On August 21, 2011, an American software engineer named Jesse Anderson created the Million Monkey project, which featured millions of virtual simians typing away randomly. In just forty-six days, Anderson claims, the mindless authors recreated all of Shakespeare's thirty-eight major works. “This is the largest work ever randomly reproduced,” he crowed.

The media trumpeted the achievement uncritically. Yet the claim is so misleading as to border on deception. In truth, what the digital monkeys produced randomly were unbroken strings of letters. It took a computer program (a digital maestro) working behind the scenes to recognize correct sequences and break them up—intelligently, not randomly—into the proper words.

My purpose is not to criticize Mr. Anderson or accuse him of any wrongdoing, nor even to lament the ignorance of the popular press. It is to illustrate the lesson that creativity is not a random process. Science and the Bible agree that in order to create something from nothing, there needs to be something or someone behind the scenes directing the show.