Many of us probably remember Alvin Toffler’s book The Third Wave, in which he talked about the three waves of our modern economies – agrarian, then industrial, and finally at present, the information-based economy. When he wrote his book, the information economy was not yet a reality.
In a piece entitled The New Age of Information (reprinted from World Magazine 2004), William Dembski proposes that by 2025 or so, science will have undergone it’s own third wave transformation, having dumped the narrow and probably incorrect naturalistic, materialistic evolution view for an information view of reality.
Dembski’s article is not too well written, so I have to kind of distill the talking points below from my reading of his article. You should definitely read his article to get a better picture of what he is saying.
- Deistic Naturalism: This first wave of science assumed a designer who used logic and consistent natural laws which could be elucidated by science. Member of this club include Descartes, Newton, and most of our founding fathers of science.
- Materialistic Naturalism: The second wave assumed initial chaos that somehow resolved into our present state of complexity and "order", assuming that no initial God was necessary. This "modern" view was purely mechanistic, and pitted science against religion, and in large part, the assumptions of atheistic evolution became a worldview, and religion in their own right
- Informatics: The third wave is an information view of science, returning science to a deistic model, since information, which appears to be the foundation for DNA and other founding structures of order in our universe, can not arise without intelligence.
It’s an interesting idea – that science will move to an information-based view, which indicates an information architect, if you will.