Miller seems to believe that if God had simply created mankind, that in so doing, man would be devoid of free will. Miller again writes:

“All things would move toward the Creator’s clear, distinct, established goals. Such control and predictability, however, comes at the price of independence. Always in control, such a Creator would deny his creatures any real opportunity to know and worship him – authentic love requires freedom, not manipulation. Such freedom is best supplied by the open contingency of evolution.”

For some reason, and who knows why, Miller has it set in his mind that God is incapable of creating a creature that is capable of true free will, and that the only way free will becomes possible is to have God at arms length. What on earth is the possible justification for this? Miller is creating a false choice here. There is no good reason why believing that God can create a fully developed creature precludes its free will. Why should it? Miller admits in the excerpt that he believes God is in fact capable of creating a person out of nothing — why does Miller then think that a God who could do this could not go one tiny step further and create that person with truly free will! The very act of creating a person out of nothing defies all known physical laws. Clearly a God that is capable of doing this (as Miller believes He is) is capable of anything.

This blends into another, very important issue: is the free will Miller talks about a matter for our biology or for the soul? Does Miller believe that souls exist and if so, how is it that they come about? The burden of proof is on the Christian evolutionist to provide a naturalistic explanation for how the soul might come about, and of course to do this, they need to first prove scientifically that the soul even exists at all.

There are essentially three possibilities that Miller must accept:

a) If sin and free will are matters for the body, then Miller’s being a Christian is a waste of time, as the soul is nothing but myth, and there’s nothing Christ needed to save us from.

b) If sin and free will are matters for the soul, but Miller believes the soul develops naturalistically, then the burden of proof is on him to prove that the soul even exists, and how it comes to be. He will then have the difficult task of explaining how it is this naturalistic soul can even be saved unto a supernatural paradise, or why this naturalistic soul even needs saving at all (as death would simply be the end, with no eternity to worry about).

c) If Miller believes in the soul, and that God in fact does create souls, then it’s altogether irrelevant if we evolved or not as far as free will is concerned as the agent of free will (the soul) was still created by God!

The only possibility that makes any sense in a Christian system sees sin and free will as matters for the soul, and sees the soul as a supernatural entity. This completely destroys the foundation for Miller’s entire argument of a theological justification for evolution– God’s creating a biological shell poses no hindrance to free will as true free will is necessarily the property of a supernatural agent — the soul — thus exempt from the process of evolution.

Any way you slice it, Miller’s argument when coupled with His Christianity collapses into meaninglessness.

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.

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