Posted on 08/07/2006 10:27:04 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
The Human Factor :A man of science face Darwin and the Deity.
by David Klinghoffer
The Language of God A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
by Francis S. Collins
Free Press, 304 pp., $26
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Head of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins is among the country's foremost author ities on genetics, a staunch Darwinist, and a prominent critic of Intelligent Design. He's also an evangelical Christian who dramatically describes the moment he accepted Jesus as his personal savior. If that sounds like it might be a paradox, read on.
Collins was hiking in the Cascade Mountains of western Washington when, as he writes, he found that "the majesty and beauty of God's creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ."
Anyone who doubts that Darwinism may coherently be embraced alongside a faith in biblical religion will be intrigued and challenged by The Language of God. Besides offering a lovely, impassioned, and transparently sincere defense of his own Christian faith, Collins argues that one need not choose between Darwin and God. Indeed, he says, embracing both is the most profound and compelling way of penetrating "that mystery of mysteries," as Darwin called it, the puzzle of the origin of species.
He makes a strong and moving case for religious belief with the part of the book that is a memoir. Collins grew up an agnostic. After medical school, he treated a woman with crippling heart disease who relied on her faith for support. She asked him what he believed about God, and he was disturbed to find that he had no thoughtful reply. Another turning point came when, on a medical mission to Africa, he saved the life of a young farmer suffering from tuberculosis with a risky emergency surgery.
The man thanked Collins afterward and commented, "I get the sense you are wondering why you came here. I have an answer for you. You came here for one reason. You came here for me." The experience set Collins to thinking about the workings of Providence, God's oversight of our lives: "The tears of relief that blurred my vision as I digested his words stemmed from indescribable reassurance--reassurance that there in that strange place for just that one moment, I was in harmony with God's will, bonded together with this young man in a most unlikely but marvelous way."
His later, and historically significant, work on the Human Genome Project has mapped the genetic language, DNA, in which Collins believes God speaks His will for living creatures. Collins does a splendid job of clarifying for the layman what genetic information actually is. He explains how evidence for Darwin's understanding of the evolutionary mechanism may be observed in queer, vestigial features of the genetic code. However, if that mechanism was never at any point guided by a transcendent intelligence--as Darwin in The Origin of Species assumes it was not--this naturally raises the question of what need there was for a Deity as most believers understand Him. God has the right to command us because he created us.
Obviously in the background here, and the foreground too, is the Intelligent Design debate. Darwin and his followers advocate an unguided and purely material mechanism of natural selection operating on random genetic variation. Intelligent Design claims to find positive evidence that the mechanism was, indeed, guided--in short, that the software in the cell (DNA) did not write itself.
Collins's book rejects Intelligent Design as an "argument from personal incredulity." That argument, in his telling, would go this way: We don't understand exactly how the Darwinian mechanism could have produced certain aspects of biological information; therefore, a Designer must have done it. I believe Collins misrepresents Intelligent Design, and it appears that he hasn't followed the latest rounds in the scientific debate. But never mind. Let's assume he's right and ask: If Darwinism is the true resolution of the "mystery of mysteries," where does that leave God?
Something you'll often hear people say is, "Well, Darwinism doesn't mean God isn't the creator. Maybe evolution was programmed into the universe from the start. So He had no need to guide the process." The problem with such thinking is that it's directly contradicted by a major current in Darwinian evolutionary theory. In his book Wonderful Life (1989), the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould demonstrated what he called the "contingency" of life's history. Gould explained what an incredibly lucky break it was that Earth ever cast up intelligent life forms.
Wisely turning away from this doomed approach to showing God's hand here on Planet Darwin, Collins argues that we may discover evidence of His existence and love from looking to our own hearts, and to the heavens. In this he follows the lead of Immanuel Kant, who famously wrote, "Two things fill me with constantly increasing admiration and awe, the longer and more earnestly I reflect on them: the starry heavens without and the Moral Law within." The incredible fine-tuning of the universe's physical laws at the moment of the Big Bang, making existence possible against unimaginably high odds, must indicate that God had us in mind when He created the starry heavens. Collins quotes Stephen Hawking: "It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create us."
But doesn't this sound like an "argument from personal incredulity" of just the kind Collins would attribute to Intelligent Design? Here is Collins on the Big Bang: "I cannot see how nature could have created itself."
The same objection may be lodged against Collins's favorite demonstration of God's being and caring. This comes from the "Moral Law," the sense of right and wrong, of charity and altruism, which he believes to be inborn in the human heart. Where else could it come from, he asks, but from God? "In my view, DNA sequence alone . . . will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal search for God." Darwin, among others, would disagree. In The Descent of Man he advanced an evolutionary explanation of altruism.
In his most satisfying defense of belief, Collins brings forward a clever way of reconciling an unguided evolutionary process with God as the Creator. He points out that God resides beyond the limits of time. Hence, what appears to us as evolution's unpredictable course was, from God's perspective, entirely predictable. It's a neat perspective--except, perhaps, if we ask whether an unguided process of "creation" is still "creation" even if its results were foreseen.
I am surprised that Collins didn't try another approach to harmonizing God and Darwin, an approach I find more promising. This one is brought forward by an Orthodox Jewish scholar who deserves to be more widely known outside Jewish circles. In his own new book, The Challenge of Creation: Judaism's Encounter with Science, Cosmology, and Evolution, Rabbi Natan Slifkin also summarily dismisses Intelligent Design. On the other hand, he offers a sumptuous variety of theological and philosophical approaches to reconciling Darwinian evolution with religious faith. Slifkin's perspective, while endorsing Darwinism, holds that what may appear random and unguided in life's history may not be at all.
His writing is too fascinatingly rich to summarize here, but a hint of this line of thinking may be found in a citation from the book of Proverbs: "[When] the lot is cast in the lap, its entire verdict has been decided by God." Or as a cryptic verse of a famous Sabbath hymn, "L'chah Dodi," suggests, in Slifkin's paraphrase:
The end of the deed is first in thought, which explains that the final result sheds light on the entire process. In this case, it clarifies that when a seemingly meaningless process results in a highly meaningful conclusion, one looks back and sees that the apparent meaninglessness was a mere disguise for the goal, which was actually envisaged at the start of the entire process. This turns Stephen Jay Gould's notion of contingency on its head. The unlikely course of evolutionary history with its ultimate product--us--actually becomes an argument for the emergence of humans having been intended all along. After all, the unlikely thing actually happened. But Slifkin's attempt at harmonizing would likely trouble Darwin, who assumed that the process not only seemed to be unguided but also was unguided.
Can we reconcile God and Darwin without changing the accustomed meaning of one or the other? I remain skeptical. Yet readers owe Francis Collins--and Rabbi Slifkin--a debt of gratitude for making us think more deeply about issues that often get swept away with trite, unexamined formulations designed to give us an excuse for not thinking. The theological and scientific paradoxes will not be resolved in a book review, nor perhaps in any book that has yet been written.
David Klinghoffer, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, is the author, most recently, of Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History.
John 4:24
|4151| spirit |9999| {is} |3588| - |2316| God |2532| and |3588| those |4352| worshiping |0846| Him |1722| in |4151| spirit |2532| and |0225| truth |1163| need |4352| to worship.
The LITERAL translation of the Greek.
No 'a' found.
"Spirit is GOD"
syntax switch...
"GOD is Spirit."
Mans DNA runs the computer(body), mans software is his spirit.. for whatever its worth both are needed the computer and the software... Amazing that this concept escapes the so-called super sophisticated computer people....
HI hosepipe! Call it willful blindness at work. And for why??? Don't bother to ask. For as a wise man once said, "certain motives are beyond the reach of argument."
IMHO, your essay/post is right on the money....
At the very worst it's only the flip side of the inconsistency of Intelligent Design when examined theologically: i.e. only attributing as acts of design those that were apparently accomplished outside of the natural order. That's a bit like playing at a game of sport and only being credited with scores when you cheat.
Oh??
What were the 'rules' of, say, baseball, BEFORE the game was INVENTED?
Acts 17:26-2726. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.
27. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.Romans 5:12-21
12. Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned--
13. for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law.
14. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.
15. But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!
16. Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man's sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification.
17. For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
18. Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men.
19. For just as through the disobedience of the one man, the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.
20. The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more,
21. so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Acts 17:24-26
24. "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. Was LUKE wrong about this? |
What is Spirit or even "a" spirit..?..
Impossible. Deal with that.
(BTW: My posts are qualified, by "I believe...", unlike yours.)
Loosely, that which exists, and can interact with nature, but is not of material form.
I am glad that ID folks are very sincere in their beliefs.
I admire anyone who is that passionate.
I do wish they would go away, but that is not going to happen.
Bahbull thumpers, and ID folks (same thing) are here to stay.
RR was great, but he made a huge mistake embracing religeous nutjobs. Perhaps it was worth it at the time, but today, it is a huge handicap.
These nutjobs believe in noah's ark. They believe the red sea parted. They believe a virgin gave birth. They see Mary in a piece of toast. They believe the bible is infallable.
Taliban christians.
oh, BTW, I agree with that and nothing in my posts negate it.
What kind of material?...
...especially not some YEC cultist who gives credit only to h/h medeieval misinterpretation of Genesis -- and would have you ignore God's other record of His Creation: His created universe, itself.
The Word and Creation are both personal works of Almighty God; they cannot disagree with each other.
Be very wary of anyone who is compelled to discount or distort one to support some ego-driven interpretation of the other.
Only those who diligently study both -- and who acknowledge God's hand in both -- are likely to escape the temptation to either
or to
Either of the above dishonor the Creator.
And both of these kinds of "half-witnesses" are "deceivers" .. of themselves -- and will deceive you -- if you allow them to do your thinking for you.
So you say. But that's not what the Bible says, not in the case of Man anyway. Even though we know that the body of a human develops in the womb according to a (more or less) deterministic DNA "program," the Bible asserts that God is personally, directly and intimately involved in this process. E.g. (among several similar passages):
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be (Psalm 139:13-16).
So here the Bible is attributing God's direct action and intimate involvement in what we know to be a "purely natural" and "programmed" process. If that's so then can't this same non-contradictory coincidence -- of God's action as Creator and "purely natural" causation -- apply in the origin of species as in the origin of individuals?
Yur earthly father created your earthy body, your Spiritual Father created your spiritual body/essence. You have two fathers.. Man is not a bluebird..
For starters, see #30. Also, even though He equipped man with the brains and hands to make the tools to do so -- we haven't managed to figure out that "dark stuff" yet... LOL!!!
Or, I guess you could try "E/C2"... <CHUCKLE...>
For starters, see #30. Also, even though He equipped man with the brains and hands to make the tools to do so -- we haven't managed to figure out that "dark stuff" yet... LOL!!!
Or, I guess you could try "E/C2"... <CHUCKLE...>
Again, not what the Bible (and God himself) says. God says that He, one and the same, created both.
"The Proxy Server could not locate..."
So -- we get two for the price of one... '-)
Semantic correction: there is only One.
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