Interview with Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D.

I was asked to deliver the Noble Lectures on science and faith at Harvard in 2003. It was the most open that I had been about describing my own personal journey, and how I had found harmony in both the truths of science and the truths of faith. For three nights in a row, the Harvard Memorial Church was packed with students and faculty asking probing questions and making it clear that this was a topic of great interest to them. It was also clear from their reaction that while they had heard repeatedly from the voices of Biblical fundamentalism and atheist fundamentalism, the concept that the scientific and spiritual worldviews could be compatible in an intellectually rigorous fashion was new and surprising to many. Though my scientific responsibilities as Director of the Human Genome Project at that time were intense, it seemed that a book on this topic might be helpful to at least a few people. And in a certain way, I had been thinking about writing that book for a quarter century, ever since I became a believer.

While interesting arguments have been made about natural human tendencies to postulate an outside agent to explain inexplicable events, they fall short of explaining why 40% of today’s working scientists, who make their professional careers out of explaining natural phenomena, still persist in believing in God. I am one of them. Of course a loving Creator, who planned at the beginning of the universe for big-brained creatures to emerge with the potential for a divine relationship, might well have utilized the process of evolution to make that clarion call more audible, so the presence of an evolutionary argument for our spiritual hunger does not discount the possible truth of the existence of God.

Put another way, and following C.S. Lewis’ argument, we humans seem to have a set of basic universal needs: for food, water, shelter and sex. Yet down through the centuries and right up to now, there seems to be this other universal need for something that will lift us up beyond the impoverished perspective of pure naturalism and provide a spiritual perspective. If there are ways to fill those other basic needs, might not this one also be intended to find its true object, the God of all the Universe, who knocks on the door of our hearts, if we will but listen?

One of the most notable characteristics of humanity, across centuries, cultures and geographic locations, is a universal grasp of the concept of right and wrong and an inner voice that calls us to do the right thing. This is often referred to as the Moral Law. We may not always agree on what behaviors are right—and this is heavily influenced by culture—but we generally agree that we should try to do good and avoid evil. When we break the Law—which, if we are honest, is frequently—we make excuses for ourselves, only further demonstrating that we feel obligated to the Law.

Evolutionary arguments, which ultimately must support reproductive fitness as the overarching goal, may explain some parts of this human urge toward altruism, especially if your sacrificial acts are offered to your relatives or to those from whom you might expect some future reciprocal benefits. Martin Nowak has recently extended those models to show that evolution could even favor altruism directed at all members of your own group.

But these evolutionary models all require hostility to outgroups within your species. Somehow we humans didn’t seem to get that memo—in fact, we especially admire examples where individuals act sacrificially for others from outgroups that they don’t even know—think of Mother Teresa or the Good Samaritan. Dismissing these acts of radical altruism as some sort of evolutionary misfiring, which is the usual response from an atheist, ought to at least be viewed skeptically as a bit of a just so story. And if these noble acts are frankly a scandal to reproductive fitness, might they instead be a pointer toward a holy, loving and caring God, who instilled this Moral Law into each of us as a sign of our special nature and as a call to relationship with the Almighty?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not arguing that this, or any other scientific argument, is an actual proof for a God who cares about humans. But it might be cause for some reflection.

I realized that there were compelling signposts to God in nature: the fact that there is something instead of nothing, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics (Wigner’s phrase) to explain the behavior of matter and energy, the need to answer the question what came before the Big Bang? and the fine-tuning of physical constants in the universe to have just the value they need to make complexity possible. With my eyes opened by the first chapter of C.S. Lewis’s book Mere Christianity, I also realized that there was no simple materialistic explanation for the existence of right and wrong, nor for our universal human calling to be moral beings.

Theism is the belief in the existence of God. Theistic evolution, therefore, is simply the belief that evolution is the way by which God created the marvelous diversity of life as we know it, including human beings. What an elegant plan! I came to that position by a) having come to belief in God through the signposts noted above and b) having access to the scientific evidence about biology, which overwhelmingly supports Darwin’s theory.

A great deal of ink has been spilled by those who try to argue that these worldviews cannot both be true, but in thirty years as a Christian geneticist, I have found no conflict. As an aside, the term theistic evolution confuses many people, and may even suggest that evolution, the noun, is more important than belief in God, the adjective. In The Language of God, I suggest an alternative term, BioLogos. This word is taken from the Greek words Bios (life) and Logos (word), specifically referring to the opening words of the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1).