Excerpts from an interview at Salon.com with Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, about his religious beliefs (he's an evangelical Christian), which he discusses in his new book, "The Language of God."
..."The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome," he writes. "He can be worshiped in the cathedral or in the laboratory."... S: You've said you were once an "obnoxious atheist." What changed you? Why did you turn to religion? C: I became an atheist because as a graduate student studying quantum physics, life seemed to be reducible to second-order differential equations. Mathematics, chemistry and physics had it all. And I didn't see any need to go beyond that. Frankly, I was at a point in my young life where it was convenient for me to not have to deal with a God. I kind of liked being in charge myself. But then I went to medical school, and I watched people who were suffering from terrible diseases. And one of my patients, after telling me about her faith and how it supported her through her terrible heart pain, turned to me and said, "What about you? What do you believe?" And I stuttered and stammered and felt the color rise in my face, and said, "Well, I don't think I believe in anything." But it suddenly seemed like a very thin answer. And that was unsettling. I was a scientist who was supposed to draw conclusions from the evidence and I realized at that moment that I'd never really looked at the evidence for and against the possibility of God. S: In your book you describe this as a "thoroughly terrifying experience." C: It was. It was like my worldview was suddenly under attack. So I set about reading about the various world religions, but I didn't understand their concepts and their various dogmas. So I went down the street and met with a Methodist minister in this little town in North Carolina and asked him a number of blasphemous questions. And he smiled and answered a few them but said, "You know, I think you'd learn a lot if you'd read this book on my shelf. It was written by somebody who has traveled the same path -- a scholar who was an atheist at Oxford and tried to figure out whether there was truth or not to religion." The book was "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis. And within the first three pages, I realized that my arguments against faith were those of a schoolboy. S: So that one book totally changed your life? C: Absolutely. It was as if he was reading my mind. As I read his arguments about the Moral Law -- the knowledge of right and wrong, which makes no sense from the perspective of basic evolution and biology but makes great sense as a signpost to God -- I began to realize the truth of what he was saying. Ultimately, I realized I couldn't go back to where I was. I could never again say atheism is the only logical choice for a scientifically trained person.... S: You and I have grown up with certain moral lessons. We've been told that we should help people. This is the right thing to do. Couldn't you argue that doing good and helping people is just part of cultural evolution? C: You could argue that, but if it was just a cultural tradition, you ought to be able to find some cultures where it is not present. If you read the appendix of C.S. Lewis' wonderful book "The Abolition of Man," he comes to the conclusion that there is this wonderful, monotonous repetition of morals across the world and across history. You are to reach out to those who are less fortunate. You are to aid the widow, you are to help the orphan. All of these altruistic things seem to be a universal feature of human beings. And yet, they're a scandal to evolutionary biology because they motivate people to do things that are exactly the opposite of what evolution would require... S: How can you as a scientist accept some of these ideas in the Bible that cut so directly against the laws of nature? C: I have no trouble at all. Again, the big decision is, do you believe in God? If you believe in God, and if God is more than nature, then there's no reason that God could not stage an invasion into the natural world, which -- to our limited perspective -- would appear to be a miracle. S: And yet, this does seem to be a case where religion and science are in fundamental conflict. Everything we know from science says this is not possible. The Virgin Birth is not possible. The resurrection of a dead person -- no matter how special -- is not possible. It's never happened in the history of the world, as far as we know. C: Again, that would be the perspective if one had decided upfront that the only worldview that can be brought to bear on any circumstance is the scientific one. In that situation, all miracles have to be impossible. If, on the other hand, you're willing to accept the spiritual worldview, then in certain rare circumstances -- I don't think they should be common -- the miraculous could have a non-zero probability.... http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/08/07/collins/index.html To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
