I’m often baffled by the duality scientists so regularly inject into the Creation/Evolution discussion. They are swift to accuse proponents of Creation or Intelligent Design as offering a kind of “pseudo-science.” However, when defending their own ideas scientists offer in return a kind of “pseudo-philosophy.” The latter I find to be more problematic. The foundation of an idea is more critical than the idea itself. In the excerpt from his book Finding Darwin’s God, Kenneth Miller presents several arguments on the topic, and each one is predicated on a very weak philosophical and theological foundation.

Let me state my premise: the Christian is philosophically prohibited from accepting evolution. I will be challenging Miller’s view on the grounds that a Christian has certain intellectual obligations that he cannot simply do away with for convenience’s sake. There are certain foundationals that the Believer must be take as a priori — a lens through which all other information passes — otherwise ones Faith is built on nothing but his own ideas.

Here are Miller’s chief arguments that I’ll be trying to refute:

1) That God created an independent, self-sustaining Universe

2) That if God had created mankind ex nihilo (out of nothing), it would negate man’s free will, thus man’s ability to truly love God (”such a Creator would deny his creatures any real opportunity to know and worship him - authentic love requires freedom, not manipulation.”)

3) That “evolution may explain the existence of our most basic biological drives and desires, but that does not tell us that it is always proper to act on them.”

1) God created and independent, self-sustaining Universe

Miller has an issue with God creating a Universe that He must maintain or play an active role in the continuance of. Miller instead envisions a Universe which is essentially self-perpetuating, complete, and independent of Divine meddling. He seems to think that such a Universe would bear the maker’s hand in a far too obvious way, and that at every turn we would see God’s fingerprints, thus negating Faith. Miller writes:

If he so chose, the God whose presence is taught by most Western religions could have fashioned anything, ourselves included, ex nihilo, from his wish alone…If a string of constant miracles were needed for each turn of the cell cycle or each flicker of a cilium, the hand of God would be written directly into every living thing - his presence at the edge of the human sandbox would be unmistakable. Such findings might confirm our faith, but they would also undermine our independence. How could we fairly choose between God and man when the presence and the power of the divine so obviously and so literally controlled our every breath? Our freedom as his creatures requires a little space and integrity. In the material world, it requires self-sufficiency and consistency with the laws of nature.

It’s clear that Miller feels no compulsion to find harmony with the Scriptures (i.e. in Him we live and move and have our being; the Earth is the Lord’s and everything in it; God’s eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse), but that is a whole other discussion. Instead, let’s evaluate the practical implications of Miller’s statements for the Christian.

Based on his reasoning, a few very large problems arise. Firstly, Miller is begging the question: God wouldn’t miraculously sustain life because we’d be able to observe Him doing so, and this sort of obvious involvement would leave no room for faith.

Why is Miller so sure we would be able to observe the sustaining act of God? How can Miller assert this isn’t currently happening in ways that we cannot observe? The Scriptures certainly suggest this is so but for Miller, the possibility of seeing tiny miracles everywhere would prevent true faith since God’s presence would simply be an empirically observable phenomenon — just look under the microscope and see tiny angels inside every cell. But what does Miller imagine these tiny miracles would look like? How is he justified in saying that they are not present? I’m sure he believes the supernatural is not scientifically testable — after all, he talks about Faith, and Faith requires a certain amount of intellectual uncertainty (Miller himself is presenting that concept in the excerpt). This being the case, how can he be sure that there is not a miracle in each cell that cannot be observed but is nonetheless, there?

Miller is confusing issues. He’s presenting God’s making Himself known as an afront to free will. A verse I cited above, Romans 1:20, seems to have no problem with God making Himself known in an obvious way. Miller is a Christian and Christians believe in the deity of the man Jesus Christ. What could be more obvious than God himself walking in our midst! Free will suffers no hits in the light of God being accessible or obvious. He has been forthright throughout human history and people still refuse Him. This is just sloppy theology on Miller’s part.

Secondly, and most problematically, miracles are not even possible in Miller’s Universe. Miller’s whole premise is that the Universe is independent, self-consistent, and is limited to the laws governing it. For the Universe to hold together, it needs to be self-consistent. This means that anything miraculous must have a naturalistic explanation for the sake of consistency — this includes Christ’s Resurrection. This is an utterly impossible position for the Christian to subscribe to. A Universe in which miracles are impossible is a Universe entirely contrary to everything Christianity is based on, chiefly, the miracle of the Resurrection. The reason the Resurrection of Christ has any meaning at all is precisely because it was a Divine act, and not possible as a simple act of nature. However, what Miller is suggesting prevents such Divine infiltration. The laws of the Universe must be obeyed, and God has in some sense bound Himself to abide by those laws as far as this reality is concerned. By virtue of his position Miller essentially undercuts the core pillar of his belief system.

The third issue is simply this: how is it that God could even create a truly independent Universe? God’s involvement at any stage renders the Universe non-independent. The Universe would have to be self-creating to truly be and independent system. Why would God’s creating an independent Universe fill its parts with more integrity than if He had created its parts ex nihilo? God could very well have created the independent Universe with a built-in program of predestination, perhaps written into strings, which would see Him very literally “pulling the string of every human puppet, indeed of every material particle,” and manipulating events. Miller’s argument on this point is essentially moot: it does not remove the possibility of a meddlesome God at all. I believe Miller agrees that at some point God created something. So what makes this act less suspicious than creating an organism? Evolution is not a safeguard against God’s whims and there is no defensible reason for believing it is.

In the next post I’ll focus on the issue of free will, as for Miller, it seems to be the crux of his argument.

tags: biology, creation, evolution, free will, God, Kenneth Miller, Universe