With my school and work schedule being what it is, I have not had a lot of time for non-school-related reading lately. But I was able to find time to devote to this book by one of the foremost scientific minds of our day.
This book is a must-read for anyone with any interest in the creation/evolution debate-or, for that matter, anyone who has ever struggled with the question of whether or not science and belief in God can coexist. Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project and a devout Christian, takes us through his own spiritual journey and sets out a framework by which we can reconcile science and faith. Collins does a good job of presenting scientific ideas in a manner that does not require a wealth of scientific background knowledge to understand (although at times it gets decidedly cheesy and sentimental–especially the songs that he wrote at various stages in the completion of the Human Genome Project, which appear in the chapter on the human genome). At 234 pages (not including the appendix and notes), this is not a very time-consuming read.
Collins looks at and refutes all of the major arguments posed by skeptics, such as the idea that God is just wish-fulfillment, all of the harm caused by religion, and the questions of why a loving God would allow suffering and how a rational person can believe in miracles. Collins then looks at ways in which the universe points to the existence of God, such as the Big Bang (since nature had a definite beginning, then how could it have been created except by something outside of space and time?), and the Anthropic Principle (the idea that the universe is uniquely tuned to support the rise of human life. If certain constants such as the rate of expansion of the universe or the strength of the strong nuclear force had been just slightly different, then life in the universe would never have been possible. The chance of these constants taking on the right values for life to exist is almost infinitesimal).
Collins then unpacks the specific areas of science that pertain to the study of life. Here is where the battle between belief and nonbelief is being fought most viciously in our day. On one side, you have atheists who claim that Darwin’s theory of evolution provides them with just the mechanism to explain how we got here without any divine assistance. On the other side, you have religious believers who believe that Darwin’s theory is a crock.
Collins refutes those atheists who claim that acceptance of the scientific worldview necessitates atheism. Science is devoted to the study of nature, but God is outside of nature and therefore cannot be proven or disproven by scientific means. Young-earth creationists, prepare to be disappointed: Collins is not in your camp either. The bulk of scientific evidence points to an earth far older than 10,000 years. The Bible was never meant to be used as a scientific textbook. And the idea that God would attempt to deceive us by creating a young earth with the appearance of antiquity flies in the face of everything we know to be true about Him.
Collins then looks at Intelligent Design, a recent scientific movement that has gained a great deal of traction within the evangelical community as a result of objections to Darwin’s theory of evolution raised by Christian lawyer Phillip Johnson, but finds this to be problematic as well. Intelligent Design rests primarily on the concept of “irreducible complexity”-the idea that certain living structures and systems (such as the human eye) are far too complex to have come about by random evolutionary processes, and that they could not have evolved from simpler structures. But Collins finds that many of the examples of “irreducible complexity” that Intelligent Design advocates point to are not irreducible after all. Furthermore, Intelligent Design leads to a “God of the gaps” kind of faith that relies on the divine to explain anything for which there is no satisfactory scientific explanation based on the knowledge we presently have. If later scientific discoveries lead to new naturalistic explanations which fill in the “gaps”, then a “God of the gaps” faith is headed for serious trouble.
Collins ultimately comes down in favor of theistic evolution (he calls it “BioLogos”, a new term which is intended to avoid the baggage associated with the words “theistic” and “evolution”). According to theistic evolution, life began billions of years ago through processes currently unknown to us. Living beings evolved from simple to complex without any divine intervention, and are still evolving even to this day. Theistic evolution is an elegant solution because it only requires one act of special creation by God to generate all animal life on earth, including humans. God stands outside of space and time, so what appears from our end to be a long, drawn-out, chance-driven process is actually something that God knows fully and is intimately involved with all in a single moment. Collins finds this to be the most scientifically rigorous and spiritually satisfying of all the possible options.
Collins then concludes with a description of his own journey to faith in Christ, and a plea for the reader to examine the evidence pointing to Christ and come to faith in Him. The appendix is a discussion of bioethics and the role that the Christian faith plays in many ethical issues concerning present-day science and medicine.
This book has forced me to look honestly at my own views regarding the origins of life. My main pushback to the idea of theistic evolution is that I cannot accept that a righteous and loving God would use a process requiring billions of years of selection, competition, and the death of animals and species deemed unfit for survival, to create human beings in His image.
So here is where I come down: I cannot accept evolution because of the sheer improbability of creating the proteins required for just the simplest theoretical life forms by chance processes. But if God is involved, then possibly it could have occurred within the five billion years accepted by the scientific community as the age of the earth. The Bible is not a scientific textbook, and any proper reading of the creation accounts in Genesis is at least open to the possibility that the “six days” of creation are in fact stretched out over a much longer period. Perhaps there was not a special act of creation for every single plant and animal species on the earth, but the Bible seems to indicate that the creation of humans, or at least the infusion of humans with what we refer to as the soul, was a special act of creation apart from the creation of the animals.
If you have any interest at all in the debate between creation and evolution, or more generally with the question of how (or if) science and faith in God can be reconciled, then I would strongly recommend this book. Prepare to be challenged, whether you are a scientist of the atheistic/materialistic persuasion, a Christian of the young-earth creationist variety, or anyone in between.
