Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (P.S.) Paperback – April 3, 2007

As a life-long atheist, this book was a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately it took me nine years to come across it.

Miller is a sincere Christian who simply refuses to go down the road of Intelligent Design. And he does not do this naively, since he is an accomplished cellular biologist himself. In its stead, he offers a view of religion that is consistent with the findings of science, and consistent with, as he argues, the future findings of science. After the machinations of Johnson, Behe, and others to predict the inevitable failure of science to explain life, this is indeed a book that breaks the mold and adds something new to the argument (or perhaps not new, but a point of view that has not received much press recently).

In the first half or so of the book, Miller offers vigorous arguments against three creationists/intelligent designists-Morris, Johnson, and Behe. His critique is well-informed and articulate. I am no biologist, so my assessments are far less informed that Miller's, but it seemed rather clear to me that Miller's criticisms of Morris and Johnson were devastating. Having read Behe's "Darwin's Black Box" I did note that Miller didn't take on each of Behe's examples directly, but he does convincingly show that examples of what might seem initially to be "irreducibly complex" systems, to use Behe's term, can be explained by plausible evolutionary mechanisms, and he does note that at least one of Behe's examples was explained in the very year of the publication of Behe's book.

The second half of the book consists of Miller's argument that in fact religion and science are not incompatible. The arguments here are indeed less targeted and somewhat more vague, but they are for the most part reasonable. I think much could be added to his argument, as one would expect from a theist who is in a real sense breaking new ground-accepting science unconditionally and exploring the relation of religion to science.

A couple of his points fall flat in my opinion, but perhaps not a fault of Miller, since I am reviewing him after nine years of active science. He seems to be rather convinced of the anthropic or fine-tuning argument, that the various constants of our universe are fine-tuned to the evolution of life. Recently physicists, from various perspectives, have considered seriously the possibility of a multiverse-that our universe is simply one of many. The fine-tuning argument depends on the premise that our universe is unique. So long as the question is unanswered on the issue the fine-tuning argument needs to wait. His argument from the congruency of the religious story of unique creation and the scientific story of the unique "big bang" also needs to be set aside for the moment, since my understanding (which is again not that of a physicist) is that the story is still out as to whether the big bang was unique, or whether we can see scientifically before this event.

But there are many insights that remain unscathed in Miller's discussion. One is, and I think he's right, that much of the issue of religion vs. science arises out of a nineteenth century conception of science as supporting complete determinism, which since has been negated by quantum physics.

In all, I think Miller's attitude towards the issue of religion and science is the right one, and I'll be looking actively for books that emulate it.

In the past 700 years science has had a way of humbling humans more and more, once we were the center of everything, created on day 6 in the image of God. First we learn that everything doesn't revolve around the Earth, instead we circle the sun. The sun isn't anything more than just one of billions of stars in the Milky Way, which itself is just one of billions of galaxies. The earth wasn't created created in 1 day, its billions of years old and humans aren't the first dominant species but instead just the latest in a large series. We weren't even created in one day but instead we've evolved over billions of years from a multitude of species. In this book Miller sets out to present the evidence for evolution and then later to shows that you can still believe in God and evolution.

The first half of the book presents the evidence for evolution while at the same time taking on the arguments from young earth creationists, intelligent design and theistic evolution. This is the first book on evolution I've read so I don't know how it compares to others, but its pretty convincing (well I think, I already accepted it). I liked how Miller presented the other sides arguments and then showed how they are mistaken, but doing so in a civil manner. The second half of the book deals with naturalism and the view that evolution has removed the need for God. He goes on to argue why God and evolution can coexists. Truthfully, in my opinion it almost seemed at times like the God he presents is one that I picture with open theology much more than the common one presented in Milers Catholic background. In a way I think I can accept this view of God sometimes more than the one presented in Calvinism which is so sovereign that he even controls or predestines our belief in Jesus. With evolution and a less active God, harder things to accept like disease or things like bedbugs become more tolerable, although sometimes it did seem that Miller was taking a deist approach even though several times he spoke against it. Overall I loved this book and it got me interested in reading more on evolution and especially interested in reading about genomes and DNA.

From my perspective having an evangelical background, I think the biggest hurdle to getting evolution or even an old earth model accepted, is getting the evangelical community to start to accept that Genesis isn't a scientific account of the early creation of the earth and man. Miller briefly mentioned this and showed how even early church fathers like Augustine didn't take the literal 6 day approach, but this is still going to be a battle. From my point of view to accept that the earth wasn't created in 6 days is to at least have to partially start to question inerrancy. Sadly there are many people who would rather put their head in the sand than confront these pressing issues.