Before I begin, I should say that the posts on this blog do not necessarily reflect the thoughts and beliefs of the congregation of First Presbyterian Church in Washington Court House, Ohio. They are my thoughts and my beliefs.
I won’t give you a full biography of Dr. Francis Collins. You can read that in his book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, which I wholeheartedly recommend. All you really need to know at this point is that he is the director of the National Institutes of Health, he was the director of the Human Genome Project, and he led the studies that discovered the genetic abnormalities that cause Cystic Fibrosis and Huntington’s Disease. He is one of the top medical scientists in the United States and the entire world. He is also a Christian. He even calls himself an Evangelical Christian. Because he is a top scientist and a Christian he is very interested and involved in trying to build bridges between serious modern Science and the Christian faith.
Because Dr. Collins is a Christian, he believes that human beings are sinful and that Jesus Christ is the risen Lord and Savior through whom reconciliation with God has come. He believes in repentance and forgiveness and that the Scriptures are the inspired Word of God. However, because he is a scientist and because he helped discover much of the genetic evidence for it, he knows better than anyone that the evidence for evolution is so incredibly overwhelming that for anyone to deny the strong likelihood of the truth of it is like a child covering her eyes and actually believing that because she cannot see the people around her anymore that they are no longer there. Dr. Collins is able to hold his strong orthodox Christian faith and his brilliant scientific mind and the overwhelming evidence for evolution together, and he feels it makes his faith even stronger. This is why Dr. Francis Collins is one of my heroes.
If you don’t already know this, I’m sorry to break it to you but the scientific evidence that the Earth is 4.54 billion years old is overwhelming. In fact, the Big Bang Theory that helps explain this was developed and championed by a Christian physicist, the Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre. The geological evidence for common descent and the changing of species over time is also overwhelming. The genetic evidence, especially after the mapping of the human genome, is incredibly overwhelming in favor of evolution. The fossil record, species distribution, comparative anatomy, developmental similarities, and comparative biochemistry/physiology all show overwhelming evidence in favor of evolution. To deny this is really to reject the validity of science. Dr. Collins’s good friend, the physicist Dr. Karl Giberson (who is also a Christian) in his book Saving Darwin: How to be Christian and Believe in Evolution, writes, “Absent evolution, thousands of patterns in nature become completely mysterious, without explanation. Creationism offers virtually no alternative explanations, and most of its ‘evidence’ is nothing more than a catalog of small details that don’t fit neatly into the standard evolutionary scenario. Rejecting evolution on the basis of these small details, however, would be like abandoning modern medicine because it can’t cure every illness or declaring that meteorology is not a science because weather forecasts are sometimes unrealiable.” Many creationist and Intelligent Design arguments are based off of 19th century information and even the most modern ones have trouble dealing with the scientific findings of the last 10-20 years.
Dr. Collins has taken it upon himself to stand in the gap between the extremists in the world of atheistic science (like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens) and the extremists in the world of strict Biblical literalism. Dr. Collins has founded an organization called Biologos. Through Biologos, Dr. Collins and a large number of serious scientists who are also faithful Christians and theologians who also accept the evidence for evolution, are trying to give a new option to those who think that in order to respect modern science that you have to be an atheist or agnostic and to those who say that in order to be a faithful Christian you have to believe in a literal reading (what many biblical scholars would call “misreading”) of the first chapters of Genesis, which means you must reject modern science. Dr. Collins and the other scientists and theologians at Biologos say, “That is not true! You can accept all the overwhelming scientific evidence for common descent and species changing over time and still have a relationship with Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. These are not mutually exclusive categories!" That’s why he’s one of my heroes. I encourage you to go to www.biologos.org to explore this amazing website.
Now, does this cause some problems for biblical interpretation and theology? Sure it does, but so did finding out that the Earth orbited the sun instead of the other way around. It causes us to look at the Word of God a little differently in parts, but evolution doesn’t really negate anything that someone would believe who’d been reading the Scriptures in ways that allow the Scriptures to say what they want to say instead of what we want them to say. Biblical scholar and theologian Peter Enns is extraordinarily helpful in this area. Accepting the overwhelming evidence for evolution doesn’t negate the fact that people still sin and that people still die. It doesn’t negate human uniqueness, the image of God, or the existence of a soul. It doesn’t negate our need for God or our need to be reconciled with God through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. As Pope John Paul II declared in 1996, "New findings lead us toward recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis... If the origin of the human body comes through living matter which existed previously, the spiritual soul is created directly by God." C.S. Lewis also addresses this in his book The Problem of Pain in the chapter entitled “The Fall of Man.” C.S. Lewis, the hero of many Evangelical Christians, a man who lived and died decades before the strongest evidence of evolution had ever been found, had no problem with holding evolution and Christian faith together. Also, my favorite contemporary theologians like N.T. Wright, Peter Enns, and Alister McGrath have no problem with evolution and Christian faith going together. Evolution doesn’t tell us who created us, why we exist, or what happens after we die. It just describes what the overwhelming evidence shows and says, “According to the evidence, this is how we got here.” Evolution, when properly understood is descriptive, not prescriptive.
Way before C.S. Lewis, St. Augustine, who lived in the 400’s, warned against overly literal interpretations of the beginning of Genesis and chastised his contemporaries for using the Bible to embarrass the Church by opposing scientific knowledge supported by ample evidence. Also, Dr. Collins, in The Language of God, tells us about how “Benjamin Warfield, a conservative Protestant theologian in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century… wrote, 'We must not, then, as Christians, assume an attitude of antagonism toward the truths of reason, or the truths of philosophy, or the truths of science, or the truths of history, or the truths of criticism. As children of the light, we must be careful to keep ourselves open to every ray of light. Let us, then, cultivate an attitude of courage as over against the investigations of the day. None should be more zealous in them than we. None should be more quick to discern truth in every field, more hospitable to receive it, and more loyal to follow it, whithersoever it leads.'”
We need to note, however, that whether or not we believe in a literal six-day creation, in some version of the Intelligent Design idea, or in what is called Theistic Evolution (Collins calls it "Biologos"), this is not a “salvation issue.” As Paul writes in Romans,
"The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart,” that is, the word of faith we are proclaiming: That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. As the Scripture says, “Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame.” For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”However, while I do not think that views held on the origins of the universe and humanity have any bearing on the salvation of the person holding that view, I do feel, along with St. Augustine, Francis Collins, and I would imagine many of the scientists and theologians with BioLogos that a stubborn unwillingness to accept the overwhelming evidence of every pertinent branch of science in favor of the views of the movements known as Creationism or Intelligent Design does actually endanger the salvation of others because for many non-Christians it causes an unnecessary barrier between an intelligent informed person and faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. I firmly believe that creationism and places like the Creation Museum in Kentucky with its exhibits of dinosaurs and human beings living together do not hurt science one bit because no one who knows anything about science takes them seriously. What it does hurt, however, is the Christian faith. Because of that I want nothing to do with Creationism and the Creation Museum or Intelligent Design and the Discovery Institute.
Here’s what St. Augustine wrote 1,600 years ago,
“Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for a [non-Christian] to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics [he’s been writing about the natural sciences]; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show a vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but the people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books on matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learned from experience in light of reason?”
But what happens if evolution is proved wrong? That's a very important question. First of all, I think we do need to admit that with evolution we're not talking about simple observational evidence like there was for the sun orbiting the earth or a flat earth; with evolution we're talking about a hard independently verified scientific consensus that continues to be strengthened with every new finding in many different areas of science. Since the evidence is so overwhelming, evolution being proved wrong is pretty unlikely so don't get your hopes up. But even if evolution was proved wrong then that wouldn’t affect my Christian faith one bit. My faith isn’t in evolution. My faith isn't in science. My faith isn't in religion either. My faith isn't in a literalistic interpretation of the God-inspired ancient liturgical poem known as Genesis 1 either. My faith is in the Triune God, revealed to us most fully in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and through the inspired Word of God, even in the parts that shouldn't be interpreted literally. I have a relationship with this God. As mentioned earlier, evolution doesn’t tell us the who, the why, or the what now. The Scriptures do tell us these things and so does our Lord Jesus. I just think, like Dr. Collins, that it doesn’t make sense for Christians to put their heads in the sand when the evidence for common descent and the changing of species over time, when it is looked at thoroughly, scientifically, and with a realization that wherever the evidence leads cannot disprove the essentials of the Christian faith, is so incredibly overwhelming in its description of how we got here that it should not be denied. This isn't something worth being stubborn about. I am very stubborn about the who, the why, and the what now, but to me, in being stubborn about the how (the mechanism used for human origins) it just makes us look ignorant in ways that St. Augustine warned us about 1,600 years ago. If someone wants to think I'm ignorant because I believe in Jesus' resurrection then that's fine. According to the Scriptures, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is both a salvation issue and (unlike the mechanics for human origins) something that is outside the realm of what can be studied and described by science. Even though Biblical interpretation and theology would be easier if it wasn't so, I just think that the evidence for evolution is way too overwhelming to deny anymore. We simply have to deal with it. Dr. Collins has been a great help to me in that.
In Philippians 4:8, the Apostle Paul writes, “Finally, brothers [and sisters], whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things.” Please consider reading The Language of God by my hero Francis Collins and please check out www.biologos.org to see if you find this synthesis between contemporary science and orthodox Christian faith to be as true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy as I do.
Grace and Peace to You in the Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ,
Pastor Everett
