English theologian and philosopher William Paley made a similar argument at the beginning of the 19th century. Jeremy Narby will be launching his book in San Francisco and Los Angeles April 22-24. Behe is listed among the institute's fellows. Dembski, a philosopher, mathematician, and theologian, has written The Design Inference , a monograph to be published in the fall by Cambridge University Press. In it, he characterizes intelligent design as a theory of information that confers function on complex systems.
Information thus constitutes a fundamental entity in the biophysical universe, on a par with energy.
It is this functional information that can be reliably detected and measured as a proper object for scientific investigation, he believes. In his mathematical formulation, to eliminate chance and infer design as a causal force in a biological system, complexity and structure must first be present. Dembski's challenge was to make his mathematical formulation robust enough to contain already-existing patterns of life. This required a key, as in cryptography. He found the key in specificity, which, when combined with complexity in a theory of probability, can discern information.