Exploring Darwin’s “Tangled Bank” – Evolution, God, and Science in America Today

About the Speaker

Kenneth R. Miller did his undergraduate work at Brown and earned a PhD in 1974 at the University of Colorado. He spent six years as Assistant Professor at Harvard University before returning to Brown University in 1980. His research on cell membrane structure and function has produced more than sixty scientific papers and reviews in leading journals, including CELL, Nature, and Scientific American. Miller is coauthor, with Joseph S. Levine, of four different high school and college biology textbooks used by millions of students nationwide. He has received six major teaching awards at Brown, the Presidential Citation of the American Institute for Biological Science (2005), and the Public Service Award of the American Society for Cell Biology (2006). He was honored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and received the Gregor Mendel Medal from Villanova University in 2009. The Society for the Study of Evolution presented Dr. Miller with the Stephen Jay Gould Prize in 2011, and in 2014 he received the Laetare Medal from Notre Dame University. He is the author of Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution, and Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul.

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Start Date

11-12-2014 7:00 PM

Description

In his lecture, Dr. Miller argues that biological evolution is the key to understanding the extraordinary diversity, beauty, and unity of life. Unfortunately, to many Americans, evolution is a doctrine thought to be at odds with faith and to be resisted at all costs as the price of retaining a Christian worldview. But this opposition is misguided and even antithetical to the Christian tradition of seeing faith and reason as complementary ways of knowing. Ultimately, our religion and science debate is driven by a deep antagonism between extremists on both sides of the issue. The solution is not to split the difference, but to come to a genuine understanding and appreciation of the true depth of scientific and religious thought on the issues at hand. When this is done, both sides may come to realize, as Charles Darwin did, that there is indeed beauty, wonder, and even grandeur in the evolutionary view of life.

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Nov 12th, 7:00 PM

Exploring Darwin’s “Tangled Bank” – Evolution, God, and Science in America Today

In his lecture, Dr. Miller argues that biological evolution is the key to understanding the extraordinary diversity, beauty, and unity of life. Unfortunately, to many Americans, evolution is a doctrine thought to be at odds with faith and to be resisted at all costs as the price of retaining a Christian worldview. But this opposition is misguided and even antithetical to the Christian tradition of seeing faith and reason as complementary ways of knowing. Ultimately, our religion and science debate is driven by a deep antagonism between extremists on both sides of the issue. The solution is not to split the difference, but to come to a genuine understanding and appreciation of the true depth of scientific and religious thought on the issues at hand. When this is done, both sides may come to realize, as Charles Darwin did, that there is indeed beauty, wonder, and even grandeur in the evolutionary view of life.