Walter Bradley (engineer)


Walter L. Bradley is a retired professor of engineering, lecturer, old Earth creationist and an advocate of intelligent design. He is a professor at Baylor University a private Baptist college in Waco, Texas, and has researched the use of coconut husks as a replacement for synthetic fibers. He taught mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University.

Intelligent design

Bradley is the co-author, along with Roger Olsen and Charles Thaxton, of The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories. This book, published in 1984, presents a creationist interpretation of abiogenesis, attributing it to "Special Creation by a creator beyond the cosmos", and says that Special Creation holds "that the source that produced life was intelligent". William Dembski has described Bradley as one of the originators of the intelligent design movement, and the book as seminal in the ID movement.
Bradley was one of the pioneers of the concept of intelligent design, attempting to explain topics not yet understood by science as the activity of God. Bradley's writings on the subject anticipated some of the concepts later articulated by William Dembski and Michael Behe, and he was a participant in early meetings regarding the wedge strategy, a religious public relations campaign with a goal of reshaping American culture to adopt evangelical Protestant values.
As of 2007, Bradley was on the selection committee for the Trotter Prize, which rewards work on intelligent design.