THE EXTREMISTS ARE, OF COURSE, RIGHT...:

Ken Miller just can’t win: Brown biology professor attacked by Darwin-hating fundies and leftie atheists alike (DAVID SCHARFENBERG, March 3, 2010, Boston Phoenix)

A flush-faced Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, shook his finger at Miller during a tense panel discussion at New York University a few years ago. Christopher Hitchens, who wrote God Is Not Great, accused Miller of doing "damage to the good name of science" — and worse — in a recent on-line debate.

And Jerry Coyne, the University of Chicago biology professor who penned Why Evolution Is True, wrote a lengthy essay in The New Republic last year attempting to dismantle Miller and his intellectual ally Karl W. Giberson.

The source of their concern: Miller, a practicing Catholic, has made a very public bid in the last decade or so to square religion and science; to mix church and state, in their view. "It's an effort to reconcile a legitimate discipline," says biology professor and prominent atheist blogger PZ Myers, "with foolishness."

A true scientist, the New Atheists argue, must renounce God. Must acknowledge the fundamental incompatibility of an empirical science and a revelatory faith. Miller couldn't disagree more. [...]

[T]he biologist has provoked a more public debate with his second major claim: science, viewed by so many churchgoers as a mortal threat to religion, does not exclude a belief in God.

Miller leans, first, on biologist Stephen Jay Gould's florid contention that the two realms are "non-overlapping magisteria." Religion, Miller argues, addresses questions of purpose and meaning that science simply cannot approach.

But the cell biologist also makes explicitly scientific arguments: maintaining, for instance, that quantum indeterminacy — the ultimately unpredictable outcome of physical events — could allow God to intervene in subtle, undetectable ways.

This sort of sly intervention, he argues, is vital to the Creator's project: if God were to re-grow limbs for amputees, for instance — if God were to perform the sort of miracles demanded by atheists as proof of his existence — the consequences would be disastrous.

"Suppose that it was common knowledge that if you were a righteous person and of great faith and prayed deeply, all of a sudden, your limb would grow back," he says. "That would reduce God to a kind of supranatural force . . . and by pushing the button labeled 'prayer,' you could accomplish anything you wanted. What would that do to moral independence?"

But for the New Atheists, Miller's focus on quantum indeterminacy sounds a lot like a classic ID formulation — a "God of the gaps" argument suggesting that anything not explained by science is proof of God's existence; an argument that grows increasingly tenuous as science expands its explanatory power and believers shrink into smaller and ever more ornate gaps.

Miller insists there is a difference: he is not saying that indeterminacy is proof of God's existence, but rather that it allows for God's existence. It is, naturally, a distinction that carries little weight with his opponents. But the New Atheists say there are bigger problems, too, with the arguments put forth by Miller.

"By discussing science and religion together and asserting that science more or less points you to evidence for God, he blurs the boundaries between science and faith," says Coyne, "boundaries which I think have to be absolutely maintained if we're going to have a rational country and we're going to judge things based on evidence rather than superstition."

...just like religion, Darwinism/Materialism/Sciencism/Atheism/whatever must begin with an assertion of pure faith--in the former case that there is a God, in the latter that there isn't. And physics is the enemy of the latter. You can not start from scratch and build a case for Darwinism on pure science. You have to begin by denying God.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 3, 2010 6:08 PM