Scientist Puts Faith in Evolution
Brown University biologist Kenneth R. Miller likes to sum up his views about evolution with a bumper sticker slogan: “We have the fossils. We win.”
But he also likes a tabloid headline from the New York Post: “Evolution and God Do Mix: Pope.”
Finding common ground between faith and and the theory of evolution was the subject of Miller’s Oct. 30 talk at the University of San Diego. USD’s Center for Catholic Thought and Culture sponsored the event which drew an estimated crowd of 900 people that packed USD’s Shiley Theatre and spilled over into overflow rooms where the talk was broadcast by closed-circuit television.
The evidence is clear, Miller said. There is “an embarrassment of riches” showing at least 15 distinct species that preceded human life on the planet over just the last five million years. Research published this fall from Ardipithecus ramidus, a fossil found 15 years ago, helped definitively answer another question about evolution – that man’s ancestors began to walk upright before their brains tripled in size.
In the past few years, Miller said, DNA evidence also has shown that 24 pairs of chromosomes from the early primates became the 23 pairs humans have, when two chromosomes fused together. The definitive evidence of evolution “is genetic and molecular. The fossil evidence is just icing on the cake.”
But 150 years after Charles Darwin wrote “The Origin of the Species,” the debate between evolution and creationism rages on. Miller was one of the chief witnesses at a 2004 trial in Dover, Penn., which challenged the notion of “intelligent design” the idea that the living world is so complex that it could not have occurred through natural processes and and required the direct intervention of an outside force.
While the federal judge in the case ruled against intelligent design proponents, saying the argument was akin to the theory of creationism and a form of religion that could not be taught in the public schools, anti-evolutionary measures continue to pop up in all 50 states, Miller said. The United States was at the bottom of a survey, ranking just above Turkey, in public acceptance of evolution, he added.
Miller, the best-selling author of “Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientists’ Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution” and several other books, argued that much of the debate stems from the argument about whether a belief in evolution is compatible with religion. Fellow scientist Richard Dawkins, for example, has written that the evidence of how the universe evolved is what one would expect of a world with “no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
But Miller cited the long legacy of Catholic theologians, including Pope Benedict XVI, who say that far from being incompatible, a belief in both faith and science is necessary to truly understand the universe. The fruitfulness of evolution and the glory of the natural world can be understood “as a reflection of divine creativity and divine promise,” Miller said.
But neither of these views, of course, is “testable by the methods of science,” Miller added. It all comes down “to asking a question that science cannot answer,” namely, “is there meaning, is there purpose, is there value to this universe?”
— Liz Harman