Still Looking for Ken Miller's God

Published way back in 1999, Ken Miller's book "Finding Darwins God" was a major event in the Evolution/Creation/Intelligent Design battles. A friend loaned me a copy and I finished it today. A few observations:

Miller has an absolute commitment to naturalism as essential to science. And he is opaque to that being a problem for many theists who believe in a God who is outside of nature. He writes: "Presented modestly and accurately, evolution is a simple scientific idea. It claims only that material causes, the laws of physics and chemistry as played out in living things, are sufficient to account for the history and complexity of life. If evolution is neither more nor less than this simple scientific idea, then why does it engender such hostility?" (167)

His book is supposed to find a meeting point between Darwin and Christianity, and yet his methodology as a scientist insists that all of the history of life and all the complexity of creation can be accounted for through material causes. What he is stating here is simply the party line of materialist naturalism, the starting assumptions of Humanist Manifestos I and II and of most any world view that opposes theism and Christianity, yet he wonders why such a view might engender hostility?

Just a few pages later he writes: "At its heart, evolution is a modest idea, a minimal concept, just two points really. First the roots of the present are found in the past; and second, natural processes, observable today, fully explain the biological connections between present and past. On purely scientific terms, these two points leave very little to argue about." (174)

Again, the materialist viewpoint is fully embraced, including the universe spanning assumption that what we observe in the present will always and without fail be consistent with what occurred in the past according to natural law. This is an assumption that virtually all secular scientists and most theistic evolutionists or evolutionary creationists accept as almost a creedal statement of faith. It is one that creationists have vehemently argued against for decades precisely because it is an assumption. No one disputes the regularity of natural events. Theists have traditionally rejected the notion that such regularity is absolute.

More to the point, it is an assumption that calls into question dozens and dozens of events in both the Old and New Testaments. I have no beef with atheists who adopt naturalism, deny the miraculous and dismiss the Biblical accounts. But what place does this viewpoint have in a book that is supposed to reconcile Darwin to Christianity?

At a minimum, one who professes Christianity should accept the Nicene creed, which explicitly states God is maker of heaven and earth, that Christ was born of a virgin, that Christ rose on the third day after having suffered and died, and acknowledges a life in a world to come. I'm sure Miller, a Catholic, accepts these at some level.

But none of those creedal statements are consistent with the view that material causes account for everything in our world, nor are they consistent with the notion that all events in the past, without exception, can be explained by observations in the present. Add to these the miracles of Jesus, turning water to wine, walking on water, raising the dead, giving sight to the blind and we should see a problem. Adding further the Old Testament miracles of parting the Sea, crossing the Jordan on dry land, fire from heaven, etc., and one would think Miller and others who try to mesh naturalism with Christian faith would have a problem.

Oddly, and quite inconsistently, Miller stumbles into the issue and simply explains it away.

"Any God worthy of the name has to be capable of miracles, and each of the great Western religions attributes a number of very specific miracles to their conception of God. What can science say about a miracle? Nothing. By definition, the miraculous is beyond cxplanation, 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' Y-chromosome to account for. But that is the point. Miracles by definition, do not have to make scientific sense. ..(239)

What miller has forcefully and rudely taken away from the Creationist - the acts of God in nature in the creation of the universe, the earth and all living beings - he now attempts to reclaim in the events of the Gospels without offending any materialists in his academic community. He believes miracles can occur, but claims science can say nothing about them. So on one hand the possibility of miracles cannot be disproven by science, and on the other they are no threat to science. Does Miller see no conflict between his view that all biological, geological, astronomical and chemical phenomena can be explained in reference to natural law, but yet the virgin birth is something science simply cannot touch?

If the virgin birth is outside the reach of science, on what basis does he insist that nothing miraculous could have occurred in the origins of the universe? The origins of life? In essence, he dismisses the views of creationists for failing to follow scientific materialism to the letter, then reclaims the virgin birth by excluding it from scientific materialism.

Eventually, after arguing for the absolute certainty of the materialist, Darwinist model for the origins and development of life, he has to somehow find a way to squeeze God back into his thesis. He does so by introducing the idea of quantum indeterminacy. In short, the regularity of nature is not entirely predictable at the subatomic level. This means, for Miller, that determinism is false, that in the end science cannot predict or know everything, and somehow this leaves room for both freedom and for the activity of God.

"Even the most devout believer would have to say that when God does act in the world, He does so with care and with subtlety. At a minimum, the continuing existence of the universe itself can be attributed to God. The existence of the universe is not self-explanatory, and to a believer the existence of every particle, wave and field is a product of the continuing will of God. That's a start which would keep most of us busy, but the Western understanding of God requires more than universal maintenance. Fortunately, in scientific terms, if there is a God, He has left Himself plenty of material to work with. To pick just one example, the indeterminate nature of quantum events would allow a clever and subtle God to influence events in ways that are profound, but scientifically undetectable to us. (241)

Note that this is not an argument for the existence of God. It is merely the assertion of a possibility. And in the end, IF God acts at the quantum level to sovereignly influence events, possibly including the development of life itself, God's actions would NOT be detectable.

So belief is relegated to the realm of the unverifiable, allowing science the sole claim to objective certainty. He has reconciled faith to Darwinism by sequestering them into separate realities. Nothing about quantum indeterminacy requires belief in God, but for Miller, it is sufficient to insert God into that gap in our knowledge to allow some to still believe without opposing the scientific academy.

Here he does the same thing to ID proponents he did to the Creationists. He uses the very logic for his own view that he denied to them. He insists that ID amounts to a "god of the gaps" approach, where whatever we cannot fully explain by natural mechanisms is by default attributed to God. Such a suggestion (which does not accurately represent the ID position) is impermissible. Yet our gap in knowledge about why photons randomly pass through a mirror leaves an opening somehow for God to invisibly act. In what way is inserting God into quantum indeterminacy not also a "God of the gaps" approach?

Ultimately, nothing about Miller's (Darwin's) God resembles the Biblical, miracle-working Creator. Those who claimed to be eyewitnesses to the resurrection may not have used scientific terms to describe what they saw, but none would likely suggest the resurrection was explainable by natural causes alone, or that the action of God in that event was beyond detection. Instead, they insisted that they saw, held, touched something real.

"That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. (1 John 1:1) In the Biblical accounts, God created all, acted in history, did things that were visible, verifiable and left physical evidence. If Miller finds such notions of acts of God that left tangible evidence unscientific, on what real basis does he still believe in the virgin birth?

There are other details: I think he misunderstands Henry Morris' objections to radiometric dating, I think he under represents Behe's irreducible complexity arguments. Written in 1999 he could not have dealt with Stephen Meyer's arguments regarding the origins of life or ID arguments regarding genetic information and specified complexity.

But most importantly, I think Miller fails in the same way all attempts to mesh Darwin with Christianity fail. Science is given magisterial authority that cannot be questioned and scriptural accounts are diluted to the point that they are unrecognizable. And he trips over his own arguments.

In the end, Miller's book is an account that details THAT he believes in both Darwin and God, details WHY he accepts Darwin, but in no way explains WHY he believes in God or why anyone else should. If his intent was to reconcile faith and science, it fails to do anything other than elevate science over faith and turn faith into a mere irrational hope based on indeterminacy.