Collins, Francis

Francis is the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH. He is a physician-geneticist noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes (the genetic basis of Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a rare disorder that causes a dramatic form of premature aging, and genetic variants associated with type 2 diabetes), and famously for his visionary leadership of the Human Genome Project, the multidisciplinary, multi-institutional, international effort to map and sequence the entire sequence of three billion letters in the human DNA instruction book. Francis’ book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief supports theistic evolution (not Intelligent Design), and he considers scientific discoveries “an opportunity to worship,” a position that is opposed by most of his top-tier scientific peers. Here’s how Francis addresses the relationship between evolution and God: “Evolution as a way of explaining the relatedness of living things is no longer in question. The data, somewhat from the fossil record but more recently and powerfully from the study of DNA, is incontrovertible. You can't look at that evidence and not conclude that living things, including ourselves, are all related by descent from a common ancestor. Those are the facts. As to what that says about whether or not God was involved in the process, it says nothing at all. All it says is that this is what happened, the means by which what we have today came to be. But did God have a hand in that process? I believe He did. Science is about the natural world. If God has any meaning, God is outside the natural world, at least in part. This means that science really can't comment upon whether or not God exists -- for which reason I think atheism to be the less logical than agnosticism. Left then between agnosticism and belief, one's decision ultimately should be determined not from the study of evolution, or of any other branch of science, but from other aspects of experience. Each person needs to decide whether it is reasonable that there is a God, and, if so, whether that God is a personal God who care about all of us. I've come to the conclusion that it's more reasonable to say that ‘I believe in God’ than to say ‘I don't know’ or certainly ‘I know He's not there’. Science has taught us that the kind of god we should not embrace is the god of the gaps. We ought not to identify things that we can't yet understand in the natural world and therein plug God. Oh, that must be where God is! We've made that mistake down through time. Some are still making it today. Science is not the box into which we can put God. But having said that, there are fundamental questions remaining, the ‘Why’ questions, not the ‘How,’ which science is powerless to answer. We are still left with ‘Why is there something instead of nothing?’ ‘Where did the laws underlying the Big Bang come from?’ ‘How can we explain the fine tuning of the universe; how can it be that all of these constants of physics have exactly the value required to make it possible for the coalescence of matter and the emergence of life?’ So there is plenty of room to postulate a need for God, if one is open to that idea, without boxing Him into some small aspect of biology, chemistry, physics or cosmology which is an unproductive way to explore belief or unbelief.