Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining for Darwin-minded folk
Review: Miller's is an ambitious and enjoyable attempt to reconcile Christian faith with evolutionary fact. Perhaps it is not surprising that Miller is brilliantly convincing on Darwin, and much, much less so on God. His discussion of Darwinism is meticulous and very careful; yet while his writing on God is nice, and provocative, it ultimately feels half-hearted. Still, it was an important book to have tried, even if ultimately only half of it turns out to be of much truth. And even if he isn't convincing on God's existence, he is quite convincing on the possibility that natural selection and God could co-exist, which is significant and deserves attention. I recommend the book enthusiastically, however, for those intrigued by Darwin's sublimely brilliant vision, and for Miller's conciliatory approach between two sectors of the intellectual population that have long been at each other's throats.
Rating: 
Summary: Miller "a devout Christian?"
Review: Kenneth R. Miller, it seems, is among the world's rarest geniuses. Biologist, physicist, astronomer, legal scholar, and theologian, Miller's expertise seems to know no limit.A professor at a university known for eschewing "right-wing" concepts like GRADES and inviting pornographers to teach English literature, and a scientist known primarily for writing mediocore biology textbooks for high school students, Kenneth R. Miller is the latest unexceptional researcher to aim for media fame as a "creationist basher." Unlike his peers, however, Miller sets out to claim an intriguing middle ground: despite the claims of Dawkins, Blackmore, and co. on one side, and Johnson, Behe, and Wells on the other, you CAN be a dogmatic Darwinist who believes that life wasn't created by a higher intelligence and be a believer in God. Miller tries to make a synthesis between theism and evolution by theorizing that God rolled up the Big Bang with the "potential" that intelligent life would evolve somewhere, and then sat back and watched the show. (Basically the same theory that Scott Adams put forth with much less earnestness in "God's Debris." The theory traces itself to a Jesuit theologian named Teilhard de Chardin, if anyone cares.) Evolution is nature's way of creating and correcting itself (when you strip away Miller's academic demeanor, you're left with basically the same New Age goop that fuels books like "Conversations with God" and Deepak Chopra's stuff). I don't think too many practicing Christians - even those on the extreme left end of the Protestant spectrum, like the Episcopalians - can identify with Miller's remote deity. A God who didn't even decide whether his "intelligent" creatures would be insect, mammal, or silicone-based life and never bothers to interact with his Creation isn't the personal God that most Christians (and Jews) encounter in their spiritual lives or in the pages of the Bible. It certainly leaves no room for classic Christian doctrines like the Incarnation and the Resurrection. If Miller's book is an attempt to show that evolution and Christianity are in perfect unison, I have to ask whether Miller understands either topic well, or precisely what he means by "Christianity." On the plus side, I think Miller comes closer to making a real contribution when he talks about history seems to be formed by free human actions, but God is still thought to be active in it. I think that Christians can understand creation as a physical process with physical causes that remain divinely guided. (After all, atheist Richard Dawkins has said that if he saw a statue wave its hand, he'd promptly deny that he'd seen a miracle and instead insist that all the molecules in the statue simply re-arranged themselves spontaneously at once.) The process of "creation" simply has no analogous counterpart in human experience, so to say that we can come up a model to explain how God works seems naive. A "materialistic" view of how crop circles are made would point out, simply, that the wheat bends under pressure. A "theological" view of crop circles would be that people plan to make patterns in the wheat, and go out and bend the wheat. If scientists would simply admit that their discipline says absolutely NOTHING about divine causes instead of letting rogues like Dawkins proclaim that God is dead, I don't think there'd even be a creationist controversy. Curiously, Miller than goes on to attack the Intelligent Design movement, which simply asserts that evolution was divinely guided. (Attacks by Miller and others on ID have convinced me - and a lot of other people - that the Evolution industry isn't really concerned with having real science overturned by Young Earth Literalists, but is unwilling to admit that the field isn't the final word on reality.) All in all, a very muddled and confused book.
Rating: 
Summary: A Very Important Book
Review: For the scientist, the atheist, the agnostic and the fathful alike, this is a challenging book. It takes a measure of courage to read it with an open mind. Yet, it is the only book I have read in the last 25 years that honestly brings into harmony the spiritual with pragmatic science. You may not want to agree with the author, but you will have a hard time faulting his conclusions.
Rating:
Summary: Coming to terms with Christian theology
Review: The main thesis of the book is that evolution does not really bring any new problems to Christian theology. Theological objections that creationists make against evolution could equally be argued against nature or history in general. For example, creationists think that evolution is a "random" process and therefore would not guarantee the eventual arrival of human beings. Miller's response is a little inconsistent at times, but his best answer is that human history could equally be considered a "random" process from our human point of view, and yet Christains still believe in a divine plan. This is a case of having your cake and eating it, too. Christians like to believe that there is a divine plan including their own lives, and yet they also like to believe they have free will and determine the course of their own lives. I think most Christians need to come to terms with their own paradoxical views concerning divine plans and human freedom. Personally, I think that these two concepts are mutually exclusive, so I don't have to pretend that they are somehow consistent with each other... :)
Rating:
Summary: No real direction, Read SB 1 or God by Maddox
Review: This book is a wonderful effort at going no futher than anyone of us has already gone concerning our two lifes options. This author does not confuse, but tries to fuse the two, by information understood by anyone who has studied High School biology or has a religious belief. There are quotes from the book that actually read like the bible, and almost contradictory if a reader were to be in favor of creationism. I have to take the position that this author is strongly in favor of creationism with a religious bias that at the same time accepts a possible but unreal creators evolution. The book is at war with itself in that respect. I strongly recommend reading a truly unprejudiced write, Karl Mark Maddox, SB 1 or God
Rating:
Summary: Science defended, religion redefined.
Review: The author spends five chapters defending science from the challenges of a myriad of creationist groups and four chapters redefining religion to be compatible with that science. He skillfully shows how any assailant of evolutionary theory is forced also to attack most major branches of modern science in order to remain self-consistent. With that approach he demolishes the ideas of the traditional young-earth creationists, old-earth creationists, intelligent designers and a bunch of other anti-evolution groups. He applies Science and Reason without mercy leaving evolution standing tall and strong. For the next four chapters, he performs the most cunning redefinition of religion I have ever read. He attempts to put religion out of the reach of science by suggesting that a Creator works through the subtle application of the mechanisms of Quantum effects. But this only considers one of many challenges to religion. His coverage of attacks on religion is therefore much less comprehensive than his coverage of attacks on evolution. Ultimately we learn more about the author than we do about religion. Clearly an intelligent and honest scientist, he is an openly religious man. Before reaching his theory, I think he struggled deeply to reconcile the science he knows with the religion he loves. His is the most inventive attempt that I've seen and the book does a great service by setting up camp at what may become the last bastion of the educated believer. If I met the author, the first question I would ask is "You spend five chapters defending science and four chapters defining your religion to survive that science yet not a single word to suggest your religion has any truth. Why is that?"
Rating: 
Summary: Misunderstands Darwin, misrepresents fellow scientists
Review: I give Dr. Brown credit for originality - he proposes a theology in which God creates the universe with wriggle-room vis-a-vis quantum physics for life to develop. This life develops, apparently, more or less on its own, because according to Miller, life shows no apparent intelligent design. Miller's God (and this is Darwin's God, it seems) is like a brewer of fermented beverages, who stuffs ingredients into a flask and comes back in several years to see what's brewing. As a Christian, I don't find Miller's God to be remotely like the one presented in the Bible. I don't see why Miller needs to restrict God to some remote "first cause" when Yahweh and Jesus are always messing with the laws of nature in the Bible. Miller is welcome to believe in his Deist god, but he goes too far in trying to brush over the conflict between Darwinism and religion. The conflict is real, and clever rhetoric isn't enough to whitewash it away. Some scientists have proposed an idea called "intelligent design," in which they say that life was designed by an guiding force (not excluding God). This hypothesis has been met by a ferocious response in which scientists have lost their jobs, their teaching tenure, been slandered in the press, and in some cases have even been arrested for not teaching orthodox neo-Darwinian theory. To date, no one has offered a compelling critique of Intelligent Design. Miller's critique of Intelligent Design is widely touted as the definitive rebuttal of the movement, but when you read Miller's arguments against ID, you realize that Miller doesn't understand what the movement is about. ID is not against evolution. Most ID proponents readily admit that common descent is a fact - they simply deny that pure chance processes could have driven evolution. Miller marshals misleading arguments against ID (for example, the long-debunked "argument from imperfection) and implies that ID is "stealth creationism." No one has ever found an "evolutionary link" between creationists like Ken Hamm and ID proponents; they're different movements with different aims. ID isn't even distinctly Christian. ID offers a more compelling vision of nature than Miller's. There is much in ID that needs to be refined, but unless the movement is crushed by political force (which, unfortunately, is likely), I think ID will flower into something much greater than Miller's half-baked theorizing.
Rating:
Summary: Shakey biology, worse theology
Review: Miller searches for common ground between Darwinism and Roman Catholicism - but his search is far less successful than he hopes. For starters, Miller (a Brown University biologist) refuses to accept any criticism of neo-Darwinian models of evolution. Miller probably feels that this theory is too widely accepted to be challenged. But that is simply not the case - the truth is that neo-Darwinism is being kept afloat not by sound science, but by right-wing economic policy groups (which see it as a justification for Capitalism) and left-wing social movements (which see it as a justification for homosexuality, abortion, and other drastic moral revisionisms). Many scientists, including Stephen J. Gould, have flirted with various forms of "complexity theory" to explain the development of life because neo-Darwinism simply falls flat. At best, Darwinism explains the "Survival, not arrival, of the fittest." Miller may try to fit Roman Catholicism in with neo-Darwinism, but what will that accomplish in 15 years, when new theories of evolution finally displace the old paradigm? Miller also fails to make his case that Darwinism fits with Catholicism. In his critiques of the Intelligent Design movement, Miller states that the eye is obviously the product of pure chance, since no intelligent creator would make the human eye the way it is. If biology shows no sign of intelligent creation, then where is God? There are many Christian ideas about evolution, ranging from God setting the conditions of the universe to produce life to God actually creating life by miraculous fiat. But in a Christian world view, life shows design, period. To say that life is produced by chance but that God created us is nothing but a flat contradiction, and Miller fails to reconcile them. Miller's weaknesses are also evident as both a philosopher and a biologist. He depicts the Intelligent Design movement as flawed because, in his mind, it requires perfect design of organisms, something we rarely see. But Miller is wrong. There are many, many designed objects around us that are flawed. Miller is attributing qualities to the Creation that have never been attributed to Creation by classical theology. His argument from imperfection is fatally flawed and collapses before it's even finished. His shortcomings as a biologist are also apparent in his critique of the eye. He states that a perfectly-designed eye would have its optics in the front, not behind the nerves, as they are now. But this is simply wrong. Miller's "perfect eye" is characteristic of invertebrates who can barely see - the vertebrate eye is as good as it is precisely because of its "backward" design. Without this design, the eye would not have the blood or nerves required to function. Could the eye be improved? Probably. But Intelligent Design doesn't require such attributes on the part of the creator. It's Miller, with his misunderstandings of Roman Catholic theology, who is attempting to put such qualities on God. All in all, a weak book. The worst thing is that Miller seems to take Richard Dawkins as a prose role model - sweeping bombastic rhetoric may sway weak minds, but contribute nothing to real debate.
Rating:
Summary: great biology, shaky theology
Review: Very thorough in scientific analysis but falls apart in the second part. I never understood how quantum indeteminacy leads to
free will. Also if science is unable to explain something now (gap), how does that translate to God, especially the God that he believes in. Even if evolution theroy is wrong ( I whole hertedly believe the theory is correct), it does not mean Judeo/Christian/Muslim version of creationism is right. I also do not see how he made the comment that "Hindu philosophers were left to contemplate the ever changing dance of life and time, while western scholar s, inspired by the one true god of Moses and Mohammad, developed algebra ...". The author should also read more about the history of mathematics to find the Hindu's contribution to Algebra, Arabic Numerals (which is actully Hindu numeral), use of zero as a valid number, indeterminate equations, etc. not to mention scores of Chinese contributions.
He failed as a scientist to be objective and explore other religion's view,
Rating:
Summary: great book
Review: this is one of the best books out there for a person who is trying to reconcile faith and religion. Miller does a good job of both proving evolution and showing how it can be paired with religion.
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