objection being tossed around by Polish scientists and science popularizers. The new book by Dembski and Ewert could be a real game changer here. When it comes to books that propose a great idea, authors must find a golden mean to make their conclusions understandable. If the book is too technical, it could be regarded by readers as confusing; if it is too simple, it could be viewed as unconvincing from a scientific point of view. Dembski and Ewert found this golden mean. 

I sent the book to Grzegorz Słowik at the Institute of Materials and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Zielona Góra. I knew he was busy with his astrobiological research. Still, I asked him for his opinion of The Design Inference. Because he is scientifically knowledgeable, I was convinced that the book wouldn’t pose a challenge to him, but I thought he might find it unacceptable from a scientific point of view. He read the book carefully, and his opinion is published on the back cover.

“William A. Dembski and Winston Ewert’s book The Design Inference is a very valuable contribution to the methodology of discovery of intelligent design. The methodology used in the book presented to readers is mathematically and logically precise and includes an accurate tool for this purpose: the explanatory filter. It can be successfully applied to many important research areas to detect that some things cannot be explained only by chance, and they have traits of specified complexity. The authors show that the chance hypothesis can be ruled out based on small probabilities and specifications. The tool constructed by Dembski and Ewert may become groundbreaking, for example, in astrobiological research. This may lead us to answers to a number of most important questions: where we came from, who we are, and where we are going.”

It is evident that he believes that the tool described by Dembski and Ewert (first by Dembski alone more than 25 years ago) is valuable and can be used to detect design not only in the world of human artifacts but also in nature.

A standard feature of every revolutionary concept in science is that it is met with different reactions. Some are very positive, like that of Grzegorz Słowik; others are more skeptical or critical in nature. One thing can be said for sure — this book is worth reading with an open mind, and if someone accepts the challenge of doing this, who knows where it will lead? Thanks to En Arche Foundation, every Polish reader can now take up this challenge.

Congratulations to our associates at En Arche, and to William Dembski and Winston Ewert. Also to Geoffrey Simmons whose What Darwin Didn’t Know is another recent publication by En Arche! The Polish publisher has an impressive website with a bookstore carrying all their publications. We have some of them in the office. I would add that the books are sturdy and lovely, with a consistent, striking artistic design to them. You might — you certainly could — call it an intelligent design.