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<< Of course if the author was speaking of "creation science", then that is an oxymoron ... >>

He's not as literal on Genesis as we'd like, but he is a Christian and a creationist, and he blows away the argument that non-evolutionists are handicapped in science.

http://www.counterbalance.com/bio/coll-body.html

Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., is a physician-geneticist and the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH. In that role he oversees a fifteen year project aimed at mapping and sequencing all of the human DNA by the year 2005. Many consider this the most important scientific undertaking of our time. The project is currently running ahead of schedule and under budget.

X: Of course it was ahead of schedule and under budget - Dr. Collins is a *creationist*. He was not handicapped by evolutionary assumptions.

http://www.scienceshorts.com/FrancisCollins.html

<< Of special interest is Dr. Collins’ strong Christian commitment. Although growing up in a church-going family, Dr. Collins was quite boldly atheistic while a young adult. Personal reflection on issues of faith, significantly aided by the writings of C. S. Lewis, brought him to the point of conviction of the truthfulness of Christian truth claims. He states that his Christian commitment is "the most important organizing principle in my life" (www.pbs.org/faithandreason/transcript/coll-body.html). >>

More from http://www.counterbalance.com/bio/coll-body.html

After a residency and chief residency in internal medicine in Chapel Hill, he returned to Yale for a fellowship in human genetics, where he worked on methods of crossing large stretches of DNA to identify disease genes. He continued to develop these ideas after joining the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1984. This approach, for which he later coined the term positional cloning, has developed into a powerful component of modern molecular genetics, as it allows the identification of disease genes for almost any condition, without knowing ahead of time what the functional abnormality might be.

Together with Lap-Chee Tsui and Jack Riordan of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, his research team identified the gene for cystic fibrosis using this strategy in 1989. That was followed by his group's identification of the neurofibromatosis gene in 1990, and a successful collaborative effort to identify the gene for Huntington disease in 1993.

X: How could he ever have accomplished all this? Doesn't he know that evolution is the unifying factor of all sciences? Isn't he aware that genetic disease resistance proves evolution and nothing can be accomplished in genetics without an evolutionary paradigm?

http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/transcript/coll-body.html

QUESTION: What is your own faith and religious background?

MR. COLLINS: I was not raised in a particularly religious household. I went to church, but it was mostly to learn music, which was a good place to learn music. But I didn't learn a whole lot about theology. And for quite a while, in my early 20s, I was a pretty obnoxious atheist. Then at the age of 27, after a good deal of intellectual debating with myself about the plausibility of faith, and particularly with strong influence from C.S. Lewis, I became convinced that this was a decision I wanted to make. And I became, by choice, a Christian, a serious Christian, who believes that faith is not something that you just do on Sunday, but that if it makes any sense at all, it's part of your whole life. It's the most important organizing principle in my life.

QUESTION: As a scientist, have you ever found that your faith has conflicted with your scientific work?

MR. COLLINS: I actually do not believe that there are any collisions between what I believe as a Christian, and what I know and have learned about as a scientist. I think there's a broad perception that that's the case, and that’s what scares many scientists away from a serious consideration of faith. But, unless one chooses to make an absolutely literal interpretation of the book of Genesis and the story of creation -- which I believe is not a choice that people made even before science came along in the last century to cast some doubt upon the timing of the creation events -- other than that I am not aware of any reasons why one cannot be a completely dedicated person of faith who believes that God inspired the writings in the Bible, and also be a rigorous, intellectually completely honest scientist, who does not accept things about the natural world until they're proven. ... For me, as a person of faith, that moment of discovery has an additional dimension. It's appreciating something, realizing something, knowing something that up until then no human had known - but God knew it. And there is an intricacy and an elegance in the nature of biology, particularly when it comes to the information carrying capacity of DNA, which is rather awesome. And so, in a way, perhaps, those moments of discovery also become moments of worship, moments of appreciation, of the incredible intricacies and beauty of biology, of the world, of life. And, therefore, an appreciation of God as the creator.

QUESTION: Richard Dawkins has raised the question that if God created the universe, then how come he seems to have disappeared from the universe?

MR. COLLINS: I'm sorry that God has disappeared for Richard Dawkins. He's not disappeared for me. I think you can make an argument that if God made himself so obvious, so known, so easily interpretable in daily events, then the whole concept of faith and of making a personal decision about where you stand would be pretty meaningless.

Here's a quote from another interview with this same guy. I kinda like him. He seems to find a very nice balance between his faith and scientific evidence. I don't know what made you think he was a creationist or had anything against evolution. I may disagree with him on the God-motivated evolution thing, but it doesn't blatantly contradict any current evidence and if it allows him to reconcile faith and evolution, fine.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/transcripts/collins.html

ABERNETHY: What do you say to your fellow Christians who say, "Evolution is just a theory, and I can't put that together with my idea of a creator God"?

COLLINS: Well, evolution is a theory. It's a very compelling one. As somebody who studies DNA, the fact that we are 98.4 percent identical at the DNA level to a chimpanzee, it's pretty hard to ignore the fact that when I am studying a particular gene, I can go to the mouse and find it's the similar gene, and it's 90 percent the same. It's certainly compatible with the theory of evolution, although it will always be a theory that we cannot actually prove. I'm a theistic evolutionist. I take the view that God, in His wisdom, used evolution as His creative scheme. I don't see why that's such a bad idea. That's pretty amazingly creative on His part. And what is wrong with that as a way of putting together in a synthetic way the view of God who is interested in creating a group of individuals that He can have fellowship with -- us? Why is evolution not an appropriate way to get to that goal? I don't see a problem with that. The only problems that get put forward are by those who would interpret Genesis 1 in a very literal way. And that interpretation in many ways is a -- is a modern one. Saint Augustine in 400 AD, without any reasons to try to be an apologist to Charles Darwin, agreed that that was not a particularly appropriate way to interpret the words that are written in that first chapter of the Bible.