| Obama to nominate prominent Christian geneticist to head NIH |
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| By Robert Marus | ||
| Thursday, July 09, 2009 | ||
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WASHINGTON (ABP) -- The White House announced July 8 that President Obama would tap a prominent Christian geneticist to a top government post. Obama announced that he would nominate Francis Collins, one of the world’s most famous thinkers on the relationship between religion and science, to head the National Institutes of Health.
Collins led the decade-long effort to map the human genome that culminated in 2003. An evangelical, he has written and spoken extensively about his view that Christian and other kinds of religious faith need not be in tension with modern science. He has debated atheist thinkers over whether science and religious faith are inherently in conflict. He also rejects young-Earth creationism and its close ideological cousin, the intelligent-design movement. “I think I would also say intelligent design is not only bad science; it’s questionable theology,” Collins said, in a recent discussion with journalists sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. “It implies that God was an underachiever and started this evolutionary process and then realized it wasn’t going to quite work and had to keep stepping in all along the way to fix it. That seems like a limitation of God’s omniscience.” He describes himself as a believer in “theistic evolution,” the idea that God created the universe billions of years ago with the parameters precisely set to allow all current life forms, including human life, to emerge and evolve. In his 2006 book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Collins detailed his struggles with the idea of religious faith as a young scientist and physician. He eventually left agnosticism and atheism for Christianity after examining classic philosophical and scientific questions. In the Pew Forum discussion, he described his understanding of how the world came to be succinctly. “God, who is not limited in space or time, created this universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned -- that fine-tuning argument -- to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time,” he said. “That plan included the mechanism of evolution to create this marvelous diversity of living things on our planet and to include ourselves, human beings. Evolution, in the fullness of time, prepared these big-brained creatures, but that’s probably not all we are from the perspective of a believer.”
Collins is a native of Virginia and holds the bachelor of science degree from the University of Virginia, a Ph.D. in chemistry from Yale University and an M.D. from the University of North Carolina.                 Comments (1)
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I do, however, disagree with Dr. Collins' comments on creation and Intelligent Design. I do not see how Darwinism and Christianity can both be true. Evolution in the sense of all living organisms evolving from a common elemental source through a continual series of random mutations is hardly consistent with the notion of a Creator who rationally structured the universe as Dr. Collins himself finds in his examination of the evidence in nature. Those who accept Darwin's account of nature clearly must reject the possibility of "fine-tuning" that Dr. Collins infers from scientific collections of data. Any teleological explanation for the universe, concerning both its origin and its sustainability, is grossly inconsistent with the type of evolution conceptualized by Darwin and his adherents. Plato or Aristotle's account of nature, both teleological, are at odds with the atomist accounts of Democritus and later picked up by Darwin.
Of all people, Dr. Collins should see the overwhelming scientific evidence for Intelligent Design (which does not necessarily embrace a young earth view of creation) in his study of DNA. DNA is clearly not an accumulation of simple elemental particles aggregated together by blind chance. DNA is highly rationally structured and its basic structure is consistently maintained over time. The dispute here is not between science and religion, but between different schools of philosophy, teleology versus atomism. DNA and its complex structure that exhibits purpose offers evidential support for teleology and refuting evidence against atomism.
Finally, there is the problem of evil. Did God really create a process governing the material world that would lead to the unnecessary deaths and untold suffering of millions of organisms? Without Adam and Eve being historical individuals who were the exemplars of the human race freely choosing evil, and consequently introducing sin into the world and its deadly consequences, the atheist account does make more sense of the available evidence.