Dr. Ken Miller discusses the facts of evolution, the nature of science, and his views on Scripture and theology
A DOULOS Magazine interview conducted by Tyler Francke ’10
Kenneth R. Miller, Ph.D., a Christian and evolutionist, is a professor of biology at BrownUniversity. A self-described “ardent theist,” Miller has passionately defended the scientific integrity of evolutionary theory while simultaneously asserting that fellow believers need not be afraid of modern science undermining their belief in God. Miller has written two books and numerous articles to improve public understanding and acceptance of evolution.
DOULOS Magazine: Dr. Miller, you say that evolution is both a theory and a fact. Could you explain these terms?
Ken Miller: Sure. Evolution and evolutionary theory are not the same thing. In English, we often use the word ‘evolution’ in two entirely different ways. Evolution describes a process we can see and observe in nature. It is a fact, for example, that we have a record of the past history on earth called the fossil record. It’s a fact that living things in the past were different than living things today, and it’s also a fact that when we examine fossils over hundreds of millions of years, we see a series of relationships from one time period to another that document ancestor-descendent relationships as we move forward or back in time.
So, if what one means is the process of change over time, evolution is as much a fact as anything we know in science. However, by evolution, sometimes we mean the explanation for how that process took place – a theory that ties together what we know about genetics, molecular biology, and developmental biology to explain the factual patterns of evolutionary change. In this sense, evolution is very much a theory, because scientific theories are used to explain facts. Scientific theories are not hunches or guesses, they’re explanations built upon facts and consistent with facts.
DM: Would you please describe some of the evidence that you believe supports evolutionary theory?
KM: [amused] Well, how much do you want? Walk into any museum of natural history anywhere in the world, and you will see so much evidence you could be buried under it: that life has changed over time, that our species is a relatively recent appearance on this planet, and that we and other species today were preceded by species that were clearly ancestral to us but also clearly different. Those are the documented facts of what life was like in the past.
There is also genetics. We understand that many of the physical characteristics of living organisms are determined genetically. If it were true that genes were incapable of change, the characteristics of living organisms would be pretty much fixed. But we know, as a fact, that living things contain genetic information that can and does change over time due to a variety of different processes that we can observe in the field and reproduce in the laboratory. They produce the kinds of changes from one generation to another that create genetic diversity in a population.
Thirdly, it’s perfectly clear, and Darwin wrote about this brilliantly in the third chapter of On the Origin of Species. Any living organism, whether it be a dandelion, a humpbacked whale, or a bacterium, can produce far more offspring than could possibly survive on this planet. And what this means is that there is a struggle for existence among all organisms. Take, for example, an oak tree on your front lawn. In a good growing season, an oak tree can drop two or three thousand acorns. Does every one of those acorns grow up to be a full-sized oak tree? Well I would hope not! It doesn’t happen that way, and that means even among acorns, there is a struggle for existence. And in that struggle for existence, given the fact that there is variety and diversity within any population, those individuals whose particular characteristics suit them best to survive are going to contribute more to the gene pool in the next generation.
It is from this process of natural selection, operating on genetic diversity, that evolutionary change takes place. And finally, evolution makes fairly specific predictions about what the sequences of DNA in our genome ought to look like with respect to our evolutionary relatives. It’s a fact, for example, that the human genome contains dozens of molecular errors from the remnants of transposable genetic elements and so forth that we share with our close relatives related by common ancestry.
What I mean by that is we have almost pointless genetic information – defective genes, psuedogenes, genetic mistakes, and so forth – that we share in the exact same places with our evolutionary relatives, such as the other great apes. The notion that our species and other species were uniquely designed or intelligently created or simply brought into existence spontaneously doesn’t fulfill any of these predictions. And that is why evolution has a very strong support of factual evidence in genetics, molecular biology and paleontology.
DM: Going along with that, in the landmark case Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, you testified that intelligent design is not science and should not be in schools. How do you define science, and why does ID not fit that definition?
KM: I think science is actually rather easily defined: It is simply the human activity of seeking natural explanations for natural phenomena. When a meteorologist tries to figure out why it’s raining today, the meteorologist looks for a natural explanation in terms of moisture content in the air, warm fronts, cold fronts, movements of the jet front, and so forth. When a chemist tries to figure out why mixing two solutions together produces a red color, the chemist looks for a natural explanation in terms of the laws of chemistry and physics, chemical bonding, resonance structures, light absorbance, and so forth. When a biologist tries to figure out why a cell is dividing into two cells, the biologist looks for a natural explanation in terms of macromolecules, their interactions with the proteins that control cell structure, timing mechanisms, and so on. That’s how science works.
Now, the research program for intelligent design – if you want to call it that since they don’t really do research – is to find complicated structures or intricate processes within cells and then throw up their hands and say, ‘We cannot think of a natural explanation for this, therefore it must have been specially created or designed.’ It is, in effect, a negation of everything science stands for.
One of my colleagues, Kevin Padian, was asked on the stands of the Kitzmiller trial why he objected to intelligent design in schools and he said, ‘It makes kids stupid.’ What he meant by that is the whole idea of intelligent design is: ‘Look at this! There’s no explanation for it. Look at that! We can’t figure out where this came from.’ It basically teaches students to be satisfied with not explaining things that we find in the natural world, and that’s why it’s sometimes referred to as a ‘science-stopper.’
DM: How do you respond to the common claim that a true transitional form has never been found?
KM: I don’t want to get too brutal, but that is simply not true. About 20 years ago, I was in a debate with a Young Earth creationist who made the same claim. I had three minutes to respond, and I told the audience that I had slides – this was before PowerPoint – of 22 different transitional forms and I would try to get as many in before the moderator rang the bell and I had to shut up. I don’t remember if I did go through all of them, but after I got through 10 or 15, the audience realized the claim that there are not transitional forms is bogus.
We have well-documented evidence of major evolutionary transitions: the origin of mammals from reptiles, the origin of swimming mammals, the transition from lobed-finned fish to early tetrapods [amphibians]. And all these guys meet any reasonable definition of intermediate form. My paleontologist friends tell me that when they find yet another intermediate form representing the transition from reptiles to mammals, they actually argue about whether it should be called a ‘reptile-like mammal’ or a ‘mammal-like reptile.’ Some of these arguments can get pretty vicious, but what this shows is that, absolutely, positively, we have intermediate forms. A lot of the criticism, saying this or that doesn’t count as a transitional form, is done not because of the evidence, but really in spite of the evidence.
DM: What do you think is the problem many religious people have with evolution, if it’s not because of a lack of evidence?
KM: Most people in a country that loves science like ours does would say their objections are scientific. But when you answer those objections, one after another, they just search for other objections. They approach it with such passion and look so desperately for examples to counter evolution that it’s obvious there is something that bugs them besides science alone. I think there are two things that bother religious people about evolution. The first one applies to the minority who take Genesis as literal, historical, and scientific fact, which is a non-traditional way to read it. They don’t care what the geologists, astronomers, or biologists say. They believe this planet is 6,000 years old and that every single living thing was created during a six-day Creation period and that those who survived the Great Flood are still alive today. That, I’m sorry, is a contradiction of everything we know in modern science.
Most religious people, however, reject evolution because they think it means we are just animals, morality doesn’t exist, and our lives are without meaning, value, and purpose. They’re afraid evolution is a theological doctrine that tells us there is no God – you might call it an anti-theological doctrine. If I thought that’s what evolution really meant, I would find it disturbing too. But evolution isn’t philosophy. Evolution isn’t theology. Evolution is a scientific theory that explains literally tens of thousands of observations and experimental facts about the nature and history of life. The great biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, a Christian, once wrote, ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ Any biologist will tell you that that’s true. That is the essence of evolution.
Evolution doesn’t invalidate morals or religious beliefs. Francis Collins, the new head of the National Institutes of Health, is also an evangelical Christian. I’m a practicing Roman Catholic. The reality is that mainstream faiths across the Christian spectrum accommodated themselves to evolution more than a century ago and many of them have been outspoken about the need to value both faith and reason in trying to form a worldview consistent with Christianity. I understand why people find evolution so disturbing, but I would like to respectfully suggest that I think they’re wrong about that and that there are perfectly good ways to understand the evolutionary process within a Christian context.
DM: Dr. Miller, people can and do read Scripture in many different ways. What is your view of the Bible?
KM: I’m always amazed at how uninformed many Christians are about what the Bible is. The Bible is not a book, it is a library, which has been added to, taken away from, and gradually assembled over the years. If you visited an early Christian community, say in Greece, Israel, or Rome and asked them for a Bible, they would have no idea what you’re talking about. It didn’t exist. The letters of Paul existed, and many of the other epistles were beginning to be circulated. There were books from the Jewish tradition and other writings. But the Bible itself simply did not exist until about three or four hundred years after the birth of Christ, when it was assembled into its present form.
It is naïve to think that this library that was consciously assembled by fallible human beings somehow represents words that literally came out of the mouth of God. It doesn’t. What it does represent are the best efforts of the authors to explain their experiences with God and the person they and I believe to be the savior of the world, namely Jesus.
When people tell me that the Bible has to be literally true, I’m always fond of quoting one of the Psalms, in which the Psalmist says, ‘O Lord, thou art my rock and my strength.’ I like to ask the literalists, what kind of rock is God? Is He sedimentary, metamorphic, or igneous? The other person usually gets mad at me, because they know that what the Psalmist is doing is comparing God’s constancy and His staying power to that of a rock. In other words, it’s not literal! The Psalms are poetry in which the writers are trying to express their own conceptions of God. The Book of Job is one of the greatest meditations on the nature of good and evil. The Song of Solomon is a love poem, and a pretty sexy one at that. I don’t have to think that these things actually happened in order to understand that the author of Job was divinely inspired and trying to answer the question of why bad things happen to good people.
Many Bible scholars think Genesis was written during the Babylonian captivity and shows the differences between the conception of the gods held by their Babylonian captors and the Hebrew conception of God – that creation is all good, that we exist because a loving, kind, merciful God wants us to exist, and that to find the sources of evil in the world, we should just look in the mirror, which is to say that it is humankind’s rejection of God’s plan and God’s law that causes suffering in the world.
St. Augustine, in the 4th century,said Christians who interpret Genesis as scientific history lay themselves open to non-believers who say ‘the stars are not like that,’ ‘animals are not like that,’ who will then reject the real message of Scripture, which in Augustine’s view and mine too, is salvation. So how do I read the Bible? It depends on the book.
DM: Do you think the Gospels are historical accounts?
KM: Of course I do because, to be a Christian, I need to accept the reality and indeed the divinity of Jesus Christ, which I certainly do. But that does not mean that every book that was placed into that collection has the same sort of firsthand account or testimony.
DM: Do you view evolution as guided by God or a random process that He initiated?
KM: OK, the answer is no and no. To most people, the word ‘random’ means anything could happen. It’s like a roll of the dice – you never know what’s going to come up. Even though some of the things that power evolution are random – like genetic recombination, transposition, the unpredictable appearance of mutations – the driving force that Darwin identified is natural selection and it’s not random at all. It is driven by the environment in which the organism lives, and it’s regulated by the laws of physics and chemistry, which are not random either. Genetic change is constrained by the process of development and the way gene expression works, and that’s also not a random process. Evolution, therefore, is not random. Is it guided by God?
Thomas Aquinas, the great theologian of the Middle Ages, said that when you show that something that happens in the natural world has a natural cause, that does not take God out of the picture because He is the author of all things natural. So when you say the rain has a natural cause by the clashing of cold and warm fronts, that does not remove God, it simply places all of nature in God’s providential plan. Evolution, too, is a natural process.
The whole message of evolution is that we can explain our origins in terms of natural processes that operate today in living organisms all around us. If God is real, as I believe He is, that means that those natural processes are part of His providence. Does it mean that He was such an incompetent planner that He had to constantly reach in and supplant His own laws and rules to make things come out the way He wanted? The answer to that is no, for theological reasons.
The most satisfying, Christian view is a God who is the master of everything, including nature itself. Does that mean that God is not involved? No, to a person of faith like myself, God is involved in every second, every millisecond of existence, not by constantly pulling strings and subverting our independence, but by supporting our existence and the natural laws that make this world so orderly and enable us to do science in the first place.
DM: Do you think our morality evolved, or was it a gift given at one time by God?
KM: The whole field of evolutionary psychology is predicated on the idea that you can understand a lot of human activity by realizing that evolution has shaped our patterns of behavior, which it surely has. If that’s true, then evolution also shaped our moral sense. And not only do I have no problem with that, I find it quite persuasive. If evolution shaped it, does that mean God had nothing to do with it? Think again. Remember, evolution is a natural process and God is the author of nature; therefore, this is a process happening within God’s providential plan.
And if you can understand that God used the process of evolution to shape our bodies, which is surely how our bodies came to be, then why would the same God not use the evolutionary process to shape our minds and our morality? So I find it consistent and satisfying to accept that our moral sense was also shaped by the evolutionary process. That does not mean you think rape and murder are bad things because evolution wanted you to – they are bad things intrinsically and what evolution gave you is the mental capability to understand that.
Editor’s Note: Interested students should look up Ken Miller’s newest book, Only a Theory, which is available at Fogler Library.
