Opus 2025-069: Out of Touch

I am in the process of reading a book by Francis Collins called The Language of God.  Collins was the leader of the Human Genome Project that mapped the human DNA.  He is a real scientist and a Christian believer.  I am about two-thirds through and am still waiting for the title to be realized.  Collins is a genuine believer in Jesus.  He also is totally committed to the theory of evolution in all of its random selection.  I have no real problem with that but it seems a bit inconsistent.  To both believe in random selection and that God created the heavens and the earth is uncomfortable at best.  The problem is not in the idea of evolving but in the guidance of only chance.

I also question if he is paying attention.  Collins makes this statement,

“No serious biologist today doubts the theory of evolution to explain the marvelous complexity and diversity of life.  In fact, the relatedness of all species through the mechanism of evolution is such a profound foundation for the understanding of all biology that it is difficult to imagine how one would study live without it.”  page 99

Stephen Meyer has this to say in his prologue,

“The technical literature in biology is now replete with world-class biologists routinely expressing doubts about various aspects of neo-Darwinian theory, and especially about its central tenet, namely, the alleged creative power of the natural selection and mutation mechanism.”  page x

Both cannot be accurate statements.

At first I thought that Collins was just writing too early to know these little details.  Then I checked a passage in a novel by Michael Crichton called The Lost World.

“First of all, there’s a time problem.  A single bacterium - the earliest form of life - has two thousand enzymes.  Scientists have estimated how long it would take to randomly assemble those enzymes from a primordial soup.  Estimates run from forty billion years to one hundred billion years.  But the earth is only four billion years old.  So, chance alone seems too slow.” page 226-7

I concede that this is a novel but it is a statement based on a knowledge of the field of evolution.  Both of the statements by Meyer and Crichton are consistent with the other books and articles I have read on the subject.  Collins writes like a philosophy professor trying to sound like a scientist after watching a few You Tubes.  Yet I know he is a serious scientist and a genuine believer.  Both Collins and Meyer are presenting reasons to believe in God.  Crichton, on the same page, attacks the idea that there is even intelligent design.  

Be thoughtful.  Read with your mind turned on.  Make sure that you don’t get a petrified mind but also don’t be naive.  Just because someone has a degree does not make him right.  And of course keep in mind that this criticism is a two edged sword.

Collins, Francis S.  The Language of God.  New York:  Free Press, 2006.

Crichton, Michael.  The Lost World.  New York:  Ballantine Books, 1995.

Meyer, Stephen C.  Darwin’s Doubt.  New York:  Harper One, 2013.

homo unius libri