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God's Finger in Evolution; Christian Geologist Says: Creationism, Evolution Are Not Mutually Exclusive

Posted on: Sunday, 26 September 2004, 06:00 CDT

The creation/evolution debate boils down to a misunderstanding of the nature of science, says Keith B. Miller, an assistant professor of geology at Kansas State University.

"Evolution and Christian faith are widely seen as an irreconcilable conflict," Miller, a Franklin & Marshall graduate, said at a lecture Tuesday afternoon at F&M's Stahr Auditorium. "But this (conflict) is not from the scientific community."

From 1999 to 2000, Miller, who has a doctorate in geology, helped moderate a debate --- still raging today --- in the Kansas state department of education about whether to teach creation or evolution.

Miller quoted letters to the editor published in several Kansas newspapers regarding the debate. One person wrote that the views of creationists and evolutionists are "diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive."

Miller's response to this argument is that "science doesn't affirm or deny the existence of a creator. It is simply silent on the existence or action of God. The simple conflict or 'warfare' view of science and faith is historically invalid."

Miller quoted several prominent evangelicals who were contemporaries of Charles Darwin --- James McCosh, James Orr and Benjamin B. Warfield. All three defended or accepted evolution, but noted that God acted through evolution; it didn't just happen.

"In many Christian theologies, God is understood to act through the natural processes," said Miller, who is a Christian. "Divine action doesn't imply any necessary breaks in continuity of cause- and-effect processes."

God is sometimes seen as a "God of the gaps," he said, in which meaningful divine action takes place primarily when there are gaps in what science can describe. Thus, each advance in scientific understanding results in a corresponding reduction in the realm of divine action.

Some, therefore, believe that scientists are trying to eliminate God from our lives, setting supernatural action aside in all aspects of life or "excising" God from our culture, Miller said.

"They have turned this methodological limitation into a broad philosophical statement of ultimate reality," Miller said. "Science, however, is not a statement about the nature of ultimate reality."

The essence of science, he said, is the process of inquiry and theory construction, which is continually being tested by new observations. Miller said there is a perception that science is just about proof and unchanging facts.

"It's not. Science is not like logical or mathematical proof. It's emphatically not a mastery of a body of unchanging scientific facts," he said. "Science is always open-ended. We say this is the best current understanding of how the process works, but we are open for future bservations. To just say God did it is useless for science."

If science meets a cause-and-effect gap that it can't bridge, "we say we don't understand it, but we'll redouble our efforts to fill in the gaps. Later on down the line we may be able to fill them in. We risk the chance to make false conclusions if we don't try to fill in the gaps. How else can you demonstrate there is a gap except by trying to fill it in?"

Good science is not determined by popular vote, but by a consensus of the professional scientific community, which holds a wide range of cultural and religious world views, he said.

The scientific community looks at theories for their explanatory power, predictive power, fruitfulness (ability to generate new research) and aesthetics.

The theory of evolution, therefore, is currently the best understanding scientists have in determining the way life came to be as it is on Earth, he said.

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