The Human Factor: A man of science face Darwin and the Deity(Book by Head of Human Genome Project)

Weekly Standard ^ | 08/06/2006 | David Klinghoffer

[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

-------------------------------------

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.

[hosepipe]

[ Again, not what the Bible (and God himself) says. God says that He, one and the same, created both. ]

He did create Adam(Eve).. that was enough..

[hosepipe]

[ we haven't managed to figure out that "dark stuff" yet... LOL!!! ]

True... dark energy/matter is a mystery...

[Just mythoughts]

Well John 1:1 says "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

2. The same was in the beginning with God.

3. All thing were made by Him; and without Him was not any thing made that was made.

4. In Him was life; and the life was the light of men.

5. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

Genesis 1:1 declares only "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

No time is given to this.

Now I am not sure what you mean when you say "God's other record of His Creation: His created universe, itself.

[Mark Felton]

"What kind of material?..."

It is not made of matter(material), it has no mass, but can influence matter, the material world.

I'm sure there are more, supernatural, definitions.

[Mark Felton]

". dark energy/matter is a mystery..."

It is debateable that dark matter exists at all.

[Mark Felton]

Science today more than ever is coming closer to the Bible.

Many scientist have been astounded by the implications of the accelerating galaxies, (there was only ONE big bang) and the unnatural harmony seen in string theory and the sheer improbnability of the constants in nature to be of such precise values that the slightest variation in any of a dozen or so such constants would mean life could not exist.

It has driven scientists, such as hawking even, to conceptualize that there may be an infinite number of universes and ours is the one that just happens to chieve the right values.

Because the probability of otherwise randonmly arriving at those values approache3s infinity, or God did it. (which is the more probable and more rational explanation anyway)

[betty boop]

Loosely, that which exists, and can interact with nature, but is not of material form.

Sounds good to me Mark Felton, "loosely speaking." What say you, hosepipe?

[Matchett-PI]

Actually the verse in John says "God is A spirit"... forgot to mention, the above verses ar "King James" ~ Mark Felton

The King James doesn't give a good rendering. For instance, here are a couple (out of many) of items you may want to read regarding the subject:

IS GOD A SPIRIT?
http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:WbuXhZfWckIJ:www.nccg.org/141Art-GodSpirit.html+god+a+spirit+%3F&hl=en&lr=&strip=0

[snip]

"..But it says in John 4:24 that 'God is a spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and truth!'", is the immediate response.

But is that what the text actually says?

God is Spiritual in Nature (John 4:24)

Almost without exception, every translation of John 4:24 leaves the clear impression that God is a spirit -- an immaterial, untouchable Being. But what is the warranty for such a translation? And is not this translation inspired by preconceived doctrine rather than by a proper rendering of the Greek?

The original Greek says pneuma ho theos which literally translated is: "God is spirit", or better still, "God is spiritual in nature", the noun being anarthrous (without the definite article "a").

We know that this is the correct translation because other New Testament passages use the same grammatical construction. 1 John 1:5 is correctly translated as, "God is light" in virtually every Bible version. Similarly, 1 John 4:8 is rendered, "God is love."

But if the translators had followed the faulty translation of John 4:2 which they incorrectly rendered as "God is a spirit", then they ought to have rendered 1 John 1:5 and 1 John 4:8 as: "God is a light", and "God is a species of love", respectively, which does violence to Greek grammar and is plainly nonsense.

The Context of John 4:24

John 4:24 must further be seen in context. Though used almost universally by Christians as a proof text that God is a formless, non-material Spirit Being, these words of Jesus were not given to define God's form or substance but to reveal His spiritual nature. These words were given in reply to a question by a Samartian woman who supposed that the true God could only be worshipped in a Temple of stone and wood. To correct her essentially materialist view of worship, Jesus declared that God the Father, being spiritual by nature, can only be worshipped "in spirit and in truth" (John 4:23). Thus true worship does not require physical devices like temples, church buildings, wooden crosses, or any of the apparatus that was used by the Jews in their temple -- true worship is to make contact with God through the spirit in man, for God is Himself spiritual by nature.

There is a real diference between "a spirit" and "spiritual". A man may be spiritual whether he has a physical body or not, because the word defines his nature, not his form or substance. Thus Abraham, who is a spirit in Paradise (the spirit world), is spiritual; but when he was on earth in right relationship with God he was also spiritual. Thus to be spiritual is not to indicate whether the person possesses a physical body or not.


[snip]

*
God’s Spirituality by John M. Frame
http://www.frame-poythress.org/frame_articles/spirituality.htm

[snip]

"..We will, of course, have much more to say later about the Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity. But in this section I am interested in spirit or spirituality as an attribute of God, as in John 4:24, where Jesus says, “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth." Here Jesus is, I believe, not referring specifically to the Holy Spirit, but to spirituality as an attribute of the triune God. We shall see, however, that there is a close relation between the qualities of the Holy Spirit and the spirituality of the Triune God. .." [snip]

[Matchett-PI]

"A further clarification: Adam was not created; his physical body was made from pre-existing (created) materials ("formed from the dust of the earth"...)."

Correct. In fact, I understand the word dust should have been more properly translated "slime", since the latest scholarship says that is a more accurate "sense" of the word.

[Stultis]

He did create Adam(Eve).. that was enough..

Again, The Bible says differently. He creates each generation of Israel. He creates each individual human being including their physical bodies, knitting them together (of bone and sinew), forming their inward parts, and etc.

The Bible has God directly involved in other "purely natural" phenomena as well. For instance the book of Amos says that God "creates the wind". Here the verb, although a different tense, is the same used in Genesis (which fundamentalists sometimes claim only refers to creation ex nihilo.

[Stultis]

Loosely, that which exists, and can interact with nature, but is not of material form.

Sounds good to me Mark Felton, "loosely speaking." What say you, hosepipe?

Um, there are lots of natural entities that are "not of material form" but interact with (and are part of) nature. Are we to say that a gravitational field, for instance, is a spirit???

[TXnMA]

Are we to say that a gravitational field, for instance, is a spirit??

~~~~~~

We now see mass (material) and energy as interchangeable, That's why in #56, I tossed in,

"Or, I guess you could try "E/C²"... "

[hosepipe]

[ Again, The Bible says differently. He creates each generation of Israel. ]

If so, Gods people maker must've vapor locked when Noam Chomsky was spat out..

[RussP]

>tophat -- read his book. He takes issue with Intelligent
>Design (the movement and some of its thinking.) He has no
>issue with (and affirms) the Creator as an intelligent >designer. When you read the book, as opposed to a review, >you can see that he presents of valid argument. He mainly >attacks the Intelligent Design movement from a "God of the >Gaps" standpoint.

If you think that "God of the Gaps" is the main argument of ID, then I think you fundamentally misunderstand ID. That's the evolutionist caricature of ID.

[TXnMA]

Now I am not sure what you mean when you say "God's other record of His Creation: His created universe, itself.

~~~~~~

When God (including Jesus) provided his brief (but, we now know, amazingly accurate) outline description of His Creation for man to record as Scripture,

• written language was in its earliest, formative stages.
• man could only see what his unaided eyes could discern. (Do you know how many galaxies Moses could see on a dark, clear night?)
• but...He commanded and equipped man to "have dominion over" His creation. And that equipment includes the intellect and the curiosity and the tool-making ability to observe and understand all aspects of what He created.

  ---

  Moses may well have been able to admire this marvel of God's Creation:

  

  But, he diden't have a scanning electron microscope so he could marvel at the intricacy of its pollen:

  

  Moses could see the same heavens you see when you look up at at the night sky. But with our modern tools, we can see majestic vistas of God's created Universe that Moses had no idea even existed:

  

  And moses probably never knew that preserved records of long-dead creatures lay in the rocks beneath his feet

  

  But they are all part of God's Creation and are just as valid a testament to His mighty works as is man himself.

  ---

  All of the above are "pages" from "God's other record of His Creation: His created universe, itself." We call the study of it, "science".

  And that revealed "Book" is just as much His as is His Written Word. For, as John 1:3 says,

  All things were made by Him; and without Him was not any thing made that was made."

  You cannot trust God's written Book without trusting His revealed "Book", for both are His -- and both are absolutely true.

  Any man who accepts the truth of either one and denies the other calls God Himself a liar. And any interpretation of one Book that leads to discomfort with or the need to deny the other "Book" is a sure sign that the Deceiver is at work...

  (Read John 1:1, and you will understand, why, in Genesis God said, "Let us make man in our image".)

[hosepipe]

[ Any man who accepts the truth of either one and denies the other calls God Himself a liar. ]

I don't recieve that.. To me the same ones call God a "fool"..
Big difference.. And those that follow "the fool", morons..
Thereby raising themselves up to be "smart"... or "smarter"..

Professing themselves to wise become fools"... as scripture says.. Logic can be reciprocal..

[TXnMA]

LOL!! I would not want to have to answer to Almighty God for having called Him either a "fool" or a "liar".

[MHGinTN]

Or, I guess you could try "E/C2"... Would a positron/electron do, or would you prefer entangled phtons?

[TXnMA]

My point was that trying to define "Sprit" in terms of physics or materials science as we know it -- even subatomic particle physics -- is a task that is beyond my grasp... ;-)

[Just mythoughts]

Well I will agree that Moses did not have a *scanning electron microscope*, however if the Heavenly Father had need for Moses to see the intricacy of pollen a scanning electron microscope would not have been required.

There was a whole lot of instruction regarding 'kind after kind' to not think that Moses was given a lesson in nature, however elementary it might have been.

Brings to mind Jeremiah 18.

I also would not agree that Moses was not aware of 'fossils' coming from an age before considering some of the things he penned. The translations we have today do not always give we the modern reader the full design given in the original Hebrew.

I also find that the evidence turned up on this earth does not disagree with what the scripture says.