In Defense of Evolution
- NOVA
Dr. Kenneth Miller is as familiar as anyone in the scientific community with the intelligent-design movement and its attempts to undermine the theory of evolution. A professor of biology at Brown University and coauthor (with Joe Levine) of the standard high-school textbook Biology, Miller testified at the Dover trial as an expert witness for the plaintiffs, the Dover parents who brought suit against their town's school board. Here, Miller, who stresses that he is also a man of faith, talks about why evolution matters, what flaws he sees in the intelligent-design argument, and why the Dover decision hardly means the end of the controversy.
The intelligent-design movement, says Ken Miller, "is basically designed to bring the supernatural into science. And that kind of introduction would destroy both science and religion.Photo credit: Courtesy Ken Miller
FAITH AND REASON
NOVA: Why is evolution so controversial?
Kenneth Miller: I think one of the reasons why evolution is such a contentious issue, quite frankly, is the same reason you can go into a bar and start a fight by saying something about somebody's mother. Evolution concerns who we are and how we got here. And to an awful lot of people, the story of evolution, the story of our continuity with every other living thing on this planet, that's not a story they want to hear.
They favor an entirely different story, in which our ancestry is separate, our biology distinct, and the whole notion of our lineage traceable not to other organisms, but to some sort of divine power and divine presence. But it's absolutely true that our ancestry traces itself along the same thread as that of every other living organism. That, for many people, is the unwelcome message, and I think that's why evolution has been, is, and will remain such a controversial idea for many years to come.
Where do you come from personally on this topic?
I think that faith and reason are both gifts from God. And if God is real, then faith and reason should complement each other rather than be in conflict. Science is the child of reason. Reason has given us the ability to establish the scientific method to investigate the world around us, and to show that the world and the universe in which we live are far vaster and far more complex, and I think far more wonderful, than anyone could have imagined 1,000 or 2,000 years ago.
Does that mean that scientific reason, by taking some of the mystery out of nature, has taken away faith? I don't think so. I think by revealing a world that is infinitely more complex and infinitely more varied and creative than we had ever believed before, in a way it deepens our faith and our appreciation for the author of that nature, the author of that physical universe. And to people of faith, that author is God.
Now, I'm a scientist and I have faith in God. But that doesn't make faith a scientific proposition. Faith and reason are both necessary to the religious person for a proper understanding of the world in which we live, and there is ultimately no necessary contradiction between reason and faith.
The article can be read in its entirety at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/defense-evolution.html
Be sure to pick up Miller's very readable and thorough work: Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (P.S.)
or Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul
Be sure to pick up Miller's very readable and thorough work: Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (P.S.)
or Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul
