March 25, 2009

For Dr. Francis Collins, the question of whether he believes that the laws of nature can be temporarily suspended by God is an extremely pointed one because it cuts to the core of his life’s work in science.  The entire foundation of science is based on the assumption that the laws of physics are immutable.  Every day we bet our lives on it, whether we drive on the freeway or ride in an elevator.  It is the essence of human technological advancement.  A belief in miracles is fundamentally different from stating that science is limited in its scope to the natural world; it is the belief of the direct intervention by God out of the spiritual world and into the physical world.  It is a profoundly counterintuitive and perhaps even frightful thought to believe in the suspension of everything we can observe and sense.

tothesource:  Dr. Collins, how can you, a scientist who has built his entire life on the laws of physics, believe that they don’t always apply?

Dr. Collins: This is a tough one for a scientist.   I am inherently skeptical about the claim of casual modern day miracles.  I find myself asking why would God have chosen that instance to do something miraculous?  So I would not claim that speaking for myself I have observed a miracle.  I’ve taken care of patients who have had terrible diseases and were supposed to die and who got better and who were praying for that outcome and other people were praying for it and were convinced that they had a miraculous event and it is possible they did, but I also know just how little we understand about the human body and how it works.  It seems to me that you downgrade miracles a bit if you apply it in a circumstance where there is some legitimate reason to question whether this could have been explained on natural basis, like a flower blooming.  That really is not a miracle, it is a biological phenomenon we understand pretty well.  I have no problem at all with God interrupting the laws of nature at those moments where a really important message needs to be sent to God’s people; the birth of Christ, and His life and death and resurrection is the prime example.  But if God disrupts natural laws on a capricious basis we would live in a very chaotic universe.  In a certain way the order of the universe is also part of God’s gift to us.

(tothesource):  This belief in the possibility of miracles while not ceding scientific rigor is really the lynchpin for the strength of Dr. Collins BioLogos project.  It is an approach that allows for both the admission of relevant scientific discovery such as the fossil record and genetic homology to describe evolution as well as the recognition that human beings are unique on this planet as image bearers of God.  The strongest argument for the uniqueness and our separation from the rest of creation was laid forth by Oxford scholar C.S. Lewis and is known as the Moral Law argument which states that regardless of culture, epoch, age, race, or gender, human beings are endowed with a sense of morality that is inherent to us, the knowledge of good and evil.  This can be directly observed today through “radical altruism” with examples such as Mother Teresa.  The problem with an acceptance of an ingrained knowledge of good and evil is that it requires a miracle—something that stepped outside of the bounds of evolution.  Many evolutionary atheists have attempted to describe potential mechanisms by which our moral compass could have been derived by purely natural means but each of them falls short to fully account for our observed behavior.

tothesource:  Dr. Collins, do you allow for the possibility that our morality and sense of separateness from the rest of creation was derived from some sort of evolutionary process and can be accounted for by evolution.

Dr. Collins:  If the atheists are right and the Moral Law is purely an evolutionary creation, then that means that right and wrong are also evolutionary creations that are artificial and illusionary so they have no substance and no true meaning.  The whole basis of morality from a strict atheist naturalistic evolutionist perspective goes out the window.  I know of very few atheists who are willing to yield that one up.

tothesource: Ironically, they could no longer call religion evil because there would be no such thing.  With all of this uncertainty floating around about the origins of the Moral Law, what is your interpretation of the development of the Moral Law?  Do you believe that it comes from a unique specific event in history or was it developed over time by God inhabiting the evolutionary process?

Dr. Collins:  Of course I like the special gifting of God’s image because it resonates so well with the story of Adam and Eve in the garden and the eating of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and the not eating of the fruit of the tree of life and the loss of relationship with God and spiritual death and the need for redemption.  All of that fits really beautifully with the idea of evolution getting you to this almost, but not quite, human stage and then in that garden this final gifting happens and it all goes wrong.

tothesource: You believe there is harmony between science and religion.  Are you at ease with your understanding of our origins?

Dr. Collins:  Yes.  But that is not the end of the story any more than being convinced that evolution is probably true means you no longer study evolution.  It basically says okay, the foundation seems okay but boy the details need a lot of work.

tothesource: Are we the end point of evolution?

Dr. Collins:  No we are not.  You can see evolution’s handiwork at work even today in human kind so there’s no reason to think that it has stopped today if it wasn’t stopped a few years ago.  Our white skin is a good example of evolution within the last 30-40 thousand years having selected for fairly obvious human characteristics to prevent us from getting rickets.  Even more recently, sickle cell maybe is an evolutionary consequence because the sickle cell trait allowed survival in the presence of malaria over just a few thousand years.   It’s already made a pretty big difference in terms of the frequency of that mutation.  We have manipulated our own species for benevolent reasons.  We have helped people survive to reproductive age who didn’t use to and that means we’ve changed the gene pool in a way that’s not necessarily a way that natural selection alone would have indicated.  But I would argue that’s exactly what we should have done.  It seems to me likely that we will take charge of our own evolution and start to play with the genome and start adding in genes that we think would be beneficial and taking away ones we don’t like, and that’s very scary.  That seems to me that we assume we know a lot more than we do.  For a believer this raises the question of at what point after we manipulate the human instruction book are we still talking about the image of God.   At some point you’ve really gotten out of the middle of what God’s plan was all along.  To start to mess with the human germ line where it affects many future generation without a complete knowledge of the consequences and with the risk that you would really be changing our species seems to me like a very troubling scenario.

On that note, we concluded our interview.  As a scientist myself pursing a PhD in biomedical engineering, the time I had with Dr. Collins was very stimulating and inspiring and the pending launch of BioLogos.org will usher in a new perspective where the divisiveness that has plagued science and faith can be reconciled.