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Key Bible Verse: Do you still want to argue with the Almighty? … Do you have the answers? (Job 40:2). Bonus Reading: Isaiah 40:26; Psalm 19:1-4

Astronomer Carl Sagan wrote a novel about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) called Contact, later made into a movie starring Jodie Foster. The plot and the extraterrestrials were fictional, but Sagan based the SETI astronomers' methods of design detection squarely on scientific practice. After years of receiving apparently meaningless, random signals, the Contact researchers discovered a pattern that began with two beats and then a pause, three beats and then a pause, and so on like this through all the prime numbers to 101. That grabbed their attention.

The combination of complexity and specification pointed the radio astronomers in the movie to an extraterrestrial intelligence. Real-life SETI researches have never detected designed signals from distant space, but if they did encounter such a signal, they too would have to infer design. Specified complexity is the characteristic signature or trademark—the reliable empirical marker—of intelligence in the same way that fingerprints are an empirical marker of a person's presence. Design theorists contend that blind natural causes cannot generate specified complexity.

—William Dembski in The Design Revolution

My Response: Why does accepting the theory of evolution require its own leap of faith?

Thought to Apply: The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine, designed by a pure mathematician.

—JAMES JEANS (English physicist)

Adapted from The Design Revolution (InterVarsity, 2004) by permission.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine. Click here for reprint information on Men of Integrity.

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Prayer for the Week

Thank You, Lord, for mounting evidence that only intelligent design can account for the origins of our universe.

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