Francis Collins, currently the director of the National Institutes of Health, having been appointed by President Obama: he is a physical chemist, a medical geneticist, and former head of the Genome Project. He is also, by his own account, living proof that there can be no conflict between science and religion.
In 2006, Collins published a bestselling book, The Language of God, in which he claimed to demonstrate a "consistent and profoundly satisfying harmony between twnety-first century science and Evangelical Christianity. The Language of God is a genuinely astonishing book. To read it is to witness nothing less than an intellectual suicide. It is, however, a suicide that has gone almost entirely unacknowledged.
Collins is regularly praised by his fellow scientists for what he is not: he is not a "young earth creationist," nor is he a proponent of "intelligent design." Given the state of the evidence for evolution, these are both very good things for a scientist not to be. But as director of NIH, Collins now has more responsibility for biomedical and health-related research than any person on earth, controlling an annual budget of more than $30 billion. He is also one of the foremost representative of science in the United States.
Here is how Collins, as a scientist and educator, summarizes his understanding of the universe for the general public (what follows are a series of slides, presented during his lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008:
Slide 1: Almighty God who is not limited in space and time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago
with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods
of time.
Slide 2: 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.
Slide 3: After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced "house" (our human brain), God gifted
humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the Moral Law), with free will, and with an
immortal soul.
Slide 4: We humans use our free will to breal the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God.
For Christians, Jesus is the solution to our estrangement.
Slide 5: If the Moral Law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good and
evil. It's all an illusion. We've been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially strong atheists,
really prepared to live our lives within this worldview?
....................................................................
Here is Collins story about his Christian conversion:
"A full year had passed since I decided to believe in some sort of God, and now I was being called to account. On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God's creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ." Here is another statement of Collins:
"As believers, you are right to hold fast to the concept of God as Creator; you are right to hold
fast to the truths of the Bible; you are right to hold fast to the conclusion that science offers no
answers to the most pressing questions of human existence; and you are right to hold fast to the
certainty that the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted.
God, who is not limited to space and time, created a universe and established natural laws that
govern it. Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living creatures, plants, and
animals of all sorts. Most remarkably, God intentionally chose the same mechanism to give rise
to special creatures who would have intelligence, a knowledge of right and wrong, free will, and
a desire to seek fellowship with Him. He also knew these creatures would ultimately choose to
disobey the Moral Law.
Here's what Collins said before he accepted the chairmanship of the Human Genome Project:
"I spent a long afternoon in a little chapel, seeking guidance about this decision. I did not 'hear'
God speak - in fact, I've never had that experience. During those hours, ending in an evening
service that I had not expected, a peace settled over me. A few days later, I accepted the offer."
Collins argues that science makes belief in God "intensely plausible" --the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of nature's constants, the emergence of complex life, the effectiveness of mathematics, all suggest to him that a "loving, logical and consistent" God exists. But when challenged with alternate (and far more plausible) accounts of these phenomena -- or with evidence that suggest that God might be unloving, illogical, inconsistent, or, indeed, absent - Collins declares that God stands outside of Nature, and thus science nannot address the question of His existence at all. Similarly, Collins insists that our moral intuitions attest to God's existence, to His perfectly moral character, and to His desire to have fellowship with every member of our species; but when our moral intuitions recoil at the casual destruction of innocent children by tidal wave or earthquake, Collins assures us that our time-bound notions of good and evil cannot be trusted and that God's will is a perfect mystery. As is often the case with religious apology, it is a case of heads, faith wins; tails, reason loses.
Like most Chrsitians, Collins believes in a suite of canonical miracles, including the virgin birth and literal resurrection(bodily) of Jesus Christ."
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*Excerpts taken from Sam Harris's book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Moral Values, pp.160-66. Sam Harris is a neuroscientist and the author of the New York Times bestsellers The End of Faith (Winner of the PEN Award for nonfiction) and Letters to a Chrstian Nation. His writings has appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Annals of Neurology, Foreign Policy, and many other publications. Dr. Harris holds a degree in philosophy from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He is cofounder and chairman of Project Reason. Please visit his website at www.samharris.org.
Posted April 28, 2013 (for my other readings/reflections,etc., you can type either one of these: YouTube-John Riingen; john riingen/google; juan riingen/facebook)
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