Kenneth Miller, acclaimed author and outspoken opponent of efforts to introduce intelligent design into America’s science classrooms, delivered the message his enthusiastic Lehigh audience expected on Wednesday, and concluded with a caveat that distinguishes him from some staunch defenders of evolution—that one can embrace Darwin’s theory while believing in a God who plays an active role in the universe and in the lives of people.
In a two-hour address and slideshow before more than 600 people, Miller critiqued intelligent design as a pseudo-science that builds up a questionable religious idea while undermining the scientific process.
Miller, professor of cell biology at Brown University and co-author of three popular biology textbooks, said intelligent design, unlike natural selection and other scientific theories, cannot be tested or falsified because it invokes supranatural explanations for natural phenomena.
“The advocates of intelligent design propose that a supranatural agent, working outside nature and beyond the laws of science, has brought genes, proteins and complex living systems into existence,” Miller said.
“Intelligent design offers no method of scientifically detecting the actions of a creator-designer. Thus it is not testable. Intelligent design can attribute any result to the action of an intelligent designer. But any theory that can explain everything is not science.”
In contrast, said Miller, the theory of natural selection through random mutation has withstood every challenge mounted against it since Charles Darwin wrote
The Origin of Species in 1859.
Miller, author of
Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution , is serving as expert witness for parents who sued the Dover, Pa., Area School Board when it required that ninth-grade science students be informed about intelligent design. The case is being tried in federal district court in Harrisburg.
Miller made his remarks before a standing-room-only crowd in Packard Lab Auditorium in an address titled “Darwin’s Genome: Answering the Challenge of ‘Intelligent Design.’” The event was sponsored by the university and the
department of biological sciences.
A complex argument
Miller’s speech came four weeks after an overflow crowd of 200 attended a panel discussion on “Intelligent Design: What does it mean for science? For religion?”
The discussion, sponsored by the university chaplain’s office, featured six faculty members, including Michael Behe, professor of biological sciences, author of
Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution , and one of the nation’s leading proponents of intelligent design.
In his book, Behe defined design as “the purposeful arrangement of parts” and wrote that design of “discrete physical systems—if there is not a gradual route to their production—is evident when a number of separate, interacting components are ordered in such a way as to accomplish a function beyond the individual components. The greater the specificity of the interacting components required to produce the function, the greater is our confidence in the conclusion of design.”
Behe also introduced the concept of an “irreducibly complex system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”
Behe, who is serving as expert witness for the Dover school board in the Harrisburg trial, has debated Miller nine times since the publication of
Darwin’s Black Box in 1995. He was not present at Miller’s speech.
Miller, in his Lehigh address, said the assertion that evolution cannot produce irreducibly complex structures “represents the heart and soul of intelligent design” and is one of the two main arguments against Darwin’s theory of natural selection. The other is that evolution cannot produce new biological information.
Miller countered the second argument by pointing to the natural emergence in the past century of new biochemical pathways and new enzymes, including nylonase, which have been reported in refereed science journals and which often occur in response to human alterations of the environment. He showed slides of the journal articles that described these developments.
As for the first argument, Miller agreed with Behe that the bacterial flagellum, with its dozens of genes and proteins working in concert to propel the bacteria and to transport materials inside it, is a marvel of nature.
“There are 50 genes and 30 to 40 proteins in the bacterial flagellum,” he said. “With an acid-powered rotary and a reversible engine, the flagellum almost resembles a machine. No human being has come up with a system this cool, this powerful.”
But a claim for the flagellum’s irreducible complexity could be made, Miller said, only if it could be shown that its many individual parts had no possible function outside of their contribution to the workings of the flagellum.
“Intelligent design says the individual parts of the flagellum are useless on their own. Darwin’s theory says the parts, on their own, could have other jobs. We can look at these complex biochemical machines and see whether their parts do or do not have other functions.
“If you take away all but 10 of the 50 or so parts of the bacterial flagellum, what remains, according to intelligent design, should be non-functional. Instead, we find that what is left behind makes up a Type III secretory system that is perfectly functional. The Type III secretory system is a very nasty [apparatus] that hooks to [a host’s] cells until those cells burst and are devoured by a bacteria.
“Indeed, virtually every protein in the bacterial flagellum shows strong homologies [similarities in DNA or protein sequences] to other systems. This does not explain the step-by-step evolution of the bacterial flagellum. But once you admit that the parts of such a complex machine might have a useful function outside of that machine, you open the door to natural selection.”
Miller also took issue with Behe’s assertion that the blood-clotting system is non-functional if one of its multiple components is absent and thus irreducibly complex. Whales and dolphins, he said, are missing a substance called Factor XII, yet their blood “clots perfectly.”
“Coherent overall explanations “
In addition to his speech, Miller also met on Wednesday with faculty and students in the biological sciences department, with members of the media and with local high school science teachers and science students.
He told those groups, and he told his evening audience, that intelligent design proponents have undermined the American public’s sometimes shaky understanding of science by claiming that the unanswered questions raised by scientific theories amount to evidence against those theories and for intelligent design.
“What is the nature of the evidence in favor of intelligent design? There is none. It has to be manufactured by contriving a dualism that says that anything that Theory A cannot explain is evidence for Theory B. Intelligent design advocates say, ‘We have no evidence for our theory so we will count evidence against evolution as evidence for intelligent design.’”
This type of reasoning, Miller said, leads confused school boards to qualify the teaching of evolution—but not the teaching of atomic theory, the germ theory of disease or any of science’s other theories—by urging students to keep “an open mind” because evolution is “only a theory and not a fact.”
This approach, Miller said, “blurs” the foundations of science and sends students the subtle message that the scientific process—of hypothesis, experimentation, gathering of evidence and formulation of theories—“is not reliable.”
Science is built on theories, said Miller, and theories are “coherent overall explanations, not inspired guesses or hunches” that are built in turn on evidence. Science is also filled with unanswered questions, said Miller, which makes science a dynamic enterprise, a restless and exciting search for truth—scientific truth.
“When we can explain, step by step, the Darwinian evolution of every living system,” he said, “it will be time to close every biology department in the nation.”
Bridging the gulf between science and religion
While scolding intelligent design proponents for employing divine explanations for natural phenomena, Miller argued that some supporters of Darwin’s theory—some of whom he has butted heads with publicly—have stepped outside the bounds of science themselves.
Citing philosopher David Hull, who wrote in
Nature magazine that “the God of the Galapagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical…certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray,” Miller said some supporters of natural selection have contributed to the hostility between science and religion by claiming “that science alone can lead us to truth.
“This is a philosophical statement, not a scientific one,” he said. “It is not testable, and it has no more standing than faith-based assertions about nature.”
The idea that science and religion need not be antagonistic and can be compatible, said Miller, can be traced back to St. Augustine, a Catholic thinker who in the fifth century cautioned Christians that they would subject their religious faith “to scorn” if they used the Bible to make scientific observations.
Twentieth-century popes, including Pius XII, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, have accepted the main tenets of natural selection, said Miller, who is a practicing Catholic, while affirming God’s active role in creation.
Miller cited a 2004 report by the Vatican’s International Theological Commission, which found “mounting support” for natural selection and the “virtual certainty” of a common ancestor for all forms of life, while maintaining that “the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation.”
By implying God’s active presence in the details of nature, Miller said, intelligent design advocates miss two key points: that a universe they believe to be fine-tuned to sustain life is sufficiently fine-tuned for life to evolve, and, more importantly, that God’s involvement in nature infringes on the free will necessary for human beings to express a love for God that is genuine and not compelled.
But those who promote science as the ultimate source of the answers to life’s deepest questions, Miller said, are also missing a point.
“Ultimately, the question is, ‘Does science carry us as deeply into the mystery of life as we would like to go?’ People of faith argue that it does not,” he said. “An understanding of the validity of this is key to bridging the gulf between science and religion.”