Darwin's God Discussion 1: Chapters 1-2

Now that we’re done with the first week of June, I figured I’d try to get some discussion started about the first few chapters of the book. Feel free to contribute any thoughts you have about what you’ve read, or ideas outside of the reading if you think they’re relevant to the discussion. While I’ll probably break the discussion up into 2-3 chapter segments, don’t feel limited to commenting based solely on the content of those chapters. The point of this discussion is to examine ideas, and share new ones with each other.

The main point of this book is to examine the question of, “…whether or not God and evolution can coexist?” (pg. 3). While evolution wasn’t a hotly debated issue during my upbringing (either in school or at home), the general understanding (by me, my church, my family) was that evolution had dangerous implications for the person of faith, specifically with regards to the account of creation depicted in Genesis. To accept evolution would mean that humans (and other creatures) weren’t created out of nothing by God, but rather had descended from other earlier organisms through adaptation and natural selection. If evolution occurred and humans resulted from evolution, then is the foundation of my faith (the literal truth of the Bible) suddenly questionable? My assumption is that most of the people that I know are following along with this reading group have either a similar background or currently feel that evolution and faith are incompatible. My discussion thoughts/questions/points will reflect a person with this background and be directed towards others with a similar perspective, however if your perspective or background differs, I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Within the first couple of chapters Miller doesn’t directly answer the question above, but it is obvious that his position is that Evolution and God can and do coexist, but it’s not yet clear how he integrates these two apparently divergent worldviews. I think the first item worth discussing is the issue of whether or not we think up front this can be done. The second question becomes, ‘Does acceptance of Evolution change the way we view the Bible and understand our relationship to God?’

In the second chapter Miller also goes into detail about the methodology used for understanding biological history using the scientific method. Since history (particularly ancient history) doesn’t lend itself to experimentation (by humans anyway), however we are capable of understanding history though the items it left behind, most notably through the fossil record, but also through geologic, chemical, and radioactive evidence. He discusses in some detail what is entailed by Darwin’s theory of evolution, and how it has maintained the status of ‘scientific theory’ through the accumulation of observed facts, and through it’s ability to make new and interesting predictions about the natural world. I think that it’s worth discussing how exactly we ought to define and view science.

My hope is that these items and my personal opinion of some of these (see the comments section) will spark some good discussion, even disagreement among us. Please feel free to join in the discussion through the comments section whether you’ve read much of the book yet or not. You may have additional points/questions that you think are worth discussing, please go ahead and do so in the comments to this post.