[asa] Ken Miller: Evolangelist

Ken Miller is currently on an NCSE sponsored speaking tour, and last
night he spoke here at Kennesaw State University, which is in Cobb
County GA, in the northwestern suburbs of Atlanta. I attended his talk
and wanted to pass on my observations.

It ended up being packed out and standing room only with probably
about 200 people there and was the typical college student crowd and a
few profs. It has been a while since I have been on a college campus
but suffice it to say that most of the crowd did not seem to be too
pious, and in fact looked like future E.O. Wilson’s that had already
crossed their “Baptist no more” line. It appeared as if they came
readily expecting to be fed plenty of raw meat of reasons to bash the
moral judgments of the Christian religious right, and they were not to
be disappointed.

Ken Miller is obviously a very intelligent and accomplished scientist,
and also very personable and very engaging and an excellent speaker.
He had the audience hanging on his every word. His talk was punctuated
with a lot of gratuitous political references that were wildly popular
with the audience like a picture from a magazine that had a picture of
Bush imposed over the cover of his textbook in the background that he
used to say he was thinking about upgrading his cover artwork and that
it might sell well in Texas. He also showed a clip of him appearing on
Stephen Colbert’s show which he said his students thought eclipsed all
his other lifetime accomplishments.

After a brief introduction of himself, he moved into the recent ID
movement and went to the trouble to define ID and pointed out that
they define it to be “special creation”. He covered a lot of the
background of ID including the DI and Philip Johnson and his Wedge of
Truth book with a quote where I seem to recall Johnson saying his
intention was to pit science against religion, but I have searched and
can’t verify that I heard that right. Regardless Miller makes it clear
that he takes a very different view of science and faith than Johnson
and he thinks the wedge approach is harmful. He covered a bit of the
meat of the ID argument and mentioned Behe and included his debunking
of IR and showed how many of the constituent proteins of the bacterial
flagellum have homologs in other systems and he made quite a bit our
of the mousetrap analogy and of course wore one as his tie clip.

He went on to discus the history of ID and the challenges in the
courts including the recent case there in Cobb Countywhere labels were
applied to his own high school textbooks. Jeffrey Selman, the person
who brought the case againstCobb County was in the audience, whom
Miller introduced to wild applause, and later Miller said he was going
to add a fish clade to his “fish wars” cladogram in his honor. He
moved onto the Dover trial and set it up by going over the history and
the people involved and the political climate there. He had a
newspaper clipping from the elections after the trial that showed the
candidates using the ID issue to pit themselves against the other and
one equated themselves with truth and morality and their opponent with
evolution & abortion to which the audience howled with laughter.

He pointed out that Judge Jones was a conservative Republican
appointed by Bush and sponsored by Santorum. One interesting fact that
mentioned that I wasn’t aware of was that several of the plaintiffs in
Dover and several some of the experts besides himself were in fact
professing Christians. He also referred to Barbara Forrest as the
“star” of that trial. He had a slide that she had put together showing
how they had resurrected a previous creationist textbook and done the
search and replace on Creationism to ID etc and he and he said that he
thought Pandas and People was really what sunk them in the trial.

One thing that came out clearly about Miller is that he is passionate
about defending evolution against all enemies, foreign and domestic,
and he sees that as even his calling to do so, even if it makes for
strange bedfellows like Selman and Forrest, who are not typically
thought of as friends of the faith. And having personally known some
of those that testified on the other side on Kansas and Dover like
Charles Thaxton, it was hard for me to endure the derision from the
audience toward these people that was engendered form Miller’s
presentation. I don’t know how wise it is for him to be sewing this
rift and division in the church among those who are looking for
justification to discredit and marginalize the Christian faith.

I will say that to Miller’s credit, that he was unabashed about his
own Roman Catholic faith, although he takes offense at being label a
TE because he says chemists and physicists don’t get labeled as
theists so he doesn’t think biologists should get singled out. He did
repeatedly affirm the harmony he felt that existed between evolution
and his faith and that was warmly received by the audience. As a
result I have mixed emotions about the overall event, My CSI Forensic
Toxicologist friend attended as well and we discussed it afterwards
and he felt the same way. I think a lot of good pro-faith seeds were
sewn and we can only hope that they are followed up on and they take
root. I guess we have to leave that to the ministry of the Holy Spirit.

I think the key takeaways from last night and ID in general is that
they overplayed their hand scientifically and they used it as an
offensive weapon instead of defensive and because of guys like Ken
Miller, that has backfired on them. Ironically, excepting the special
creation distinction that Miller drew about ID and IR, all the rest
of his presentation and his personal testimony strongly affirmed the
general principle of a Designer, so just like on this list, I regret
seeing the concept of Design being disparaged in total. Because these
terms and concepts are used carelessly and interchangeably even by
Miller, I hope and pray that all the young students left there last
night having had a good time and having a good laugh at the expense of
some they perceive as small minded and anti-science theocrats and
rejoicing in their downfall, but hopefully not rejecting the
underlying Truth as a result. And I pray that Miller is aware of this
risk as well and is being wise enough to avoid abetting this cause.

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Received on Fri Nov 30 01:10:25 2007