In a recent article, I firmly stated that policy makers should not be applying religious beliefs to science policy. I remain steadfast in my position because whereas science is a rigorous process of observation, experimentation, and an analysis of acquired data from experimentation, religious belief is dependent on one’s own personal faith. Hence, faith does not depend on the five senses smell, touch, taste, hear, or sight. Faith does not require any substantive evidence by way of a verifiable process for it to be legitimized by the person who believes it. But this does not mean a person of faith cannot be a practitioner of policy or a practicing scientist. In fact, there are people of deep faith that implement important policy and perpetuate the scientific endeavor every day.

           One such person is Ken Miller who is a cell biologist and molecular biologist, and a professor of Biology and Royce Family professor for teaching excellence at Brown University. Along with being a staunch advocate for science, Miller is Notre Dame’s 2014 Laetare Medal award recipient. As the university president, Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C, expresses, “’Kenneth Miller has given eloquent and incisive witness both to scientific acumen and religious belief…As an accomplished biologist and an articulate believer, he pursues two distinct but harmonious vocations and illustrates how science and faith can mutually flourish.’”

           Ken Miller is a charismatic, witty, and engaging speaker. He is also easy to understand and has the ability to take complex, scientific ideas and make them accessible and comprehensible to the everyday person that does not have a degree in evolutionary biology or biological anthropology. In a 1997 PBS intelligent design versus biological evolution debate between intelligent design proponents William F. Buckley Jr., Phillip E. Johnson, Michael Behe, and David Berlinski, and evolutionary biology proponents Ken Miller, Eugenie C. Scott, Michael Ruse, and Barry Lynn, Professor Miller made the point clear, and that point is that intelligent design and its predecessor creationism has “no explanation for natural history.”

           He further contrasted intelligent design’s lack of basic scientific rigor with the fossil record. “Fossils show a succession of types over time” Professor Miller stated. “Intelligent design has no explanation for the succession of the fossil record…Evolution has a perfect explanation and that is the appearance of new forms and the extinction of others.” This means that evolution has an explanation for the processes and mechanisms of natural, biological history of all species that ever existed on this planet; whereas, intelligent design does not even deserve the title of pseudoscience.

For instance, if one were to accept and analyze intelligent design as a scientific theory, then one would see a designer who seems to have no explanation for why species appear or disappear. Matter of fact, if one were to view natural, biological history through the eyes of an intelligent designer, one would see a confused entity that could not ever seem to make up one’s mind. One example of this would be the fact that 99 percent of all species have gone extinct throughout the history of the earth. Is this because the designer was negligent in his engineering ability?

In addition, intelligent design does not seem to have an explanation for speciation, which is the transition of one species to another, although it should be noted that species are in constant transition. Thus, contrary to some intellectually challenged thought, species do not just occur. They are formed by environmental pressures over the succession of hundreds to thousands of generations depending on the rate of transition. Hence, this oversimplification does not do the evolutionary process any justice.

Make no mistake, Ken Miller is a man of faith and he often espouses is Catholicism as an appreciation of the divine being for which he believes and as a nod to evolutionary biology as a understanding of God’s finest work, thus there is no contradiction between science and faith for professor Miller. But for this, he is very much hated by creationists as Karl W. Giberson argues in his piece in the Daily Beast, “When creationists try to remove evolution from public schools, Miller’s text is often the target.”

Ken Miller illustrates a very interesting point that is often lost in the faith vs. science debates and that is faith and science are not incompatible. One explores and attempts to explain the processes of the natural world while the other attempts to explain the processes of the spiritual being no matter if it is Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Jainism, Wicca, or any of the other approximately 10,000 religions and spiritualities that have existed in human history. Each belief system is valuable to one’s self for the sake of exploration of the spiritual being; whereas, the scientific endeavor is important to the understanding of nature and to the benefit of humanity.