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Kenneth Miller speaks at the New York Encounter

Last weekend Ken Miller and three other panelists at the New York Encounter spoke on theism and evolution.  Miller himself did an exquisite job of showing why it is absurd to reject the evolutionary origins of the human form (not a hard thing to do, in my opinion, but Miller did it with both clarity and panache).  One thing that struck me, however, is that he is reluctant to say that human beings are exceptional.

In a way, that's understandable.  Before discussing claims regarding human exceptionality, one would do better to first note that part of the universe points to God precisely by asking the question (mentioned by the other panelist, Martin Nowak), why all this?  Granted, it seems that only humans go around asking that question, but more important than the impression that only humans ask it is the fact that any being asks it at all.  What would happen to natural theology if we discovered that other terrestrials or even extra-terrestrials asked it as well? Nothing. The same is the case if we discovered that dolphins are existentialists or natural theologians. The fact that many types of creatures ask it would be no less evidence of the divine than the fact that only we do so.

As a biologist, Miller has a special reason for avoiding the question of exceptionality.   The biological evidence points to a continuum between the human and not-quite-human phenotypes, genotypes.  So it would seem that a biologist, inasmuch as he is not at the moment reflecting on what it's like to be a biologist, a scientist, a seeker, a human, he is focused on that continuum.

But inasmuch as a scientist does reflect on his or her scientific inquiry, he or she sees it as part of the much older human enterprise of asking why.  To repeat what Martin Nowak, another panelist at this meeting, said:  we are the part of the universe that asks the question "Why?" That fact is not a properly biological fact, except for the fact that the intention to find an answer to that question motivates one to do biology at all.

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