Leader of the Human Genome Project argues in a new book that science and religion can coexist happily


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2006/08/07/findrelig.DTL

David Ian Miller, Special to SF Gate

Monday, August 7, 2006


Science and religion have long had an uneasy relationship, at best. But Dr. Francis S. Collins believes the two can coexist happily and that a scientist can worship God equally well in a cathedral or a laboratory.
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Dr. Francis S. Collins, who led the Human Genome Project,...Cover of "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evide... View Larger Images


Finding My Religion



Collins, a physician-geneticist, led the Human Genome Project, an international research initiative that mapped all 3.1 billion base pairs in human DNA. The monumental project took a crew of scientists deep inside the uncharted landscape of the human body. At the end, they had what amounts to a blueprint for building a human being and a unique reference to use in developing diagnoses, treatments and, ultimately, ways to prevent genetic diseases. Collins is now the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute.

Once a staunch atheist and now a devout Christian, Collins puts forth in his book "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief" (Free Press, July 2006) the idea that "belief in God can be an entirely rational choice, and the principles of faith are, in fact, complementary with the principles of science." I spoke with him by phone last week from his home in Rockville, Maryland.
You were a staunch atheist for many years. What made you so sure that God didn't exist?

I grew up in a home where faith was not an important part of my experience. And when I got to college and people began discussing late at night in the dorm whether God exists, there were lots of challenges to that idea, and I decided I had no need for that. I was already moving in the direction of becoming a scientist, and it seemed to me that anything that really mattered could be measured by the tools of science.

I went on to become a graduate student in physical chemistry, and as I got more into this reductionist mode of thinking that characterizes a lot of the physical and biological sciences, it was even more attractive to just dismiss the concept of anything outside of the natural world. So I became a committed materialist and an obnoxious atheist, and it sounded very convenient to be so, because that meant I didn't have to be responsible to anybody other than myself.

What changed your mind? Did you have a sudden epiphany, or did religion sort of quietly sneak up on you?

It was a sneaking process. As a medical student I had the responsibility of taking care of patients who had terrible diseases. I watched some of these people really leaning on their faiths as a rock in the storm, and it didn't seem like some kind of psychological crutch. It seemed very real, and I was puzzled by that.

At one point, one of my patients challenged me, asking me what I believed, and I realized, as I stammered out something about "I don't believe any of this," that it all sounded rather thin in the face of this person's clearly very strong, dedicated belief in God. That forced me to recognize that I had done something that a scientist is not supposed to do: I had drawn a conclusion without looking at the data. I had decided to be an atheist without really understanding what the arguments were for and against the existence of God.

So where did you go from there?

With the full intention of shoring up my atheism, I decided I'd better investigate this thing called faith so that I could shoot it down more effectively and not have another one of those awkward moments. I read about the major world religions, and I found it all very confusing. It didn't occur to me to read the original texts -- I was in a hurry. But I did ultimately go and knock on the door of a Methodist minister who lived down the street and asked him if he could make any recommendations for somebody who, like me, was looking for some arguments for or against faith.

He took a book off his shelf -- "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis. Lewis had been an atheist [and] set out as I did to convince himself of the correctness of his position and accidentally converted himself. I took the book home, and in the first few pages realized that all of my arguments in favor of atheism were quickly reduced to rubble by the simple logic of this clear-thinking Oxford scholar. I realized, "I've got to start over again here. Everything that I had based my position upon is really flawed to the core."

I can understand how you might make the change from being an atheist to an agnostic, given your scientific worldview. But moving from an agnostic to a believer, now that seems like a tougher transition.

And I made it in stages, so for a while I abandoned atheism and landed in the agnostic bin, but I found that in a certain way a cop-out. It did not seem that that was necessarily a place where one could comfortably stay unless you could say, "I have now considered all of the evidence, and I've concluded that there is no reason to actually make a real decision." This business of saying "I don't know" can't just be an "I don't want to know." And the more I looked at the evidence, the more I concluded that I wasn't really in a position where that was a viable choice.

Why not? What kind of evidence?

One piece of evidence was the argument, which is right there in Lewis' first chapter on moral law, [about] the knowledge of right and wrong, which I find to this day a puzzling feature of humanity if all we are is products of evolution. Moral law, which seems to be universal to humankind, calls us, on a regular basis, to do things that are not consistent with the idea that our only purpose is to propagate our own DNA.

It calls us sometimes to do things that are truly sacrificial, to help out somebody else at our own expense. And all of the arguments that the social biologists have put forward about how this kind of sacrificial love, this kind of agape, as the Greeks would call it, can be explained on the basis of evolution -- I find rather hollow. It doesn't work in many instances where we are called to do something really quite destructive to the possibility of propagating our own DNA.

I found with Lewis a compelling argument that there is something within us, a signpost, that is pointing us towards the importance of recognizing good and evil, and that is drawing us towards being good and not evil. As Lewis says, if you were looking somewhere around you and within you for some evidence of a God -- not a deist God who wandered off after starting the universe, but a God who really cares about people -- where else would you find more powerful evidence than in this particular thing you find in your own heart? I continue to find that a pretty interesting argument.

You said in your book that your scientific explorations had a lot to do with convincing you that God exists. Can you cite some aspects of your research that particularly confirmed God's existence for you?

Everything I do as a scientist reinforces my sense of God's presence because every new discovery is, if you believe in his role as creator, a glimpse into his mind. And I find that very meaningful and satisfying to be able to have the experience of discovery by both the natural world unveiling itself and also getting a glimpse into what God's plan was.

Can you give me an example?

Well, sequencing the human genome. This was an incredibly breathtaking experience, to unveil over the course of just a few short years the complete instruction book for human biology, the 3 billion letters of the code. That's something which will only be done once in human history, which has incredible power to reveal information about exactly how human biology works and which for me, as a believer, is the culmination of God's creative plan to put creatures on this planet. To have that laid out in front of you for the first time is breathtaking to any scientist, but particularly if you see it as that significant language of God, [which] as the title of the book suggests, carries it to a whole other plane.

Can you tell me about BioLogos, your theory of theistic evolution? How does it differ from intelligent design?

Intelligent design argues that there are certain molecular machines, like the human eye with all its remarkable engineering, that are just too darned complicated for evolution to have been able to develop, and that there had to be supernatural intervention in order to produce those functions. So it makes a very specific claim that there are failures, or gaps, in Darwinian evolution that God had to fix along the way.

In that context, I have trouble with intelligent design, because as science is progressing rapidly, particularly with the study of the DNA sequences of many, many organisms, it becomes pretty clear that some of these gaps are in fact not machines that came suddenly out of nowhere, but were built up bit by bit, component by component, in a way that's entirely compatible with evolution over long periods of time.

I believe in a different model, which I call BioLogos. It's a model that I find entirely consistent with what I know scientifically and what I believe about God, which is the following:

If God decided to create the universe and his purpose was to populate it with creatures in his image, with whom he could have fellowship and to whom he would give the knowledge of right and wrong, an ability to make decisions on their own free will and an immortal soul, and if he chose to use evolution to accomplish that goal, who are we to say that's not how he would have done it? It's an incredibly elegant means of creation. And because God is outside of time and space -- at least, I think that would make sense, given that he's not part of the natural world -- he could, at the very moment of creation, at the instant of the Big Bang, have this entire plan completely designed right down to our having this conversation. And it would seem perhaps a bit random and long and drawn out to us, but not to him.

Why do you think God would do that? What is the purpose of it?

Well, now we are into a really difficult question, which is trying to understand God's motivations, and I don't think I am qualified to have a clue about that. But I think any religion that people believe in has within it the idea that humans are in search of God, and that God is interested in our being in search of him. So if you accept that idea, then the mechanism by which he could carry that out could be almost anything, but I think in this case it was evolution.

So you think evolution pleases God in some way?

Absolutely.

You said that one of the groups that you wanted to address in your book are literal interpreters of the Book of Genesis who reject the last two centuries of scientific discovery. What is it you want to say to them?

I want to say with great love and empathy that I understand their concern about people watering down the truth of the Bible, because if carried very far that could lead to essentially the complete destruction of the faith, but I would just entreat those who hold that position not to carry it to the extreme of insisting that even in places where the Bible appears to be open to interpretation, that only one interpretation is right. I believe Genesis 1 and 2 fall into the category of components of the Bible where very deep thinkers have been unable to determine exactly what the meaning of those verses was, and it seems odd now, faced with some new information about how the world is put together, for believers to insist that there is only one proper interpretation, that happens to conflict with the scientific facts.

These literal interpreters of the Bible might say: "Well, you can't pick and choose which parts of the Bible to believe. It's either all literally true, or it's not." How do you respond to that?

I would say that when it comes to the parts of the Bible that are clearly the record of eyewitnesses, that one had best accept those as historical fact, and that includes most of the New Testament, including the literal resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is the cornerstone of my faith. But when it comes to other parts where reasonable people with much effort have been unable to determine whether this is intended as literal history or in some way as allegory, or as a way of teaching us about God's character, then it is probably not correct to insist that those also have to be taken with the same literal sense as something else that is clearly an eyewitness record. There were no eyewitnesses in the Garden of Eden.

As a scientist you are trained to accept only that which can be proven as a fact. But as a religious person, you are necessarily operating on faith. How do you resolve this dichotomy?

Well, that is very much the argument I had with myself when I was an atheist as a graduate student. And the problem, of course, is that science, with all of its appropriate demands to rigor, really only applies to investigating the natural world. If one decides that the natural world is the only interesting place to study, well, then science will do. But as you get a little bit more thoughtful about it, there are a lot of really important questions that science can't help you with, like, What's the purpose of my life? Is there a God? What happens after I die? Science is powerless to come anywhere near answering those questions. And yet, for most of us, we probably would be well served to think about those things.

If you contemplate that for a bit, you realize the scientific worldview is, by its very definition, narrow. If you want to explore those other questions, they clearly fall, at least to some degree, outside of nature, and the only tools you've got going for you then are in the spiritual realm. I find that enormously exciting because that frees your mind up to go beyond the interpretation of the material aspects of the world around us into a very important and interesting territory, and one which ultimately led me to become a believer.

Some of our most brilliant scientific minds -- Da Vinci, Newton, Galileo, to some extent, Einstein -- have all been people of faith. But organized religion hasn't always been kind to scientists. Why do you think that is?

I think religions have always been uneasy that scientists are going to cut the legs out from under their claims about how things are. And scientists are also sometimes seen as a little too focused on the material world and not paying enough attention to spiritual matters, so there is a natural tension there as well.

I think it's important to point out that we humans tend to take the great eternal truths of faith and interpret them in ways that suit our own selfish purposes. I mean, those great conflicts between the Church and science, at least the ones that we have now gotten through, seem quite puzzling and wholly unnecessary. Why would it be, for instance, that faith in God would be threatened whether the Sun goes around the Earth or the Earth goes around the Sun? Who cares? Why is that relevant? And yet at the time of Galileo, people were pointing to certain Scriptures as if they were scientific proof that the Earth was the center of the universe. Nobody now considers that as an issue in deciding whether or not to believe in God.

I hope that in a few more decades, we will say the same thing about evolution. People will look back and wonder, "Why did they get so worked up about that? Why did anybody think that the demonstration of the correctness of evolution, which is incontrovertible, would be a threat to the Church or to belief in God?" I think they will find that quite surprising. I hope they will find it surprising. The current battles are unnecessary and destructive, and we need to get past them.

Finding My Religion wants to hear from you. Send comments on stories and suggestions for interview subjects to miller@sfgate.com.

Check out books written by Christian aplogists Josh McDowell and Frank Morrison.

Very good read.

One of the more interesting, informed and thought-provoking reads I've had on here for a while! Thanks Mira.

Clark

Yes, quite interesting. I see a gap though (that I suspect is filled in this guy's book) in explaining why he chose Christianity after once deciding there must be a God.

Jim

Great post Mira! I saved that one for a hard headed friend to read.

Thank you for posting this!
I actually have an issue in National Geographic of him talking about his faith

I agree. The arguements for evolution do not hold up well when applied to humans and our unique minds and ability to reason without being constrained by instictive reaction. As a matter of fact, the very existance of the theory of evolution would not have occured without God. If we came from monkeys, we would think like monkeys.

If we are a product of natural selection and evolution, the very idea of evolution in itself would have been impossible! Evolution kills itself when applied to humans.

Good story !

C.S Lewis gets mentioned in the article. I think some folk might not have a real instinct for just how much of an intellectual he was.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis#Biography


The scholar
Magdalen College
Magdalen College

Lewis began his brilliant academic career as an undergraduate student at Oxford, where he won a triple first, the highest honors in three areas of study. [6] Lewis then taught as a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, for nearly thirty years, from 1925 to 1954, and later was the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Using this position, he argued that there was no such thing as an English Renaissance. Much of his scholarly work concentrated on the later Middle Ages, especially its use of allegory. His The Allegory of Love (1936) helped reinvigorate the serious study of late medieval narratives like the Roman de la Rose. Lewis wrote several prefaces to old works of literature and poetry, like Layamon's Brut. His book "A Preface to Paradise Lost" is still one of the most valuable criticisms of that work. His last academic work, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964), is a summary of the medieval world view, the "discarded image" of the cosmos in his title.
The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where the Inklings met on Tuesday nights in 1939
The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where the Inklings met on Tuesday nights in 1939

Lewis was a prolific writer, and his circle of literary friends became an informal discussion society known as the "Inklings", including J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and his brother Warnie Lewis. At Oxford he was the tutor of, among many other undergraduates, poet John Betjeman, critic Kenneth Tynan, mystic Bede Griffiths, and Sufi scholar Martin Lings. Curiously, the religious and conservative Betjeman detested Lewis, whereas the anti-Establishment Tynan retained a life-long admiration for him (Tonkin 2005).

Of Tolkien, Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy:

When I began teaching for the English Faculty, I made two other friends, both Christians (these queer people seemed now to pop up on every side) who were later to give me much help in getting over the last stile. They were H.V.V. Dyson … and J.R.R. Tolkien. Friendship with the latter marked the breakdown of two old prejudices. At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both. (Lewis 1966, p. 173)

[edit] The author

In addition to his scholarly work, Lewis wrote a number of popular novels, including his science fiction Space Trilogy and his fantasy Narnian books, most dealing implicitly with Christian themes such as sin, humanity's fall from grace, and redemption.





http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0507000/bio

Very interesting read. You gotta hand it to those Atheists...They've got a LOT of faith!