This is John West for ID the Future. I'm Associate Director of the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute and I am delighted again to be here talking with mathematician and philosopher Bill Dembski, one of our senior fellows who has a new book out Being Being as Communion, Metaphysics of information.

And Bill, thank you for joining us again.

And in our last conversation, we talked about the overall point of your book and challenging sort of just basic

materialism with all that we're learning about information theory and sort of an

information first view of the world.

In this conversation, I thought maybe we could just focus on

maybe three, what I'd call tidbits.

You have a great way of turning a phrase and having things that stick out in your mind, at least when I was reading the book that I very much enjoyed.

And so I thought we'd maybe, I'd highlight just three of those and allow you to sort of talk about those.

The first one is something that you call the Tang problem.

What is the Tang problem? Well, Tang is that famous breakfast drink that tastes like orange juice but cannot be confused with orange juice.

If you look at the ingredients, it says something like orange juice solids along with other things, but what Tang does is it basically takes

fresh orange juice and then strips it down to a powder and then you add water and then it gets

reconstituted. Now what you get reconstituted there is not, and cannot be confused with fresh orange juice.

Now the tank problem as I've articulated, I'm relating it to materialism. I see what materialism tries to do is take the

world as it is, corresponding to fresh orange juice, then strip it down to material particles and the interactions of those particles according to various laws of physics and chemistry and

then try to reconstitute the world and tell us what the world is like in those terms.

So we try to explain evolution in terms of some

sort of mechanistic Darwinian process. We try to explain neurophysiology or explain human

person in terms of a neurophysiology that's purely

materialistic. Things like that. And the problem that I always find is that when you

do this you analyze it down to the material constituents, and then try to reconstitute the reality,

...