摘要: EVEN A CASUAL examination of nature reveals the existence of complex, organized states of matter. Organization is found on all scales—for example, in the elaborate spiral shapes of galaxies in space and hurricanes on earth, in organisms, in snowflakes, and in the molecules that participate in many important chemical reactions. Ordered, organized, complex states of matter abound in the world around us. How are we to explain this complexity? Our current best account of these types of phenomena is given by dynamical systems theory, a branch of natural science that explains the existence of complex, organized systems in terms of self-organization. But natural science has critics who want to explain the existence of organized complex systems as the result of intelligent design by a supernatural being. One such critic is William Dembski (2002b), who modestly claims to have discovered a fourth law of …