Preface 1 The Challenge of a Material World 2 Free Will: The Power of No 11 3 Information as Ruling Out Possibilities 4 Possible Worlds 5 Matrices of Possibility 6 Measuring Information 7 Information Theory 8 Intelligence vs. Nature? 9 Natural Teleological Laws 10 Getting Matter from Information 11 The Medium and the Message 12 Embodiment and Transposition 13 Energy 14 An Informationally Porous Universe 15 Determinism 16 Contingency and Chance 17 Search 18 Conservation of Information 19 Natural Selection 20 The Creation of Information 21 A World in Communion

A philosopher and mathematician, William A. Dembski is a senior fellow with Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture as well as a research scientist with the Evolutionary Informatics Lab. A cross-disciplinary scholar, he has published widely in the mathematics, engineering, philosophy, and theology literature, and is the author/editor of more than 20 books. Being as Communion ties together two decades of his research on the relation between teleology and information.

For a thing to be real, it must be able to communicate with other things. If this is so, then the problem of being receives a straightforward resolution: to be is to be in communion. So the fundamental science, indeed the science that needs to underwrite all other sciences, is a theory of communication. Within such a theory of communication the proper object of study becomes not isolated particles but the information that passes between entities. In Being as Communion philosopher and mathematician William Dembski provides a non-technical overview of his work on information. Dembski attempts to make good on the promise of John Wheeler, Paul Davies, and others that information is poised to replace matter as the primary stuff of reality. With profound implications for theology and metaphysics, Being as Communion develops a relational ontology that is at once congenial to science and open to teleology in nature. All those interested in the intersections of theology, philosophy and science should read this book.