"The Language of God"
Reprint of article by Karen Kaplan Dr. Francis Collins is a gene hunter. Early in his career, he found the genes responsible for cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease, among others. Then be took over the Human Genome Project, which, in 2000, presented the first draft of the roughly 22,000 genes contained in human DNA. More recently, he published "The Language of God," a book that reconciles scientific conviction with religious faith. Collins, now director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., was recently in Los Angeles to receive the Will Rogers Institute's inaugural annual prize for lung research. You used to be an atheist. What made you a believer? I was raised to be nothing. My parents were wonderfully creative people who were very much into music and theater and the arts, but faith just wasn't important. Then I decided to go to medical school. I arrived there as an atheist and I left as a believer. That happened to me because of being put face-to-face with suffering and death. Challenged by one of my patients, who asked me one afternoon what I believed, I realized I didn't have a good answer. Did faith change your views about science? I find it quite troubling that it's being portrayed right now as a battle. Many people are getting the message that if you believe evolution is true, then you must be an atheist. Evolution is as well supported as any theory in science that we have, probably at least as well as gravity. The data that supports our descent from a common ancestor really cannot be refuted if you look at it closely. What about intelligent design? Proponents of intelligent design don't accept that some of the very complex nanomachines that we have inside ourselves could have come about solely on the basis of natural selection. That basically neglects growing evidence that those machines don't come out of nowhere - they build up bit by bit in a way that Darwin would entirely approve of. Unfortunately, the intelligent-design argument is scientifically flawed. My premise, which is shared by virtually all scientists who are believers - and that's about 40% of scientists - is that evolution is true, and it was God's method of creation. How do you reconcile religion and science? Science is the way you understand nature. If God has any meaning, then God is not entirely enclosed within nature. Science can say nothing about what's outside of nature. So to use a scientific argument to say that God can't be real is a complete disconnect of a rational mind. Copyright © 2008 St. Augustine by-the-Sea
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