Miller’s meanderings: only the same bogus contentions
A review of Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul
by Kenneth Miller
Viking Penguin, New York, 2008
reviewed by John Woodmorappe
On the outer jacket of this book, Miller is praised as a brilliant and original
thinker. To the contrary: Miller is simply dusting off and repackaging the same
old straw-man arguments against creationists of decades ago and reusing them against
ID.1
Even the title is a straw man: creationists have long advised against saying that
evolution is ‘only a theory’, since the evidence is far too weak to
dignify it with the term ‘theory’. Rather, it is just a conjecture or
hypothesis.2
Throughout this book, the reader is constantly treated to the ‘only naturalism
is science’ hubris. There are so many absurdities and non sequiturs
in Miller’s book that it is hard to decide what to write about in this brief
review. The technicalities of Miller’s contentions (e.g. regarding Behe, irreducible
complexity, the immune system, etc.) have already been refuted by ID proponents,
and will not be repeated here.
Disguising the atheism of evolution
In an obvious attempt to mollify the usually-theistic reader, Francis Collins, on
the outer jacket, says that Miller’s book is no atheistic screed, and that
Miller is a devout believer. This is a smokescreen. Miller’s views on the
origins of the universe and of life are, theological rhetoric aside, indistinguishable
from those of the hardcore atheist.3
But Collins has long been shown to be just as confused as Miller is,4 just not as obsessively and viciously anticreationist.
Interestingly, Miller provides a table of nations and their rates of popular acceptance
of evolution
(p. 214). Besides secular Japan, the nations with the highest rates of the acceptance
of evolution are the highly-secularized western European ones. Obviously, the enlightened
secularists, no less than those big, bad, dumb American fundamentalists, reject
the sugar-coated fluff, coming from the clergy of most religious bodies, which insist
that God and evolution are compatible, or even apologize to Darwin.5
Irrelevant evolutionary considerations
Miller’s comments on the horse series, transitional forms, convergence of
living things, human evolution, shared human-simian similarities, etc, even if correct,
are relevant to creation-vs-evolution questions, but are completely irrelevant to
ID. The issue is not why there are different horses at different stratigraphic levels,
but why there were/are horses or any kind at all in existence. Pointedly, ID, unlike
creationism, allows for geologic periods, the possibility of a considerable amount
of common descent, etc. Is Miller so abysmally ignorant of ID that he doesn’t
know this, or is he intentionally misrepresenting the ID movement? Miller also commits
the fallacy of composition by insinuating that, since some ID members are creationists,
therefore all of ID is nothing more than re-labelled creationism.
The example of the Antarctic fish with its antifreeze is misrepresented as some
kind of example of a modern complex feature arising by non-teleological processes.
Yet antifreeze protein is not complex, unlike the machinery of living organisms.
All an antifreeze protein has to do is stick to tiny ice crystals to prevent them
growing. So, if machinery can be compared to the manmade Hoover Dam, the antifreeze
protein can be compared with random pieces of debris that might block a stream or
drain.6
Humans have 46 chromosomes and chimps have 48. Miller cites this as an example of
the elegance of the predictive powers of evolution, which anticipated the (inferred)
fusion of chromosomes in humans. But what if the missing chromosomes had not been
accounted for? Would evolution have been abandoned? I rather doubt it. Some other
explanation would have been concocted.
Besides, the whole issue begs the question whether the fusing of the chromosomes
occurred as a result of an unplanned mutation during the course of the non-teleological
evolutionary process, or if it happened intentionally according to the will of a
Designer. The arrangement is unique to humans, but fusion of pre-existing chromosomes
would have reduced fertility. Some evolutionary researchers pointed out:
‘Because the fused chromosome is unique to humans and is fixed, the fusion
must have occurred after the human–chimpanzee split, but before modern
humans spread around the world, that is, between 6 and 1 million years ago. …
This gross karyotypic change may have helped to reinforce reproductive barriers
between early Homo sapiens and other species, as the F1 offspring would
have had reduced fertility because of the risk of unbalanced segregation of chromosomes
during meiosis [emphasis added].’7
Naturalism applied and misapplied
His reasoning begs the question in that it assumes that processes by which the universe
functions are identical to the processes which brought it into being!
Miller discusses the non-starting of his car, and how he would try to find an explanation
in terms of a frozen gas line, empty gas tank, etc., not a supernatural explanation.
Unbelievable! How can a well-understood process like the function of a car be equated
with the decidedly not-understood mysteries of the origin of living things, and
of the universe? Also, his reasoning begs the question in that it assumes that processes
by which the universe functions are identical to the processes which brought it
into being! He may as well look for naturalistic causes of his car coming into existence
without any intelligent maker.
When it comes to the fine-tuning of the universe, Miller brings up the old saw about
us not being here to discuss it were it not so. But this only repeats the fact;
it doesn’t explain it. It’s like handling a piece of dynamite, not getting
blown up, and noting that one would not be here to realize this fact had it in fact
exploded. This simply restates the fact—it doesn’t explain why it didn’t
explode in the first place! Also, explanations involving infinite universes are
vacuous. They’re like saying that, since there are innumerable numbers of
beaches on innumerable numbers of planets within an innumerable number of universes,
a non-designed watch on one of them is inevitable. And, had we not in fact encountered
it, we wouldn’t be talking about it.
Miller resurrects the tired argument that teleological thinking discourages scientific
curiosity and thereby delays scientific discoveries. Just the opposite: dysteleological
thinking does. How much has our understanding of physiology (not to mention medicine)
been delayed by the evolutionistic belief in vestigial organs, and, in more recent
times, how much has our understanding of the genome been delayed by the evolutionistic
belief in junk DNA? Geneticist John Mattick, although an evolutionist, said:
‘ … the failure to recognise the implications of the non-coding DNA
will go down as the biggest mistake in the history of molecular biology.’8
The familiar argument about no designer being necessary for the origin of the eye,
owing to the fact that the eye occurs at different levels of sophistication in nature,
is repeated. That’s like saying that, since airplanes (from the paper airplane
to the Wright Brothers’ biplane through the Boeing 747) occur at different
levels of sophistication, therefore no intelligent designer is needed to account
for the existence of airplanes.
Not surprisingly, Miller is forced to argue out of both corners of his mouth. In
common with so many other evolutionists, he simultaneously complains that ID contentions
are unscientific because they are not falsifiable, and then turns around and says
that they have been in fact falsified (e.g. allegedly Behe on the immune system).
Miller complains that a design explanation is not a good one, because the design
process is finished and therefore unable to be studied. But this begs the question
about origins, as it tacitly supposes that any valid explanation must involve
an ongoing process—that is, a non-design one.
We also hear the same old ‘design explanations are too sweeping’ argument.
But exactly the same can be said about evolutionary theory. It simultaneously purports
to explain the long neck of the giraffe and the short neck of the rhino; the existence
of selfishness in nature and the existence of altruism in nature. A few relatively
trivial counter-examples (e.g. the immune system) do not change this basic picture.
Most evolutionary explanations are clearly post hoc and ad hoc.
The value of design-based explanations
We hear the old rhetoric that only evolution explains things, makes predictions
and is testable. Oh really? How many times has evolutionary theory been modified
ad hoc in the face of contrary evidence, and then continued on as if nothing
had happened? Anyone with even a cursory familiarity with ID knows that it makes
testable predictions. Let’s make a simple example. A fragment of a spacecraft,
with English-language alphanumeric printing on it, is found by extraterrestrials.
One of them suggests that the markings are the products of intelligent design, and
makes the prediction that they cannot ever be satisfactorily explained by ordinary
cosmic processes. The other one suggests the absence of design, and makes the opposite
prediction.
Science is supposed to be a disinterested search for truth. What kind of science
is this that determines, in advance, which explanations are acceptable and which
are not? If the extraterrestrials, in the example above, decided a priori
that design explanations are off limits, how would they ever discover the fact that
the markings were made by intelligent beings? Ditto for the study of the origins
of life, and of living things, by scientists.
Miller also contends that, since the designer putatively can make anything, ID has
no explanatory power. This is completely bogus. The fact that humans can make so
many different things in no way disqualifies them as originators of the markings.
More fundamentally, Miller’s ‘designer can make anything’ contention,
whether putatively true or false, is totally irrelevant to the question whether
the markings on the spacecraft originated from design or non-design processes.
Then we hear the old ‘design explanations are lazy and ignorant ones, invoked
only because we don’t understand the process that formed something’
argument. This begs the question about origins, as it tacitly assumes that only
non-design explanations are ultimately the correct ones. Were the extraterrestrials
in the example above, after conducting many futile experiments to recreate the markings
by cosmic processes, to give up on non-teleological explanations in favour of a
teleological one, should we conclude that they have grown lazy, and become satisfied
with their ignorance? Only if we already assume that the non-design explanation
is in fact the correct one!
‘Bad design’ vs no design
This non sequitur confuses the issue, which is not whether the design is ‘poor’
or not (according to someone’s opinion) but whether or not it exists at all.
In bringing up pseudogenes, and besides not being up-to-date, Miller drags out the
old chestnut that makes ‘poor design’ synonymous with no design. This
non sequitur confuses the issue, which is not whether the design is ‘poor’
or not (according to someone’s opinion) but whether or not it exists at all.
(Certainly IDer’s must explain the origins of pseudogenes in terms of their
paradigm, but that is a separate issue. Proven functions of many have undermined
the evolutionary case.9)
Consider the extraterrestrial who, in the earlier example, says:
‘The markings, while deployed in interesting patterns in terms of sequence,
grouping, spacing, etc., are also conspicuously full of senseless features. Some
of them, such as (e), appear frequently, while others, such as (q), hardly appear
at all. Some (C, c; X, x; Z, z) come in two sizes, most (A, a, B, b, etc.) are each
one size only. The symmetries are inconsistent: (O) is radial, (X) is four-fold,
(B) is bilateral-horizonal, (M) is bilateral-vertical, and (L) has none at all.
Close examination reveals that the markings lack consistency in terms of the surface
area they cover. They also differ from each other in terms of centre-to-centre distances
in their deployment, even within strings of markings, and are indented to measurably-unequal
depths.’
He continues:
‘The markings themselves bear the hallmarks of some kind of unintelligent,
improvisatory, minimal-solution process, and are frankly a horrible mess. They are
full of errors. (f)s are overdeveloped (t)s. (F)s are (E)s with the bottom missing.
(W)s are shared-mistake co-deployments of (V)s side-by-side, and this shared-mistake
combination often forms upside-down as (M). In like manner, (u)s form as duplicates
next to each other and deploy upside-down as (m). Each (C) is obviously a partly-closed
(O), and sometimes this closing process goes too far, producing a (Q) instead of
(O). (V) is (A) with its middle unformed, and the entire marking deployed upside-down.
(Y) is a malformed (X), while (H) is an (A) that failed to close during deployment.
(0) is a malformed, compressed (o), while (l) is an overdeveloped (i) that ran together
vertically. (L)s are malformed (l)’s that somehow developed in two mutually-perpendicular
directions.’
This extraterrestrial’s dys-teleological pile-on continues:
‘(B)’s are notably prone to produce malformed variants. Whenever the
two bulges run into each other, we see (D) instead of (B). Whenever the bottom bulge
fails to close on itself, (R) forms instead of (B). With the bottom bulge missing
entirely, (P) forms instead of (B). Each (p), in turn, is a malformed, stunted,
slightly-translocated (P), while (b) is a malformed, stunted (B) with its top missing.
When the distortion during formation is even greater, (6) appears instead of (b).
Worse yet, the (6) often deploys erroneously upside-down as (9). The list is almost
endless. Any designer who made these markings would have to be a “bungling
creator” [Miller’s term, p. 86], and it is self-evident that the markings
are not the products of intelligent design.’
What are we to make of this fictional discourse? The extraterrestrial, like Miller,
is allowing his preconceptions, even if hypothetically valid, to confuse the actual
issue: do the markings require a designer for explanation, or not? Also, why is
Miller’s proposed ‘God who used evolution’ any less a ‘bungling
creator’ for using such a wasteful, inefficient and cruel process as evolution?
Is ID discredited?
We hear the old saw that Darwin discredited Paley. He did no such thing. Proposing
non-teleological explanations for complex systems is not the same as explaining
their origin without a designer. Furthermore, Miller commits the fallacy of hasty
generalization, and makes yet another non sequitur, when he contends that,
since some intelligent-design theories (e.g. Behe on the immune system) have (supposedly)
been discredited, therefore all intelligent-design contentions are discredited.
To illustrate: imagine the extraterrestrial, from the previous examples, who conducted
research on the markings engraved by dust-sized meteoroids on solid surfaces. He
finds that these markings often resemble (l) and sometimes (X) and (x). ‘Aha!’,
he triumphantly tells his teleologically-inclined extraterrestrial colleague.
‘You thought that (l), (X), and (x) were the products of intelligent design,
and this has now been decisively proved wrong. Therefore, intelligent design as
an explanation for all the other markings has also been discredited, and meteoroid-induced
scratches can account for all the other markings.’
Rationalist thought police to the rescue!
Decades ago, we were warned that creationism was a grave danger to science and reason.
Modern creationism has now been around for nearly 50 years, yet science and reason
are doing just fine. Now Miller is repeating the same sky-is-falling warning concerning
ID.
Is science really so fragile that it would collapse with the admission of a Designer?
If acceptance of design is so toxic to science, why did modern science originate,
and make so many important discoveries, in the centuries before the Darwinian revolution,
when design and a Designer were not only tolerated but actively welcomed in science,
and were in fact the ruling paradigm/worldview? Nor did pre-Darwinian scientists
merely hold their teleological beliefs at arms length from their scientific activities:
the two were intertwined. For example, Linnaeus built his system of taxonomy, still
used by biologists to this day, explicitly guided by his belief that living things
had been specially created, and that the biological limits of these creations could
be discovered in nature.
Miller engages in silly alarmism as he elaborates on his warning about the dangers
of ID. He alleges that rejection of evolution means that we are likely to ignore
such things as environmental concerns, the emergence of new strains of pathogenic
bacteria, etc. What nonsense! None of these concerns has anything to do with molecules-to-man
evolution, much less whether things originated by design or not.
Biblical literalism, though irrelevant to the fundamental design/non-design issue,
is briefly brought up. Indeed, it is a straw man even with creationists, who accept
the grammatical-historical approach, not a ‘literalistic’ one,
i.e. interpret history as history, poetry as poetry etc.10 We get the same old song-and-dance about Genesis
having been written in a prescientific age, and intended to lead us to God but not
tell us how the universe came to be, etc. Says who?
Miller dwells on how the general American public considers evolution repugnant,
and rejects it for this reason. How about rejecting evolution because it is repugnant
and, especially, because it is also unconvincing? After all, most people
are reasonable, and will accept a repugnant truth if it is truly well-supported
(I would). But, repugnant or not, this issue, once again, is totally irrelevant
to the fundamental question of whether living things originated from design or non-design
processes.
What about randomness? Miller tries to mollify concerns about our ostensible origin
by non-design processes by alleging that our lives are already governed by many
random (actually, unpredictable) events. One obvious example is our parents meeting
each other, and which particular sperm combined with which particular egg to form
us. This is disingenuous. For the Christian theist, at least, nothing is random
or unplanned in God’s eyes—not even the falling of a sparrow to the
ground. Ditto for contingent events.
Miller suggests that, despite the ostensible fact of non-design evolutionary origins,
we can frame our own meaning of life, and enjoy the wonders of nature. So can the
atheist.
Science or politics?
Decades ago, creationists were accused of bypassing the scientific process in favour
of pushing their agenda through legislation and direct appeals to the uninformed
public. Now Miller is dusting off this old chestnut and accusing ID of the same,
focusing on a few local cases like Dover. Indeed, there are glaring double standards
here: quite a number of evolutionists have appealed to the ruling of judges about
whether ID is science, although the judges lack any qualifications in science.
Whatever merit these arguments had long ago, they have been superseded by the considerable
amount of research done by creationists and ID proponents—considering their
limited resources (i.e. they must persuade people to support them, while evolutionists
often make use of money coerced from taxpayers). Miller is also protesting too much,
in view of the ways that evolutionists have gone far beyond the evidence to make
slick presentations to the public—something which has been included under
the rubrics of ‘junk science’ and ‘The Carl Saganization of science.’
In conclusion, Miller’s book is nothing new. It tells us more about his rationalistic
preconceptions than about ID.
Related articles
Further reading
References
- See also the review of Miller’s previous anti-creationist
tirade Finding Darwin’s God (2000):
Mutilating Miller, J. Creation 15(3):29–35,
2001; <creation.com/miller>. Return to text.
- CMI article,
Arguments we think creationists should NOT use, <creation.com/dontuse#just_theory>.
Return to text.
- For an illustration of the vacuity of the ‘God used
evolution’ position, see Woodmorappe, J.,
The horse and the tractor, Creation 22(4):53,
2000; <creation.com/horsetractor>. Return to text.
- See Weinberger, L.,
Harmony and discord: A review of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence
for Belief by Francis S. Collins, J. Creation 21(1):33–37,
2007; <creation.com/collins>. Return to text.
- See Sarfati, J.,
Church of England apologises to Darwin: Anglican Church’s neo-Chamberlainite
appeasement of secularism, 20 September 2008, <creation.com/anglican>.
Return to text.
- Behe, M., The Edge of Evolution: The search for the limits
of Darwinism, Free Press, NY, 2007; see review by Batten, D.,
Clarity and confusion, J. Creation 22(1):28–33,
2008. Return to text.
- Fan,Y., Linardopoulou, E., Friedman, C., Williams, E. and
Trask, B.J., Fusion site in 2q13-2q14.1 and paralogous regions on other human chromosomes,
Genome Research 12:1651–1662, 2002.
Return to text.
- From a transcript of the ABC TV science program Catalyst,
episode titled ‘Genius of Junk (DNA)’, broadcast 10 July 2003, <www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s898887.htm>.
Return to text.
- Doyle, S.,
Large scale function for ‘endogenous retroviruses’, J. Creation
22(3):16, 2008. Return to text.
- See Kulikovsky, A.,
The Bible and hermeneutics, J. Creation 19(3):14–20,
2005. Return to text.
| It has been said that “Information is power”. When it comes to creation information we’d have to agree. Keep the ‘powerful’ evidence for God being Creator coming.  | | |
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