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Ken Miller is professor of biology at Brown University. In addition to his specialized research, Miller—a practicing Roman Catholic—is the author of Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (HarperCollins, 1999). He is also the coauthor of a series of high school and college texts and has frequently debated opponents of evolution (see www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/). Karl Giberson spoke with Miller about his faith, his public role as a defender of evolution, and the integrity of science.
Did you ever have any misgivings about the prospects of integrating evolution with your Catholic faith?
It's an interesting question to ask, and the simple answer to it is no. I benefited from the way that Catholics are generally brought up, which is to believe, almost from the get-go, that there is no inherent conflict between faith and reason, between religious doctrine and science. If science seeks truth and religion reveals truth, then how can there be a conflict between these two aspects of the truth?
Even though I saw no particular conflict between science and religion, there were many times when I was disillusioned with religion and frankly left the faith, stopped attending mass, stopped receiving sacraments. And this happened for a couple years at a time, first when I was an undergraduate and second when I was in graduate school. In both cases I had to find my way back to the church after leaving it in the sense of becoming disillusioned with what it had to offer. I simply turned my back on it for a long period of time.
When you came out of that and rejoined the church of your childhood, what was it that brought you back into the sustaining relationship that you have now?
When I was an undergraduate, in addition to being interested in science, I had very serious literary ambitions. I wanted to be a poet, and I wrote quite a lot of poetry. I published a few poems in college literary magazines. Like many people who tried that, the best I can say is that my poetry occasionally rose to the heights of mediocrity!
I'd just as soon forget most of the stuff that I wrote, but in the process of doing this I read a lot of other poets, especially contemporary American and British poets, and one I found particularly attractive was Thomas Merton. I brought several of his poems into a writing workshop, an English course in college, and I showed them to the instructor, who mentioned, almost in an offhand way, "You do know, don't you, that Thomas Merton is a monk, a Catholic priest?"
I was absolutely floored. The poetry was wonderful; it was exciting; it was sensual; it was vibrant and attractive; and I thought I had to learn more about this person. I began by reading a couple books of Merton's poetry. Then I discovered he'd written prose as well, and I picked up a book called The Seven Storey Mountain, which described Merton's epiphany as a student at a very secular university—Columbia University—in New York.
Merton's account of how he found his way back to God, and back to the church, struck a very resonant chord within me. In particular—and this sounds strange to say—Merton convinced me that a thoughtful and intelligent person could be a sincere and committed Christian, that becoming a Christian didn't require one to check one's brains at the entrance to the church door, as people occasionally have said. Merton's writings—his poetry, his meditations, and especially The Seven Storey Mountain—were enormously influential in bringing me back to religion.
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