Marc's+7th+Week+Assignment

Response to __Finding Darwin's God__ (Kenneth Miller)

For centuries, things not understood by man were attributed to the divine, whether it be one being or many. As man survived through these centuries and used science to explain natural phenomena, more and more mysteries of the world around us were uncovered and understood. Miller is right when he points out that creationists are wrongfully clinging to the things that science has not yet uncovered: "The trouble is that science, given enough time, generally explains even the most baffling things. As a matter of strategy, creationists would be well-advised to avoid telling scientists what they will never be able to figure out." The downfall of strength in creationist belief is that they only claim God exists where science cannot explain something.

As an evolutionist who still believes in God, Miller argues that God can be found strongest in what we have already discovered. He feels that limiting God's existence only to phenomena we do not understand puts a limit on what we can learn. It may in fact limit learning about belief itself. Miller then begins talking about faith and reason, although very vaguely. From my own education at a Jesuit high school, I spent my last two years studying faith and reason in theology class. Miller seems to be beating around the bush without making any decisive point about the matter, but a certain amount of reason is most certainly needed and can help enhance one's faith. Reason //cannot//, however, prove the existence of God. It can only pave the road so far. Obviously, this is where faith comes in. Someone must make the leap from knowing as much as they can to believing in God, even though some information may be missing and may never be found. Neither blind faith nor reliance on man's logical assumptions alone are good, there must be a balance.

Miller believes God created some beings and then stepped back to let the kind of evolution that Darwin theorized take over from there. Before today's class, I would have likened this to the general idea of intelligent design; that God is some kind of biological engineer who formed the first organism. After watching today's video, however, we know that intelligent design, in the case of the Dover trial, was simply creationism with a new label. Ultimately, it is quite unclear the difference between Miller's belief and society's generalized idea of intelligent design. Why he can believe in both things just fine and other people have trouble is also baffling.