Tag Archive for francis_s_collins at Zeal For Truth

Tag Archive for 'francis_s_collins'

Review: The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Part IV

Published by Thainamu June 26, 2008 in Book Reviews. 4 Comments

Part 4 of 4 - Appendix on Bioethics and my reflections

Links to earlier parts of this review: Part I, Part II, Part III

Francis S. Collins ends his book with an Appendix chapter about bioethics, especially bioethics relating specifically to the rapid progress in understanding of the human genome. He talks about his first hand experience in dealing with an extended family who were part of an experiment to isolate the gene for a certain type of breast cancer. We all think that an understanding of genetics could do wonders for treating disease, but the non-medical implications that the families and doctors had to deal with in this case were considerable. For instance, should a woman have a preemptive double mastectomy if she learns she has the bad gene? Should children be tested, and what should their options be? How does one deal with “survivor guilt” when one sister has the bad gene and the other doesn’t?

He goes on to other issues that come up when we can learn about our own genetic predispositions to disease. Some examples: Who gets access to our genetic info, and what will they be allowed to do with it? Would insurance companies discriminate on whom they will cover? Will our life-style change if we learn about our own predispositions?

He covers cloning in detail, and devotes a few pages to the “when does life begin” question. He brings up a case that I personally have seen, where Christians who believe that life begins at conception turn a blind eye to the process of in vitro fertilization which often destroys embryos and most certainly leaves thousands in frozen limbo.

Lastly, he talks about the idea of “my genes made me do it.” He presents evidence that, yes, there are psychological traits that statistically do run in families, but strongly puts forth that these traits are “genetically influenced, but not hardwired.”

My Reflections on the Book
First of all, in regard to this appendix, I’ve often felt like, for several decades, humans have had the scientific and technological expertise to create situations way beyond their ability to deal with the implications of those situations. The burgeoning field of genetic medicine is just one more example of this. At this rate, I wonder what things my grandchildren will have to deal with–probably things I can’t even imagine.

I very much enjoyed reading this book and re-reading it as I wrote this review. I had known of Collins’s work for some years, so it was good to read his autobiographical story. I suppose the big idea that I come away with is that which I wrote about in part 3, my views on the creation of the world. This book has given me cause to think that maybe an interpretation of Genesis 1-2 that is not literal would be possible without doing damage to one’s faith in scripture or the saving work of Christ.

Ironically, my father comes to mind. He was not a believer during my growing up and teen years (though he always attended church as a way to shut my mother up). He was not an educated man, just high school, but he liked to read the newspaper. I remember having some weird conversations with him as he read news items about finding humanoid fossils, etc. He believed the scientists, and that made him more disbelieve what he was hearing at church. He was one of those people for whom a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 was a stumbling block to faith.

A final green-light thought that reading this book brought me to: if evolution is true and continuing, I wonder what would happen if humans manipulate the world such that the unfit will survive as well as (or instead of) the fit?

Review: The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Part III

Published by Thainamu June 16, 2008 in General and Book Reviews. 14 Comments

Part 3 of 4 - Faith in Science, Faith in God

Part 1 of this review may be found here and part 2 here.

The third main section of the book gets to the nitty-gritty of the current controversies that we hear so much about when Christians (or atheists) get together to talk about evolution and faith in a personal God.

Chapter 6 starts as an introduction and retells the story of Galileo who suffered under the church for daring to accept the Copernican idea of a heliocentric solar system. Collins’s point is that even though Ecclesiastes 1:5 actually says “The sun rises and the sun sets, and then hurries back to where it rises” that doesn’t mean we have to throw out either the Bible or science because it was discovered that the earth actually goes around the sun. Of course, his next point is that he thinks many Christians are doing just that when it comes to evolution.

Chapters 7-10 were the most interesting to me. They are a discourse on four different responses to the way people think about the theory of evolution and faith in God, with a chapter dedicated to each:

Chapter 7–Option 1: Atheism and Agnosticism (When Science Trumps Faith) Collins is not all that sympathetic with today’s aggressive atheists. He never speaks unkindly, but he comes down pretty hard on the likes of Richard Dawkins whom he thinks gives evolution a bad name. He points out that one of Dawkins’s favorite ploys when ragging on Christians is to set up a straw man which he then attacks with such relish that one wonders if there isn’t a personal, rather than scientific, agenda hidden in his attacks. After all, pure science would know better than to speak about a topic–the existence of God–that it cannot prove or disprove with its own methods. Collins points out that evolution has become the current touchstone of atheism after its own evolution starting with materialism in the Enlightenment, then rebellion against governmental-religious authority in the 18th century, to Sigmund Freud’s thinking that the idea of God is just wishful thinking. Collins does not put evolution in the same bucket with atheism though many Christians do.

Collins is somewhat more sympathetic to agnostics, granting that at least agnosticism is entirely compatible with evolution as a scientific theory. However, he thinks that many agnostics are that simply because they have been too lazy to make a full consideration of the evidence for and against a belief in God.

Chapter 8–Option 2: Creationism (When Faith Trumps Science) I will have to admit that this chapter may have been the most meaningful to me in some ways because I am one of many evangelical believers who was taught as a young child that if you don’t believe in a literal reading of Genesis 1 and 2, then you’re going to hell. Collins speaks to Creationists–specifically, Young Earth Creationists–with kindness and compassion and yet says their position is entirely untenable from a scientific point of view. He gets right to the crux of the matter when he says that Creationists first and foremost are serious about their faith and about the Bible, and that they are concerned that accepting non-literal interpretations of Bible would be the top of the slippery slope into disbelief. One very interesting point he makes is that the ultra literal interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 has arisen in the last 100 years largely as a reaction to Darwinian evolution.

I consider myself to be a strong evangelical believer, and I have a scientific mind too (though I am not a trained scientists, just an armchair one). Therefore I found this quote rather striking, seeing myself to some degree (from page 177):

Young people brought up in homes and churches that insist on Creationism sooner or later encounter the overwhelming scientific evidence in favor of an ancient universe and the relatedness of all living things through the process of evolution and natural selection. What a terrible and unnecessary choice they then face! To adhere to the faith of their childhood, they are required to reject a broad and rigorous body of scientific data, effectively committing intellectual suicide. Presented with no other alternative than Creationism, is it any wonder many of these young people turn away from faith, concluding that they simply cannot believe in a God who would ask them to reject what science has so compellingly taught us about the natural world?

Chapter 9–Option 3: Intelligent Design (When Science Needs Divine Help) Collins points out that the Intelligent Design movement (ID) is only 15 years old and its emergence coincided with a series of judicial defeats to the teaching of creationism in US schools. Even so, Collins says that from his viewpoint as an evangelical believer and a biologist, the movement deserves a good look. Collins reviews the main ideas of ID, and talks quite a bit about Michael Behe’s work.

He ends up rejecting ID for reasons both scientific and theological. His scientific objects are that without a time machine, the idea that irreducible complexity was brought on by an intelligent creator is unverifiable. He then gives a few technical examples where irreducible complexity has actually later been proven to be reducible. Theologically, he rejects ID because it is a God of the gaps idea, where God is asked to step in in places where science has thus far failed. He also thinks that ID portrays God as a clumsy creator, having to intervene at times to fix up the work he started in the past but didn’t quite get right.

In summary, Collins says that “The warm embrace of ID by believers, particularly by evangelical Christians, is completely understandable, given the way in which Darwin’s theory has been portrayed by some outspoken evolutionists as demanding atheism.” Yet he rejects it.

Chapter 10–BioLogos (Science and Faith in Harmony) It was some years after becoming a believer that Collins came to the point where the shrill voices of the points of view of the previous three chapters persuaded him to grapple with the controversies himself. This time came when he was in the thick of studying genomes and observing how interrelated all living things were at a molecular level:

I found this elegant evidence of the relatedness of all living things an occasion of awe, and came to see this as the master plan of the same Almighty who caused the universe to come into being and its physical parameters just precisely right to allow the creation of stars, planets, heavy elements, and life itself.

His position is called theistic evolution, but he wants to call it BioLogos instead. (There may be problems with the term ‘theistic evolution’ but I doubt his new name will catch on.) He gives a list of six things that generally define a theistic evolutionist starting with an ex-nihilo creation and ending with humans who have a spiritual and moral nature.

He readily agrees that theistic evolution cannot prove that God is real–saying no logical argument can do that–but he finds this position the most satisfying way to be both a scientist and a believer in the Christian God. Again he takes up the matter of reading Genesis 1 and 2 as some kind of figurative language instead of as “an elementary textbook of astronomy, geology, biology and anthropology.” And while he does posit a non-literal reading of certain passages of scripture, he doesn’t go along with “liberal theology that eviscerates the real truths of faith.” He ends the chapter with “The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshiped in the cathedral or in the laboratory.”

Chapter 11 ends this section and is again more autobiographical. Collins relates stories of God’s work in his life and gives a more detailed personal testimony of his journey out of atheism into a personal faith in the Christian God who forgives sins.

Next week, the last part of this review which will cover his appendix on bioethics.

Review: The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Part II

Published by Thainamu June 4, 2008 in General. 1 Comment

Part 2 of 4 - The great questions of human existence

Part 1 of this review may be found here.

Part 2 covers chapters 3-5. Chapter 3 talks about the origins of the universe. Collins covers a number of scientific principles of cosmology, but with language that, for the most part, even an ordinary old lady can understand (that’s me). He states that while at the beginning of the 20th century most scientists assumed a universe with no beginning and no end, now it is assumed that the universe indeed did have a beginning. Of course, the scientists don’t call it ex-nihilo creation, they call it The Big Bang and have calculations to say it happened about 14 billion years ago.* Collins makes the point that the Big Bang Theory cries out for a God explanation, especially when the scientists try to talk about what came before the Big Bang. Collins gives a very interesting quote from agnostic astrophysicist Robert Jastrow:

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Chapter 4 is entitled Life on Earth, and it was, in my opinion, the least satisfying of the chapters. Collins firmly holds to the current scientific thinking that the universe was created (ex-nihilo) about 14 billion years ago and that the age of the earth is about 5 billion years. (These numbers come from dating rocks, moon rocks and meteorites using radioactive chemical dating methods which, of course, I don’t know very much about.) He then says that microbial life started on earth somewhere around 3.8 million years ago–microbes that could store information, self-replicate, and evolve.

Then he asks the obvious question: How did self-replicating organisms arise in the first place? Collins answers the question like this: “We don’t know. But we do know that it seems utterly improbably to have ‘just happened.’”

At this point all of us Christians are saying, “Well, God did it, of course.” This is the point in Collins’s discourse that seems a bit odd to me–he very much believes that God created life, but he is loath to give any hints as to how He did it. Also, at this point he takes a little swipe at the Intelligent Design people because he says their explanations are too much of the “God of the gaps” type–where Christians just say “God did it” in order to fill in any gap of understanding that they might have. (More about his take on ID in Chapter 9.) Chapter 4 also talks about fossils, Darwin, and then waxes eloquent about seeing God’s handiwork in DNA. (The rest of us non-microbiologists have to be satisfied to see it in flowers.)

Chapter 5 starts out autobiographical again as Collins tells about the early days of DNA sequencing and how thrilling it was for him to discover the faulty DNA sequence that causes cystic fibrosis. He then tells about scientists arguing whether trying to map the entire human genome was a good idea or not, and spending an afternoon in prayer asking God’s guidance as to whether he should accept the directorate of the entire Human Genome Project. As a side story he tells about the heated debates about whether the information about the human genome should be kept as open source or whether it should be patentable. The chapter ends with a detailed study about the interrelatedness of all living things, pointing out that the DNA between a human and a chimpanzee is 96% identical.

Next week: Faith in science, faith in God

*The topic of a literal vs. nonliteral reading of Genesis is discussed in a later chapter.

Review: The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Part I

Published by Thainamu May 28, 2008 in Book Reviews. 11 Comments

The Language of God: a scientist presents evidence for belief
by Francis S. Collins
Free Press, Simon and Schuster
2006, 295 pages
Amazon link

Part 1 of 4 - Introduction and the Chasm Between Science and Faith

Most of you have probably heard of Francis Collins. If you haven’t heard of him as a evangelical Christian who believes in evolution, at least you’ve heard of him as the head of the Human Genome Project. His list of degrees, accomplishments and publications is impressive from a purely secular view, but his story of how he came to faith as an adult and how he relates faith to the study of human genetics is impressive too. The title of his book comes from a speech given by then President Bill Clinton on June 26, 2000 when it was announced that the first draft of the human genome had been assembled. Clinton said,

Today we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God’s most divine and sacred gift.

Chapter 1 of this book is Collins’s autobiographic tale of how he came to faith. Collins’s parents were homeschooling free thinkers. Growing up only vaguely aware of the idea of God, he began college as a lazy agnostic (”In fact, my assertion of ‘I don’t know’ was really more along the lines of ‘I don’t want to know.’” p.16) and gradually became a full-fledged atheist while studying physical chemistry at Yale. After taking a course in biochemistry he got excited about studying medicine and found a way to combine his love of mathematics with his new interest in medicine by studying genetics. At the age of 26, a patient asked him about his religious beliefs. This question haunted him until he felt compelled to make a full investigation into religion, fully expecting to find no rational reasons to believe and thus to reaffirm his atheism. He dug into a survey of the world’s religions and eventually made a visit to a local Methodist preacher who gave him a copy of CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity.

Lewis’s point that struck closest home to Collins was the discussion of right and wrong and the moral law. Collins returns to this idea often throughout his book–that man has something inside of him that knows there is a right and a wrong. (One negative reviewer pointed out that Collins should have mentioned that recent ideas in evolutionary biology claim this perhaps universal idea of the existence of right and wrong is just one more thing evolution has brought the human race.) It was the realization that the moral law points to a God and that this God is holy which soon led to his conversion:

I had started this journey of intellectual exploration to confirm my atheism. That now lay in ruins as the argument from the Moral Law (and many other issues) forced me to admit the plausibility of the God hypothesis. Agnosticism, which had seemed like a safe second-place haven, now loomed like the great cop-out it often is. Faith in God now seemed more rational than disbelief. (p.30)

Chapter 2 was written for skeptics. Collins gives a brief and very readable explanation about how he worked through each of these four rather common objections we hear from unbelievers:

Isn’t the idea of God just wishful thinking?
What about the horrible things have been done in the name of God and religion?
How could a loving God allow so much suffering in the world?
How can a rational person believe in miracles?

Next week: Part 2 of 4 - The great questions of human existence

Zeal For Truth