I believe that physical science, as it is practised by the establishment, is based on the premise that there is a design in the universe and that the design is discernible by man. I will argue that this widely held premise has its roots in theological thinking and, if closely examined, cannot be supported by actual evidence. It is my thesis that whether or not there is a design is what we in Computer Science call an undecidable question. From our position inside the thing that we are studying, I believe that it is—and always will be—impossible to decide whether it is by chance or design—or even by a mixture of chance and design—that we are here.

This means that there are no General Laws; they are challenged later in the book.

For me, general laws imply design and I will try to show that there are no discernible general laws. I will describe how, in the process of looking at laws differently, I was led to a serious reappraisal of many of the well-established ideas in physical science.

Here is the news that Intelligent Design cannot even rely on science as an underpinning.

My thesis is that the evidence of design in the physical world that we have through the existence of laws is an illusion; that there is no evidence of a plan of creation or unity of design in any scientific knowledge that we have.

The Universe we are trapped inside is a big part of the answer.

One of my principal points later on is that we have too often ignored the environment, in say a physical interaction between two objects, as if it did not matter. Surely, one of the major points of Darwin’s theory of evolution is that the environment matters. Darwin, in several important ways, is a starting point for me and in the next chapter I will show how my ideas about the inanimate world are a logical extension of his ideas about the animate world.