Intelligent Design as a Theory
Intelligent Design as a TheoryABSTRACT: For the scientific community intelligent design represents creationism's latest grasp at scientific legitimacy. Accordingly, intelligent design is viewed as yet another ill-conceived attempt by creationists to straightjacket science within a religious ideology. But in fact intelligent design can be formulated as a scientific theory having empirical consequences and devoid of religious commitments. Intelligent design can be unpacked as a theory of information. Within such a theory, information becomes a reliable indicator of design as well as a proper object for scientific investigation. In my paper I shall (1) show how information can be reliably detected and measured, and (2) formulate a conservation law that governs the origin and flow of information. My broad conclusion is that information is not reducible to natural causes, and that the origin of information is best sought in intelligent causes. Intelligent design thereby becomes a theory for detecting and measuring information, explaining its origin, and tracing its flow.
BIOSKETCH: Bill Dembski has a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary. Bill has done post-doctoral work at MIT, University of Chicago, Northwestern, Princeton, Cambridge, and Notre Dame. He has been a National Science Foundation doctoral and post-doctoral fellow. His publications range from mathematics to philosophy to theology. His monograph The Design Inference will appear with Cambridge University Press in 1998. In it he describes the logic whereby rational agents infer intelligent causes. He is working with Stephen Meyer and Paul Nelson on a book entitled Uncommon Descent, which seeks to reestablish the legitimacy and fruitfulness of design within biology.
1. INFORMATION
In Steps Towards Life Manfred Eigen (1992, p. 12) identifies what he regards as the central problem facing origins-of-life research: "Our task is to find an algorithm, a natural law that leads to the origin of information." Eigen is only half right. To determine how life began, it is indeed necessary to understand the origin of information. Even so, neither algorithms nor natural laws are capable of producing information. The great myth of modern evolutionary biology is that information can be gotten on the cheap without recourse to intelligence. It is this myth I seek to dispel, but to do so I shall need to give an account of information. No one disputes that there is such a thing as information. As Keith Devlin (1991, p. 1) remarks, "Our very lives depend upon it, upon its gathering, storage, manipulation, transmission, security, and so on. Huge amounts of money change hands in exchange for information. People talk about it all the time. Lives are lost in its pursuit. Vast commercial empires are created in order to manufacture equipment to handle it." But what exactly is information? The burden of this paper is to answer this question, presenting an account of information that is relevant to biology.
What then is information? The fundamental intuition underlying...
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