This may not be of much interest to those who don't follow the debate between evolution and intelligent design, but theistic evolutionist Ken Miller of Brown U. has written a couple of reviews of IDer Michael Behe's Edge of Evolution which, Behe thinks, indicate a very slim difference between them. This is interesting because Miller has been a very outspoken critic of intelligent design, and testified against it at the Dover trial a couple of years back.
In fact the difference between Miller and Behe seems to be more theological and methodological than scientific. Miller thinks that if God is an active designer of the world then He would be responsible for the world's suffering and pain. Behe thinks that as scientists they should stick to the empirical facts and leave the theological interpretations of those facts to the theologians and philosophers.
Theistic evolutionists like Miller generally hold that God uses the evolutionary process to bring about the living things He wants to exist, but they don't believe that God's hand is empirically detectable in the process. In other words, they believe by faith that God is hidden behind the evolution of life. Intelligent design advocates, on the other hand, believe that there are some things in the living world which are best explained in terms of intelligent, purposeful engineering and that these constitute empirical evidence of the existence of a Designer. I.e. they believe that God's hand is visible in what has been made.
The difference probably seems very thin to many people, and this is Behe's point. Why, he and others wonder, do people like Miller get so out of sorts over a difference that seems so slight?
For those who follow this fascinating debate Behe's comments (there are three posts) on Miller's second review of his book can be read at the link.
RLC
