Francis Collins Quotes

There were long stretches of DNA in between genes that didn't seem to be doing very much; some even referred to these as "junk DNA," though a certain amount of hubris was required for anyone to call any part of the genome "junk," given our level of ignorance.

Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth. Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98,000 years. Heaven watches this with complete indifference. And then 2000 years ago, thinks 'That's enough of that. It's time to intervene,' and the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don't lets appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization. Let's go to the desert and have another revelation there. This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person. Why am I glad this is the case? To get to the point of the wrongness of Christianity, because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral. The central one is the most immoral of all, and that is the one of vicarious redemption. You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating. In fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert. I can pay your debt if I love you. I can serve your term in prison if I love you very much. I can volunteer to do that. I can't take your sins away, because I can't abolish your responsibility, and I shouldn't offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There's no vicarious redemption. There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It's just a part of wish-thinking, and I don't think wish-thinking is good for people either. It even manages to pollute the central question, the word I just employed, the most important word of all: the word love, by making love compulsory, by saying you MUST love. You must love your neighbour as yourself, something you can't actually do. You'll always fall short, so you can always be found guilty. By saying you must love someone who you also must fear. That's to say a supreme being, an eternal father, someone of whom you must be afraid, but you must love him, too. If you fail in this duty, you're again a wretched sinner. This is not mentally or morally or intellectually healthy. And that brings me to the final objection - I'll condense it, Dr. Orlafsky - which is, this is a totalitarian system. If there was a God who could do these things and demand these things of us, and he was eternal and unchanging, we'd be living under a dictatorship from which there is no appeal, and one that can never change and one that knows our thoughts and can convict us of thought crime, and condemn us to eternal punishment for actions that we are condemned in advance to be taking. All this in the round, and I could say more, it's an excellent thing that we have absolutely no reason to believe any of it to be true.

Yeah, it’s true we’re all dealt a set of cards. But it’s also true that it’s up to us to figure out how to play the hand.

BY INVESTIGATING GOD’S MAJESTIC AND AWESOME CREATION, SCIENCE CAN ACTUALLY BE A MEANS OF WORSHIP. —FRANCIS COLLINS

a discussion about the miraculous quickly devolves to an argument about whether or not one is willing to consider any possibility whatsoever of the supernatural

Will we turn our backs on science because it is perceived as a threat to God, abandoning all the promise of advancing our understanding of nature and applying that to the alleviation of suffering and the betterment of humankind? Alternatively, will we turn our backs on faith, concluding that science has rendered the spiritual life no longer necessary, and that traditional religious symbols can now be replaced by engravings of the double helix on our alters? Both of these choices are profoundly dangerous. Both deny truth. Both will diminish the nobility of humankind. Both will be devastating to our future. And both are unnecessary. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate and beautiful - and it cannot be at war with itself. Only we imperfect humans can start such battles. And only we can end them.

I do not believe that the God who created all the universe, and who communes with His people through prayer and spiritual insight, would expect us to deny the obvious truths of the natural world that science has revealed to us, in order to prove our love for Him.

Faith and reason are not, as many seem to be arguing today, mutually exclusive. They never have been. The letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament defines faith as ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of the things not seen.

...to apply scientific arguments to the question of God's existence, as if this were somehow a showstopper, is committing a category error.

Studies of the interaction between genetic and environmental risks are pinpointing critical parts of our health that derive from environmental variables.

…to apply scientific arguments to the question of God’s existence, as if this were somehow a showstopper, is committing a category error

At this point, godless materialists might be cheering. If humans evolved strictly by mutation and natural selection, who needs God to explain us? To this, I reply: I do. The comparison of chimp and human sequences, interesting as it is, does not tell us what it means to be human. In my views, DNA sequence alone, even if accompanied by a vast trove of data on biological function, will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal search for God. Freeing God from the burden of special acts of creation does not remove Him as the source of the things that make humanity special, and of the universe itself. It merely shows us something of how He operates.

When we proclaim that someone is subhuman, we not only remove for them the possibility of change and repentance, we also remove from them moral responsibility.

What, to use Noble Laureate Wigner's classic phrase, accounts for the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics'?

Today, we have discovered that everyone is born with dozens of genetic glitches. There are no perfect human specimens. But not all our glitches are the same, so one treatment often does not fit all sufferers of a given disease.

It is the awareness of right and wrong, along with the development of language, awareness of self, and the ability to imagine the future, to which scientists generally refer when trying to enumerate the special qualities of Homo sapiens

while the long history of religious oppression and hypocrisy is profoundly sobering, the earnest seeker must look beyond the behavior of flawed humans in order to find the truth. Would you condemn an oak tree because its timbers had been used to build battering rams? Would you blame the air for allowing lies to be transmitted through it? Would you judge Mozart’s The Magic Flute on the basis of a poorly rehearsed performance by fifth-graders? If you had never seen a real sunset over the Pacific, would you allow a tourist brochure as a substitute? Would you evaluate the power of romantic love solely in the light of an abusive marriage next door? No. A real evaluation of the truth of faith depends upon looking at the clean, pure water, not at the rusty containers.

Arno Penzias, the Nobel Prize–winning scientist who codiscovered the cosmic microwave background radiation that provided strong support for the Big Bang in the first place, states, “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five Books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.

But there is, alas, no doubt that we are becoming a vocabulary-deprived nation—nay, planet. Words have been dropping off all through this century, but the loss increased radically in the sixties with the immorality of “limited vocabulary.

Faith and reason are not, as many seem to be arguing today, mutually exclusive. They never have been. The letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament defines faith as 'the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of the things not seen.

The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate, and beautiful.

In fact, genetic medicine has brought the problems of rare genetic conditions right to my own door.

...let us recognize that a large fraction of our suffering and that of our fellow human beings is brought about by what we do to one another. It is humankind, not God, that had invented knives, arrows, guns, bombs, and all manner of other instruments of torture used through the ages. The tragedy of the young child killed by a drunk driver, of the innocent young man dying on the battlefield, or of the young girl cut down by a stray bullet in a crime-ridden section of a modern city can hardly be blamed on God. After all, we have somehow been given free will, the ability to do as we please. We use this ability frequently to disobey the Moral Law. And when we do so, we shouldn't then blame God for the consequences.

Discoveries about genetics are not limited to just those 6,000 conditions of a strongly hereditary nature, however. We are now in the midst of a genetic revolution that will touch all of us in numerous ways:

In this modern era of cosmology, evolution, and the human genome, is there still the possibility of a richly satisfying harmony between the scientific and spiritual worldviews? I answer with a resounding yes! In my view, there is no conflict in being a rigorous scientist and a person who believes in a God who takes a personal interest in each one of us. Science’s domain is to explore nature. God’s domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science. It must be examined with the heart, the mind, and the soul—and the mind must find a way to embrace both realms.

Science is progressive and self-correcting: no significantly erroneous conclusions or false hypotheses can be sustained for long, as newer observations will ultimately knock down incorrect constructs. But over a long period of time, a consistent set of observations sometimes emerges that leads to a new framework of understanding. That framework is then given a much more substantive description, and is called a “theory”—the theory of gravitation, the theory of relativity, or the germ theory, for instance.

There are many subtle variants of theistic evolution, but a typical version rests upon the following premises: The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time. Once evolution got under way, no special supernatural intervention was required. Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes. But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.

To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability…. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles.

The Human Genome Project, the full sequence of the normal human genome, was completed in 2003. In its wake comes a far less publicized but vastly more complex project: fully sequencing the genomes of several human cancer cells. Once completed, this effort, called the Cancer Genome Atlas, will dwarf the Human Genome Project in its scope. The sequencing effort involves dozens of teams of researchers across the world. The initial list of cancers to be sequenced includes brain, lung, pancreatic, and ovarian cancer. The Human Genome Project will provide the normal genome, against which cancer’s abnormal genome can be juxtaposed and contrasted. The result, as Francis Collins, the leader of the Human Genome Project describes it, will be a “colossal atlas” of cancer—a compendium of every gene mutated in the most common forms of cancer: “When applied to the 50 most common types of cancer, this effort could ultimately prove to be the equivalent of more than 10,000 Human Genome Projects in terms of the sheer volume of DNA to be sequenced.

an essay in the Human Rights Reader, Rorty suggested that the basis for human rights is not rationality or moral law but “what Baier calls ‘a progress of sentiments.’…It is the result of what I have been calling ‘sentimental education.’”17 So the basis for morality, in Rorty’s view, is “sentiment.” We are back to preferences and tastes. But whose sentiments? Rorty’s? A Nazi’s? Or someone else’s?

Evolution has been working toward optimizing the human genome for 3.85 billion years,” says NIH director Francis Collins, who is not an atheist. “Do we really think that some small group of human genome tinkerers could do better without all sorts of unintended consequences?

There are no perfect human specimens...We are all flawed mutants

The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming

The pure, clean water of spiritual truth is placed in rusty containers, and the subsequent failings of the church down through the centuries should not be projected onto the faith itself, as if the water had been the problem.

As the leader of the international Human Genome Project, which had labored mightily over more than a decade to reveal this DNA sequence, I stood beside President Bill Clinton in the East Room of the White House... Clinton's speech began by comparing this human sequence map to the map that Meriwether Lewis had unfolded in front of President Thomas Jefferson in that very room nearly two hundred years earlier. Clinton said, "Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind." But the part of his speech that most attracted public attention jumped from the scientific perspective to the spiritual. "Today," he said, "we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God's most divine and sacred gift." Was I, a rigorously trained scientist, taken aback at such a blatantly religious reference by the leader of the free world at a moment such as this? Was I tempted to scowl or look at the floor in embarrassment? No, not at all. In fact I had worked closely with the president's speechwriter in the frantic days just prior to this announcement, and had strongly endorsed the inclusion of this paragraph. When it came time for me to add a few words of my own, I echoed this sentiment: "It's a happy day for the world. It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring, to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God." What was going on here? Why would a president and a scientist, charged with announcing a milestone in biology and medicine, feel compelled to invoke a connection with God? Aren't the scientific and spiritual worldviews antithetical, or shouldn't they at least avoid appearing in the East Room together? What were the reasons for invoking God in these two speeches? Was this poetry? Hypocrisy? A cynical attempt to curry favor from believers, or to disarm those who might criticize this study of the human genome as reducing humankind to machinery? No. Not for me. Quite the contrary, for me the experience of sequencing the human genome, and uncovering this most remarkable of all texts, was both a stunning scientific achievement and an occasion of worship.

In that context, I find theistic evolution, or BioLogos, to be by far the most scientifically consistent and spiritually satisfying of the alternatives. This position will not go out of style or be disproven by future scientific discoveries. It is intellectually rigorous, it provides answers to many otherwise puzzling questions, and it allows science and faith to fortify each other like two unshakable pillars, holding up a building called Truth.

First, because it’s based on a fantastic illusion. Let’s say that the consensus is that our species, we being the higher primates, Homo sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says it may be 100,000; Richard Dawkins thinks maybe quarter of a million. I’ll take 100,000. In order to be Christian you have to believe that for 98,000 years our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25, dying of their teeth, famine, struggle, indigenous war, suffering, misery, all of that. For 98,000 heaven watches it with complete indifference and then 2,000 years ago thinks, “That’s enough of that—it’s time to intervene. The best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don’t let’s appear to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization, let’s go the desert and have another revelation there.” This is nonsense. It can’t be believed by a thinking person.”                                  —Christopher Hitchens

I swear. My girlfriend and I got into a fight, and she took my car to get some fresh air. She…oh, God…please tell me that she’s okay. Where is she?” Tears are burning in my eyes, and a huge lump is forming in my throat.  She has to be safe. I can’t lose her — please tell me that they’re here because they thought she stole my car or something. Please let her be okay.  “I’m sorry, son, but she was in an accident last night…”  The rest of his words fade off in the background as I collapse to my knees. I hold my head in my hands and sob wildly. No! No! No! This can’t be happening. I feel my heart break in my chest as I think about her being hurt. I feel a hand at my back and see another reach around to help me up. Officer Rivera says, “She’s alive but in critical condition. She’s at St. Francis Hospital. We’ve been trying get in contact with you all morning. When we reached her next of kin, Melanie Crane, she gave us your number and told us that you were staying here. We’ve been trying to call the room and your cell, but there was no answer. If you’d like, we can take you there to see her. Ms. Crane is on her way as we speak.” I

One of the greatest tragedies of our time, is this impression that has been created that science and religion have to be at war

Apesar de ser crente à vinte e oito anos a Lei Moral ainda continua a ser, para mim, o maior sinal que aponta para Deus. Mais do que isso: aponta para um Deus que se preocupa com os seres humanos, para um Deus que é infinitamente bom e sagrado. p.169

A ciência sem religião é coxa, a religião sem a ciência é cega.’ Alber Einstein (1941). p.176

(...) o ateísmo é a menos racional de todas as concepções possíveis do mundo. p.179

Here’s the question: “Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings? (1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process. (2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process. (3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” In 2004, 45 percent of Americans chose option 3, 38 percent chose option 1, and 13 percent chose option 2.

Aging is not just a running down of the system. It is a programmed process. Evolution probably had an investment in having the lifespan of a particular species not go on forever. You've got to get the old folks out of the way so the young ones have a chance at the resources.

Yet, unlike the causal specificity that obtains for microevolutionary processes, origin-of-life researchers have yet to specify the chemical pathways that supposedly originated life. For instance, Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, admits that “no serious scientist would currently claim that a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life is at hand.”5 Self-organizational theorist Stuart Kauffman is bolder yet: “Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on the earth some 3.45 billion years ago is a fool or a knave. Nobody knows.

The same year that Dawkins’s The God Delusion was published, Francis Collins published The Language of God. Collins is an eminent research scientist and head of the Human Genome Project.

Dr. Francis Collins, was impressed with the moral argument on his way back to God. He later wrote, “After twenty–eight years as a believer, the Moral Law still stands out for me as the strongest signpost to God. More than that, it points to a God who cares about human beings, and a God who is infinitely good and holy.

Francis Collins put it, “Why would such a universal and uniquely human hunger exists, if it were not connected to some opportunity for fulfillment?

Those distractions combine with a desire to avoid considering our own mortality, so that days, weeks, months, or even years can easily pass where no serious consideration is given to the eternal questions of human existence.

Si Dios existe, debe estar fuera del mundo natural, y por lo tanto las herramientas de la ciencia no son las adecuadas para conocerlo.

Science’s domain is to explore nature. God’s domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science. It must be examined with the heart, the mind, and the soul—and the mind must find a way to embrace both realms.

The next day, Trump toured Fauci’s lab, the NIH Vaccine Research Center, as part of the White House effort to showcase the president’s determination to speed up the creation of a vaccine. Fauci again reminded Trump that getting a vaccine in a year was wildly optimistic. At the end of the tour, Fauci and Azar drove with the president across Wisconsin Avenue from the NIH campus to the helipad at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where Marine One awaited to fly Trump back to the White House. “So how’s Francis Collins doing?” the president asked Azar, referring to the NIH director they had just said goodbye to. “He’s really helped us on the fetal tissue ban,” Azar said. He referred to Trump’s 2019 decision to dramatically cut government funding at NIH and elsewhere for medical research that relied on tissues of aborted fetuses. This was a move to please antiabortion conservatives, a key part of the president’s political base. Collins didn’t agree with the policy, Azar told Trump, but was “being very professional in implementing it.” Azar was surprised when Trump asked, “Is that fetal tissue issue going to slow down the vaccine and therapies?” When he learned the answer was yes, the president said he wanted them to reverse the ban, but that never happened.

Conservatives, Marxists, post-modernists and pre-modernists have queued up to take a kick at the bruised ideas of the eighteenth century. The most vicious of these boot-boys is John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, who has published dozens of increasingly apocalyptic books and articles on the need to end the Enlightenment project forthwith. Whereas MacIntyre seeks sanctuary in twelfth-century monasteries, for Gray our only hope of salvation is to embrace Eastern mysticism ... Taoism seems to be his favoured creed but it is hard to interpret Gray's prescriptions with any certainty, partly because of his scattergun style but mostly because he changes his mind so often. A line on the dust-jacket of Enlightenment's Wake (1995), which says that the book 'stakes out the elements of John Gray's new position' could just as well be appended to everything he writes (Wheen, Francis (2004). How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. London: HarperCollinsFourth Estate. p. 187)

What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are they not both saying: Hello?

Would not intentional restrictions on the progress of life-saving science, simply to allow ethics to “catch up,” be themselves unethical?

Aging is not just a running down of the system,” explains longevity researcher and director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins. “It is a programmed process. Evolution probably had an investment in having the lifespan of a particular species not go on forever. You’ve got to get the old folks out of the way so the young ones have a chance at the resources.

So, while the long history of religious oppression and hypocrisy is profoundly sobering, the earnest seeker must look beyond the behavior of flawed humans in order to find the truth. Would you condemn an oak tree because its timbers had been used to build battering rams? Would you blame the air for allowing lies to be transmitted through it? Would you judge Mozart’s The Magic Flute on the basis of a poorly rehearsed performance by fifth-graders? If you had never seen a real sunset over the Pacific, would you allow a tourist brochure as a substitute? Would you evaluate the power of romantic love solely in the light of an abusive marriage next door? No. A real evaluation of the truth of faith depends upon looking at the clean, pure water, not at the rusty containers.

We are each called to reach out to others. On rare occasions that can happen on a grand scale. But most of the time it happens in simple acts of kindness of one person to another. Those are the events that really matter.

Sim, Darwin estava certo e que intuição brilhante ele teve, mas tudo o que ele estava fazendo era deduzir o mecanismo de criação que Deus usou." (Francis Collins, cristão e cientista, ex-diretor do Projeto Genoma Humano, no DVD "O Teste da Fé")

I was vaguely aware that same of those around me thought that this pairing of explorations was contradictory and I was headed over a cliff, but I found it difficult to imagine that there could be a real conflict between scientific truth and spiritual truth. Truth is truth. Truth cannot disprove truth.

Science is simply mankind trying to understand the greatness of God's design.

The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate, and beautiful.

In accessing the possible consequences of the Church electing its first Jesuit pontiff, Caleb K. Bell, writing in The Christian Century, had this to say: “With their emphasis on mission work and intellectual pursuits, Jesuits often work on the margins of the Church, sometimes overstepping boundaries set by Rome.  It’s a point of pride among some Jesuits that they frequently challenge authority and seem to have a predisposition for coloring outside the lines. [David Collins, a history professor of Georgetown University has said] ‘since their founding, Jesuits have consistently offended people…But if there’s a barricade in the street, there’s going to be a Jesuit on both sides of that barricade’.”[33]

As explained by Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (of which NIMH is a part), “The connectome refers to the exquisitely interconnected network of neurons (nerve cells) in your brain. Like the genome, the microbiome, and other exciting ‘ome’ fields, the effort to map the connectome and decipher the electrical signals that zap through it to generate your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors has become possible through development of powerful new tools and technologies.”37 The connectome is now being mapped in detail under the auspices of NIMH.

Dios existe, debe estar fuera del mundo natural, y por lo tanto las herramientas de la ciencia no son las adecuadas para conocerlo. En cambio, como lo empezaba a comprender al mirar dentro de mi propio corazón, la evidencia de la existencia de Dios tenía que llegar de otra dirección, y

DNA is God's language, and the complexity of our bodies and the rest of nature is a reflection of God's plan. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. God can be found in the cathedral or in the laboratory. By investigating God's majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a form of worship.

Nearly all of the atoms in your body were once cooked in the nuclear furnace of an ancient supernova—you are truly made of stardust.

The concept of right and wrong appears to be universal among all members of the human species (though its application may result in wildly different outcomes).