Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

by Stephen C. Meyer

I’ve often explained Dembski’s theory by asking students to think about the faces on Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota. If you look at that famous mountain you will quickly recognize the faces of the American presidents inscribed there as the product of intelligent activity. Why? What about those faces indicates that an artisan or sculptor acted to produce them? You might want to say it’s the improbability of the shapes. By contrast, we would not be inclined to infer that an intelligent agent had played a role in forming, for example, the common V-shaped erosional pattern between two mountains produced by large volumes of water. Instead, the faces on the mountain qualify as extremely improbable structures, since they contain many detailed features that natural processes do not generally produce. Certainly, wind and erosion, for example, would be unlikely to produce the recognizable faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt.