Artist Karen Wong was a very interesting conversation partner for intelligent design theorist William Dembski. As she explains, she began thinking a couple of decades ago about the “specified qualities that show up in art” and how “those qualities also show up everywhere else in the universe.” On her YouTube channel, The Meaning Code, she interviews “people like [Dr. Dembski] to see where I can find those qualities in different arenas of science — physics, chemistry, and biology.” Others have seen the same connection between art and the mystery behind the world, including literary critic George Steiner who discussed (worth watching) how music in particular gestures to the mysterium tremendum.

The discussion between Wong and Dembski encompasses intelligence as a creative force in nature; why science, as Stephen Meyer argues in Return of the God Hypothesis, is conducive to belief in a higher power; the significance of specified complexity for detecting design; and how conservation of information defeats theories of the purely natural, unguided origins of life. Dembski’s latest book is the second, expanded edition of The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities, with Winston Ewert. You can enjoy the interview now: