Dr. Ken Miller, professor of biology at Brown University, presented a lecture titled "Finding Darwin's God" to the Hamilton community on February 28. Dr. Miller's research focuses on cell biology and he is the co-author of three high school biology textbooks. Outside the lab, Dr. Miller lectures and debates about evolution on the pro-evolution side. He is the author of Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution, and most recently was the lead witness for the parents in the 2005 Dover, Pa., "intelligent design" case.
Dr. Miller began his lecture with a question he is often asked: how does one reconcile belief in evolution and religious faith? "They don't need to be reconciled," said Miller, who argues that when evolution is understood correctly, it does not conflict with religious beliefs.
In 1999, a Kansas school board voted to take evolution completely out of the science curriculum. In 2004, an anti-science majority on the school board in Kansas redefined all of science in such a way that implied not all science could be explained by natural processes. "In other words," said Miller, "Kansas now has room for the supernatural."
In Dover, Pa., the school board instructed high school biology teachers to teach intelligent design. Intelligent design is an anti-evolution concept that claims some features of nature and living things are too complex to have happened by processes such as natural selection, and therefore must have been put into place as by a higher being—an "intelligent designer." The teachers in Dover refused to comply with this decision, so the board settled on the superintendent reading a statement about intelligent design to the biology classes and directing them to sources for more information. Eleven parents sued the school board in response to this decision. Dr. Miller spent two days on the witness stand in the case, and the outcome "was a stinging rebuke for advocates of intelligent design," he said.
Dr. Miller then discussed some ways to respond to anti-evolution arguments. One argument anti-evolutionists often make is that fossil records do not support evolution because intermediate forms are missing. "If you show this to a paleontologist, their jaw drops," said Miller. The truth is, there are so many intermediate forms it is hard to see where one ends and another begins. Anti-evolutionists will also claim that evolution can not be true because we can not go back and time and prove that it happened; however, as Miller pointed out, evolution's predictions are testable, through fossil study and other means, such as comparing genomes.
Another way Dr. Miller argues for evolution is to fight the presumption that evolution is anti-religious. "Many people think if evolution is right, then creation is wrong, and vice versa," said Miller. Proponents of intelligent design have shifted the argument to be about the existence or non-existence of God, rather than creation versus evolution. Many people on the evolution side argue that science alone can lead us to truth regarding the purpose of existence, which would be, there is not one. However, Miller believes the first step to making peace between science and religion is to understand that "science tells us a great deal, but it doesn't tell us everything." According to Miller, a way to reconcile these differences is to accept that "evolution defines a relationship between creator and created based on a moral independence and free will."
Miller also discussed the history of a compatibility of science and religion. St. Augustine wrote in 411 A.D. that people should not use the Bible to make observations about science, as it would bring embarrassment on religion. Furthermore, Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, was an Augustinian monk who did his famous experiments with pea plants in the monastery gardens. "What do you get from an Augustinian monk doing empirical science? Damn good science," said Miller.
Miller then posed the question, what can we learn from the Dover trial? "The trial documented the complete collapse of I.D. as a scientific theory," he said. Miller cited some of the evidence used against intelligent design in the trial, including the very recently chimp genome, which, when compared to the human genome, showed which two of the 48 chimp chromosomes had fused to form one human chromosome (chromosome 2). "This shows we shared a common ancestor," said Miller. "If we were made by an intelligent designer, the designer wanted to fool us and make us think we shared a common ancestor." The trial also exposed intelligent design as a religious doctrine, by showing that in earlier versions of the I.D. textbook the Dover school board recommended the word "creator" was used instead of "designer," and the rest of the book was the same.
"Why is this a big deal?" asked Miller. The answer, according to Miller, is the future of science in America. We are raising a generation of people who are going to be suspicious of science, and that has huge implications for scientific fields. Other countries will be moving ahead in science, leaving the United States behind. "What is at stake is, literally, everything," said Miller.
"As for what evolution really means, I can't think of anyone who summed it up better than Charles Darwin," said Miller. Miller closed with a quote from the conclusion of Darwin's Origin of Species: "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."
-- by Laura Trubiano '07
