Karina+Week+7

I do not find the points that Kenneth Miller makes in //Finding Darwin’s God// to be convincing, or that his argument for being both a scientist and a Christian really makes any sense. He argues for a God that created a complete world and then left his creation to run free from his whim and with the ability of intelligent beings to independently choose from right and wrong, good and evil (and that evolution supports that complete world). This is a deistic god – one who sets the world in motion and then steps back away from it, letting it run unimpeded. In this sense, he is not a traditional Christian at all, because the Bible does not support a belief system of this sort at all. Miller then says that, “ E ach of the great Western monotheistic traditions sees God as truth, love, and knowledge. This should mean that each and every increase in our understanding of the natural world is a step toward God and not, as many people assume, a step away. If faith and reason are both gifts from God, then they should play complementary, not conflicting, roles in our struggle to understand the world around us. As a scientist and as a Christian, that is exactly what I believe.” Calling God by some abstract terms does not follow with any god that has the three qualities of the Christian God – omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscient. I don’t think that I could have put it any better than Carl Sagan when he said in his Gifford Lectures (1985), “Well, if we say that the definition of God is reality, or the definition of God is love, I have no quarrel with the existence of reality or the existence of love…However, it does not follow that God defined in that way has anything to do with the creation of the world or of any events in human history…So my proposal is that we call reality ‘reality’ and love ‘love’, and not call either of them God, which has, while a enormous number of meanings, not exactly those meanings.” Miller than says that science can explain the how, but not the why about the world. Science cannot give meaning to the world, and thus because humans have the tendency to give something meaning, then meaning must come from outside the world. “What science cannot do is assign either meaning or purpose to the world it explores. This leads some to conclude that the world as seen by science is devoid of meaning and absent of purpose. It is not. What it does mean, I would suggest, is that our human tendency to assign meaning and value must transcend science and, ultimately, must come from outside it.” Why? Why does the meaning that we give to something have to come from a god, or better phrased, why does God give us a reason to care? What is so special about God and why do we need He/She/It to care about finding “which proteins control the cell cycle”? This makes no sense for the perspective of those who do not have a religious belief. Yes, the world as seen by science can be interpreted as “devoid of meaning and absent of purpose”, BUT firstly, people themselves give meaning to something and that is that. For example, I care about finding a cure for cancer. Why? Because I think it’s a terrible condition and people I loved have died of cancer. No need for a God to be the reason why I (or we) care and secondly, why does everything have to have a meaning? Can’t people just accept that things happen and there is no reason behind it? Oh, the tsunami killed hundreds of thousands of people and there //must// be a reason behind it. Maybe God wanted to punish those people or maybe He/She/It wanted to give us a sign that gay marriage is wrong, abortion is evil etc, etc. Tsunamis happen by natural causes and scientists can tell you how. //But they just happen without any special reason behind them//. (And one would think that if God could create a huge wave under the sea that He/She/It could have easily written in the sky or even made a giant banner saying what He/She/It thought about gay marriage, abortion, etc.) Miller then goes on to say that a world in which a God pulled all the strings would be a world in which there was no meaning because there would be no freewill, and that evolution allows us that freedom. “ In biological terms, evolution is the only way a Creator could have made us the creatures we are - free beings in a world of authentic and meaningful moral and spiritual choices.” In other words, evolution is the Creator’s method for the creation of the world and the reason why we don’t live in the world that would exist in the Old Testament. Evolution is guided by the invisible hand of God…so Miller is sticking God in the gap of “why” (why we exist the way we are) just as much as the people he criticizes for putting God in the gaps that science can’t fill at the moment. Evolution is true and works and is the only explanation, but wait, God is actually the one who is makes evolution work. As a scientist, Miller would have to admit that the evidence for such a claim is shoddy at the very best, and absent completely at worst. Kenneth Miller’s God is present in the beginning to create the world, sets evolution is motion, and then goes away. His God is not a personal God at all, or one that answers prayers or intervenes in daily life. Miller’s God is abstract (let’s call He/She/It “love”), but that does not, as Carl Sagan said, have anything to do with creation. And Miller’s God is the reason there is meaning and purpose in life and in the world, which is outright false. And his God uses evolution to give everyone freewill because He/She/It does not directly intervene, which is not supported by any evidence.