The Sunday Forum at Washington National Cathedral:
“Can Faith and Science be Reconciled?”
with Francis Collins

October 21, 2007
The Sunday Forum: Critical Issues in the Light of Faith
Washington National Cathedral
Host: Cathedral Dean Samuel T. Lloyd III
Guest: Human Genome Scientist Francis Collins

Lloyd: Welcome to our Sunday Forum. This is our opportunity, week by week now, to explore the critical juncture between faith and public life and public issues in as many ways as possible with the liveliest minds we can find in Washington and beyond.

Today we have one of those liveliest minds around with us, with Dr. Francis Collins. He is the internationally known and respected scientist and Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. Between 1992 and 2003, Dr. Collins led the enormously important landmark Human Genome Project which maps in sequence the three-billion-letter human DNA, one of the greatest scientific achievements of our time. Dr. Collins also happens to be a Christian and a former atheist who thought long and hard about the arguments for belief and especially for the arguments for belief in the context of all the challenges that science brings. His best selling book, The Language of God, is marvelous testimony of his reflections.

Also on this Virginia State Day, it’s nice to say that we have a native Virginian with us. We planned this just for you! So our timing is perfect.

Dr. Collins, it’s great to have you with us today.

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Collins: It’s wonderful to be here and an honor to be part of this Forum program.


Lloyd: So let’s begin. You are someone who has been working for quite some time looking closely at the relationship between science and faith. You didn’t start off, at least in the science part of your life, as a believer. You were an Atheist, but you made the shift. Can you tell us something about how and why that shift happened?


Collins: So I was not raised in a home where faith was considered a central part of daily life. Faith was not denigrated. My parents had respect for it, but it was not something that I internalized as I was growing up. And as I began to become interested in science, initially chemistry and physics, I found that I could understand the universe quite nicely in a reductionist sort of way, and I became more convinced that faith was simply a matter of age-old superstitions and that I was ready to move on from that. And as I became more interested in graduate school in physics and chemistry, I basically decided there was no more need for God in my life. And I was an atheist that was not shy about saying so if someone explained their beliefs to me.

But then I had a change in my own professional plan. I got more interested in the life sciences and decided to take a rather drastic turn and went to medical school. And there these hypothetical concerns about life and death and ‘is there a God?’ became much more real as I sat at the bedside of people who had advanced illnesses from which there was going to be no rescue. And I heard them talk about how their faith was the rock that supported them and gave them confidence in the afterlife, and gave them a sense of peace about their circumstance. I could quite clearly see for myself that I would not be peaceful in the position they were in. And I wondered about this, though I assumed this was all a psychological crutch.

And one afternoon, one of my patients who had shared her faith with me asked me point blank, “Doctor, what do you believe? I shared my faith with you. You never say anything. What do you believe?” I didn’t like that question. That made me really uncomfortable. I tried to dodge it. I left the room, and then I began to struggle with my thoughts and try and figure out why this was such an unsettling moment. And I realized something I had been hiding from, which was that I’d never really looked at the evidence. I assumed there wouldn’t be any. But I was a scientist, and I wasn’t supposed to draw conclusions without looking at evidence, and I’d never done that. So I decided I’d best have a look.

To my surprise, by reading books by C. S. Lewis, by beginning to understand something about the principles of faith, and by looking at nature and the pointers in nature that I found actually were suggesting there had to be something outside of nature to explain the fine tuning of the universe, I became more and more convinced that the atheist position was the least rational of all the choices.

I’d thought that faith was over here, and reason was over there. Well, no. Faith was over here with reason too. It was simply a matter of seeing those pointers and not running away from them. And over the course of a couple of years of wrestling with that, and ultimately to coming to the position that belief in God was more plausible than disbelief, I had to make a decision. You can’t get to proof on the basis of those arguments about how the universe is put together, or the moral law, our knowledge of right and wrong, which I found a very compelling pointer towards a God who cared about human beings. But you can get very close to the edge of making that leap. And ultimately I made that leap after a couple of years of struggling against it. And I became a believer and a follower of Jesus. That was 27 years ago.


Lloyd: Let’s stay with this notion that you began to see in nature pointers toward God. You say somewhere—I think it’s in your book—that your very work on the Human Genome Project became something like an act of worship for you. And some of us even noticed that on the cover of your book there’s a design that is a picture of DNA that looks very much like a stained glass window, as if the two worlds blend together. Tell us about that.


Collins: Well, I wouldn’t have appreciated that when I was an atheist. But now it seems so obvious. When you look at the way the universe is put together, when you consider the fine tuning of all the constants that determine how matter and energy behave, it is astounding to see how precisely those constants have their value set to make complexity of the universe possible. If you tinkered with the gravitational constant by just one part in a hundred trillion, basically it would be impossible for there to be a universe that has stars and galaxies and planets and us. And that’s just one of fifteen such coincidences that seem to characterize the way that the universe is assembled. That seems like a very strong argument for design, for our Creator who put this whole thing in process with the intention that the universe would not be a sterile place, but would contain the possibility of consciousness, the possibility of spiritual creatures, us, with whom God could have fellowship. So I think that’s a compelling one of those arguments.

And as I became a believer and began to appreciate that God is behind all of the things that we, as scientists, have the opportunity to learn about, that every scientific discovery takes on new meaning. It’s not just like, “Okay, I’ve learned something about nature. I’ve also glimpsed just a little bit of God’s mind. I’ve seen it in an awesome way, a glimpse of his creative genius, what Bernard Lonergan calls ‘this amazing cry of ecstasy,’ of spiritually experiencing every cry of ‘Eureka’ as also a chance to see what God is up to.

So for me that’s very much true. And I don’t take my spiritual perspective and my scientific perspective and build a wall between them just in case there might be a problem. I don’t think there’s a problem at all. But that means that a scientific discovery is an occasion of worship, not just a natural phenomenon. And that is enormously enriching.


Lloyd: That’s such a beautiful vision of bringing the two together. These days there have been some rather noisy voices that don’t buy that one bit. And some of them are scientists themselves. We’ve been hearing a great deal in the last few months from what we call ‘the new atheists, ‘ people who are quite skeptical of the capacity to bring together science and faith, raising other charges as well. But that one, in particular, what do you make of the kinds of charges that a Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett brings to people of faith like you who are also scientists?


Collins: Well yes, our airwaves and our bookshelves are certainly filled up with these angry atheist manifestos. And many of them, I think, are driven not so much by reason, but by a personal agenda of animosity towards faith. And perhaps some of those reacting to what they think to what they see and decry—as you and I would—as excesses of religious activities that are really far away from the principles of faith where religion is being used as an excuse to do terrible things. And believers would agree that those are horrible circumstances that we should all basically step away from and point to as not what the faith represents. But these angry pronouncements are, in fact, very prominent these days.

And science is being used by someone like Dawkins as part of the argument. And there’s a profound logical fallacy here. Science is about investigating the natural world. That’s what science does. That’s what its tools are very good at. It is the only way, I would argue, to get reliable information about material things. But if God has any meaning at all, God cannot be entirely enclosed within nature, unless of course you’re a pantheist. But as somebody who is not, who is a believer in Almighty God who is outside of nature although he is capable of invading nature as in the case of Jesus Christ, then it is totally inappropriate to say that the tools of science have very much of anything to say about God’s existence. It’s a non sequitur. It’s a mismatch. If you want to understand about the nature of God, you have to approach it in some other way. The existence of God is not a scientific question. It’s a spiritual question.

Now, mind you, I think you can look at nature and see some of these pointers to God’s existence, and they’re actually more consistent with God’s existence than his non-existence. But it’s not a proof.

But to someone like Dawkins, who is a very articulate expositor of science, and particular the science of evolution, to say that “this says convincingly that there can be no God,” is a complete mismatch in terms of the argument, using the wrong basis to draw the conclusion. And Dawkins’s cherished dependence on reason goes out the window when he makes that kind of point.


Lloyd: Do you think that the argument that socio-biologists and Dawkins make, that evolutionary science now has a comprehensive explanatory network that can account for everything that it means to be human from our responsibility to others, to our being in love, to our being moved by nature, by our sense of mystery and wonder, that all of that is now, can be explained through carefully looking at our emotions from lower forms of life?


Collins: I think that is an extreme kind of logical positivist position, and it certainly is the position that someone like Dawkins would take. And I think, actually when you look closely, unjustified by the evidence that supports it. It comes down to a series of “just-so stories.” Now don’t get me wrong. Evolutionary science is enormously powerful to somebody who studies DNA and looks at our own genome and that of many other species. The comparisons that one can draw tell you a lot about the mechanics of how life goes on. But I don’t think it will tell us much about love or what that is. I don’t think it will tell us much about why we humans seem to be universally searching for something spiritual for no particular reason or benefit that it’s obvious to do so.

And I don’t think it will ultimately will answer this profound question that first grabbed my attention as an atheist searching for evidence, which is, “Where does this sense of right and wrong come from that we humans have that is unique to humanity, and it exists across all cultures down through history?” If that is an evolutionary consequence, it would say that it ought to, therefore, benefit those who have it in terms of improving their reproductive fitness. That’s all that evolution cares about. Evolution doesn’t really care about anything else other than “are you going to be successful in passing on your DNA?” Now, I can see if you are generous to your family members, that might be appropriate from evolution’s perspective, because they share some of your same genes. And even that if you are generous to people who might help you later on in a reciprocal way, that might make sense. But Oscar Schindler risking his life to save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust when he is not of their tribe? That is a scandal to evolution. Martin Luther King, as an example of somebody taking sacrificial steps for his people, that is a scandal to evolution.

There’s a wonderful story of a prisoner who was taken in medieval times because of his religious beliefs and put in the tower, and he managed to escape and let himself down with a series of knotted sheets and began running across the frozen landscape pursued by a guard. He crossed a frozen lake. Fatefully, the guard pursuing him, fell through. Looking behind him, he saw the guard drowning. He stopped. He felt this urge: “I have to save this person’s life. Life matters.” He went back, saved the guard, who promptly arrested him, and he was put to death two days later.

Now that, from evolution’s perspective, is an absolutely ridiculous story. And yet something in us resonates with what that man did. He had to save this other person even at the cost of his own life. And of course Jesus is the ultimate manifestation of that kind of sacrificial love.

Evolution cannot tolerate that kind of attitude. It would not be sustainable.

And furthermore, and this is a really, I think, important thing to consider: if Dawkins is right, if evolution is responsible for the moral law, for this sense of right and wrong and our calling to do the right thing, do you see what that means? That means that there really is no such thing as good and evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve all been hoodwinked. Evolution has convinced us there is something there called morality. But there isn’t. If that’s true, why does Dawkins rail against the evils (he uses the word) that he sees religion committing? Why does Christopher Hitchens do the same? They should say, “Wait a minute. There’s no such thing as evil. Let’s just what do what we all please. Let’s be as selfish as we possibly can because we’ve now been liberated from this trick that evolution has played on us. And nobody wants to go there.

And I think that is one of the more profound arguments for why you really cannot step away from a spiritual basis of the moral law without ending up in a profoundly bizarre, depressing place.


Lloyd: What does a scientist do with the whole problem of evil, we might say, the sense of looking at the natural processes of nature and how beautiful and how destructive they can be? And then looking at a world where human beings have emerged who can be both beautiful and destructive themselves? Was this a good scientific plan God entered into, or is there something a little more chaotic going on here?


Collins: Well, goodness knows, it seems chaotic from our perspective. I think we have to constantly remind ourselves that our minds are not capable in any way of understanding what God’s perspective might be in a given situation. When you look at the problem of evil, of all the terrible things that happen in our world, it’s clear that many of them are, in fact, committed by human beings using the gift of free will which God gave us, and it would be a very strange universe indeed if we did not have that. I challenge anybody to imagine an existence of any kind of human society where free will was not part of it. Does it have any meaning?

So that seemed like a given. But then, we use that. We are fallen creatures. We have the ability, even though we know right and wrong, to do the wrong thing. And we do it quite regularly. So the free will defense, as it’s been called, accounts for a fair amount of human misery. But not all, and we shouldn’t dodge that.

A child with cancer. A tsunami. What you call natural disasters. What are those about? The English Anglican theologian and physicist John Pulkinghorn I think writes very cogently about this, referring to these as examples of physical evil. Pulkinghorn would argue that the way in which the universe came into being, the way in which our world was created, involved a certain series of natural processes, such as the slipping of tectonic plates, without which it would not be possible for life to exist. But the consequence of that can, in fact, be cases of human misery. It also involves copying DNA. And DNA mistakes are essential. Otherwise the evolutionary process, which I believe is God’s plan for creating human beings over a long period of time, could not have occurred. You have to have changes in DNA. But a change in wrong place in a vulnerable location can also cause cancer. And maybe the argument is you can’t have one without the other, and to try and design such a system would be simply not feasible.

I’m not sure that’s totally satisfying. Again I come back to C. S. Lewis’s wonderful book The Problem of Pain, which says more about this question than I could say in a week. He says it in the first three pages, that basically we have to recognize that there are instances in which God speaks to us not through the good times, but through the difficult times. That’s true in my own life. Lewis calls this God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. He may whisper when things are going well. He shouts when things are not going well. And if God’s plan is more for us than what we see around us here on this particular sphere that we all reside upon, then perhaps in our sufferings are some of the most important lessons that we need to learn.


Lloyd: Speaking of suffering, one issue that turns up a lot in the conversation between science and faith, is a long discussion about the power or efficacy of prayer these days. We happen to be spending our morning services this morning thinking and talking about the life of prayer. So what difference can prayer make? You’re a scientist working by natural laws and yet, and yet as a Christian you believe that prayer can make a difference. There have been some studies trying to document and prove the efficacy of prayer, having blind studies and having people prayed for, and other people not prayed for. What do you make of that discussion, and what’s your sense of where the power of prayer fits into a scientific worldview?


Collins: I should say right away that I’m an amateur theologian. I’m a pretty good scientist, but I’m an amateur theologian, and when it comes to questions like this, I always feel like I’m probably not to be looked at as any kind of expert. I would say things that I read, Philip Yancey’s book on prayer, which I think is a superb place for people to go who are trying to sort this out. In my sense, yes, God is capable of intervening in the natural world. After all, he is God. He has got this ability to suspend the laws because he started the whole thing in the first place. And of course he has done so in some of the miracles of our own faith, the most dramatic one being the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, which I believe in absolute certainty, as the literal foundation of my faith and not an allegory or a metaphor. And yet when we pray to God in a particular circumstance and ask for an intervention, can we count on that as a natural consequence? No, of course not.

I think in my own life, my prayer life has turned into more of a sense to try and understand what God’s plan is for me than to try to manipulate him into doing something that I wanted. Sometimes I do that! We all do. But I’m not sure how successful it is, or that that is in fact the point. I can certainly say I have experienced, through prayer, opportunities to come to peace about issues where I was feeling very stirred up. And that is not because God has changed the situation, but because he changed me.


Lloyd: It is one of the great mysteries. One I’m tackling myself this morning, and you’re doing about as well at is as I can do at it. It’s very hard to talk about the sovereignty of God and the finite limits of our life within the forces of nature. How God can grant us full freedom and yet be profoundly involved, and that’s what we proclaim every week. But it’s a very hard thing to talk about. Thank you.

The “Big Bang.” You say it cries out for divine explanation. What does that mean?


Collins: So what is the Big Bang now anyway? The Big Bang is now pretty much universally accepted by cosmologists and physicists and various other scientific disciplines as a reality, that the universe had a beginning. That about 13.7 billion years ago, in an unimaginable singularity, a flash of energy, the universe came into being. Out of nothingness. And after that, in a great expanding phase, a matter coalesced, stars, galaxies, planets were formed including our own, about 4.55 billion years ago. And then, over the course of hundreds of millions of years, life appeared and evolved into you and I sitting here this morning in this beautiful place. So, why does that cry out for God?

Well, we have not observed nature to create itself. That has not been something that there is evidence scientifically can occur. So if you have something occurring of that sort out of nothingness, ex nihilo, it does seem to me to cry out for an explanation. And the explanation cannot be a natural one, or you haven’t solved the problem. So the only answer I can see is there has be a creator who is outside of nature, and that sounds like God.

And even physicists who do not accept the idea of a God who cares about human beings, do find this fairly compelling. There are other aspects that are compelling. Why is there something instead of nothing? There’s no reason. There should have been something in the first place. Why does mathematics work? Why is it that simple equations can describe the behavior of matter and energy? There’s no reason why that should be it. But it sure makes you think about God as a mind. Einstein, certainly, supported that view.

All of these again, pointers coming from the study of nature that I believe make the existence of God a pretty compelling argument. Not a proof. But a pretty compelling argument.


Lloyd: My sense is we’re on our way to stirring up just a few questions here. So I’m going to ask one more question and while we’re doing that I want to ask that the microphones be in position to give people chances to put some good questions to you.

One of the things you talk about is the effort by some believers who are scientists to solve the problems we are discussing through things like ‘intelligent design,’ and some notion of God of the gaps that sometimes they say if there’s a pretty clear indication if you even look at the evidence, that something like the hand of God had to be in the work for this to happen. Could you say something about what you make of those arguments? We hear them a lot these days.


Collins: Sure. And we hear them particularly because there is a sense on the part of many people that there’s actually a really big conflict between what science is teaching us about life and how it works and the evolutionary process, and what believers take as a given in terms of God’s creative genius in making this all possible.

Intelligent Design arrived on the scene only about twenty years ago. And not from the scientific community, but really from the religious community, particularly from Phillip Johnson, a lawyer who wrote a book called Darwin on Trial. The argument here is that evolution is just not sufficient to account for the very complicated nanomachines that we find inside the cells of our body, and that in fact there had to be some kind of supernatural intervention to make that possible. The arguments are interesting and thought provoking, but they do fall apart rather readily when you begin to look at new evidence that’s coming out of the study of many different life forms. And so many of these complicated machines, that Intelligent Design argue could not have evolved in a stepwise process, do in fact appear to have done exactly that. And so Intelligent Design is beginning to appear as a God of the gaps argument that can’t really be sustained. And as a result the people who have attached themselves to that perspective often times, as a defense against what they see as the Dawkins camp of evolutionary atheism, are now finding they are standing in a rather awkward position, that the ice is cracking under them.

This is a terribly unfortunate situation, and I would argue an unnecessary one. The premise that I find very appealing, and which most scientists I know who are believers in God have also arrived at, oftentimes without knowing others had traveled the same path, is just this: that God had the intention of creating human beings in his image, creatures that would have free will, would have knowledge of right and wrong, would have an immortal soul, and would have a desire for fellowship with him; and in his wisdom and amazing genius he figured out how to do this using the process of evolution in what seems to us like a very long period of time, but to God (he was not limited to space and time) might have been the blink of an eye. And in that process, described in beautiful poetic but, I would argue, allegorical form in Genesis 1 and 2, he put into place all the mechanics necessary for a stable universe, for a planet that could support carbon-based life, and for all the diversity of the wonderful living things that we see around us, but with the ultimate purpose of developing creatures with consciousness, ourselves, with whom he could have this kind of spiritual relationship. I find nothing that I know as a scientist is in disagreement with that perspective, and nothing that I know in terms of an Augustinian view of Genesis 1 and 2, that is at discord of that perspective. And I find it enormously satisfying to be able to put those things together in harmony to live in this place where science and spirit can coexist on any given Thursday afternoon, happily in my mind and in my heart. And I find it deeply troubling that that message of potential harmony seems to be getting lost in the current shrill outpouring of extremism from one end to the other of this spectrum between science and belief. And if we have a culture that has a future, I don’t think we want to see science triumph over faith, or for that matter, faith triumph over science when it fact it’s all God’s truth. And God’s truth cannot disagree with God’s truth.


Lloyd: So it sounds like there’s a slow unfolding of evolution that is in many ways the necessary pre-condition for an independent creation that brings forth creatures of free will. Not being plunked like that, but the slow shaping of a universe that brings forth finally conscious creatures who can make choices.


Collins: And that is an awesome and elegant means of creation. And who are we to say, “Well, I wouldn’t have done it that way.”


Lloyd: Let’s go to a question.



Q: Good morning, I’m here with my 11-year-old daughter who is very interested in genetics. Two-part question. I just want to find out what your definition of God is. And then secondly, I would love to know your thoughts about this book about the God gene. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Thank you.


Collins: So I already declared myself as an amateur theologian, so being asked for a definition of God is causing me to feel slightly anxious. But I will say what I don’t think of God as. I don’t think of God as a figure with a white beard living up in the sky somewhere. The closest thing I can come to in terms of a picture or a concept of God (it’s not really a picture) is a mind, an incredibly creative, diverse, sophisticated, impossibly complex mind. For someone like me to try and even grasp in even the tiniest way, maybe I get those glimpses with scientific discovery. But that’s about as far as I can go. But it’s a mind that is not all about facts and figures and mechanics and equations. It’s a mind whose basic core is love. That is really what God’s definition most appropriately ought to be.

As far the book you mention, The God Gene—this is a book written by a colleague at the National Institutes of Health, Dean Hammer, where he had done a bit of research to try and identify why some people might be more interested in religion than others. The premise was a little bit shaky and the data was hopelessly shaky. It’s never found its way into a peer-review publication. So it made the cover of Time magazine, but I don’t think it really provided us with anything all that compelling. It is clear that there are aspects of human personality that may make some people somewhat more receptive to the idea of transcendence than others. But they are minor contributors. We all have the opportunity to learn about God despite whatever deck of cards we might have been dealt in our genomes.


Q: I wonder or if you have thought about or inquired into the ideas around chaos, that underlying order in the universe is there is total chaos and what you see as order in the universe is an emergent property that comes completely out of chaos.


Collins: So, I don’t know a lot about chaos theory, or about the current deliberations about emergent properties of the universe, but I think they are interesting concepts, and certainly they would fit to my mind quite comfortably with the idea of a creator God who’s not limited in the same that we are. I would say if we consider that chaotic properties are completely impossible therefore to have predictions made about their future that may apply to us, but not necessarily to God who is outside of those limitations. And in fact people have argued that one of the complaints about evolution is its potential of chaotic nature, that if you rewound the tape and started over again, minus maybe an asteroid that hit the Yucatan Peninsula 62 million years ago and knocked out the dinosaurs, would you end up with a very different outcome? And how could God have allowed that kind of uncertainty? My sense is again, that assumes that God has that same limitation that we do. I’m not sure that God has to wait for tomorrow to know what tomorrow brings.


Q: Hi. I was just curious what brought you to a faith in Christianity rather than the Hindu faith or the Buddhist faith, or some other faith?


Collins: That’s a very appropriate question, and I didn’t go into that at all, although I do in the final chapter of this book. And I confess I am hesitant to present my own pathway as if, well, this has got to be right for absolutely everybody listening to these words. I think Christians have been absolutely not helpful to their own cause by appearing to argue that they exist in this exclusive club and that narrow mindedness seems to be a component of being a Christian. At the same time, I have found truth in that pathway. I did look at the other world religions as I was struggling with what to make of this idea that, if there is a God, there must be something I could learn about God through those religions. And I was surprised to find just how much they have in common. And that is in fact very true if you look across those that have survived for long periods of time. That must be because they do in some way represent truth.

But there are differences. And frankly it was the person of Jesus Christ who not only came across as a great moral teacher, but claimed to be God and claimed to know the way to God, that caught my attention, which is different than other figures that I saw in the other religions. And I assumed that much of that was myth, and I was surprised to learn how much of how much we know about Christ is in fact very strongly historically documented, including the resurrection. Read N. T. Wright’s book The Resurrection of the Son of God to see just how confidently one can state on a historical basis that this really happened. And ultimately the person of Christ solved the problem for me, a big problem which was, as I began to be aware of God’s real existence and that this must be a Holy God who stood for all that was good, I became increasingly aware that I was far short of that standard and needed some bridge to form a pathway to have a relationship with that perfect and holy God in Jesus Christ who is both God and man, provided that for me in a way that I could not find elsewhere.


Q: If evolution is just such a powerful engine, are humans, is this the culmination of God’s plan? We see evolution all around us. Other things are changing. Are we changing? Are we the end?


Collins: That’s a great question. And I hope not, because I hope we’ll be around for a little while. I mean, from a scientific perspective, do we have the opportunity to actually accelerate evolution by tinkering with the whole process? There certainly are people, most of them writing from a non-spiritual perspective, who argue that we should do that. That we should not be satisfied. Stephen Hawking, the physicist, who of course suffers from a terrible medical condition, argues that we should take charge and we should not put up with the defects that evolution has left us with.

As a believer, I have some trouble with the idea of our taking on this creative role, because that we might ultimately move ourselves into a different area where we are no longer quite the plan that God had. But if we don’t do that, of course over the course of very long periods of time, evolution can result in some change. We can see that actually some evolution has been acting in the last four or five thousand generations, by the fact that people have different skin color in different parts of the world, even though we’re all descended from the same set of common ancestors. And that’s evolution basically saying that if you have dark skin at the equator you’re going to do better than if you have light skin, and in Finland you’re going to do better, and there are good medical reasons for that. So you can see evolution didn’t stop at the point at where our common ancestors were identified and at the point where I see that the story of Adam and Eve taking place.

But, will it go on? We’ve kind of messed with it a bit in the sense that we are, in a benevolent way, avoiding the consequences of natural selection for people who may not have ideal situations. We support, and I think God intends for us to support, people with disabilities. We support children who have illnesses. We try to help them survive. And so in a certain way we are already affecting the process.

But, what is God’s plan? I don’t know. I think right now his plan for each of us to try and find him and that’s the responsibility that we here living in 2007 ought to think about as most serious and most important.


Q: Why do you think there’s such a separation between science and religion? How do you unite the Christian tradition of the age of the earth with current scientific evidence?


Collins: So it’s a great question. Why is there such a separation? As I said earlier, I find it deeply troubling that there is. It was not always so. There had been, of course, occasions, Copernicus and Galileo amongst them, where the church and science have found themselves at counter purposes. But we look at science over centuries, it’s really only in the last couple hundred years that scientists have appeared to be stepping away from a theological perspective. Theology was considered the queen of the sciences for a long period of time. So, what’s happened here?

I supposed Darwin has something to do with that, especially in our current circumstance. The argument that you could, in fact, explain the relatedness of living things through a long flow evolutionary process was unsettling to people who thought of species as having being created out of nothingness by God, one at a time. And the idea that human beings would, in fact, be part of that process was even more deeply unsettling. But the evidence is overwhelming that in fact that is the case. One cannot look at the current data coming out of biology, both from the fossil record which is admittedly incomplete and always will be, but especially from the study of genomes, and not come to the conclusion that evolution was in fact the process by which we humans arrived on the scene.

Again, I see that as entirely compatible with God’s having been the author of that process. But you can’t basically step away from it and say evolution is a lie, which in fact I find many believers are being asked to say. So this is a really serious tension, and a considerable tragedy at the present time. I have a lot of young people who come to me who’ve been raised in an evangelical tradition, who have been led to believe that if you a serious committed believer, then you have to reject evolution because it’s intrinsically atheistic and materialistic, and who therefore, when they encounter the data that supports it, which is as I said is extremely compelling, are in a crisis. They’re in a crisis of faith and a crisis of science. And they feel like they are being called to walk away from one or the other. And sometimes they walk away from both.

What a terrible tragedy. This is actually a recent arrival on the scene. If you read the writings of people like Ron Numbers or Ernest Lucas, who have looked at the history of Creationism as a particular perspective of Christianity, it is only about a hundred years that this narrow view of a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 has been considered a badge of sincerity for a believer. Prior to that time, and certainly going back to St. Augustine who wrote no less than five books about Genesis trying to figure out what it meant, there was no consensus at all about what the actual historical events were that are being described in Genesis 1 and 2. Augustine writes powerfully about how we should not make the mistake of attaching ourselves to a particular interpretation of those verses, lest science reveal other things that turn our interpretation to be wrong and faith is made to look ridiculous as a result. And I wish that warning had been adhered to more closely of the course of the last hundred years.

So we now find ourselves really in quite a contentious situation. And frankly, I think the atheist manifestos are making it worse because someone like Dawkins is saying, “Yeah, accept evolution. Your faith is out the window.” So, is it any wonder that believers, hearing that say, “Well, then evolution has to be wrong.”

All of these extreme perspectives cannot be sustained by a close consideration of the evidence, but they are dominating the stage. And my hope would be that, despite all of that noise that those of us who live in this place in between, who can see the harmony between science as a means of understanding God’s creation and faith as a means of understanding who God is and who we are in relationship to God, can begin to actually begin to make some more noise about the fact that this is a satisfying, comforting, intellectually rigorous way, to be both a believer in God and a scientist who can understand nature through the gifts that God gave us using the tools of science. That is increasingly, it seems, a well-kept secret, and we shouldn’t make it so in occasions like this in beautiful places like this. We should celebrate what God has given us -- the knowledge of himself through experiences that we all live throughout our faith life and the experience of who he is by the tools that science provides us to learn about the elegance and awesome nature of his creation. To be a fully formed human being, it seems to me, you don’t want to take just one of those books of truth. You want to take them both.


Lloyd: Shall we stop there. Will you join me in thanking Dr. Collins for his wonderful talk? Thank you for coming and participating today. We’re back next week with Michel Martin, who is from NPR, has her own program called “Tell Me More.” We’ll be talking about cultural diversity in America, what’s happening, what are the challenges we face as we become one very complex, one very diverse nation. Please stay for services at 11:15 today. Everyone’s invited to that. And in the meantime there is coffee on in the back, and Dr. Collins will be there to greet and talk to you as well. Glad you are here.