Chapter 1Foreseeing God in the Laboratory HOW EVIDENCE FOR DESIGNSHOWS UP IN PROPHETIC DREAMSOne April day in 2001, the phone in my home office rang. The caller was a man with a charming British accent and a sparkling manner alive with animation and humor, who introduced himself as Chris Robinson. He had read about my lab at the University of Arizona, he said, and was calling to announce that he wanted me to test his abilities to see if I could conclude that he was, indeed, getting tips from some otherworldly source.After a near-death experience thirteen years earlier, weird messages had begun arriving in his sleep -- dreams that foretold the future, especially about murders and terrorism.Over the years, he said, evidence obtained through his dreams had helped put many criminals behind bars. Because of Robinson's information, murderers who thought they had escaped were caught, IRA bombers were captured, and corrupt members of the police force were uncovered and sent to prison. Fingering corrupt cops and detectives didn't make Christopher popular with British law enforcement, he said. Although they had continued to listen to his information and act on it, he said, he had been kept at arm's length and mistrusted.

I had no reason to think anyone could really do what Christopher was claiming. I listened patiently as he shared stories that were amazing and outrageous. I found most of what he said virtually impossible to believe. He claimed that a book calledDream Detectivehad been published in England about many of his cases and that he would send me a copy. The book actually arrived, and I found it supported his claims, apparently substantiating his uncanny skill.I was about to start on a journey on which this total stranger from England would ultimately propel me to reconsider the entire history of my scientific career, and in the process come to new and meaningful conclusions.We had a series of phone calls after that. Trained in clinical psychology, I listened closely for signs of psychosis or thought disorder.

He not only sounded sane but was insisting that he fly over from England if I would conduct tests to verify his claims of dreams that foretold the future. This blue-collar worker with marginal income was offering to buy his own airline ticket and pay for his own hotel and meals if I was willing to try to help him find out, once and for all, what his power really represented.Over the next weeks Christopher and I discussed a highly controlled yet seemingly impossible (to me, not to Christopher) experiment that begged to be conducted. I realized that if Christopher was neither a delusional schizophrenic nor a pathological liar -- these were two big ifs -- and the findings were positive, the experiment held the possibility of becoming one of the more remarkable investigations in the history of contemporary parapsychology, and perhaps even of science in general. I subsequently learned that Christopher could be unreasonably suspicious at times -- no doubt because of his dangerous work as an undercover agent and his extraordinary sensitivity as a psychic.Four months later, in early August 2001, Christopher arrived from England and set up temporary residence in a Tucson hotel. I had by then selected twenty possible locations in southern Arizona -- from Nogales, a Mexican border town, to Summerhaven, a ski resort on the top of Mount Lemmon. Of these twenty locations known only to me, ten would be selected at random for us to visit on ten successive days.

I printed out the name of each site on a sheet of paper, placed each sheet in a separate envelope, sealed the envelopes, and shuffled them, then shipped them overnight to my friend and coauthor Bill Simon, who had agreed to help in the experiment. He acted as an intermediary, receiving the package and turning it over to a third party whose i.