[The above video is mostly a
reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure
as they strike me as relevant. I welcome
questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]
Kenneth Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University, has made a name for himself in communities that are deeply concerned with the intersection of religion and science, both on the atheist/skeptical side and the religious side. He successfully manages to irritate both camps because he says that supporting evolution and deistic belief are not necessarily contradictory. (Miller is a Catholic.) This shouldn’t be too controversial of a statement for someone who has thought about the issue for more than a few minutes, but it still seems to disconcert people.
“Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution” works in some ways, but it is not what it is advertised to be. Judging from the title alone, you might guess that it involves a lot of digging through Darwin’s papers for his (non)religious inclinations, and to be fair we do get a very small amount of this. It will probably come as no surprise that Darwin was at different times throughout his life more conflicted and sometimes less conflicted about the existence of a Christian God, or even the God of deism. Earlier in his career, he was very convinced by the arguments of renowned eighteenth-century English scientist William Paley’s watchmaker analogy set forth in his “Natural Theology,” but seemed to become more skeptical as the publication of “Origin of Species” approached, and certainly toward the end of his life.
First, the part of the book that I wasn’t expecting: approximately the first two-thirds of this book is dedicated to demolishing creationist “science” (not really science at all), and particularly youth earth creationism. I realize the continuing need for popularizing science education, but I was more interested in the “Finding Darwin’s God” angle than a re-hashing of basic high school biology and chemistry which we all *supposed* to have learned. Even though this part of the book was a slog, he was extraordinarily thorough. He shows how a literal interpretation of Genesis no longer makes any sense considering what we know about morphology, radioactive dating, and the fossil record. He also equips someone who might be less familiar with pro-evolution arguments with examples, including the biochemical details of the blood clotting cascade and the development of the eukaryotic cilium. There is also a wonderful part of the book that explains how Gould’s punctuated equilibrium only exists as a different-looking phenomenon when you use shortened geological time scales, and that when you re-elongate these scales, you get the evolutionary tree of common descent that would have been more recognizable to Darwin himself. These couple of hundred pages were largely designed to arm the non-biologist with technical arguments to combat creationist nonsense, and they do a fine job.
The last two chapters are where Miller finally starts to explore the possible arguments for God. None of his arguments are convincing. He even says a couple of things that are embarrassing for a scientist of his caliber, like when he wanders into the field of cosmology: “…when one makes a run backwards in time to the moment before the big bang, one must imagine inconceivable amounts of mass and energy concentrated at a single point in space” (p. 225). Except that even talking about “before the big bang” makes no sense, since that very event is what created space and time as we know it. There was no time before the big bang that we know of. It’s like talking about cakes before the time of baking. It seems that he might be trying to raise the question of what allowed the big bang to occur. A great question, and we have the greatest minds in science working on it. The current answer? We don’t know.
A bit later, Miller delves into the miraculous: “What can science say about a miracle? Nothing. By definition, the miraculous is beyond explanation, beyond our understanding, beyond science. This does not mean that miracles do not occur. A key doctrine in my own faith is that Jesus was born of a virgin, even though it makes no scientific sense – there is the matter of Jesus’s Y-chromosome to account for. But that is the point. Miracles, by definition, do not have to make scientific sense” (p. 239). This truly is a disappointing argument from someone who just spent two-hundred pages arguing against creationism because it *doesn’t make scientific sense*. One of the points of science is to try to build heuristic models that explain the universe around us, or some aspect of that universe, that account for the most observable data. We must either reject or be agnostic about those phenomena which cannot be assimilated into these models.
Miller sometimes waxes philosophical, with about as much success. On God’s eternality: “This means that God, who always has been and always will be, transcends time and therefore is the master of it” (p. 242). I realize this is a stock-in-trade argument from classical Christian theology, but it is fundamentally flawed: something cannot exist outside of time because time is a predicate of existence. To exist means to have *come into existence*. The popular formulation of this argument is when a theist asks an atheist “What caused the big bang?” and the atheist responds “What caused God?” If you’re operating under the assumption that everything needs a cause, as classical Christian theology does, saying that God is an exception to your own rule isn’t going to work. It’s a logical fallacy called special pleading.
So, why does Kenneth Miller believe in God? One reason is his acceptance of the God of the Gaps arguments; he seems to be perplexed by the fact that we don’t have all of cosmology explained away. The second is his peculiar interpretation of quantum mechanics. He thinks that the random events of quantum mechanics and the simultaneous orderliness of the universe have something to with a God, though he never comes out and explicitly states it, and never clarifies how the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics would provide evidence for God.
What kind of God does Miller believe in? In the closing lines of the book, he quotes Darwin: “There is grandeur in this view of life; with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most wonderful and most beautiful have been, and are being evolved” (p. 292). This is awe-filled Darwin at his most wondrous. However, even when Darwin indulged these sentiments, this is clearly the God of deism: a world set into motion by a distant, non-personal God who created natural laws and then let happen what may. It doesn’t at all comport with the fundamental tenets of the Catholic Church (the virgin birth, the assumption, et cetera) in which Miller claims to believe.
Darwin’s God wasn’t the God of miracles, and therefore isn’t Miller’s God. He was the God of reverence for the mysteries of the universe, which have been slowly decreasing in number since the rise of modern science. This number will never reach zero; there will always be something new to learn, and science will never disappear. But looking for God in the unexplained nooks and crannies of science leaves a smaller and smaller place for Him/Her/It with each passing year, and this seems to be a theological approach in danger of having God slip through its very fingers.
“Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution” works in some ways, but it is not what it is advertised to be. Judging from the title alone, you might guess that it involves a lot of digging through Darwin’s papers for his (non)religious inclinations, and to be fair we do get a very small amount of this. It will probably come as no surprise that Darwin was at different times throughout his life more conflicted and sometimes less conflicted about the existence of a Christian God, or even the God of deism. Earlier in his career, he was very convinced by the arguments of renowned eighteenth-century English scientist William Paley’s watchmaker analogy set forth in his “Natural Theology,” but seemed to become more skeptical as the publication of “Origin of Species” approached, and certainly toward the end of his life.
First, the part of the book that I wasn’t expecting: approximately the first two-thirds of this book is dedicated to demolishing creationist “science” (not really science at all), and particularly youth earth creationism. I realize the continuing need for popularizing science education, but I was more interested in the “Finding Darwin’s God” angle than a re-hashing of basic high school biology and chemistry which we all *supposed* to have learned. Even though this part of the book was a slog, he was extraordinarily thorough. He shows how a literal interpretation of Genesis no longer makes any sense considering what we know about morphology, radioactive dating, and the fossil record. He also equips someone who might be less familiar with pro-evolution arguments with examples, including the biochemical details of the blood clotting cascade and the development of the eukaryotic cilium. There is also a wonderful part of the book that explains how Gould’s punctuated equilibrium only exists as a different-looking phenomenon when you use shortened geological time scales, and that when you re-elongate these scales, you get the evolutionary tree of common descent that would have been more recognizable to Darwin himself. These couple of hundred pages were largely designed to arm the non-biologist with technical arguments to combat creationist nonsense, and they do a fine job.
The last two chapters are where Miller finally starts to explore the possible arguments for God. None of his arguments are convincing. He even says a couple of things that are embarrassing for a scientist of his caliber, like when he wanders into the field of cosmology: “…when one makes a run backwards in time to the moment before the big bang, one must imagine inconceivable amounts of mass and energy concentrated at a single point in space” (p. 225). Except that even talking about “before the big bang” makes no sense, since that very event is what created space and time as we know it. There was no time before the big bang that we know of. It’s like talking about cakes before the time of baking. It seems that he might be trying to raise the question of what allowed the big bang to occur. A great question, and we have the greatest minds in science working on it. The current answer? We don’t know.
A bit later, Miller delves into the miraculous: “What can science say about a miracle? Nothing. By definition, the miraculous is beyond explanation, beyond our understanding, beyond science. This does not mean that miracles do not occur. A key doctrine in my own faith is that Jesus was born of a virgin, even though it makes no scientific sense – there is the matter of Jesus’s Y-chromosome to account for. But that is the point. Miracles, by definition, do not have to make scientific sense” (p. 239). This truly is a disappointing argument from someone who just spent two-hundred pages arguing against creationism because it *doesn’t make scientific sense*. One of the points of science is to try to build heuristic models that explain the universe around us, or some aspect of that universe, that account for the most observable data. We must either reject or be agnostic about those phenomena which cannot be assimilated into these models.
Miller sometimes waxes philosophical, with about as much success. On God’s eternality: “This means that God, who always has been and always will be, transcends time and therefore is the master of it” (p. 242). I realize this is a stock-in-trade argument from classical Christian theology, but it is fundamentally flawed: something cannot exist outside of time because time is a predicate of existence. To exist means to have *come into existence*. The popular formulation of this argument is when a theist asks an atheist “What caused the big bang?” and the atheist responds “What caused God?” If you’re operating under the assumption that everything needs a cause, as classical Christian theology does, saying that God is an exception to your own rule isn’t going to work. It’s a logical fallacy called special pleading.
So, why does Kenneth Miller believe in God? One reason is his acceptance of the God of the Gaps arguments; he seems to be perplexed by the fact that we don’t have all of cosmology explained away. The second is his peculiar interpretation of quantum mechanics. He thinks that the random events of quantum mechanics and the simultaneous orderliness of the universe have something to with a God, though he never comes out and explicitly states it, and never clarifies how the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics would provide evidence for God.
What kind of God does Miller believe in? In the closing lines of the book, he quotes Darwin: “There is grandeur in this view of life; with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most wonderful and most beautiful have been, and are being evolved” (p. 292). This is awe-filled Darwin at his most wondrous. However, even when Darwin indulged these sentiments, this is clearly the God of deism: a world set into motion by a distant, non-personal God who created natural laws and then let happen what may. It doesn’t at all comport with the fundamental tenets of the Catholic Church (the virgin birth, the assumption, et cetera) in which Miller claims to believe.
Darwin’s God wasn’t the God of miracles, and therefore isn’t Miller’s God. He was the God of reverence for the mysteries of the universe, which have been slowly decreasing in number since the rise of modern science. This number will never reach zero; there will always be something new to learn, and science will never disappear. But looking for God in the unexplained nooks and crannies of science leaves a smaller and smaller place for Him/Her/It with each passing year, and this seems to be a theological approach in danger of having God slip through its very fingers.
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