Francis Collins & Theistic Evolution



Francis Collins was a physician and the project manager for the Human Genome Project, which was a project to map the DNA of humans.  A single strand of DNA consists of 3 billion base pairs.  If you were to read it at an average pace, 7-days per week, 24-hours per day it would take 31 years!  Mapping this is no small task.  He wrote a book called, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.  As always, why read a book if there is a video to watch instead!?!

 

The first half of the video is his testimony on how he came to realize the truth of Christianity and second half is how he reconciles faith and evolution.  Here’s a summary:

 

Francis Collins was not raised in a religious home and was an atheist when he started med-school.  He had a patient who was dying and he wondered how she was so at peace at the end of her life.  She was a Christian and asked him what he believed.  He realized that he didn’t really know and had never investigated any evidence to form an opinion one way or the other.

“Scientists are supposed to make decisions after they look at the data, after they look at the evidence.  I had made a decision that there was no God and I’d never really thought about looking at the evidence.  That didn’t seem like a good thing.  It was a decision that I wanted the answer to be, but I had to admit I didn’t really know whether I had chosen the answer on the basis of reason or whether because it was a convenient form of perhaps willful blindness to the evidence.  I wasn’t sure there was any evidence, but I figured I had better go find out.”

After a two year search, he found that nature provides some interesting pointers to God:

·        There is something instead of nothing

·        The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics

·        The Big Bang

·        The precise tuning of physical constants in the universe

·        The Moral Law

 

He came to believe in a creator, but did not know which god to choose from.  It seemed to him that this type of evidence required monotheism.  He investigated Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.   After reading CS Lewis, he settled on Christianity since it provided the redemption he felt he needed.  He also was relieved that there was good evidence for his faith in Christ and that it did not require him to take a blind leap.

“I discovered this great sense of peace and a joyfulness about having finally crossed that bridge, and also to have done so in a fashion that seemed to live up to my hopes that faith would not be something you had to plunge into blindly, but something were there was in fact reason behind the decision.”

One of the things I found interesting about Collins is that he is what is known as a “theistic evolutionist”; he believes God created through the undirected process of evolution as described by Darwin.  He rejects the Intelligent Design movement, where many claim that evolution needed God’s direction to create the complex changes we see, as using the “God of the gaps” argument. 

“ID turns out to be, and I’m sorry to say this for those who have found this a very appealing perspective, but I think it is the truth that ID turns out to be putting God into a gap in scientific knowledge which is now getting rapidly filled.  And that God of the Gaps approach has not served faith well in the past and I don’t think it serves it well in this instance either.”

“ID is not only turning out to be science that’s hard to defend, it’s also sort of an unusual kind of theology cause it implies that God wasn’t quite getting it right at the beginning and had to keep stepping in and helping the process along because it wasn’t capable of generating the kind of complex structures that were needed for life.  Wouldn’t it actually be a more awesome God who started the process off right at the beginning and didn’t have to step in that way?”

Collins thinks the term theistic evolution is confusing, so he prefers BioLogos which means, Life through The Word.  He founded the BioLogos website to help show that faith and science, specifically evolution, can be reconciled.  He makes the following statement in the video:

 

“Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time created our universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.  God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet.  Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.  After evolution, in the fullness of time, had prepared a sufficiently advanced neurological “house” (the brain), God gifted humanity with free will and with a soul.  Thus humans received a special status, “made in God’s image”.  We humans used our free will to disobey God, leading to our realization of being in violation of the Moral Law.  Thus we were estranged from God.  For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.”

This obviously does not match a literal interpretation of Genesis nor a literal Adam and Eve.  One of the responses Collins gives is to say that Genesis 1 & 2 seem to disagree in the order of creation for humans and plants, so why do we think those chapters were meant to be taken literally or as science?  Collins also says that requiring a literal interpretation of Genes is a recent phenomenon and quotes Augustine from 1600 years ago:

“In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received.  In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.”

~Saint Augustine, 400 AD, The Literal Meaning of Genesis

Evolution is something that I’m starting to look at.  I’ve never investigated the evidence for or against it nor thought through all of the implications.  I hope to write about my findings as I go along.

What Comes from Nothing?

I asked my 7-year-old “What comes from nothing?” and was, well, not surprised by her answer.  “Nothing comes from nothing, Duh!”  Oh the hours of laughter our family has had over the word “Duh”, but that is something and I am writing about nothing….or am I?  Of course, my daughter is very smart, but she is only 7 and has no grounds to argue with a PhD theoretical physicist and cosmologist that says something can come from nothing.

It is a well-established metaphysical truth (and basic intuition that even a child can understand) that out of nothing, nothing comes.  So, I was a little surprised when many atheists online began to tell me that Lawrence Krauss has demonstrated that something can come from nothing and pointed me to the video below called “A Universe From Nothing”.  Krauss has since written a book titled the same.  Here is what Richard Dawkins wrote about the book.

 “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages.  If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology.  The title means exactly what it says.  And what it says is – devastating.”

Those are some strong words!  He must really be on to something if this book/video is really as devastating as the Oxford professor claims it is.  Here's the video for those who want to sit through an hour long science lesson with a lot of theistic derision. 

I was very curious how he got around the 1^st Law of Thermodynamics, which states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but can only change forms.  It was pretty clear how.  Here are some of my favorite quotes from the video: 

“by nothing I don’t mean nothing I mean nothing”

“nothing isn’t nothing”

“nothing weighs something”

“let’s calculate the energy of nothing”

“nothing is really a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that are popping in and out of existence”

Nothing isn’t nothing?  Nothing weighs something???  Krauss says in the video that theists are experts at nothing, so since I am a theist, I can say with the authority of an expert that Krauss knows nothing about nothing! 

So what is this “nothing” Krauss believes produced our universe?  In empty space there is still energy present called the vacuum energy.  It cannot be seen and has not been directly detected, which is why it is also called dark energy.  Its value is known as the Cosmological Constant, which Einstein mistake nly put on the wrong side of the equation can called it his biggest blunder (even Einstein’s mistakes were brilliant).  How do we know dark energy exists if it cannot be directly detected?  Matter is attracted to other matter due to gravity.  If all we had in the universe was the matter we see, the universe would collapse in on itself due to the gravitational attraction.  We know the universe is expanding and energy is required to push matter apart; therefore, there is energy pushing the universe apart.  In 2003, WMAP measured the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation and determined that only 5% of the universe is made up of the matter we see (stars, galaxies, planets, etc), 24% is made up of dark matter, and 71% is made up of dark energy. 

Essentially Krauss is saying that 71% of the universe is nothing….except it weighs something, has energy, is full of virtual particles popping in and out of existence, contains quantum fields, and is pushing the universe apart.  Plus the laws of physics had to exist prior to the universe forming.  I’m curious as to why Krauss feels the need to change the definition of the word "nothing" if physics truly shows that God is unnecessary. 

David Albert, who is a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, wrote a scathing review here.  You know it’s bad when a fellow atheist says this:

“Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right.”

Krauss’s response was to call him a “moronic philosopher”.

This is what happens when smart people are determined to deny that God exists and try to use science to falsify the creator of science.  They profess to be wise and become fools (Romans 1:22).