Biologist Ken Miller, a devout Roman Catholic and professor at Brown University, fully accepts modern scientific accounts of biological evolution, and has himself contributed to those understandings through his research. In Finding Darwin’s God (most recent printing by Harper Perennial, 2007), Miller writes about evolution, creationism, the Intelligent Design movement, his own Christian faith, and the interplay between these. He comes down decidedly in favor of evolutionary biology and in favor of Christianity. Elsewhere on the Christian map, geneticist Francis Collins, a staunch evangelical and head of the Human Genome Project, also affirms evolutionary biology and a rather conservative Protestant Christianity. His affirmation of evolutionary biology and his critique of the Intelligent Design movement can be found in his book The Language of God (The Free Press, 2006).

Yet Ben Stein’s forthcoming movie Expelled, which purports to show that “Big Science” hushes up any scientist who talks about faith, gives no attention to folk like Miller and Collins, or Francis Ayala, or Howard van Till, or any number of less-well-known scientists who affirm both Christian faith and evolutionary biology.

Wonder why? The short answer is, “Because Miller (et al.) don’t fit into the false dichotomy that Expelled seeks to promote.” The long answer lies just beyond the “continue reading” link below.

Yesterday, I mentioned the reviews of Expelled posted at the Scientific American website. Those reviews followed a screening of Expelled at the Scientific American offices. After the screening, members of the Scientific American staff had a conversation with Mark Mathis, associate producer of Expelled (Mathis is incorrectly identified on the web page and at the beginning of the first audio segment as associate editor of Expelled). Scientific American has made the entire conversation (which runs just under 75 minutes) available on its web site in the form of two separate MP3s files.

The conversation covers much interesting ground, but I found one exchange particularly arresting. What follows here is my own transcript of audio that starts about 17:08 into part 1. Any errors in transcription are, obviously, my fault, as are any errors in attribution. I think that I have correctly identified the three speakers in this part of the recording as John Rennie (editor-in-chief of Scientific American), Steve Mirsky (one of Scientific American’s editors), and Mark Mathis. I do hope that I have correctly identified each speaker’s voice, and I apologize to the discussants for any inaccurate transcriptions or attributions. However, I’m sure that I did not make any transcription errors so egregious as to obscure the main points.

Rennie: I guess, you know, I think this is an interesting question, ’cause a lot of what you’re talking about, the metaphysical underpinnings or the larger philosophical framework for this, um, I mean, that really, I think it’s safe to say that fundamentally that is what the film is really finding fault with in a lot of ways. It’s, it’s very much set up one of having a worldview that allows you to accept God as part of that worldview, or versus one that’s set up as a worldview that doesn’t allow you to have God. I mean, I think, and the argument is that evolution, Darwinian biology, and all the rest that that somehow, that that is very squarely set inside that materialist worldview you mentioned, and one that, that, the implication—it’s not even just an implication, it’s explicitly stated it a number of times— the idea is that if you accept that it eventually, ineluctably it pulls you over to the no-God-allowed side of things. So I guess what I—

Mathis: Yeah, yeah, I think that case is made pretty strongly by P.Z. Myers, Richard Dawkins—

Rennie: Sure. They definitely, they definitely make that argument. That’s, that’s actually not what I was, was—

[Here there is a comment from the background that I could not make out clearly.—RCH]

Rennie: That’s right.

Mirsky: I did have a question about that. Why not also include comments from somebody like Ken Miller—

Mathis: Uh—

Mirsky: who is famously religious—

Mathis: well— [Laughs.]

Mirsky: and an evolutionary biologist.

Mathis: I would tell you this. And this is keeping in mind who you’re talking to is an associate producer. I don’t make decisions about who gets interviewed, and, and I don’t make decisions about if they’re interviewed, what makes it into the film.

Rennie: Mm-hmm, sure.

Mathis: But I would tell you from a, my personal standpoint as somebody who’s worked on this project, that Ken Miller would have confused the film unnecessarily. I don’t agree with Ken Miller. I think that you, I think that when you look at this issue and this debate, that really there’s, there’s one side of the line or the other, and you, it’s, it’s hard to stay, I don’t think you can intellectually, honestly, honestly intellectually stand on a line that I don’t think exists—

Rennie: I mean, I think, listen—

Mathis: so—

Rennie: there are, there are obviously plenty of people, I mean as you mentioned, P.Z. Myers, Dawkins himself, a lot of them would make exactly that same argument—

Mathis: Mm-hmm, yeah.

Rennie: that somebody like Ken Miller is wrong. But I mean, you say he would have, his presence would have “confused the film.” The point is what, it would actually had, I mean, it would have, it would have considerably undercut the major point that is made, that really that belief in, in evolution obliges you not to believe in God, and to—

Pardon me for interrupting, but Rennie hits the bullseye here. By “would have confused the film unnecessarily,” Mathis can only mean, “would have put paid to the film’s dichotomy between religious believers who entertain Intelligent Design on the one hand and atheistic, philosophically materialistic scientists who affirm evolution on the other hand. Mathis as much as says that because he personally cannot reconcile Christian belief with evolutionary biology, prominent Christian scientists (not “Christian Scientists,” mind you—capitalization matters!) who do affirm both at once don’t deserve attention. Remember, please, that this comes from the associate producer of a film whose entire thesis is that well-meaning religious scientists are being persecuted or ostracized—”expelled”—for wanting to talk about God! Yet prominent Christian evolutionary biologists like Ayala, Collins, and Miller (never mind physicists like John Polkinghorne or Howard Van Till) get no attention in the film—because they “would have confused the film unnecessarily.” The only possible confusion I can see, though, is that people might wonder why the film tried so hard to construct a dichotomous conflict between evolutionary biology and Christian faith when some prominent scientists, and many less-well-known scientists see no such dichotomy—never mind theologians and biblical scholars, many of whom would stand with Ayala, Collins, Miller, Polkinghorne, Van Till, and the rest.

But when Rennie correctly states that folk like Miller undermine the whole point of the film, Mathis disagrees. His argument? Miller isn’t Catholic enough (for Mathis).

Mathis: No, I don’t think so, because, uh, the form of Catholicism that Ken Miller accepts and practices is, is nowhere near the form of Catholicism that is followed by Catholics who are members of the Catholic church, who believe in Catholic doctrine. What he believes is certainly out of—

[There are a few seconds here that are garbled as several people speak at once.—RCH]

Rennie: Actually, because, as somebody who was raised as a Catholic myself—

[Here follows a garbled moment where somebody says something that I can't make out in the background. I think somebody, maybe Mathis, says something to the effect, "I'm not Catholic."—RCH]

Rennie: no, but see, the thing is, I, I am. So I’m just curious what the, what are those distinctions between Ken Miller’s Catholicism and regular Catholicism?

Mirsky: Keeping in mind that Stephen Jay Gould was an advisor to Pope John Paul II.

Mathis: [Laughs.] Look, look, there was a lot of people who fall, well, maybe not a lot, there are some people who fall into that camp. And I am not, certainly not a theological expert in this area.

Rennie: Sure, mm-hmm.

Mathis: But I think if you talk to the average Catholic person and, and you start talking about how life came to be, they are going to cite a biblical view. Now there’s going to be some disagreement, and in some cases significant disagreement, about how that happened. Some Catholics are going to say, believe in a, uh, literal version of what is accounted for in the Bible—

Mirsky: Very few.

[Here follows a garbled moment where several people speak at once. I think Mathis is saying "I don't know," and someone else is saying "No, no."—RCH]

Rennie: Catholicism, you, Catholics, Catholics—no. One of the defining attributes of being Catholic is that you are not bound to literally interpret the Bible as such.

Mirsky: A major difference between fundamentalist Protestantism and Catholicism.

Mathis: I, I, understood, understood. But nonetheless, it still exists. I mean, you’re, you’re Catholics, and you know, and I know many Catholics—

Mirsky: But you’re saying the majority of Catholics—

Mathis: No, no, no, no. No, no. I said some. No. Some. Others, others would come from a, a evol—basically what you’re talking about, theistic evolution perspective. So they’re coming at, but they’re, but most people are falling on the side of the line of “I don’t know exactly how God did it, but I know he did it.”

What brazen arrogance of Mathis to declare that Ken Miller is not a “real Catholic”! What about Francis Collins? Is he not a “real evangelical”? What about John Polkinghorne? Is he not a “real Anglican” (ordination’s not good enough)? To shift gears, what about the 11,196 (as of April 9, 2008) signatories to the Clergy Letter Project? Are active clergy not “real Christians”? Or maybe Mathis would say that Lutherans, Nazarenes, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Mennonites, Baptists, Disciples of Christ, Moravians, and the other “flavors” of Christians represented by those 11,196 signatures aren’t “real Christians” either? Getting back to Ken Miller, at least two popes—Pius XII and John Paul II—specifically affirmed the compatibility of evolutionary biology and Catholic Christian faith (as long as special provisions were made for the direct divine production of human souls). Agreeing with two popes is hardly an aberrant in Catholicism.

But to return to the main point: the real reason that folk like Miller and Collins find no place in Expelled is because they do “confuse”—that is, complicate—the simplistic and false dichotomy that the filmmakers wish to construct. When your whole schtick is to pit religious “design proponents” open to the supernatural against atheistic, philosophically materialist “Darwinists,” all those pesky scientists who simultaneously affirm evolutionary biology and a robust Christian faith become very, very inconvenient.