William A. Dembski
Millstatt Forum
August 10, 1998


Presented at Millstatt Forum, Strasbourg, France, 10, August 1998


Introduction

"Sing, O Goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought
countless ills upon the Achaeans." In these opening lines of the Iliad,
Homer invokes the Muse. For Homer the act of creating poetry is a divine
gift, one that derives from an otherworldly source and is not ultimately
reducible to this world. This conception of human creativity as a divine
gift pervaded the ancient world, and was also evident among the Hebrews.
In Exodus, for instance, we read that God filled the two artisans Bezaleel
and Aholiab with wisdom so that they might complete the work of the
tabernacle.

The idea that creative activity is a divine gift has largely been lost
these days. To ask a cognitive scientist, for instance, what made Mozart a
creative genius is unlikely to issue in an appeal to God. If the cognitive
scientist embraces neuropsychology, he may suggest that Mozart was blessed
with a particularly fortunate collocation of neurons. If he prefers an
information processing model of mentality, he may attribute Mozart's
genius to some particularly effective computational modules. If he is
taken with Skinner's behaviorism, he may attribute Mozart's genius to some
particularly effective reinforcement schedules (perhaps imposed early in
his life by his father Leopold). And no doubt, in all of these
explanations the cognitive scientist will invoke Mozart's natural genetic
endowment. In place of a divine afflatus, the modern cognitive scientist
explains human creativity purely in terms of natural processes.

Who's right, the ancients or the moderns? My own view is that the ancients
got it right. An act of creation is always a divine gift and cannot be
reduced to purely naturalistic categories. To be sure, creative activity
often involves the transformation of natural objects, like the
transformation of a slab of marble into Michelangelo's David. But even
when confined to natural objects, creative activity is never naturalistic
without remainder. The divine is always present at some level and
indispensable.

Invoking the divine to explain an act of creation is, of course, wholly
unacceptable to the ruling intellectual elite. Naturalism, the view that
nature is the ultimate reality, has become the default position for all
serious inquiry among our intellectual elite. From Biblical studies to law
to education to science to the arts, inquiry is allowed to proceed only
under the supposition that nature is the ultimate reality. Naturalism
denies any divine element to the creative act. By contrast, the Christian
tradition plainly asserts that God is the ultimate reality and that nature
itself is a divine creative act. Within Christian theism, God is primary
and fundamental whereas nature is secondary and derivative. Naturalism, by
contrast, asserts that nature is primary and fundamental.

Theism and naturalism provide radically different perspectives on the act
of creation. Within theism any act of creation is also a divine act.
Within naturalism any act of creation emerges from a purely natural
substrate--the very minds that create are, within naturalism, the result
of a long evolutionary process that itself was not created. The aim of
this talk, then, is to present a general account of creation that is
faithful to the Christian tradition, that resolutely rejects naturalism,
and that engages contemporary developments in science and philosophy.

The Challenge of Naturalism

Why should anyone want to understand the act of creation naturalistically?
Naturalism, after all, offers fewer resources than theism. Naturalism
simply gives you nature. Theism gives you not only nature, but also God
and anything outside of nature that God might have created. The ontology
of theism is far richer than that of naturalism. Why, then, settle for
less?

Naturalists do not see themselves as settling for less. Instead, they
regard theism as saddled with a lot of extraneous entities that serve no
useful function. The regulative principle of naturalism is Occam's razor.
Occam's razor is a principle of parsimony that requires eliminating
entities that perform no useful function. Using Occam's razor, naturalists
attempt to slice away the superstitions of the past-and for naturalists
the worst superstition of all is God. People used to invoke God to explain
all sorts of things for which we now have perfectly good naturalistic
explanations. Accordingly, God is a superstition that needs to be excised
from our understanding of the world. The naturalists' dream is to invent a
theory of everything that entirely eliminates the need for God (Stephen
Hawking is a case in point).

Since naturalists are committed to eliminating God from every domain of
inquiry, let us consider how successfully they have eliminated God from
the act of creation. Even leaving aside the creation of the world and
focusing solely on human acts of creation, do we find that naturalistic
categories have fully explained human creativity? Occam's razor is all
fine and well for removing stubble, but while we're at it let's make sure
we don't lop off a nose or ear. With respect to human creativity, let's
make sure that in eliminating God the naturalist isn't giving us a
lobotomized account of human creativity. Einstein once remarked that
everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler. In
eliminating God from the act of creation, the naturalist needs to make
sure that nothing of fundamental importance has been lost. Not only has
the naturalist failed to provide this assurance, but there is good reason
to think that any account of the creative act that omits God is
necessarily incomplete and defective.

What does naturalism have to say about human acts of creation? For the
moment let's bracket the question of creativity and consider simply what
it is for a human being to act. Humans are intelligent agents that act
with intentions to accomplish certain ends. Although some acts by humans
are creative, others are not. Georgia O'Keefe painting an iris is a
creative act. Georgia O'Keefe flipping on a light switch is an act but not
a creative act. For the moment, therefore, let us focus simply on human
agency, leaving aside human creative agency.

How, then, does naturalism make sense of human agency? Although the
naturalistic literature that attempts to account for human agency is vast,
the naturalist's options are in fact quite limited. The naturalist's world
is not a mind-first world. Intelligent agency is therefore in no sense
prior to or independent of nature. Intelligent agency is neither sui
generis nor basic. Intelligent agency is a derivative mode of causation
that depends on underlying naturalistic--and therefore
unintelligent--causes. Humans agency in particular supervenes on
underlying natural processes, which in turn usually are identified with
brain function.

It is important to distinguish the naturalist's understanding of causation
from the theist's. Within theism God is the ultimate reality.
Consequently, whenever God acts, there can be nothing outside of God that
compels God's action. God is not a billiard ball that must move when
another billiard ball strikes it. God's actions are free, and though he
responds to his creation, he does not do so out of necessity. Within
theism, therefore, divine action is not reducible to some more basic mode
of causation. Indeed, within theism divine action is the most basic mode
of causation since any other mode of causation involves creatures which
themselves were created in a divine act.

Now consider naturalism. Within naturalism nature is the ultimate reality.
Consequently, whenever something happens in nature, there can be nothing
outside of nature that shares responsibility for what happened. Thus, when
an event happens in nature, it is either because some other event in
nature was responsible for it or because it simply happened, apart from
any other determining event. Events therefore happen either because they
were caused by other events or because they happened spontaneously. The
first of these is usually called "necessity," the second "chance." For the
naturalist chance and necessity are the fundamental modes of causation.
Together they constitute what are called "natural causes." Naturalism,
therefore, seeks to account for intelligent agency in terms of natural
causes.

How well have natural causes been able to account for intelligent agency?
Cognitive scientists have achieved nothing like a full reduction. The
French Enlightenment thinker Pierre Cabanis once remarked: "Les
nerfs-voil tout l'homme" (the nerves--that's all there is to man). A full
reduction of intelligent agency to natural causes would give a complete
account of human behavior, intention, and emotion in terms of neural
processes. Nothing like this has been achieved. No doubt, neural processes
are correlated with behavior, intention, and emotion. Anger presumably is
correlated with certain localized brain excitations. But localized brain
excitations hardly explain anger any better than do overt behaviors
associated with anger--like shouting obscenities.

Because cognitive scientists have yet to effect a full reduction of
intelligent agency to natural causes, they speak of intelligent agency as
supervening on natural causes. Supervenience is a hierarchical
relationship between higher order processes (in this case intelligent
agency) and lower order processes (in this case natural causes). What
supervenience says is that the relationship between the higher and lower
order processes is a one-way street, with the lower determining the
higher. To say, for instance, that intelligent agency supervenes on
neurophysiology is to say that once all the facts about neurophysiology
are in place, all the facts about intelligent agency are determined as
well. Supervenience makes no pretense at reductive analysis. It simply
asserts that the lower level determines the higher level--how it does it,
we don't know.

Supervenience is therefore an insulating strategy, designed to protect a
naturalistic account of intelligent agency until a full reductive
explanation is found. Supervenience, though not providing a reduction,
tells us that in principle a reduction exists. Given that nothing like a
full reductive explanation of intelligent agency is at hand, why should we
think that such a reduction is even possible? To be sure, if we knew that
naturalism were correct, then supervenience would follow. But naturalism
itself is at issue.

Neuroscience, for instance, is nowhere near achieving its ambitions, and
that despite its strident rhetoric. Hardcore neuroscientists, for
instance, refer disparagingly to the ordinary psychology of beliefs,
desires, and emotions as "folk psychology." The implication is that just
as "folk medicine" had to give way to "real medicine," so "folk
psychology" will have to give way to a revamped psychology that is
grounded in neuroscience. In place of talking cures that address our
beliefs, desires, and emotions, tomorrow's healers of the soul will
manipulate brains states directly and ignore such outdated categories as
beliefs, desires, and emotions.

At least so the story goes. Actual neuroscience research has yet to keep
pace with its vaulting ambition. That should hardly surprise us. The
neurophysiology of our brains is incredibly plastic and has proven
notoriously difficult to correlate with intentional states. For instance,
Louis Pasteur, despite suffering a cerebral accident, continued to enjoy a
flourishing scientific career. When his brain was examined after he died,
it was discovered that half the brain had completely atrophied. How does
one explain a flourishing intellectual life despite a severely damaged
brain if mind and brain coincide?

Or consider a still more striking example. The December 12th, 1980 issue
of Science contained an article by Roger Lewin titled "Is Your Brain
Really Necessary?" In the article, Lewin reported a case study by John
Lorber, a British neurologist and professor at Sheffield University. I
quote from the article:

"There's a young student at this university," says Lorber, "who has an IQ
of 126, has gained a first-class honors degree in mathematics, and is
socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain."
[Lewin continues:] The student's physician at the university noticed that
the youth had a slightly larger than normal head, and so referred him to
Lorber, simply out of interest. "When we did a brain scan on him," Lorber
recalls, "we saw that instead of the normal 4.5-centimeter thickness of
brain tissue between the ventricles and the cortical surface, there was
just a thin layer of mantle measuring a millimeter or so. His cranium is
filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid."

Against such anomalies, Cabanis's dictum, "the nerves--that's all there is
to man," hardly inspires confidence. Yet as Thomas Kuhn has taught us, a
science that is progressing fast and furiously is not about to be derailed
by a few anomalies. Neuroscience is a case in point. For all the obstacles
it faces in trying to reduce intelligent agency to natural causes,
neuroscience persists in the Promethean determination to show that mind
does ultimately reduce to neurophysiology. Absent a prior commitment to
naturalism, this determination will seem misguided. On the other hand,
given a prior commitment to naturalism, this determination is readily
understandable.

Understandable yes, obligatory no. Most cognitive scientists do not rest
their hopes with neuroscience. Yes, if naturalism is correct, then a
reduction of intelligent agency to neurophysiology is in principle
possible. The sheer difficulty of even attempting this reduction, both
experimental and theoretical, however, leaves many cognitive scientists
looking for a more manageable field to invest their energies. As it turns
out, the field of choice is computer science, and especially its
subdiscipline of artificial intelligence (abbreviated AI). Unlike brains,
computers are neat and precise. Also, unlike brains, computers and their
programs can be copied and mass-produced. Inasmuch as science thrives on
replicability and control, computer science offers tremendous practical
advantages over neurological research.

Whereas the goal of neuroscience is to reduce intelligent agency to
neurophysiology, the goal of artificial intelligence is to reduce
intelligent agency to computer algorithms. Since computers operate
deterministically, reducing intelligent agency to computer algorithms
would indeed constitute a naturalistic reduction of intelligent agency.
Should artificial intelligence succeed in reducing intelligent agency to
computation, cognitive scientists would still have the task of showing in
what sense brain function is computational (alternatively, Marvin Minsky's
dictum "the mind is a computer made of meat" would still need to be
verified). Even so, the reduction of intelligent agency to computation
would go a long way toward establishing a purely naturalistic basis for
human cognition.

An obvious question now arises: Can computation explain intelligent
agency? First off, let's be clear that no actual computer system has come
anywhere near to simulating the full range of capacities we associate with
human intelligent agency. Yes, computers can do certain narrowly
circumscribed tasks exceedingly well (like play chess). But require a
computer to make a decision based on incomplete information and calling
for common sense, and the computer will be lost. Perhaps the toughest
problem facing artificial intelligence researchers is what's called the
frame problem. The frame problem is getting a computer to find the
appropriate frame of reference for solving a problem.

Consider, for instance, the following story: A man enters a bar. The
bartender asks, "What can I do for you?" The man responds, "I'd like a
glass of water." The bartender pulls out a gun and shouts, "Get out of
here!" The man says "thank you" and leaves. End of story. What is the
appropriate frame of reference? No, this isn't a story by Franz Kafka. The
key item of information needed to make sense of this story is this: The
man has the hiccups. By going to the bar to get a drink of water, the man
hoped to cure his hiccups. The bartender, however, decided on a more
radical cure. By terrifying the man with a gun, the bartender cured the
man's hiccups immediately. Cured of his hiccups, the man was grateful and
left. Humans are able to understand the appropriate frame of reference for
such stories immediately. Computers, on the other hand, haven't a clue.

Ah, but just wait. Give an army of clever programmers enough time,
funding, and computational power, and just see if they don't solve the
frame problem. Naturalists are forever issuing such promissory notes,
claiming that a conclusive confirmation of naturalism is right around the
corner--just give our scientists a bit more time and money. John
Polkinghorne refers to this practice as "promissory materialism."

Confronted with such promises, what's a theist to do? To refuse such
promissory notes provokes the charge of obscurantism, but to accept them
means suspending one's theism. It is possible to reject promissory
materialism without meriting the charge of obscurantism. The point to
realize is that a promissory note need only be taken seriously if there is
good reason to think that it can be paid. The artificial intelligence
community has thus far offered no compelling reason for thinking that it
will ever solve the frame problem. Indeed, computers that employ common
sense to determine appropriate frames of reference continue utterly to
elude computer scientists.

Given the practical difficulties of producing a computer that faithfully
models human cognition, the hardcore artificial intelligence advocate can
change tactics and argue on theoretical grounds that humans are simply
disguised computers. The argument runs something like this. Human beings
are finite. Both the space of possible human behaviors and the space of
possible sensory inputs are finite. For instance, there are only so many
distinguishable word combinations that we can utter and only so many
distinguishable sound combinations that can strike our eardrums. When
represented mathematically, the total number of human lives that can be
distinguished empirically is finite. Now it is an immediate consequence of
recursion theory (the mathematical theory that undergirds computer
science) that any operations and relations on finite sets are computable.
It follows that human beings can be represented computationally. Humans
are therefore functionally equivalent to computers. QED.

This argument can be nuanced. For instance, we can introduce a randomizing
element into our computations to represent quantum indeterminacy. What's
important here, however, is the gist of the argument. The argument asks us
to grant that humans are essentially finite. Once that assumption is
granted, recursion theory tells us that everything a finite being does is
computable. We may never actually be able to build the machines that
render us computable. But in principle we could given enough memory and
fast enough processors.

It's at this point that opponents of computational reductionism usually
invoke Gdel's incompleteness theorem. Gdel's theorem is said to refute
computational reductionism by showing that humans can do things that
computers cannot--namely, produce a Gdel sentence. John Lucas made such
an argument in the early 1960s, and his argument continues to be modified
and revived. Now it is perfectly true that humans can produce Gdel
sentences for computational systems external to themselves. But computers
can as well be programmed to compute Gdel sentences for computational
systems external to themselves. This point is seldom appreciated, but
becomes evident from recursion-theoretic proofs of Gdel's theorem (see,
for example, Klaus Weihrauch's Computability).

The problem, then, is not to find Gdel sentences for computational
systems external to oneself. The problem is for an agent to examine
oneself as a computational system and therewith produce one's own Gdel
sentence. If human beings are non-computational, then there won't be any
Gdel sentence to be found. If, on the other hand, human beings are
computational, then, by Gdel's theorem, we won't be able to find our own
Gdel sentences. And indeed, we haven't. Our inability to translate
neurophysiology into computation guarantees that we can't even begin
computing our Gdel sentences if indeed we are computational systems. Yes,
for a computational system laid out before us we can determine its Gdel
sentence. Nevertheless, we don't have sufficient access to ourselves to
lay ourselves out before ourselves and thereby determine our Gdel
sentences. It follows that neither Gdel's theorem nor our ability to
prove Gdel's theorem shows that humans can do things that computers
cannot.

Accordingly, Gdel's theorem fails to refute the argument for
computational reductionism based on human finiteness. To recap that
argument, humans are finite because the totality of their possible
behavioral outputs and possible sensory inputs is finite. Moreover, all
operations and relations on finite sets are by recursion theory
computable. Hence, humans are computational systems. This is the argument.
What are we to make of it? Despite the failure of Gdel's theorem to block
its conclusion, is there a flaw in the argument?

Yes there is. The flaw consists in identifying human beings with their
behavioral outputs and sensory inputs. Alternatively, the flaw consists in
reducing our humanity to what can be observed and measured. We are more
than what can be observed and measured. Once, however, we limit ourselves
to what can be observed and measured, we are necessarily in the realm of
the finite and therefore computable. We can only make so many
observations. We can only take so many measurements. Moreover, our
measurements never admit infinite gradations (indeed, there's always some
magnitude below which quantities become empirically indistinguishable).
Our empirical selves are therefore essentially finite. It follows that
unless our actual selves transcend our empirical selves, our actual selves
will be finite as well--and therefore computational.

Roger Penrose understands this problem. In The Emperor's New Mind and in
his more recent Shadows of the Mind, he invokes quantum theory to
underwrite a non-computational view of brain and mind. Penrose's strategy
is the same that we saw for Gdel's theorem: Find something humans can do
that computers can't. There are plenty of mathematical functions that are
non-computable. Penrose therefore appeals to quantum processes in the
brain whose mathematical characterization employs non-computable
functions.

Does quantum theory offer a way out of computational reductionism? I would
say no. Non-computable functions are an abstraction. To be non-computable,
functions have to operate on infinite sets. The problem, however, is that
we have no observational experience of infinite sets or of the
non-computable functions defined on them. Yes, the mathematics of quantum
theory employs non-computable functions. But when we start plugging in
concrete numbers and doing calculations, we are back to finite sets and
computable functions.

Granted, we may find it convenient to employ non-computable functions in
characterizing some phenomenon. But when we need to say something definite
about the phenomenon, we must supply concrete numbers, and suddenly we are
back in the realm of the computable. Non-computability exists solely as a
mathematical abstraction--a useful abstraction, but an abstraction
nonetheless. Precisely because our behavioral outputs and sensory inputs
are finite, there is no way to test non-computability against experience.
All scientific data are finite, and any mathematical operations we perform
on that data are computable. Non-computable functions are therefore always
dispensable, however elegant they may appear mathematically.

There is, however, still a deeper problem with Penrose's program to
eliminate computational reductionism. Suppose we could be convinced that
there are processes in the brain that are non-computational. For Penrose
they are quantum processes, but whatever form they take, as long as they
are natural processes, we are still dealing with a naturalistic reduction
of mind. Computational reductionism is but one type of naturalistic
reductionism--certainly the most extreme, but by no means the only one.
Penrose's program offers to replace computational processes with quantum
processes. Quantum processes, however, are as fully naturalistic as
computational processes. In offering to account for mind in terms of
quantum theory, Penrose is therefore still wedded to a naturalistic
reduction of mind and intelligent agency.

It's time to ask the obvious question: Why should anyone want to make this
reduction? Certainly, if we have a prior commitment to naturalism, we will
want to make it. But apart from that commitment, why attempt it? As we've
seen, neurophysiology hasn't a clue about how to reduce intelligent agency
to natural causes (hence its continued retreat to concepts like
supervenience, emergence, and hierarchy--concepts which merely cloak
ignorance). We've also seen that no actual computational systems show any
sign of reducing intelligent agency to computation. The argument that we
are computational systems because the totality of our possible behavioral
outputs and possible sensory inputs is finite holds only if we presuppose
that we are nothing more than the sum of those behavioral outputs and
sensory inputs. So too, Penrose's argument that we are naturalistic
systems because some well-established naturalistic theory (in this case
quantum theory) characterizes our neurophysiology holds only if the theory
does indeed accurately characterize our neurophysiology (itself a dubious
claim given the frequency with which scientific theories are overturned)
and so long as we presuppose that we are nothing more than a system
characterized by some naturalistic theory.

Bottom line: The naturalistic reduction of intelligent agency is not the
conclusion of an empirically-based evidential argument, but merely a
straightforward consequence of presupposing naturalism in the first place.
Indeed, the empirical evidence for a naturalistic reduction of intelligent
agency is wholly lacking. For instance, nowhere does Penrose write down
the Schroedinger equation for someone's brain, and then show how actual
brain states agree with brain states predicted by the Schroedinger
equation. Physicists have a hard enough time writing down the Schroedinger
equation for systems of a few interacting particles. Imagine the
difficulty of writing down the Schroedinger equation for the multi-billion
neurons that constitute each of our brains. It ain't going to happen.
Indeed, the only thing these naturalistic reductions of intelligent agency
have until recently had in their favor is Occam's razor. And even this
naturalistic mainstay is proving small comfort. Indeed, recent
developments in the theory of intelligent design are showing that
intelligent agency cannot be reduced to natural causes. Let us now turn to
these developments.

The Resurgence of Design

In arguing against computational reductionism, both John Lucas and Roger
Penrose attempted to find something humans can do that computers cannot.
For Lucas, it was to construct a Gdel sentence. For Penrose, it was
finding in neurophysiology a non-computational quantum process. Neither of
these refutations succeed against computational reductionism, much less
against a general naturalistic reduction of intelligent agency.
Nevertheless, the strategy underlying these attempted refutations is
sound, namely, to find something intelligent agents can do that natural
causes cannot. We don't have to look far. All of us attribute things to
intelligent agents that we wouldn't dream of attributing to natural
causes. For instance, natural causes can throw scrabble pieces on a board,
but cannot arrange the pieces into meaningful sentences. To obtain a
meaningful arrangement requires an intelligent agent.

This intuition, that natural causes are too stupid to do the things that
intelligent agents are capable of, has underlain the design arguments of
past centuries. Throughout the centuries theologians have argued that
nature exhibits features which nature itself cannot explain, but which
instead require an intelligence that transcends nature. From Church
fathers like Minucius Felix and Basil the Great (third and fourth
centuries) to medieval scholastics like Moses Maimonides and Thomas
Aquinas (twelfth and thirteenth centuries) to reformed thinkers like
Thomas Reid and Charles Hodge (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), we
find theologians making design arguments, arguing from the data of nature
to an intelligence operating over and above nature.

Design arguments are old hat. Indeed, design arguments continue to be a
staple of philosophy and religion courses. The most famous of the design
arguments is William Paley's watchmaker argument. According to Paley, if
we find a watch in a field, the watch's adaptation of means to ends (that
is, the adaptation of its parts to telling time) ensures that it is the
product of an intelligence, and not simply the output of undirected
natural processes. So too, the marvelous adaptations of means to ends in
organisms, whether at the level of whole organisms, or at the level of
various subsystems (Paley focused especially on the mammalian eye), ensure
that organisms are the product of an intelligence.

Though intuitively appealing, Paley's argument had until recently fallen
into disuse. This is now changing. In the last five years design has
witnessed an explosive resurgence. Scientists are beginning to realize
that design can be rigorously formulated as a scientific theory. What has
kept design outside the scientific mainstream these last hundred and forty
years is the absence of a precise criterion for distinguishing intelligent
agency from natural causes. For design to be scientifically tenable,
scientists have to be sure they can reliably determine whether something
is designed. Johannes Kepler, for instance, thought the craters on the
moon were intelligently designed by moon dwellers. We now know that the
craters were formed naturally. It's this fear of falsely attributing
something to design only to have it overturned later that has prevented
design from entering science proper. With a precise criterion for
discriminating intelligently from unintelligently caused objects,
scientists are now able to avoid Kepler's mistake.

Before examining this criterion, I want to offer a brief clarification
about the word "design." I'm using "design" in three distinct senses.
First, I use it to denote the scientific theory that distinguishes
intelligent agency from natural causes, a theory that increasingly is
being referred to as "design theory" or "intelligent design theory" (IDT).
Second, I use "design" to denote what it is about intelligently produced
objects that enables us to tell that they are intelligently produced and
not simply the result of natural causes. When intelligent agents act, they
leave behind a characteristic trademark or signature. The scholastics used
to refer to the "vestiges of creation." The Latin vestigium means
footprint. It was thought that God, though not physically present, left
his footprints throughout creation. Hugh Ross has referred to the
"fingerprint of God." It is "design" in this sense--as a trademark,
signature, vestige, or fingerprint--that our criterion for discriminating
intelligently from unintelligently caused objects is meant to identify.
Lastly, I use "design" to denote intelligent agency itself. Thus, to say
that something is designed is to say that an intelligent agent caused it.

Let us now turn to my advertised criterion for discriminating
intelligently from unintelligently caused objects. Although a detailed
treatment of this criterion is technical and appears in my book The Design
Inference, the basic idea is straightforward and easily illustrated.
Consider how the radio astronomers in the movie Contact detected an
extra-terrestrial intelligence. This movie, which came out last summer and
was based on a novel by Carl Sagan, was an enjoyable piece of propaganda
for the SETI research program--the Search for Extra-Terrestrial
Intelligence. To make the movie interesting, the SETI researchers had to
find an extra-terrestrial intelligence (the actual SETI program has yet to
be so fortunate).

How, then, did the SETI researchers in Contact find an extra-terrestrial
intelligence? To increase their chances of finding an extra-terrestrial
intelligence, SETI researchers have to monitor millions of radio signals
from outer space. Many natural objects in space produce radio waves.
Looking for signs of design among all these naturally produced radio
signals is like looking for a needle in a haystack. To sift through the
haystack, SETI researchers run the signals they monitor through computers
programmed with pattern-matchers. So long as a signal doesn't match one of
the pre-set patterns, it will pass through the pattern-matching sieve. If,
on the other hand, it does match one of those patterns, then, depending on
the pattern matched, the SETI researchers may have cause for celebration.

The SETI researchers in Contact did find a signal worthy of celebration,
namely the sequence of prime numbers from 2 to 101, represented as a
series of beats and pauses (2 = beat-beat-pause; 3 = beat-beat-beat-pause;
5 = beat-beat-beat-beat-beat-pause; etc.). The SETI researchers in Contact
took this signal as decisive confirmation of an extra-terrestrial
intelligence. What is it about this signal that warrants us inferring
design? Whenever we infer design, we must establish two things--complexity
and specification. Complexity ensures that the object in question is not
so simple that it can readily be explained by natural causes.
Specification ensures that this object exhibits the type of pattern that
is the signature of intelligence.

To see why complexity is crucial for inferring design, consider what would
have happened if the SETI researchers had simply witnessed a single prime
number--say the number 2 represented by two beats followed by a pause. It
is a sure bet that no SETI researcher, if confronted with this three-bit
sequence (beat-beat-pause), is going to contact the science editor at the
New York Times, hold a press conference, and announce that an
extra-terrestrial intelligence has been discovered. No headline is going
to read, "Aliens Master the Prime Number Two!"

The problem is that two beats followed by a pause is too short a sequence
(that is, has too little complexity) to establish that an
extra-terrestrial intelligence with knowledge of prime numbers produced
it. A randomly beating radio source might by chance just happen to output
the sequence beat-beat-pause. The sequence of 1126 beats and pauses
required to represent the prime numbers from 2 to 101, however, is a
different story. Here the sequence is sufficiently long (that is, has
enough complexity) to confirm that an extra-terrestrial intelligence could
have produced it.

Even so, complexity by itself isn't enough to eliminate natural causes and
detect design. If I flip a coin 1000 times, I'll participate in a highly
complex (or what amounts to the same thing, highly improbable) event.
Indeed, the sequence I end up flipping will be one of 10300 possible
sequences. This sequence, however, won't trigger a design inference.
Though complex, it won't exhibit a pattern characteristic of intelligence.
In contrast, consider the sequence of prime numbers from 2 to 101. Not
only is this sequence complex, but it also constitutes a pattern
characteristic of intelligence. The SETI researcher who in the movie
Contact first noticed the sequence of prime numbers put it this way: "This
isn't noise, this has structure."

What makes a pattern characteristic of intelligence and therefore suitable
for detecting design? The basic intuition distinguishing patterns that
alternately succeed or fail to detect design is easily motivated. Consider
the case of an archer. Suppose an archer stands fifty meters from a large
wall with bow and arrow in hand. The wall, let's say, is sufficiently
large that the archer cannot help but hit it. Now suppose each time the
archer shoots an arrow at the wall, the archer paints a target around the
arrow so that the arrow sits squarely in the bull's-eye. What can be
concluded from this scenario? Absolutely nothing about the archer's
ability as an archer. Yes, a pattern is being matched; but it is a pattern
fixed only after the arrow has been shot. The pattern is thus purely ad
hoc.

But suppose instead the archer paints a fixed target on the wall and then
shoots at it. Suppose the archer shoots a hundred arrows, and each time
hits a perfect bull's-eye. What can be concluded from this second
scenario? Confronted with this second scenario we are obligated to infer
that here is a world-class archer, one whose shots cannot legitimately be
referred to luck, but rather must be referred to the archer's skill and
mastery. Skill and mastery are of course instances of design.

The type of pattern where the archer fixes a target first and then shoots
at it is common to statistics, where it is known as setting a rejection
region prior to an experiment. In statistics, if the outcome of an
experiment falls within a rejection region, the chance hypothesis
supposedly responsible for the outcome is rejected. Now a little
reflection makes clear that a pattern need not be given prior to an event
to eliminate chance and implicate design. Consider, for instance, a
cryptographic text that encodes a message. Initially it looks like a
random sequence of letters. Initially we lack any pattern for rejecting
natural causes and inferring design. But as soon as someone gives us the
cryptographic key for deciphering the text, we see the hidden message. The
cryptographic key provides the pattern we need for detecting design.
Moreover, unlike the patterns of statistics, it is given after the fact.

Patterns therefore divide into two types, those that in the presence of
complexity warrant a design inference and those that despite the presence
of complexity do not warrant a design inference. The first type of pattern
I call a specification, the second a fabrication. Specifications are the
non-ad hoc patterns that can legitimately be used to eliminate natural
causes and detect design. In contrast, fabrications are the ad hoc
patterns that cannot legitimately be used to detect design. The
distinction between specifications and fabrications can be made with full
statistical rigor.

Complexity and specification together yield a criterion for detecting
design. I call it the complexity-specification criterion. According to
this criterion, we reliably detect design in something whenever it is both
complex and specified. To see why the complexity-specification criterion
is exactly the right instrument for detecting design, we need to
understand what it is about intelligent agents that makes them detectable
in the first place. The principal characteristic of intelligent agency is
choice. Whenever an intelligent agent acts, it chooses from a range of
competing possibilities.

This is true not just of humans, but of animals as well as of
extra-terrestrial intelligences. A rat navigating a maze must choose
whether to go right or left at various points in the maze. When SETI
researchers attempt to discover intelligence in the extra-terrestrial
radio transmissions they are monitoring, they assume an extra-terrestrial
intelligence could have chosen any number of possible radio transmissions,
and then attempt to match the transmissions they observe with certain
patterns as opposed to others. Whenever a human being utters meaningful
speech, a choice is made from a range of possible sound-combinations that
might have been uttered. Intelligent agency always entails discrimination,
choosing certain things, ruling out others.

Given this characterization of intelligent agency, the crucial question is
how to recognize it. Intelligent agents act by making a choice. How then
do we recognize that an intelligent agent has made a choice? A bottle of
ink spills accidentally onto a sheet of paper; someone takes a fountain
pen and writes a message on a sheet of paper. In both instances ink is
applied to paper. In both instances one among an almost infinite set of
possibilities is realized. In both instances a contingency is actualized
and others are ruled out. Yet in one instance we ascribe agency, in the
other chance.

What is the relevant difference? Not only do we need to observe that a
contingency was actualized, but we ourselves need also to be able to
specify that contingency. The contingency must conform to an independently
given pattern, and we must be able independently to formulate that
pattern. A random ink blot is unspecifiable; a message written with ink on
paper is specifiable. Ludwig Wittgenstein in Culture and Value made
essentially the same point: "We tend to take the speech of a Chinese for
inarticulate gurgling. Someone who understands Chinese will recognize
language in what he hears. Similarly I often cannot discern the humanity
in man."

In hearing a Chinese utterance, someone who understands Chinese not only
recognizes that one from a range of all possible utterances was
actualized, but is also able to specify the utterance as coherent Chinese
speech. Contrast this with someone who does not understand Chinese. In
hearing a Chinese utterance, someone who does not understand Chinese also
recognizes that one from a range of possible utterances was actualized,
but this time, because lacking the ability to understand Chinese, is
unable to specify the utterance as coherent speech.

To someone who does not understand Chinese, the utterance will appear
gibberish. Gibberish--the utterance of nonsense syllables uninterpretable
within any natural language--always actualizes one utterance from the
range of possible utterances. Nevertheless, gibberish, by corresponding to
nothing we can understand in any language, also cannot be specified. As a
result, gibberish is never taken for intelligent communication, but always
for what Wittgenstein calls "inarticulate gurgling."

This actualizing of one among several competing possibilities, ruling out
the rest, and specifying the one that was actualized encapsulates how we
recognize intelligent agency, or equivalently, how we detect design.
Experimental psychologists who study animal learning and behavior have
known this all along. To learn a task an animal must acquire the ability
to actualize behaviors suitable for the task as well as the ability to
rule out behaviors unsuitable for the task. Moreover, for a psychologist
to recognize that an animal has learned a task, it is necessary not only
to observe the animal making the appropriate discrimination, but also to
specify this discrimination.

Thus to recognize whether a rat has successfully learned how to traverse a
maze, a psychologist must first specify which sequence of right and left
turns conducts the rat out of the maze. No doubt, a rat randomly wandering
a maze also discriminates a sequence of right and left turns. But by
randomly wandering the maze, the rat gives no indication that it can
discriminate the appropriate sequence of right and left turns for exiting
the maze. Consequently, the psychologist studying the rat will have no
reason to think the rat has learned how to traverse the maze.

Only if the rat executes the sequence of right and left turns specified by
the psychologist will the psychologist recognize that the rat has learned
how to traverse the maze. Now it is precisely the learned behaviors we
regard as intelligent in animals. Hence it is no surprise that the same
scheme for recognizing animal learning recurs for recognizing intelligent
agency generally, to wit: actualizing one among several competing
possibilities, ruling out the others, and specifying the one chosen.

Note that complexity is implicit here as well. To see this, consider again
a rat traversing a maze, but now take a very simple maze in which two
right turns conduct the rat out of the maze. How will a psychologist
studying the rat determine whether it has learned to exit the maze. Just
putting the rat in the maze will not be enough. Because the maze is so
simple, the rat could by chance just happen to take two right turns, and
thereby exit the maze. The psychologist will therefore be uncertain
whether the rat actually learned to exit this maze, or whether the rat
just got lucky.

But contrast this now with a complicated maze in which a rat must take
just the right sequence of left and right turns to exit the maze. Suppose
the rat must take one hundred appropriate right and left turns, and that
any mistake will prevent the rat from exiting the maze. A psychologist who
sees the rat take no erroneous turns and in short order exit the maze will
be convinced that the rat has indeed learned how to exit the maze, and
that this was not dumb luck.

This general scheme for recognizing intelligent agency is but a thinly
disguised form of the complexity-specification criterion. In general, to
recognize intelligent agency we must observe a choice among competing
possibilities, note which possibilities were not chosen, and then be able
to specify the possibility that was chosen. What's more, the competing
possibilities that were ruled out must be live possibilities, and
sufficiently numerous so that specifying the possibility that was chosen
cannot be attributed to chance. In terms of complexity, this is just
another way of saying that the range of possibilities is complex.

All the elements in this general scheme for recognizing intelligent agency
(that is, choosing, ruling out, and specifying) find their counterpart in
the complexity-specification criterion. It follows that this criterion
formalizes what we have been doing right along when we recognize
intelligent agency. The complexity-specification criterion pinpoints what
we need to be looking for when we detect design.

The implications of the complexity-specification criterion are profound,
not just for science, but also for philosophy and theology. The power of
this criterion resides in its generality. It would be one thing if the
criterion only detected human agency. But as we've seen, it detects animal
and extra-terrestrial agency as well. Nor is it limited to intelligent
agents that belong to the physical world. The fine-tuning of the universe,
about which cosmologists make such a to-do, is both complex and specified
and readily yields design. So too, Michael Behe's irreducibly complex
biochemical systems readily yield design. The complexity-specification
criterion demonstrates that design pervades cosmology and biology.
Moreover, it is a transcendent design, not reducible to the physical
world. Indeed, no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have
presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life.

Unlike design arguments of the past, the claim that transcendent design
pervades the universe is no longer a strictly philosophical or theological
claim. It is also a fully scientific claim. There exists a reliable
criterion for detecting design--the complexity-specification criterion.
This criterion detects design strictly from observational features of the
world. Moreover, it belongs to probability and complexity theory, not to
metaphysics and theology. And although it cannot achieve logical
demonstration, it is capable of achieving statistical justification so
compelling as to demand assent. When applied to the fine-tuning of the
universe and the complex, information-rich structures of biology, it
demonstrates a design external to the universe. In other words, the
complexity-specification criterion demonstrates transcendent design.

This is not an argument from ignorance. Just as physicists reject
perpetual motion machines because of what they know about the inherent
constraints on energy and matter, so too design theorists reject any
naturalistic reduction of specified complexity because of what they know
about the inherent constraints on natural causes. Natural causes are too
stupid to keep pace with intelligent causes. We've suspected this all
along. Intelligent design theory provides a rigorous scientific
demonstration of this longstanding intuition. Let me stress, the
complexity-specification criterion is not a principle that comes to us
demanding our unexamined acceptance--it is not an article of faith.
Rather, it is the outcome of a careful and sustained argument about the
precise interrelationships between necessity, chance, and design (for the
details, please refer to my monograph The Design Inference).

Demonstrating transcendent design in the universe is a scientific
inference, not a philosophical speculation. Once we understand the role of
the complexity-specification criterion in warranting this inference,
several things follow immediately: (1) Intelligent agency is logically
prior to natural causation and cannot be reduced to it. (2) Intelligent
agency is fully capable of making itself known against the backdrop of
natural causes. (3) Any science that systematically ignores design is
incomplete and defective. (4) Methodological naturalism, the view that
science must confine itself solely to natural causes, far from assisting
scientific inquiry actually stifles it. (5) The scientific picture of the
world championed since the Enlightenment is not just wrong but massively
wrong. Indeed, entire fields of inquiry, especially in the human sciences,
will need to be rethought from the ground up in terms of intelligent
design.

The Creation of the World

I want now to take stock and consider where we are in our study of the act
of creation. In the phrase "act of creation," so far I have focused
principally on the first part of that phrase--the "act" part, or what I've
also been calling "intelligent agency." I have devoted much of my talk
till now to contrasting intelligent agency with natural causes. In
particular, I have argued that no empirical evidence supports the
reduction of intelligent agency to natural causes. I have also argued that
no good philosophical arguments support that reduction. Indeed, those
arguments that do are circular, presupposing the very naturalism they are
supposed to underwrite. My strongest argument against the sufficiency of
natural causes to account for intelligent agency, however, comes from the
complexity-specification criterion. This empirically-based criterion
reliably discriminates intelligent agency from natural causes. Moreover,
when applied to cosmology and biology, it demonstrates not only the
incompleteness of natural causes, but also the presence of transcendent
design.

Now, within Christian theology there is one and only one way to make sense
of transcendent design, and that is as a divine act of creation. I want
therefore next to focus on divine creation, and specifically on the
creation of the world. My aim is to use divine creation as a lens for
understanding intelligent agency generally. God's act of creating the
world is the prototype for all intelligent agency (creative or not).
Indeed, all intelligent agency takes its cue from the creation of the
world. How so? God's act of creating the world makes possible all of God's
subsequent interactions with the world, as well as all subsequent actions
by creatures within the world. God's act of creating the world is thus the
prime instance of intelligent agency.

Let us therefore turn to the creation of the world as treated in
Scripture. The first thing that strikes us is the mode of creation. God
speaks and things happen. There is something singularly appropriate about
this mode of creation. Any act of creation is the concretization of an
intention by an intelligent agent. Now in our experience, the
concretization of an intention can occur in any number of ways. Sculptors
concretize their intentions by chipping away at stone; musicians by
writing notes on lined sheets of paper; engineers by drawing up
blueprints; etc. But in the final analysis, all concretizations of
intentions can be subsumed under language. For instance, a precise enough
set of instructions in a natural language will tell the sculptor how to
form the statue, the musician how to record the notes, and the engineer
how to draw up the blueprints. In this way language becomes the universal
medium for concretizing intentions.

In treating language as the universal medium for concretizing intentions,
we must be careful not to construe language in a narrowly linguistic sense
(for example, as symbol strings manipulated by rules of grammar). The
language that proceeds from God's mouth in the act of creation is not some
linguistic convention. Rather, as John's Gospel informs us, it is the
divine Logos, the Word that in Christ was made flesh, and through whom all
things were created. This divine Logos subsists in himself and is under no
compulsion to create. For the divine Logos to be active in creation, God
must speak the divine Logos. This act of speaking always imposes a
self-limitation on the divine Logos. There is a clear analogy here with
human language. Just as every English utterance rules out those statements
in the English language that were not uttered, so every divine spoken word
rules out those possibilities in the divine Logos that were not spoken.
Moreover, just as no human speaker of English ever exhausts the English
language, so God in creating through the divine spoken word never exhausts
the divine Logos.

Because the divine spoken word always imposes a self-limitation on the
divine Logos, the two notions need to be distinguished. We therefore
distinguish Logos with a capital "L" (that is, the divine Logos) from
logos with a small "l" (that is, the divine spoken word). Lacking a
capitalization convention, the Greek New Testament employs logos in both
senses. Thus in John's Gospel we read that "the Logos was made flesh and
dwelt among us." Here the reference is to the divine Logos who incarnated
himself in Jesus of Nazareth. On the other hand, in the First Epistle of
Peter we read that we are born again "by the logos of God." Here the
reference is to the divine spoken word that calls to salvation God's
elect.

Because God is the God of truth, the divine spoken word always reflects
the divine Logos. At the same time, because the divine spoken word always
constitutes a self-limitation, it can never comprehend the divine Logos.
Furthermore, because creation is a divine spoken word, it follows that
creation can never comprehend the divine Logos either. This is why
idolatry-worshipping the creation rather than the Creator-is so completely
backwards, for it assigns ultimate value to something that is inherently
incapable of achieving ultimate value. Creation, especially a fallen
creation, can at best reflect God's glory. Idolatry, on the other hand,
contends that creation fully comprehends God's glory. Idolatry turns the
creation into the ultimate reality. We've seen this before. It's called
naturalism. No doubt, contemporary scientific naturalism is a lot more
sophisticated than pagan fertility cults, but the difference is
superficial. Naturalism is idolatry by another name.

We need at all costs to resist naturalistic construals of logos (whether
logos with a capital "L" or a small "l"). Because naturalism has become so
embedded in our thinking, we tend to think of words and language as purely
contextual, local, and historically contingent. On the assumption of
naturalism, humans are the product of a blind evolutionary process that
initially was devoid not only of humans but also of any living thing
whatsoever. It follows that human language must derive from an
evolutionary process that initially was devoid of language. Within
naturalism, just as life emerges from non-life, so language emerges from
the absence of language.

Now it's certainly true that human languages are changing, living
entities--one has only to compare the King James version of the Bible with
more recent translations into English to see how much our language has
changed in the last 400 years. Words change their meanings over time.
Grammar changes over time. Even logic and rhetoric change over time.
What's more, human language is conventional. What a word means depends on
convention and can be changed by convention. For instance, there is
nothing intrinsic to the word "automobile" demanding that it denote a car.
If we go with its Latin etymology, we might just as well have applied
"automobile" to human beings, who are after all "self-propelling." There
is nothing sacred about the linguistic form that a word assumes. For
instance, "gift" in English means a present, in German it means poison,
and in French it means nothing at all. And of course, words only make
sense within the context of broader units of discourse like whole
narratives.

For Christian theism, however, language is never purely conventional. To
be sure, the assignment of meaning to a linguistic entity is conventional.
Meaning itself, however, transcends convention. As soon as we stipulate
our language conventions, words assume meanings and are no longer free to
mean anything an interpreter chooses. The deconstructionist claim that
"texts are indeterminable and inevitably yield multiple, irreducibly
diverse interpretations" and that "there can be no criteria for preferring
one reading to another" is therefore false. This is not to preclude that
texts can operate at multiple levels of meaning and interpretation. It is,
however, to say that texts are anchored to their meaning and not free to
float about indiscriminately.

Deconstruction's error traces directly to naturalism. Within naturalism,
there is no transcendent realm of meaning to which our linguistic entities
are capable of attaching. As a result, there is nothing to keep our
linguistic usage in check save pragmatic considerations, which are always
contextual, local, and historically contingent. The watchword for
pragmatism is expedience, not truth. Once expedience dictates meaning,
linguistic entities are capable of meaning anything. Not all naturalists
are happy with this conclusion. Philosophers like John Searle and D. M.
Armstrong try simultaneously to maintain an objective realm of meaning and
a commitment to naturalism. They want desperately to find something more
than pragmatic considerations to keep our linguistic usage in check.
Insofar as they pull it off, however, they are tacitly appealing to a
transcendent realm of meaning (take, for instance, Armstrong's appeal to
universals). As Alvin Plantinga has convincingly argued, objective truth
and meaning have no legitimate place within a pure naturalism.
Deconstruction, for all its faults, has this in its favor: it is
consistent in its application of naturalism to the study of language.

By contrast, logos resists all naturalistic reductions. This becomes
evident as soon as we understand what logos meant to the ancient Greeks.
For the Greeks logos was never simply a linguistic entity. Today when we
think "word," we often think a string of symbols written on a sheet of
paper. This is not what the Greeks meant by logos. Logos was a far richer
concept for the Greeks. Consider the following meanings of logos from
Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon:

the word by which the inward thought is expressed (speech)

the inward thought or reason itself (reason)

reflection, deliberation (choice)

calculation, reckoning (mathematics)

account, consideration, regard (inquiry, -ology)

relation, proportion, analogy (harmony, balance)

a reasonable ground, a condition (evidence, truth)

Logos is therefore an exceedingly rich notion encompassing the entire life
of the mind.

The etymology of logos is revealing. Logos derives from the root l-e-g.
This root appears in the Greek verb lego, which in the New Testament
typically means "to speak." Yet the primitive meaning of lego is to lay;
from thence it came to mean to pick up and gather; then to select and put
together; and hence to select and put together words, and therefore to
speak. As Marvin Vincent remarks in his New Testament word studies: "logos
is a collecting or collection both of things in the mind, and of words by
which they are expressed. It therefore signifies both the outward form by
which the inward thought is expressed, and the inward thought itself, the
Latin oratio and ratio: compare the Italian ragionare, 'to think' and 'to
speak'."

The root l-e-g has several variants. We've already seen it as l-o-g in
logos. But it also occurs as l-e-c in intellect and l-i-g in intelligent.
This should give us pause. The word intelligent actually comes from the
Latin rather than from the Greek. It derives from two Latin words, the
preposition inter, meaning between, and the Latin (not Greek) verb lego,
meaning to choose or select. The Latin lego stayed closer to its
Indo-European root meaning than its Greek cognate, which came to refer
explicitly to speech. According to its etymology, intelligence therefore
consists in choosing between.

We've seen this connection between intelligence and choice before, namely,
in the complexity-specification criterion. Specified complexity is
precisely how we recognize that an intelligent agent has made a choice. It
follows that the etymology of the word intelligent parallels the formal
analysis of intelligent agency inherent in the complexity-specification
criterion. The appropriateness of the phrase intelligent design now
becomes apparent as well. Intelligent design is a scientific research
program that seeks to understand intelligent agency by investigating
specified complexity. But specified complexity is the characteristic
trademark of choice. It follows that intelligent design is a thoroughly
apt phrase, signifying that design is inferred precisely because an
intelligent agent has done what only an intelligent agent can do, namely,
make a choice.

If intelligent design is a thoroughly apt phrase, the same cannot be said
for the phrase natural selection. The second word in this phrase,
selection, is of course a synonym for choice. Indeed, the l-e-c in
selection is a variant of the l-e-g that in the Latin lego means to choose
or select, and that also appears as l-i-g in intelligence. Natural
selection is therefore an oxymoron. It attributes the power to choose,
which properly belongs only to intelligent agents, to natural causes,
which inherently lack the power to choose. Richard Dawkins's concept of
the blind watchmaker follows the same pattern, negating with blind what is
affirmed in watchmaker. That's why Dawkins opens his book The Blind
Watchmaker with the statement: "Biology is the study of complicated things
that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." Natural
selection and blind watchmakers don't yield actual design, but only the
appearance of design.

Having considered the role of logos in creating the world, I want next to
consider its role in rendering the world intelligible. To say that God
through the divine Logos acts as an intelligent agent to create the world
is only half the story. Yes, there is a deep and fundamental connection
between God as divine Logos and God as intelligent agent-indeed, the very
words logos and intelligence derive from the same Indo-European root. The
world, however, is more than simply the product of an intelligent agent.
In addition, the world is intelligible.

We see this in the very first entity that God creates--light. With the
creation of light, the world becomes a place that is conceptualizable, and
to which values can properly be assigned. To be sure, as God increasingly
orders the world through the process of creation, the number of things
that can be conceptualized increases, and the values assigned to things
become refined. But even with light for now the only created entity, it is
possible to conceptualize light, distinguish it from darkness, and assign
a positive value to light, calling it good. The world is thus not merely a
place where God's intentions are fulfilled, but also a place where God's
intentions are intelligible. Moreover, that intelligibility is as much
moral and aesthetic as it is scientific.

God, in speaking the divine Logos, not only creates the world but also
renders it intelligible. This view of creation has far reaching
consequences. For instance, the fact--value distinction dissolves opposite
God's act of creation--indeed, what is and what ought to be unite in God's
original intention at creation. Consider too Einstein's celebrated dictum
about the comprehensibility of the world. Einstein claimed: "The most
incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." This
statement, so widely regarded as a profound insight, is actually a sad
commentary on naturalism. Within naturalism the intelligibility of the
world must always remain a mystery. Within theism, on the other hand,
anything other than an intelligible world would constitute a mystery.

God speaks the divine Logos to create the world, and thereby renders the
world intelligible. This fact is absolutely crucial to how we understand
human language, and especially human language about God. Human language is
a divine gift for helping us to understand the world, and by understanding
the world to understand God himself. This is not to say that we ever
comprehend God, as in achieving fixed, final, and exhaustive knowledge of
God. But human language does enable us to express accurate claims about
God and the world. It is vitally important for the Christian to understand
this point. Human language is not an evolutionary refinement of grunts and
stammers formerly uttered by some putative apelike ancestors. We are
creatures made in the divine image. Human language is therefore a divine
gift that mirrors the divine Logos.

Consider what this conception of language does to the charge that biblical
language is hopelessly anthropomorphic. We continue to have conferences in
the United States with titles like "Reimagining God." The idea behind such
titles is that all our references to God are human constructions and can
be changed as human needs require new constructions. Certain feminist
theologians, for instance, object to referring to God as father. God as
father, we are told, is an outdated patriarchal way of depicting God that,
given contemporary concerns, needs to be changed. "Father," we are told is
a metaphor co-opted from human experience and pressed into theological
service. No. No. No. This view of theological language is hopeless and
destroys the Christian faith.

The concept father is not an anthropomorphism, nor is referring to God as
father metaphorical. All instances of fatherhood reflect the fatherhood of
God. It's not that we are taking human fatherhood and idealizing it into a
divine father image la Ludwig Feuerbach or Sigmund Freud. Father is not
an anthropomorphism at all. It's not that we are committing an
anthropomorphism by referring to God as father. Rather, we are committing
a "theomorphism" by referring to human beings as fathers. We are never
using the word "father" as accurately as when we attribute it to God. As
soon as we apply "father" to human beings, our language becomes analogical
and derivative.

We see this readily in Scripture. Jesus enjoins us to call no one father
except God. Certainly Jesus is not telling us never to refer to any human
being as "father." All of us have human fathers, and they deserve that
designation. Indeed, the Fifth Commandment tells us explicitly to honor
our human fathers. But human fathers reflect a more profound reality,
namely, the fatherhood of God. Or consider how Jesus responds to a rich,
young ruler who addresses him as "good master." Jesus shoots back, "Why do
you call me good? There is no one good except God." Goodness properly
applies to God. It's not an anthropomorphism to call God good. The
goodness we attribute to God is not an idealized human goodness. God
defines goodness. When we speak of human goodness, it is only as
subordinate to the divine goodness.

This view, that human language is a divine gift for understanding the
world and therewith God, is powerfully liberating. No longer do we live in
a Platonic world of shadows from which we must escape if we are to
perceive the divine light. No longer do we live in a Kantian world of
phenomena that bars access to noumena. No longer do we live in a
naturalistic world devoid of transcendence. Rather, the world and
everything in it becomes a sacrament, radiating God's glory. Moreover, our
language is capable of celebrating that glory by speaking truly about what
God has wrought in creation.

The view that creation proceeds through a divine spoken word has profound
implications not just for the study of human language, but also for the
study of human knowledge, or what philosophers call epistemology. For
naturalism, epistemology's primary problem is unraveling Einstein's
dictum: "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is
comprehensible." How is it that we can have any knowledge at all? Within
naturalism there is no solution to this riddle. Theism, on the other hand,
faces an entirely different problematic. For theism the problem is not how
we can have knowledge, but why our knowledge is so prone to error and
distortion. The Judeo-Christian tradition attributes the problem of error
to the fall. At the heart of the fall is alienation. Beings are no longer
properly in communion with other beings. We lie to ourselves. We lie to
others. And others lie to us. Appearance and reality are out of sync. The
problem of epistemology within the Judeo-Christian tradition isn't to
establish that we have knowledge, but instead to root out the distortions
that try to overthrow our knowledge.

On the view that creation proceeds through a divine spoken word, not only
does naturalistic epistemology have to go by the board, but so does
naturalistic ontology. Ontology asks what are the fundamental constituents
of reality. According to naturalism (and I'm thinking here specifically of
the scientific naturalism that currently dominates Western thought), the
world is fundamentally an interacting system of mindless entities (be they
particles, strings, fields, or whatever). Mind therefore becomes an
emergent property of suitably arranged mindless entities. Naturalistic
ontology is all backwards. If creation and everything in it proceeds
through a divine spoken word, then the entities that are created don't
suddenly fall silent at the moment of creation. Rather they continue to
speak.

I look at a blade of grass and it speaks to me. In the light of the sun,
it tells me that it is green. If I touch it, it tells me that it has a
certain texture. It communicates something else to a chinch bug intent on
devouring it. It communicates something else still to a particle physicist
intent on reducing it to its particulate constituents. Which is not to say
that the blade of grass does not communicate things about the particles
that constitute it. But the blade of grass is more than any arrangement of
particles and is capable of communicating more than is inherent in any
such arrangement. Indeed, its reality derives not from its particulate
constituents, but from its capacity to communicate with other entities in
creation and ultimately with God himself.

The problem of being now receives a straightforward solution: To be is to
be in communion, first with God and then with the rest of creation. It
follows that the fundamental science, indeed the science that needs to
ground all other sciences, is communication theory, and not, as is widely
supposed an atomistic, reductionist, and mechanistic science of particles
or other mindless entities, which then need to be built up to ever greater
orders of complexity by equally mindless principles of association, known
typically as natural laws. Communication theory's object of study is not
particles, but the information that passes between entities. Information
in turn is just another name for logos. This is an information-rich
universe. The problem with mechanistic science is that it has no resources
for recognizing and understanding information. Communication theory is
only now coming into its own. A crucial development along the way has been
the complexity-specification criterion. Indeed, specified complexity is
precisely what's needed to recognize information.

Information--the information that God speaks to create the world, the
information that continually proceeds from God in sustaining the world and
acting in it, and the information that passes between God's
creatures--this is the bridge that connects transcendence and immanence.
All of this information is mediated through the divine Logos, who is
before all things and by whom all things consist (Colossians 1:17). The
crucial breakthrough of the intelligent design movement has been to show
that this great theological truth--that God acts in the world by
dispersing information--also has scientific content. All information,
whether divinely inputted or transmitted between creatures, is in
principle capable of being detected via the complexity-specification
criterion. Examples abound:

The fine-tuning of the universe and irreducibly complex biochemical
systems are instances of specified complexity, and signal information
inputted into the universe by God at its creation.

Predictive prophecies in Scripture are instances of specified complexity,
and signal information inputted by God as part of his sovereign activity
within creation.

Language communication between humans is an instance of specified
complexity, and signals information transmitted from one human to another.


The positivist science of this and the last century was incapable of
coming to terms with information. The science of the new millennium will
not be able to avoid it. Indeed, we already live in an information age.

Creativity, Divine and Human

In closing this talk, I want to ask an obvious question: Why create? Why
does God create? Why do we create? Although creation is always an
intelligent act, it is much more than an intelligent act. The impulse
behind creation is always to offer oneself as a gift. Creation is a gift.
What's more, it is a gift of the most important thing we
possess--ourselves. Indeed, creation is the means by which a
creator--divine, human, or otherwise--gives oneself in self-revelation.
Creation is not the neurotic, forced self-revelation offered on the
psychoanalyst's couch. Nor is it the facile self-revelation of idle
chatter. It is the self-revelation of labor and sacrifice. Creation always
incurs a cost. Creation invests the creator's life in the thing created.
When God creates humans, he breathes into them the breath of life--God's
own life. At the end of the six days of creation God is tired--he has to
rest. Creation is exhausting work. It is drawing oneself out of oneself
and then imprinting oneself on the other.

Consider, for instance, the painter Vincent van Gogh. You can read all the
biographies you want about him, but through it all van Gogh will still not
have revealed himself to you. For van Gogh to reveal himself to you, you
need to look at his paintings. As the Greek Orthodox theologian Christos
Yannaras writes: "We know the person of van Gogh, what is unique, distinct
and unrepeatable in his existence, only when we see his paintings. There
we meet a reason (logos) which is his only and we separate him from every
other painter. When we have seen enough pictures by van Gogh and then
encounter one more, then we say right away: This is van Gogh. We
distinguish immediately the otherness of his personal reason, the
uniqueness of his creative expression."

The difference between the arts and the sciences now becomes clear. When I
see a painting by van Gogh, I know immediately that it is his. But when I
come across a mathematical theorem or scientific insight, I cannot decide
who was responsible for it unless I am told. The world is God's creation,
and scientists in understanding the world are simply retracing God's
thoughts. Scientists are not creators but discoverers. True, they may
formulate concepts that assist them in describing the world. But even such
concepts do not bear the clear imprint of their formulators. Concepts like
energy, inertia, and entropy give no clue about who formulated them.
Hermann Weyl and John von Neumann were both equally qualified to formulate
quantum mechanics in terms of Hilbert spaces. That von Neumann, and not
Weyl, made the formulation is now an accident of history. There's nothing
in the formulation that explicitly identifies von Neumann. Contrast this
with a painting by van Gogh. It cannot be confused with a Monet.

The impulse to create and thereby give oneself in self-revelation need not
be grand, but can be quite humble. A homemaker arranging a floral
decoration engages in a creative act. The important thing about the act of
creation is that it reveal the creator. The act of creation always bears
the signature of the creator. It is a sad legacy of modern technology, and
especially the production line, that most of the objects we buy no longer
reveal their maker. Mass production is inimical to true creation. Yes, the
objects we buy carry brand names, but in fact they are largely anonymous.
We can tell very little about their maker. Compare this with God's
creation of the world. Not one tree is identical with another. Not one
face matches another. Indeed, a single hair on your head is unique--there
was never one exactly like it, nor will there ever be another to match it.


The creation of the world by God is the most magnificent of all acts of
creation. It, along with humanity's redemption through Jesus Christ, are
the two key instances of God's self-revelation. The revelation of God in
creation is typically called general revelation whereas the revelation of
God in redemption is typically called special revelation. Consequently,
theologians sometimes speak of two books, the Book of Nature, which is
God's self-revelation in creation, and the Book of Scripture, which is
God's self-revelation in redemption. If you want to know who God is, you
need to know God through both creation and redemption. According to
Scripture, the angels praise God chiefly for two things: God's creation of
the world and God's redemption of the world through Jesus Christ. Let us
follow the angels' example.