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.