I love this image that William Dembski uses in his new book Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information. Materialism tries to imagine reality as if information were not the substrate underlying everything. It extracts information in the same way that the old orange-colored breakfast drink Tang takes real orange juice and extracts the orange “solids,” producing the familiar, vaguely disturbing orange powder.
The result of then reconstructing or reconstituting either the universe or the juice leaves much to be desired. The product — the cosmos with no intelligence underlying its design, or Tang — bears only a crude relationship to the real thing (the real universe, or real orange juice).
An information-based picture of reality, on other hand, is the real thing, much as fresh-squeezed orange juice is.