Miller on Stein

Kenneth Miller in the Boston Globe (hat tip: W.C. Lang) on Ben Stein's movie, Expelled. (For my pseudo-review of it, click here. For more, click here and here.)

Miller is a biology prof at Brown who is quite involved in the evolution debate-- from a theistic evolutionist point-of-view. I share at least some of his religious worldview, but don't understand his faith in the "science" of evolution.

American science is in trouble, and if you wonder why, just go to the movies. Popular culture is gradually turning against science, and Ben Stein's new movie, "Expelled," is helping to push it along.

I don't detect a trend against science. (If one could measure such things, it'd be interesting to chart it over the last 170 years or so!) And such as it might be, I'd say it's a result of ID's popularity and especially, the perception of growing weakness of Evolution as a supposedly comprehensive explanation for the development of life.

"Intelligent Design," the relabeled, repackaged form of American creationism, has always had a problem. It just can't seem to produce any evidence. To scientists, the reasons for this are obvious. To conservative Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, Intelligent Design is nothing more than a "phony theory." No data, no science, no experiments, just an attempt to sneak a narrow set of religious views into US classrooms.

First sentence of the second paragraph-- and we're already getting to polemic. ID is not creationism-- young-earth or otherwise. Basic confusion on defining and understanding ID does not give me much optimism about Miller's ability to add anything to the discussion.

...by far the film's most outlandish misrepresentation is its linkage of Darwin with the Holocaust. A concentration camp tour guide tells Stein that the Nazis were practicing "Darwinism," and that's that. Never mind those belt buckles proclaiming Gott mit uns (God is with us), the toxic anti-Semitism of Martin Luther, the ghettoes and murderous pogroms in Christian Europe centuries before Darwin's birth. No matter. It's all the fault of evolution....

All? Thanks for the hyperbolic straw man. None? Is that the implication Miller would have us draw? Or just more than "God"? I don't think so. Here, Miller ignores the vast historical and philosophical connections between those links. Hopefully, Miller is better with science than with history and philosophy.