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The Sunday Forum, October 21, 2007 Can Faith and Science be Reconciled? |
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Sunday Forums
Sunday Forum On-Demand:
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Sunday, October 21, 2007, 10–10:50 am Can Faith and Science be Reconciled? with human genome scientist Francis Collins
Her question disturbed Collins. Suddenly he realized that he, as a scientist, had failed to examine the evidence for God’s existence. Although he assumed there would be no such evidence, Collins began to study the works of C. S. Lewis and observe nature more closely. This effort brought him close to the edge of what he considers proof of God’s existence. He made a leap of faith 27 years ago, becoming a follower of Jesus. Collins, who led the Human Genome Project, does not see conflict between his religious faith and his practice of science. He sees evidence of God in the order of nature and in seeming disorder, such as DNA “mistakes” necessary to evolutionary development. The evolutionary process shows “God’s plan for creating human beings over a long period of time.”
About the GuestDr. Francis Collins is director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. He led the Human Genome Project, a landmark scientific effort to map and sequence the human DNA, completed in 2003, and considered one of the most important scientific discoveries of our time. A former atheist, Dr. Collins argues in his bestselling 2006 book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief that faith and reason can support each other, and that science affirms belief in a personal God who created the world through evolutionary processes.
(also listed in Cathedral worship service leaflets) For more information, please contact Deryl Davis at (202) 537-6382 or e-mail ddavis@cathedral.org. |
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Dr. Francis Collins grew up in a family that did not
practice
religion. He was an atheist until he attended medical school
and began
to hear gravely ill patients describe their faith in God. One
day a
patient asked, “Doctor, what do you
believe?”
Cathedral Dean Samuel T. Lloyd III turns to the
topic of prayer,
asking Collins, “What difference can prayer
make?” Through
prayer, Collins tries to understand God’s
plan for him, but he
does not believe that his prayers manipulate God
into doing something
that he wants. “I have experienced through
prayer opportunities to
come to peace about issues where I was feeling
very stirred up,”
Collins says. “That is not because God has
changed the situation,
but because he has changed me.” This
scientist expresses the view
that Christ’s resurrection
demonstrates God’s intervention
in the natural
world.
Collins believes the Big Bang theory that the universe
came into
being out of nothing—ex nihilo—4.55 billion years
ago. The
Big Bang points to God’s existence, he asserts.
“Why does
that cry out for God?” Collins asks rhetorically.
“Well, we
have not observed nature to create itself... The
explanation cannot
be a natural one, or you haven’t solved the
problem. So the only
answer I can see is that there has to be a creator
who is outside of
nature, and that sounds like God.”