Catholic scientist has faith in both God and evolution

REHOBOTH -- In court, in classrooms, and on late-night cable television, cell biologist and practicing Catholic Kenneth R. Miller defends evolution.

As people across the country continue to spar over how to teach the origins of life, the voluble Brown University professor has risen above the extremists and received a level of celebrity unusual for someone who writes biology textbooks and spends his lab time studying cell membranes.

Last fall Miller starred as the lead witness for the evolution side in a Dover, Penn., court case, helping win a resounding victory against the teaching of intelligent design -- the idea that life is too complex to have evolved by chance -- in public school science classes.

In January the 57-year-old upstaged comedian Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central when he quipped that he thinks God ''is a guy who was so clever that he set in process a motion that gave rise to everything on this planet -- you, and me, and maybe even Bill O'Reilly."

Later he appeared on the children's channel Nickelodeon. This month, the speed-talking scientist is lecturing in Rhode Island, Texas, Alabama, and New York City.

But the most telling sign of Miller's science stardom? Last month a science blogger complained of ''Miller fatigue."

Miller is everywhere because he is one of the few scientists who has come from behind his lab goggles to challenge evolution's opponents. He has the full force of scientific evidence and more than a century of consensus behind him when he takes on Darwin's doubters. But he also speaks eloquently about God.

What's at stake in the debate, says Miller -- a churchgoing Catholic who has thought as deeply about the Bible as he has about chromosomes -- is not just biology's most fundamental idea but the very nature of science itself.

''Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for natural phenomenon," he said. ''They want to open up science to non-natural explanation."

Colin Purrington, an evolutionary biologist at Swarthmore College, where Miller recently gave a talk, said Miller has become science's spokesperson almost by default because so many other scientists want to avoid the topic.

''We all think that someone else is focusing on that problem -- and maybe we can blame Ken for that. Everyone thinks he alone can fix" the rift between science and religion single-handedly, he said.

Extremists on both sides of the debate have made Miller's efforts to reconcile science and religion more difficult: The renowned geneticist Richard Dawkins is working on a book called ''The God Delusion." Intelligent design advocate Phillip E. Johnson has written that natural science is at odds with religion.

Unlike many scientists, Miller has taken the arguments of evolution's attackers seriously enough to study them carefully. He continues to disagree with them, he says, because again and again he has found that the fossil record, now bolstered by genetic information, supports evolution.

And because, as a religious man, he feels that theories like intelligent design and creationism make God look like a ''comic, overworked, and rather slipshod magician." Why, he asks, would God have created the illusion of evolution in the fossil record? Why would he have designed so many imperfect creatures only so that they could go extinct?

''I have a somewhat higher opinion of God than people who are creationists," he said, believing instead in a God who made a ''creative universe."

Miller sees no rift between science and faith. He believes passionately in evolution -- that random mutations and natural selection gave rise to every living thing. And he believes in a God who is always present in life, even if he isn't intervening to design each flagellum, thumb, or flipper that has appeared through natural history. Miller believes that God reigns above nature, providing a moral order to the universe, an ingrained right and wrong that guides people through all the questions science can't answer.

Miller stumbled into his role as public intellectual in 1981, when he debated Henry Morris, the founder of the Institute for Creationism Research. Morris had a reputation for soundly trampling his evolutionist opponents, But Miller prepared extensively, creating 120 slides to refute any point Morris made.

In a review of Miller's book, ''Finding Darwin's God," Morris called his debate partner, ''deviously sophisticated in argumentation. . . . He was clearly the most superficially convincing protagonist against creationism I ever encountered in my more than 30 creation/evolution debates."

Despite his success, Miller didn't think of evolution activism as a scientific career. The 1987 Supreme Court decision Edwards v. Aguillard seemed to settle the issue when it said public schools could not require teaching creationism alongside evolution.

But as the creationist argument found new footing with ''intelligent design," Miller found that he had to defend science. Evolution's attackers were pushing a particular religious agenda. He saw their arguments as so dishonest that fighting them became a personal mission.

In 1995 he debated Michael Behe, the Lehigh University biologist and intelligent design advocate who would later be his opponent on the stand at the Dover trial. In 2002 the Cobb County school district in Georgia began slapping disclaimer stickers on Miller's high school biology textbook warning that evolution was a ''theory, not a fact." Six years ago, he wrote ''Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution."

Now he has time for little else besides arguing on behalf of evolution.

Few other scientists had joined him in the debate, reluctant to give evolution's critics credibility by engaging them directly. But the Dover trial galvanized the rest of the scientific community into action.

Groups ranging from the Soil Science Society of America to the Entomological Society of America have taken the trouble to publicly support evolution over the last year. The largest professional scientific organization in the country, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, for the first time invited several hundred grade school teachers to its annual conference and held evolution rallies, seminars, and workshops last month. Several major scientific symposiums this year will include presentations with names like ''We're Not in Kansas Anymore: Evolution and the Crisis in American Science Education" and ''Teaching the Science of Evolution Under the Threat of Alternative Views."

''It's always been the time" to speak out for evolution, ''because really this stuff never goes away," said Kevin Padian, an integrative biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who testified at the Dover trial with Miller. ''But I think that the situation here is exacerbated by the fact that the atmosphere towards science in this country is so hostile."

Which is one of the reasons that Miller now devotes much of his free time to what he likes to call ''proscience" forces -- without making religion an enemy.

''For me, as a human being, the hypothesis of faith, the idea of belief," is supported because ''I find my life makes more sense" when religion answers questions that science can't address, like when to withdraw life support, he said. Miller said he often gets questions about how he can be a scientist and also believe in God.

His answer is simple: ''Science is about nature. And God, if he exists, transcends nature."

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.

FACT SHEET

Hometown: Rehoboth

Family: Wife, Jody Zanot Miller, a biological illustrator who raises and rides horses; daughters, Lauren, a wildlife biologist, and Tracy, a history teacher.

Education: Brown University, undergraduate; University of Colorado, PhD in biology

Childhood: Miller's father was a Catholic who warned him that Charles Darwin's ''The Origin of Species" was a ''dangerous" book, and told him to be careful when he saw his son reading it one summer.

Horse dad: Miller spent hours driving his daughters to horse shows when they were young, collecting their ribbons and comforting them when things went badly. Now, four horses -- Midnight, Andee, Remy, and Bailar -- live on their family's horse farm. He's also an experienced equine midwife who has delivered four foals.

Religion: Every week, Miller attends Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church in Seekonk.