Posted on 09/09/2006 8:39:07 PM PDT by curiosity
“In the final analysis (God) used evolution to set us free.”
Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller used this quote from his book “Finding Darwin’s God” as a central point in his speech about simultaneously believing in evolution and religion.
Miller spoke to more than 500 people Thursday evening in the Kansas Union Ballroom.
He testified for the pro-evolution side in the recent lawsuit against the Dover, Pa., school district, where a federal judge ruled against the district’s teaching of intelligent design in biology classrooms. He said it was creationism in disguise.
Conservatives on the Kansas State Board of Education approved science standards last year that criticized evolution, but after the August primary election, it appears moderates will regain control of the board and eventually reinstate the former standards.
Miller gained several laughs from the audience during his speech as he described the Dover trial, including a scene when intelligent design proponent Michael Behe asked the judge if he could “move the evidence to the side.”
Plaintiffs’ attorney Eric Rothschild had stacked 58 scientific papers, nine books and other textbook chapters on evolutionary evidence supporting development of the human immune system in front of Behe on the witness stand.
Miller said religion and evolution are too often played as opposing forces and incorrectly identified as mutually exclusive. At Brown, a student once told him he could not worship at the university chapel and cited a book that places evolution as the fruit in the serpent’s mouth or a “tool of Satan.”
But Miller said the root of the portrayal of religion and evolution as opposites may come from scientists who have an “anti-theistic interpretation of evolution,” a stance he disagrees with.
“People of faith are shooting at the wrong target. They should not be shooting at evolution itself,” he said.
Miller, a Catholic, said evolution has been remarkably robust in answering criticism through fossil records, the fusing of human chromosomes and other examples.
Instead of attacking evolutionary theory, the argument should be against the anti-theistic interpretation of evolution, he said.
He quoted several scientists, philosophers and religious leaders, including Pope Benedict XVI, who has written: “Even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation.”
“By understanding the mechanics of this world, what one is really doing is praising and glorifying God,” Miller said.
Miller will answer questions from the public at 10 a.m. today at the Hall Center for the Humanities.
The lecture was the first in the “Difficult Dialogues” series on “Knowledge: Faith & Reason,” presented by the Hall Center and the Biodiversity Institute.
Federal Judge John E. Jones III, who ruled in favor of the Dover plaintiffs, will speak Sept. 26.
I read Professor Miller's book cover to cover and was much impressed with its clarity and content. The atheists have indeed hijacked evolution and turned it into an anti-theist theory.
In his book, Finding Darwin's God, Professor Kenneth Miller leaves no doubt that evolution is good science as an explanation of the origin of species. In fact, it is practically incontrovertible. The fossil record and extensive biology research has revealed that over time, evolution has added parts that expand, improve, and sometimes completely refashion living systems. Creationists and the Intelligent Design movement discount evolution because they fear that it will somehow render Christianity wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth. The following prose quotes numerous provocative passages from the book that describe both the science and reasoning use by Professor Miller in his search for Darwin's God, a God that is fundamentally consistent with the God of both the Christian and Jewish faiths.
The information presented below has been extracted, cut and paste directly from Professor Miller's book:
Evolution of a Theory
At its heart, evolution is a minimal concept with two points. 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. The explanatory power of evolution derives from its simplicity. Natural selection favors and preserves those variation that work best and a new variation is constantly generated by mutations, gene rearrangements, and even by exchanges of genetic information between organisms. The result is more complex life forms over hundreds of millions of years.
The increase of data supporting evolution and other scientific disciplines led to the rise of scientific materialism which was an assumption that actions taking place at each level of nature could be explained through the effects of actions at lower levels. Heat was molecular movement. Sound was molecular vibration. Light was a form of electromagnetic radiation. Materialism asserts that everything fit together perfectly and each level of nature was part of a machine with predictable and understandable actions operating according to well defined rules. These rules seemed to imply blind, pitiless indifference Could there be anything left for God to do?
The quantum revolution quickly destroyed this Newtonian certainty. Quantum theory makes it possible to construct, according to principles of physical law, a genuine machine whose actions are indeterminate. Experiments on matter and energy demonstrate that an outcome is always unpredictable, in principle. However, although we cannot predict the outcomes of individual events with certainty, the overall outcomes of thousands of such events fall into a very predictable statistical pattern. These probabilities give order to the physical and chemical world and is the reason why quantum indeterminacy does not produce universal chaos. This inherent unpredictability is not a matter of inadequate scientific knowledge, rather it is a reflection that the behavior of matter itself as indeterminate and therefore unpredictable.
The discovery of the unpredictability of nature means that the clockwork assumption of extreme materialism and future predictability is wrong. Thus, we can conclude that God's universe is not locked into a determinate future and neither are we. Quantum physics tells us that absolute knowledge, complete understanding, and a total grasp of universal reality will never be ours. Thus, we can conclude that life is not merely chemical matter that blindly follow the determined instructions of the machines within us.
Furthermore, if we could reconstruct exactly what the ancient world was like, we still could not predict which would have been the winners and losers in the evolutionary sweepstakes. The ancient lottery was to some extent a matter of chance. The natural history of evolution is unrepeatable because the nature of matter made it unpredictable in the first place.
Impact of Indeterminacy on Evolutionary Theory
Remarkably, this very indeterminacy has to be by any definition a key feature of the mind of God. There is only one alternative to unpredictability, and that is strict predictable determinism. We have progressed so much in self awareness and understanding that we now know there is a boundary around our ability to grasp reality. We cannot say definitively why it is there, but this boundary is consistent with the handiwork of a Creator who fashioned it to allow us the freedom necessary to make our acceptance or rejection of his love a genuinely free choice. Breaks in causality at the atomic level make it fundamentally impossible to exclude the idea that what we have really caught a glimpse of what might indeed reflect the mind of God.
Furthermore, natural laws and chance may equally be instruments of God's intentions. There can be purpose without an exact predetermined plan. If we can see the hand of God in the unpredictable events of history, and if we can see meaning and purpose in the challenges and trials of our daily lives, then we can certainly see God's will emerging in the grand and improbable tree of life. Given evolution's ability to adapt, to innovate, to test, and to experiment, sooner or later it would have given the Creator exactly what he was looking for; a creature who could know and love him and who would eventually discover the extraordinary process of evolution that filled his earth with so much life.
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. Those events could include the appearance of mutations, the activation of individual neurons in the brain, and even the survival of individual cells and organisms. Chaos theory emphasizes the fact that enormous changes in physical systems can be brought about by unimaginably small changes in initial conditions and this too could serve as an undetectable amplifier of divine action.
God, who always has been and always will be, can transcend time and therefore is the master of it. Mankind traverses time in a linear fashion. An eternal being who is present everywhere could easily act to alter the space-time continuum in ways that profoundly affect events. As mankind is locked into a single point in time and moving forward, we wouldn't have a clue. God would then exercise exactly the degree of control he chooses.
A religious person could therefore surmise that when creatures evolved who were ready to know God, being worthy of souls, his work would have reached a pinnacle of power and subtlety. At that point, God decided to reveal Himself to us. This would serve to complete the physical and spiritual reality of human nature. Thus, the evolutionary forces then become just one more tool of the Almighty. That evolution helped to create our capacities for both faith and science is undeniable. To maintain that either is thereby invalidated fails the test of logic
The contingency and improbability of our origins and the particular history that led to us, helps us to understand how truly remarkable we are and how rare is the gift on consciousness. Furthermore, if another group of animals had evolved to self awareness and shown itself worthy of a soul, God would not have been less pleased.
Evolution and Free Will
God fashioned a material universe in which the conditions of precise determinism do not apply and used evolution as the tool to set us free and to devise a universe that would make knowledge, love and service meaningful. By choosing evolution as His way to fashion the living world, he emphasized our material nature and our unity with other forms of life. He made the world today contingent upon the events of the past. He made our choices matter, our actions genuine, our lives important.
The care that God takes not to intervene pointlessly in the world is an essential part of His plan for us. If everything that happens on earth is God's will, then God is responsible for evil and suffering and God's goodness is compromised. However God can and does act in the world and is wise enough to act in ways that preserve our own freedom, allowing us to reap the rewards and consequences of our own free will. The ability to do good means nothing without the freedom to do evil.
Evolution and the Origins of the Earth
One of the most significant findings of cosmological science is that the universe did have a spectacular beginning several billion years ago. Hubble discovered that the most distant galaxies were moving the fastest, almost as though everything in the universe had been blown apart from a great initial explosion at a single point in space and time, an explosion know popularly as the Big Bang. Although this does not prove that the ultimate beginning must be attributed to the divine, neither does it provide a scientific basis for ruling God out.
Why would God waited 2 billion years for us to appear? Whatever God's characteristics, impatience is not one of them. A genuine believer will trust in God's wisdom and see history as the unfolding of his plan. There is no religious justification for demanding that the creator hold to a certain schedule of defined pathway. To God, a thousand years are as a twinkling and there is no reason to believe that our appearance was for Him anything other than right on time.
The Anthropic Principle
The possibility of life as we know it evolving in the Universe depends on the values of a few basic physical constants and in some respects is remarkably sensitive to their numerical values. Recognition of this has led to the formulation of what is known as the anthropic principle, which states that the physical constants of the universe in which we live have to be favorable to human life because if they were not, nobody would be around to observe them. The fact that we are here means that the physical constants of the universe were set up in a way that made our existence possible.
The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous, implying religious implications. One could reasonably conclude that God created the universe so that we would be possible and also, that God is the source of natural laws and the reason for there being a universe in the first place.
A Common Thread
Darwin has lifted the curtain that allowed us to see the world as it really is and thus, he ultimately brought us closer to an understanding of God. We know from astronomy that the universe had a beginning, from physics that the future is both open and unpredictable, and from geology and paleontology that the whole of life has been a process of change and transformation. From biology, we know that our tissues are a stunning matrix of complex wonders, ultimately explicable in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. With such knowledge, we can see why a Creator would have allowed our species to be fashioned by the process of evolution. Our freedom as his creature requires a little space, some integrity, a consistency and self-sufficiency to the material world.
Miracles
What can science say about a miracle? Nothing. By definition the miraculous is beyond explanation and do not have to make scientific sense. Miracles are specific acts of God, designed in most cases to get a message across and their rarity is what makes them remarkable. A miracle is more than a violation of the laws of nature but reflect a greater spiritual reality.
Symbiosis of Science and Religion
Science explores the empirical constitution of the universe; whereas religion provides the search for proper ethical values and spiritual meaning of our lives. Attaining wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domains. A Christian has faith that God expects him to use his talents and abilities in God's name. He sees adversity as a challenge from God and sees apparent misfortune as an opportunity to do good in the service of both God and man
True knowledge comes from a combination of faith and reason. We can find God in the bright light of human knowledge, both spiritual and scientific. God fashioned a material world in which truly free, independent beings could evolve. He got it right the first time. God created not a creaky little machine requiring constant and visible attention but an independent would which was produced and is run by material forces.
By any reasonable analysis, evolution does nothing to distance or weaken the power of God. We live in a world of natural law and all that evolution does is to extend the workings of these natural laws to the novelty of life and to its changes over time. A God who presides over an evolutionary process is not an impotent, passive observer. God fashions a fruitful world in which the process of continuing creation is woven into the fabric of matter itself. He retains the freedom to act, to reveal Himself to His creatures, to inspire and to teach. He is the master of chance and time, whose actions, both powerful and subtle, respect the independence of his creation and give human beings the genuine freedom to accept or to reject His love.
Conclusion (Both in my own words and those of Darwin and Professor Miller)
Charles Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species,
"There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into on; 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."
"These elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by the laws acting around us."
Using science from multiple disciplines, Professor Miller reasons that evolution allows for a personal and active God. Whereas God's physical intervention in our lives is not direct, his care and love are constants. To a believer, the strengths he gives are hope, faith and inspiration. As Christians, we should rejoice in the science of evolution and not fear but instead embrace Darwin's God.
Religion is a search for truth.
Evolution happens.
Intelligent design happens.
The federal government should not be setting limits on either the search for knowledge or the search for truth.
Using scientific methods to set limits on the search for knowledge seems as unreasonable to me as clergy setting limits on the search for truth.
That's where this Catholic creationist stands having observed both science and religion for 55 years. I started early. (wink, wink)
And has for 150 years.
If the quotation marks around "theory" indicate you don't think evolution is a "theory", than what is it?
Brilliant!!!!!
You are a genius - probably ancient - but a genius nevertheless.
;)
sp
s2r>>This "image" -- do you mean "body", or "soul"?
mg>Physical Image.
Wow, so God has eyes, nose, kidneys, an anus, all that?
Evolution IS incompatible with a literal interpretation of the Bible.
What curse?
I don't pretend to know what God looks like, speaking, as I do, from my limited perspective. I think the question becomes rather moot, if not irrelevant, if we accept the premise that God's existence precedes the physical universe.
The problem I have with this debate is the notion of the soul, which I believe is inextricably connected to man's intellect. Christ said blessed are those who believe without seeing. Such a statement would make absolutely no sense whatsoever if our intellect were not correlated to the notion of the soul, and our intellect, by all observations of every other living organism on this planet, is certainly unique, which seems to support my hypothesis. Others may disagree, which they're entitled to.
Now, if evolution alone can explain man's intellect, then it follows that such a mechanism can also explain man's desire to know God, therefore, what role does the soul play.
In other words (and I've asked this many times on these threads) why would God (let alone science) need to posit two different mechanisms of discovery.
I'm not quite sure people yet understand the significance of my inquiry though.....
The one in Gen 3:14-24 where God curses man for his disobedience.
It's also refered to in other places including Revelation 22:3 "And there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him."
OK. As I responded earlier, evoluion IS incompatible with a literal reading of the Bible. As I also explained, I won't try to dissuade you, so we have to agree to disagree.
They claimed not only did I know little about Christianity, I knew little about creationism.
I could hazard a guess, but I prefer to let others speak for themselves. You'll have to ask those that made this argument initially.
The answer is none.
See my post 169
Deuteronomy 26: ...and the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with great terror and with signs and wonders;
Exodus 24:9-10 Then Moses went up with Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, and they saw the God of Israel; and under His feet there appeared to be a pavement of sapphire, as clear as the sky itself.
Exodus 33:18-23 Then Moses said, "I pray You, show me Your glory!" And He said, "I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you, and will proclaim the name of the LORD before you; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion." But He said, "You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!" Then the LORD said, "Behold, there is a place by Me, and you shall stand there on the rock; and it will come about, while My glory is passing by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with My hand until I have passed by. "Then I will take My hand away and you shall see My back, but My face shall not be seen."
2 Samuel 22:7 "In my distress I called upon the LORD, Yes, I cried to my God; And from His temple He heard my voice, And my cry for help came into His ears.
Sounds an awful lot like a body to me. Scripture is full of references to parts of God's body. Why shouldn't we have been created in God's image physically as well as spiritually, mentally, and emotionally?
Hmm... lets run that through other branches of science:
There is no other interpretation of physics except "anti-theistic".
There is no other interpretation of astronomy except "anti-theistic".
There is no other interpretation of chemistry except "anti-theistic".
Nope, it doesn't fit any of them. You are quite wrong.
Because if the references said "He used His Mighty Psuedopod" the audience wouldn't understand. Your citations are perfect examples of allegorical references.
In your narrow corner of the Universe. Most Catholics and many Christians don't seem to have a problem with understanding how an Awesome God could create a Universe that includes Evolution.
It is Fundamentalists who want to limit God to Gandalf writ large.
So there is exactly one interpretation of the Bible, since it must be taken literally. Right?
If so, you better be ready to explain the many, many different sects of Christianity. You might also want to run "your" definition against the Catholics, who believe in both.
> Sounds an awful lot like a body to me. Scripture is full of references to parts of God's body. Why shouldn't we have been created in God's image physically as well as spiritually, mentally, and emotionally?
Just as much as when Jesus referred to the Pharisees' yeast meant he was talking about bread. (Mark 8:14-21)
I ask you again. If we are created in God's image physically, does he have nose hair? teeth? buttocks? a penis? an anus?
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