Last night I decided to get around to reading Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search For Common Ground Between God And Evolution.  As my favorite scientist, I owed him an opportunity to express his views as to the main point upon which we disagree.  After much consideration, though, my views have not changed, yet I may have more respect for his.  I fear that this review will be rather harsh, therefore I must initially express my vast degree of fondness for the book.  From the fact that I read it in one sitting, one could rightly infer that it was a real page-turner.  Miller beautifully defends Darwin from the the fossil record to the mechanism of natural selection.  However, I did not read the book to strengthen my belief in evolution.  I read it to challenge my conclusion that any meaningful conception of God cannot coexist with scientific and philosophical scrutiny.  I feel that this review will not do justice to the brilliance of the first half of the text, but, unfortunately, appreciation doesn’t make for as good of a read.

I cannot say that Professor Miller did not fulfill the initial premise.  The title of the book declares exactly what one would hope to find, common ground between God and evolution.  He does not attempt to support theism as evolution.  He does not attempt to argue biblical inerrancy.  He does not attempt to “prove” God.  Quite to the contrary, he suggests that the bible cannot be literally true.  What he does do is argue that science and religion are in different domains, that there are limits to science, not established by man’s lack of knowledge, but limits imposed both by scientific findings and definition.  Not only is it beyond a scientific inquiry to discern meaning from the evidence in any higher, moral sense, but even at it’s most basic quantum level, our understanding tends to collapse.  There is much to say on this point, though I will leave much of it with the book.

It was once an argument against the necessity for a creator to explain natural law, and it still is, but to Miller, it is also a powerful tool to God.  On the quantum level, the laws of nature no longer apply.  We cannot predict much of the actions of much of the subatomic activity, not by a lack of knowledge, but in principle.  They truly are indeterminate.  However, the statistical averages of these indeterminate events give us the predictable happenings at our superatomic level.  I’ll also leave the reader to either figure out to consult the book for as to what this means for God’s place.

Getting to my main point, Miller once said at a lecture on the Dover trial, “I’m a Roman Catholic.  I believe in a creator in the vaguest sense.”  He justifies well how such a vague creator could exist without conflicting with modern science.  However, he’s missing much of the conflict.  The conflict lies not with those with abstract conceptions of God and modern science.  The problem arises with religion and modern science, when one materializes the workings of the designer.  In the book, he writes that religion can coexist without being disfigured beyond any traditional understanding.  This, he cannot defend.  Perhaps it is wrong to take the philosophical implications of evolution labeled as science, and to use it against religion.  But, that is not the problem as I see it.  The problem is what happens to religion when it’s mythological foundations are corroded away by the “universal acid”, the science.  Then, without these, there is a deep rooted problem.  I cannot recall who wrote, wisely, that if we cannot trust the Bible’s history, how can we trust its morals?  Simply put, one can’t.

Miller rightly quotes Richard Dawkins on this issue:

“The trouble is that God in this sophisticated, physicist’s sense bears no resemblance to the God of the Bible or any other religion.  If a physicist says God is another name for Planck’s constant, or God is a superstring, we should take it as a picturesque metaphorical way of saying that the nature of superstrings or the value of Planck’s constant is a profound mystery.  It has obviously not the smallest connection with a being capable of forgiving sins, a being who might listen to prayers, who cares about whether or not the Sabbath begins at 5 pm or 6pm, whether you wear a veil or have a bit of arm showing; and no connection whatever with a being capable of imposing a death penalty on His son to expiate the sins of the world before and after he was born.”

The problem is not that science conflicts with God.  The problem is that science causes philosophical conundrums within religion that it cannot withstand.  I’m sorry Professor Miller, but these philosophical plagues, religion cannot survive.  What happens when the bible cannot be literally true?  What happens when original sin fades away?  What happens when the fall of man never happened?  What happens when Moses was never given the 10 commandments?  What happens when Jesus may never have existed?  The only way to prevent the erosion of such religious thought from being grotesquely disfigured is to not think, not consider these implications, to have faith.  That may even be fine.  You can believe whatever you like.  The problem arises when you impose it on others.  Then, it demands justification.  It demands its own suicide.