The most important single issue in the conversation of theology with science is whether and how God acts in or influences the world. Here I shall ask whether the notion of information can help theologians address this question. It is well known that traditional philosophies and theologies intuited a universal “informational” principle running through all things. Their sense that “Mind,” “Wisdom,” or “Logos” inhabits and globally patterns the universe has been repeated in widely different ways time and again: in ancient Greek philosophy, the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Scriptures, Philo, early Christianity, Stoicism, Hegel, Whitehead, and others. But can the intuition that the universe is the bearer of an overarching meaning – of an informational principle actively present to the entire cosmic process – have any plausibility whatsoever in the age of science?

These days, after all, one must hesitate before connecting the Logos of theology immediately to patterns in nature. The life process as seen through the eyes of evolutionary biologists, to cite the main reason for such reluctance, scarcely seems to be the embodiment of any universal divine principle of meaning or wisdom. Contrary to the picture of cosmic order expressed in much religious thought, evolution involves seemingly endless experimentation with different “forms,” most of which are eventually discarded and replaced by those only accidentally suited to the demands of natural selection. The impersonal Darwinian proliferation of experimental life forms, only a few of which seem to be adaptive for any length of time, scarcely reflects anything like an underlying divine wisdom. The spontaneous origin of life, the apparent randomness of genetic variation that helps account for the diversity of life, and the accidents in natural history that render the trajectory of the whole life story unpredictable, make one wonder just how “informed” the natural world can be after all. Certainly evolution makes the hypothesis of divine design questionable. If anything, nature seems, at least on the surface, to be the product of what Richard Dawkins (1986) calls a “blind watchmaker.” How, then, can theology think coherently of a divine presence meaningfully operative amid the blind impersonality and aimless contingency manifested in science's new pictures of nature?