The Scientist & God

Here's another scientist, Francis Collins, head of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, and one of the leaders who helped "crack" the human genome code, who says there is a rational basis for belief in a creator. He sees it in the complexity of DNA.

“When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion-letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can’t survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe."

He should know better: the book just assembled itself. The million monkeys will eventually type Hamlet, oh yes, they will.

Comments

[Joe McFaul]

Not remarkable.

and no friend of the Discovery Institute's verison of Intelligent Design, either:

"Among Collins’s most controversial beliefs is that of “theistic evolution”, which claims natural selection is the tool that God chose to create man."

Phillip Johnson says:

"If theistic evolutionists broadcast the message that evolution as they understand it is harmless to theistic religion, they are misleading their
constituents unless they add a clear warning that the version of evolution advocated by the entire body of mainstream science is something else altogether. That warning is never clearly delivered, however, because the main point of theistic evolution is to preserve peace with the mainstream scientific community. The theistic evolutionists therefore unwitting serve the purposes of the scientific naturalists, by helping persuade the religious community to lower its guard against the incursion of naturalism."

http://www.equip.org/free/DE382.htm

[Tom G]

He remains a friend at least of teleology. In a lecture at the National Faculty Leadership Conference today, he stated the dismayed embarrassment scientists felt when they discovered the mustard weed has about 25,000 protein-encoding genes, compared to our 19,000 or so. Then with his ever-present twinkle in his eye, he said, "the mustard weed, however, has not encoded its own genome."

In the context there, he was pointing to the special place humans have in creation.

I have my own problems with theistic evolution, but I appreciate the support he lends to belief in God as the true creator.

[Bobby Winters]

Has any one else noted the practice of bringing science in to shore up the walls of religion? This disturbs me because science is unprepared to do this. Science concerns itself with the natural and God is above nature. While God does interact with--and is indeed the author of--nature, He will always be beyond the reach of science.

It should be no surprise to anyone if some scientists let their profession lead them to unbelief. A miner who worked from before dawn until after dusk in the mines might conclude the sun didn't exist.

[Gene Godbold]

When I was in grad school in biochemistry at Chapel Hill in the early 1990s, Francis Collins visited for a lecture. (He had gained fame as discoverer of the gene that is mutated in cystic fibrosis and was the co-discoverer of the gene that is mutated in neurofibromatosis. UNC had one of the country's strongest research programs in cystic fibrosis then and his daughter was in med school--at UNC--at the time.) With a number of other grad students, I went to lunch with him and he was unfailingly gracious. We also talked a bit about God, Jesus, and evolution. At least at that point, he seemed open to accounts other than dogmatic Darwinism.

In relation to Mr. Winter's charge of science shoring up the walls of religion. I strongly believe, on what I think is Biblical evidence, that God's creation is one. His plan to rescue lost mankind is also irrevocably linked to what we call the natural order. The natural/supernatural distinction is something that we make and not something that God makes. God is certainly transcendent from his creation, but He's also immanent. God is indissolubly linked with His creation through the incarnation of His only begotten Son. Even this cursed universe, subject to vanity, is still recognizable as being created and sustained by God. Through the nexus that God has made with creation, it will all be put to rights in the end. And this scientist is looking forward to seeing what sort of "laws" the new creation will have.

[Douglas]

I hear a lot more about scientists who are led to belief in God through their work than the reverse.

I do remember reading one anecdote about an apparently prominent biochemist who was stubborn in his atheism. He was preparing to scrap the work of a decade because the odds of random assembly that he had come up with were just too long.

Rather than acknowledge the obvious, he was redoing years of work to try and shorten the odds in favor of autogenesis!

[Gene Godbold]

Dear Tom,
Incidentally, Arabidopsis thaliana does have ~25,000 genes and so do we. Fruit flies have ~19,000, nematode worms ~13,000; yeast ~5000; the largest virus and the smallest bacteria several hundred.

The way "genes" (the designation is not unequivocal) are transcribed and translated into proteins in eukaryotes, however, is a very complex process. The best evidence indicates that we have many times the number of unique proteins as we have genes. Elizabeth Pennisi (I think) has an interesting news-y article on this in the last couple months of the journal Science (if you care) :-).

[Bobby Winters]

Mr. Gobbold is correct that God is there for those who will see. God's presents oozes from every pore of the universe.

But to recognize it isn't science, it is a manifestation of previenient grace.

As a professor of mathematics who interacts with scientists on a regular basis, I so know Godly scientists, but I have also learned that truly "there is none so blind as one who will not see."

[Richard Euson]

About those monkeys...

I recall that several years ago a zoo in Great Britain (Plymouth?) tried an experiment in which computers with keyboards (Who sells typewriters anymore?) were placed in the chimpanzee exhibit.

After several days the experiment was halted because (1) the monkey's abused the equipment in various ways, including smearing monkey poop all over the keyboards, and (2) nothing recognizable had been typed into the computers anyway.

So, even assuming that typewriters or something similar should spontaneously evolve in physical and temporal proximity to chimpanzees in the wild, who's going to keep the typewriters in good repair and supply new ribbons and paper while waiting for Bonzo to produce "Paradise Lost"?

I'm no fan of shoring up the Bible with science, either. But I think it's appropriate to ask those who pronounce on the origins of life to specify the probabilistic boundaries that would serve as a disproof of Darwinism.

One last thought about those monkeys: Even if they did somehow manage to churn out The Declaration of Independence, would we (knowing how it was produced) construe the text as meaning anything?

[Bobby Winters]

>>>I'm no fan of shoring up the Bible with science, either. But I think it's appropriate to ask those who pronounce on the origins of life to specify the probabilistic boundaries that would serve as a disproof of Darwinism.<<<

That gets to the heart of it. A friend of mine was reading a book of philosophy (I think by Quine) and put an "E" in the margin every time evolution was invoked as a deus ex mechina for whatever questions was left unanswered. Evolution itself can become a God of the gaps, as it were.

Let me not mislead. I do believe in evolution; I believe in creation. I don't see a conflict, but you think there is one, you have to convince men.