Finding Darwin's God

"Finding Darwin's God", a thought-provoking article by Dr. Kenneth Miller, which was originally published in the November / December 1999 Brown Alumni Magazine, can be found here. Miller has been a professor of biology at Brown since 1986. The article was adapted from his book Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution.

The tag-line for the article reads:

"To creationists, an acceptance of evolution cannot coexist with belief in a created world. Not only are the creationists wrong, argues a professor of biology who is also a Christian, they deny the possibility of human beings created free to choose right from wrong. Darwin's theories, he says, can actually deepen our belief in a Creator."

An excerpt:

"Evolution is neither more nor less than the result of respecting the reality and consistency of the physical world over time. To fashion material beings with an independent physical existence, any Creator would have had to produce an independent material universe in which our evolution over time was a contingent possibility. A believer in the divine accepts that God's love and gift of freedom are genuine - so genuine that they include the power to choose evil and, if we wish, to freely send ourselves to Hell. Not all believers will accept the stark conditions of that bargain, but our freedom to act has to have a physical and biological basis. Evolution and its sister sciences of genetics and molecular biology provide that basis. 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."

Well worth a read, as is Miller's book, if you're inclined to delve deeper into his views, which are more relevant today than they were when Miller originally wrote it.

Paul Kimball