LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Of all the magnificence of the Vatican, there is likely nothing of more artistic consequence than the Pope’s own personal chapel within the Vatican—the Sistine Chapel, more specifically its ceiling. It took Michelangelo Buonarroti 4 long years to paint the famed ceiling and 500 years later it stands for many as the most powerful portrayal of man’s relationship to God. Art historian Bridget Goodbody.

BRIDGET GOODBODY: It wouldn’t be too hard to say that it’s the most important piece of art that’s ever been made.

SEVERSON: Important not only to Catholics, but to Christians of many denominations. In California, at the Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, Pastor John Ortberg has based much of his writing for books and sermons on Michelangelo’s images.

PASTOR JOHN ORTBERG: On the ceiling you have this image that is glorious, transcendent, splendid, overwhelming, enormous. I mean, you just stand in there and you’re kind of bowled over by it.

SEVERSON: Michelangelo depicted the Biblical Creation story from the beginning through man’s fall from grace. When it was first unveiled to the public in 1512, the artist Giorgio Vasari said: the whole world could be heard running up to see it, and indeed, it was such as to make everyone astonished. At Harvard Divinity School, for many years the coordinator of the Theological Opportunities Program for Women was Elizabeth Dodson Gray.

ELIZABETH DODSON GRAY: I think it was enormously significant because of the effect it had upon people encouraging them to think of God as male through 500 years. I don’t know how much they thought of God as male before the Sistine Chapel. I do know that in Judaism the Jews were absolutely discouraged, as you know, from doing any graven image, and so they were prohibited from drawing pictures of the Almighty, the Creator.

SEVERSON: Up until then, God was mostly depicted in non-naturalistic imagery, as a spirit, an abstract form, or as a dove hovering in the sky— essentially an impersonal diving presence. Michelangelo’s ceiling changed all that.

GOODBODY: It created an image of God that was human and superhuman and so the idea, if you personify God and you think about God as a white man with long white hair and a long white beard, chances are the picture is where you got that idea.

SEVERSON: It was the Warrior Pope, Julius the Second who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, an odd request considering that Michelangelo was a sculptor who had very little experience as a painter.

GOODBODY: And Michelangelo didn’t want to do the ceiling. (laughing) He really wanted to continue to sculpt, and Julius insisted that he do it.

PASTOR ORTBERG: He actually wrote in his journal, “I’m no painter.” And it wasn’t particularly modesty. I don’t know that he was a real modest guy. It was just stating a fact. He was a sculptor, and yet he had been commissioned to do this work. And it came at a pretty substantial personal cost.

SEVERSON: For hundreds of years it was thought that Michelangelo painted the 65 foot high ceiling while lying on his back on scaffolding. But historians now know that wasn’t so.

GOODBODY: He was standing up. Getting paint in his eyes and (laughing) almost going blind.

SEVERSON: One reason Michelangelo’s ceiling has withstood the trials of time is the method he used to paint it, a process known as fresco where the paint is applied to wet plaster. It took a lot of painful experimenting to make it work. Its central theme is humankind’s need for salvation, which is portrayed in nine scenes from the Book of Genesis.

GOODBODY: You have the drunkenness of Noah, you have the 40 days and 40 nights and representations of the floods and Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden. Then there’s the creation of Adam and the creation of Eve and the creation of the Earth and the sun and the moon. That last image you find yourself in front of the altar piece, which is the Last Judgment and which very famously has those who are going to heaven on one side and those who are not on the other.

SEVERSON: The most iconic image of Michelangelo’s fresco work is the scene where God appears to be reaching down to Adam, their fingers almost touching.

PASTOR ORTBERG: His eyes are open and it appears that he is alive, but some folks have said what’s taking place in that moment is not so much the impartation of biological life as that which makes us most human, or what the Bible talks about as being “created in the image of God,” and so, to have spirit, to be a soul, to be able to be connected with God, to be a moral agent. All of that’s what is happening at that moment.

SEVERSON: Art historian Goodbody says she paid an extra admission fee so she could spend two hours in the Sistine chapel studying the ceiling all by herself.

GOODBODY: It’s such a great painting because you have sort of God very energetic and the wind pushing his hair back and sailing through the… he’s very determined. You know, he’s just created the universe, after all. Now he’s gonna, you know, humans are gonna rise up, he’s gonna make man in his own image.

SEVERSON: This is the part where Elizabeth Dodson Gray, the feminist theologian, and author of three books, takes exception.

ELIZABETH DODSON GRAY: It was a great picture, bad theology, very bad theology. “God created man in His own image.” Okay? And if we say that a picture’s worth a thousand words, and truly the picture in the Sistine Chapel is probably worth a thousand words, if you understand the sociology of knowledge as we now do, what really makes a difference was the male of the species created God in his own image. So actually the energy of creation went up, rather than down.

SEVERSON: What do you mean when you write about the Narcissus effect with Michelangelo’s ceiling?

DODSON GRAY: Well if you look at the Caravaggio picture, when Narcissus looks in the water and only sees his face. And the sentence I wrote is that the male of the species saw only himself when he looked in the cosmic pool of ultimate mystery.

SEVERSON: More traditional Christian views have not represented God in the female form, but in Pastor Ortberg’s view, women have been an important and positive part of God’s message.

PASTOR ORTBERG: Oh I think it’s unquestionably a point worth noting. Sometimes in the scripture there are feminine analogies used. Jesus says at one point, “You know how often I would have gathered you like a mother hen gathers her chicks but you would not let me.” So I think one of the hard things is, because in the Bible we talk about God as Father, people can think about God as masculine the way that a human being is masculine.

SEVERSON: Goodbody, now the curator of Artintelligence.com, sees a modern resonance for Michelangelo’s imagery.

GOODBODY: I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about it and as I go through the scientific imagery, I seem to find Michelangelo’s creation of Adam picture frequently displayed. You know, this sort of God giving energy to a test tube baby or a DNA molecule. It’s pretty tricky when you start to get into this conversation about creation. And who creates? Was it God that’s creating it? Or are we at a point in history and in time when we’re creating life?

SEVERSON: Pastor Ortberg believes the significance of Michelangelo’s masterpiece is the message it imparts.

PASTOR ORTBERG: I think part of what gave art so much power for Michelangelo was not just the need to shock folks that might become complacent, but the vision of a transcendent order and the idea that we live in a world that has meaning and has moral beauty, and that human life is about something, and wanting to point people to something beyond themselves, wanting to point people to that hope.

SEVERSON: After nearly 500 years, the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling was getting dimmer with age, but it has since undergone a complete restoration, preparing it for the 21st century and more generations to come.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This is the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. It’s a big place with lots of exhibits depicting the creation of the earth in six days, just as it occurred in the Book of Genesis. Ken Ham, a former high school science teacher from Australia, is the CEO of the Christian ministry that created the museum.

KEN HAM: I’d say the Creation Museum, what’s happened here is way above our expectations. It exceeded all of our visions and dreams.

SEVERSON: He says some of the 1.3 million visitors who’ve come here in the last four years are simply curious, but a majority, like Danella and Donna from Indianapolis, are believers.

MUSEUM VISITOR: The Bible is the Bible, you know. God created the earth and all of it in 6 days. Can’t argue with God.

SEVERSON: It’s a place where homo sapiens and dinosaurs live together in harmony, where Adam and Eve explore the Garden of Eden, and Noah builds an ark loaded with creatures small and large, even dinosaurs. Ken Ham now has plans to build his own ark, a really big one, much longer than a football field, all part of a huge theme park called the Ark Encounter. He says his ark will have the same dimensions as the one described in the Book of Genesis.

HAM (speaking on radio): Genesis, could it be a metaphor?

SEVERSON: Ham delivers his views about the ark and creation in 90-second radio spots that air, he says, on over 600 radio stations nationwide. He says his views are gaining traction, although they are not yet widely accepted in the religious community. But it’s not Ham’s version of the creation that troubles Reverend Joseph Phelps, pastor of the Highland Baptist Church in Louisville. It’s the tax break that has been approved for the ark park.

REV. JOSEPH PHELPS: I honor anyone who has a different understanding of creation than I or my church might have. That’s not the problem at all. It’s when, as in the case of the theme park, when they want to ask for public monies in order to fund putting out their particular point of view. That’s where we have a problem.

HAM: It’s not really a tax break, it’s a tourism incentive, and what it is, it’s actually a rebate on the sales tax generated at the particular facility.

SEVERSON: What it is is a tax rebate that would allow the ark park to recoup more than $37 million in sales taxes. Under Kentucky’s Tourism Act, any company that promotes tourism is entitled to a rebate. The Creation Museum is considered a nonprofit ministry, but the ark park is intended to return a profit to its private investors. Pastor Phelps and other religious leaders argue that the tax break would violate the separation of church and state.

JOSEPH PHELPS: Well, first of all, I think it’s unconstitutional. I think to put out a particular religious point of view, such as that theme park, or if it was an evolution theme park, either one of those points of view, if they’re coming from a religious vantage point, cannot be merged with government funding, government support.

HAM: Don’t we have freedom of religion in this country? Don’t we have freedom of speech? So if you were a Christian, and you happened to be running a business that happens to have a Christian theme but you are a for-profit business, why is that different to a secular business that’s running something that just doesn’t happen to have a Christian theme?

SEVERSON: The conundrum here is that Kentucky desperately needs jobs.

HAM: The Ark Encounter is going to employ almost a thousand people, and the impact on the number of jobs associated with that is going to be in the thousands, and our particular research has shown it will be many thousands, and it will bring millions and millions of dollars into the community. In fact, the research that we did shows that the economic impact of the Ark Encounter project over 10 years will be something like $4 billion.

SEVERSON: Kentucky’s Democratic governor supports the tax incentives. He says he wasn’t elected to debate religion, he was elected to create jobs, especially in hard-hit communities like Williamstown near where the ark park will be located and where a majority of the unemployed have been out of jobs for over two years.

WADE GUTMAN: The city and the county both are in desperate need like every place in the country for revenue, and this will generate a tremendous amount of revenue.

SEVERSON: Wade Gutman is the head of the Industrial Development Office and the Chamber of Commerce for Grant County. He says he has slept with a smile on his face ever since he heard the theme park was going to be in his backyard.

GUTMAN: I would have a definitely different feeling if it was nonprofit. But since it is for-profit, and it will create so many jobs and boost our economy almost immediately once construction starts, I couldn’t find anything to be against it about.

DAN PHELPS: In the original story, Noah basically built the ark on his own shekel. He didn’t have any government funding or anything like that involved.

SEVERSON: Dan Phelps is president of the Kentucky Paleontological Society. He joins other academics who say the theme park sends the wrong message about Kentucky.

DAN PHELPS: They’re doing it on the aegis of saying that this will bring a lot of jobs to the state, and it might bring a large number of low-paying jobs to the state, but it’s definitely hurt the image of Kentucky. Jay Leno has already joked about Kentucky and the ark on his monologue on at least two different occasions.

SEVERSON: But Phelps’s biggest concern isn’t Kentucky’s image. It’s the message the theme park will send to the state’s high school and college students.

DAN PHELPS: Almost every year here in Kentucky we have attempts to get laws enacted into the state legislature that would promote creationism, and right now outside of the larger cities a lot of students aren’t learning very much about evolution. The textbooks soft-peddle it. The teachers tend to avoid the subject basically for fear of offending people, and the Creation Museum and the ark park can only make this worse in Kentucky.

HAM: So in other words they only want their particular view presented. They want their view of millions of years and evolution and there’s no God presented. They really don’t want someone like us having the freedom to present this particular position.

SEVERSON: Ham has not minced words in his views of mainline churches that don’t espouse a literal translation of the creation.

HAM: Yes, I would say that churches aren’t doing their job if they’re not teaching the Book of Genesis as it is meant to be taken, because many churches, unfortunately, have taken man’s ideas of millions of years of evolution and then they reinterpret the Book of Genesis., and what we would say is, while we wouldn’t question their Christian testimony in regard to their salvation, we would say that they are really undermining the authority of God’s word.

JOSEPH PHELPS: I don’t preach against creationism, but I would say that the majority of our church would support an evolutionary understanding of how God created this world.

SEVERSON: And they would support your position against giving them this tax break?

PHELPS: Yes, this church is a strong supporter of the separation of church and state.

SEVERSON: According to some interpretations of the Book of Genesis, it took Noah about a hundred years to build the ark. The Ark Encounter is scheduled to launch in three years.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Petersburg, Kentucky.

Q: Why did you agree to take on for the second time the mantle of leadership of the National Association of Evangelicals?

A: I was not surprised to be asked, because I served as an interim president concluding in March of 2003, so I had experience. I’m well acquainted with the evangelical community and known by many in the evangelical community, so it was time to step up and take a responsibility that I think that I am adequately equipped to do.

Q: What is your biggest challenge, your biggest responsibility right at the moment?

A: Well, the National Association of Evangelicals is an organization that is 60-some years old, has about 60 member denominations as well as individual churches, and a constituency that is variously numbered in the tens of millions, so the responsibility is to give overall leadership, to be a spokeperson on behalf of this group and to provide continuity and stability at a time when there has been less than best press.

Q: What do you think are some of the most misunderstood things about evangelicals in the broader media and in the general public?

A: In the media I think there has been a growing understanding over the last 10 years, at least in my experience with the press, in the broad diversity among evangelicals. I think in the past there has been a misperception that the group is something of a monolith in terms of race and politics and a multitude of other areas where individuals have been perceived as the spokepersons for many when in fact they may be the spokespersons only for some. The integrating motif of evangelicals is a belief in the Bible and the expectation of having a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ, so those are spiritual values, and beyond that the diversity comes in race and background and politics and a whole array of differences.

Q: Have “evangelical” and “Christian right” come to be synonymous in America today?

A: I think that is the misperception of some, and perhaps that’s because those voices have been largely heard. I don’t know whether this is a correct statistic or not, but following the last general election one of the numbers that I read in the press was an estimate that one-third of evangelicals voted as Democrats and two-thirds voted as independents or Republicans. If that number is correct, that would show a two-to-one diversity at least in terms of blue and red. There are certainly many evangelicals who hold conservative right politics, but there are many who do not.

Q: Was that statistic a consistent reflection, or was it a quirk driven by the politics of the moment?

A: I think that has shifted. Historically, evangelicals have been strong in the South, and the South was historically Democratic. The evangelicalism of the South has continued to remain strong. The politics of the South switched to become far more Republican, and therefore evangelicals were more voting Republican. However, the evangelical community includes broadly the African American church, many of whom have historically voted in the Democratic camp, so it depends on which segment you’re talking about. There are regional differences, there are denominational differences, and there are racial differences.

Q: What keeps the evangelical community together?

A: Again, the integrating motif, what keeps the community together is belief in the Bible, taking it seriously, and belief in requiring a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, so it is experiential. In terms of the Bible, that is the core of truth; in terms of faith it is experiential faith.

Q: A week after the national midterm elections that so significantly changed our government, what are your reflections as an evangelical taking over a national evangelical organization? What do you think happened in the election?

A: My take is that politics are extremely complex; they are driven by current issues; they are generally local. I think it was Tip O’Neill who said all politics are local. In this election it appears that Washington significantly affected local outcome, and that relates to the war in Iraq, it relates to dissatisfaction with incumbents. We know that frequently incumbents in Congress lose at the midterm election of the second term of a president, so there were multiple factors all coming together in the same election, and evangelicals are part of the broader community, and as part of the broader community [they] are participants in the broader decisions that are being made.

Q: Your predecessor Ted Haggard was fairly visible in a political sense – associated with the White House, politically outspoken. How does your leadership style compare with his?

A: Well, I think the comparison is to be made by others, not to be made by me. Interestingly, there was a previous president of the National Association of Evangelicals who was sometimes criticized for too close an alignment with the Clinton administration and participating in Clinton admin activities, so the criticism is not new, and individuals are not always speaking on behalf of the broader constituency. They are speaking as individuals.

Q: But Haggard was at the helm of a national organization. Are you politically involved, and do you intend to be outspoken on social issues that have been important to evangelical Christians?

A: There are some political issues on which I have and will speak, although I do not see myself as some one who succumbs to Potomac fever or largely engages in that. I’m the pastor of a local church, and in our local church people in the congregation have run for office and been elected, but we don’t talk about that within the life of the congregation.

Q: What are the issues that most concern you, that you think evangelicals ought to be involved with?

A: I can tell you issues that I’m personally concerned about, and of course I would extend that to other evangelicals and wish that they would share those concerns. I’m concerned for the poor. I’m concerned for justice for the disenfranchised. I have a great concern and the church of which I am a part is deeply involved in the HIV/AIDS issues in Africa and concerned that we be responsible in providing aid and sustenance and encouragement and everything that we can possibly do. I do share certain aspects of the social agenda in terms of being pro-life, and while not all evangelicals would share that that would be pretty broad-based within the evangelical community — a desire to be a protector of the unborn.

Q: How do you come down on the teaching of intelligent design?

A: Well, I’m not an expert on that, so as a lay person I certainly am aware of intelligent design, and because I am a believer in God and believe that God is ultimately behind all that exists, of course I believe in intelligent design, and therefore I think it’s a correct understanding of reality.

Q: So you think it ought to be taught alongside evolution in our schools?

A: It’s always a difficult question of what should be taught in schools. There are some ways in which you would prefer that neither be taught in schools and that the choices be made within the church and other communities in terms of what is taught. I am certainly wide open to diverse opinions being taught within appropriate classrooms in schools and therefore think that there is a place for the teaching of intelligent design.

Q: Alongside evolution in the science class?

A: I certainly do think that an educated person today needs to understand what all the arguments are for evolution, so it is appropriate within education that evolution be taught as one alternative to a diverse opinion of many people of how reality has come to be.

Q: Is it your position that this should be taught within a science curriculum or in a broader philosophical context?

A: It’s interesting that you say, should this be taught in the science class and should this be taught in the philosophy class, because I reflect back on my own education in public schools, and I don’t always recall who is my science teacher and who is my history teacher, so where it’s taught probably is dicing it down to a fine line, and if it is an acceptable alternative that it be taught in a different classroom, I’m okay with that.

Q: Why do you think evangelical activism on HIV/AIDS, on working for peace in the Sudan doesn’t get headlines? Why do people associate evangelicals only with social issues in North America rather than broader international social justice issues that so many evangelicals are engaged in?

A: Historically evangelicals have been broadly involved in social issues. There’s a new film coming out in January about William Wilberforce who was the British minister of Parliament who advocated for the eradication of slavery within the British Empire, and that will be broadly embraced in the evangelical community Today evangelicals have been significantly involved in the eradication of sex trafficking around the world, in the HIV/AIDS issue, poverty, war. Why are evangelicals not known for those things? I suppose it’s because the press and the political sector are not greatly engaged in those issues, and so people become known for how they relate to whatever is the current political headline. Not that those things are not important. They are also important, but we need to be engaged in justice and good within the world on a broad base.

Q: Do you intend to steer more of a course that goes in that broader direction than your predecessor? Ted Haggard was known for speaking out on issues like the gay marriage amendment in Colorado and others, or will we be hearing differently from you on some of these issues?

A: I certainly have no obligation to continue his or anyone else’s agenda. I do think that Ted Haggard was particularly involved in political issues in Colorado, which are not always the same political issues elsewhere. As an interesting example, the Colorado Springs Gazette and Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post carried a multitude of front-page articles about what happened with him in the beginning of November and his political views and his fall from position. I had a conversation with a reporter from the Colorado Springs Gazette who said they had done 22 major articles. I live in Minnesota, where the Minneapolis Star Tribune did 8 column inches on page A-10 next to a furnace ad, so it was not as big an issue here as his political opinions were in Colorado. I think we need to, again, recognize that America is a varied and diverse place, so am I going to perpetuate the issues of Colorado? I’m not.

Q: Do you just not share them as a priority, or do you think your congregants are not as concerned about some of these issues as Ted Haggard’s might have been?

A: I think that the political issues vary by part of the country and day of the week. I do think that the people that are part of Wooddale Church where I am the pastor share probably the same concerns as people in congregations elsewhere. I would tend to take an approach that would say, here is what the Bible teaches, and as an individual Christian you have a responsibility to engage in the political and the social process. But it is clearly your choice to make. It is not my responsibility to dictate to you how you should vote or what you should do.

Q: What do you sense are the main concerns of your congregants in Minnesota, in the upper Midwest? Were you to name two or three or four, what would those be?

A: I’m not sure I’ve ever thought through what the three or four may be. The honest reality is that for most people they are first concerned about themselves and their family and their immediate needs and then how that impacts them. So if they are unable to get employment or health insurance and their children thereby suffer, then they become deeply engaged in those particular issues. Beyond that, surely we become concerned about broad social and moral issues. The issue of abortion and being for protection of the life of the unborn is a top priority among evangelicals, and that has been a galvanizing force politically, so there have been evangelicals who have actually disagreed with many other political positions but voted for candidates with the hope that they would significantly reduce abortion in America. It may well be that at the point that that is either resolved or there is a complete deadlock over the abortion issue, that other issues will rise to the surface and you will see more of a fracturing of the evangelical community in terms of how voting is done because of which other issues are then chosen.

Q: You gained some notoriety coming out in favor of an evangelical environmental initiative, acknowledging that we face global warming. Is that one of those issues which is potentially a fracturing issue?

A: The evangelical climate initiative, which had 86 signatories (in alphabetical order, so with Anderson I was at the top of the list), had as a priority to put climate concerns, or as we would sometimes say creation care issues, on the evangelical agenda. I think that effort was highly successful, so it has significantly come into evangelical conversation — not that it hasn’t been there for a long time, but it became broader and better understood, and I think clearly the direction is that evangelicals are engaging in this issue. A recent Newsweek poll reported that a high percentage of evangelicals are significantly concerned about climate care and related matters, and it makes sense, because as evangelicals we say that we believe the Bible, we take the Bible seriously, the Bible is our guide for faith and practice, and the Bible says that God is the creator of the universe and that we are to be stewards of that which we have on his behalf. So of course we would be concerned about the climate.

Q: The environment has been a polarizing issue in world of politics, with the US backing out of the Kyoto treaty with the assent of Bush administration. Would you support the US becoming a signatory to the Kyoto protocols?

A: I’m not well enough informed to be an expert to address the Kyoto protocols. Certainly the US needs to be recognized as a leader in the world, and if we are to be a leader in terms of economics and culture and other ways, then I think we should also be a leader in terms of taking care of what God has created.

Q: What are your reflections on what has happened since the midterm elections? Do you see the evangelical movement differently? Do you see it expressing itself differently, coming to some point in a cycle of growth? Do you perhaps sense an historic landmark that the election brought into higher relief?

A: It’s always difficulty to get a broad perspective on short notice. I read a quote recently that was attributed to Chou En Lai. I am not sure if he was the one who actually spoke it. Someone asked him what he thought of the French Revolution, and his answer was, “It’s too soon to tell.” We have to be cautious that we don’t make an immediate evaluation of what may be, in fact, inconsequential. But let me give you what may be a long answer to the question. Evangelicals were marginalized in the early part of the 20th century and the middle part of the 20th century. It dates back to the Scopes Trial, to the ascendancy of liberal Christianity in North America, and a multitude of other factors, but I think it’s safe to say that in that marginalization evangelicals spoke to one another but were not largely heard by the mainstream. That started to change around 1950 and was most centered in Billy Graham, who was widely known and an evangelical. And then in 1976 with Jimmy Carter’s election to the White House and Time magazine declaring the year of the evangelical, evangelicals came more and more into positions of influence and mainstream in America with little experience, often not knowing how to speak to the mainstream or to adequately communicate ideas, because evangelicals had been marginalized, and those that are on the margins of society frequently don’t know how to deal with the center of society. In the last 20 years especially, evangelicals being in the mainstream have been figuring this out and learning how to do it. There is now greater experience and I hope a maturity in the movement that will be reflective and responsive and will both advance the cause of Jesus Christ and be beneficial to society.

Q: Did the election suggest potential fractures within evangelicalism, and how injurious might they be? Are there any schisms in the making?

A: In my opinion, within recent years we have had growing polarization in America and siloing, so it’s everywhere. If you look at your radio dial, we are narrowingcasting more than broadcasting, and within our culture we are shouting in a louder and louder voice to fewer and fewer people. And that’s distressing to me, because I prefer that we have unity on at least some significant issues. Evangelicals are not exempt from the polarization and fracturing that has happened to the rest of the society, and, yes, we are suffering from that as well, and we have different voices and divergence. And that’s not widely understood by people who are not evangelicals. They tend to understand that in their arena but don’t understand it in other arenas, and that would probably be typical of us all. So, yes, there is fracture.

Q: Your organization is one effort to keep the cohesion, and you spoke of integrating motifs. In the secular political arena, where do you see trends leading, particularly in the 2008 political cycle, which has already begun? What do you see as you look ahead?

A: On an immediate basis what I see is that there is going to be an effort initially following this election for people to communicate with each other and to find common ground. I think that that is very good and a hopeful sign. Whether that will last very long is probably anybody’s guess, and the 2008 election is so far off it is difficult to predict. What I anticipate is that evangelicals will increasingly will go to what is our central core message, and our central core message is belief in the Bible and commitment to Jesus Christ, and that other matters that have too much been perceived as central will be come secondary or peripheral to who we centrally are.

Q: Do you see any kind of humanizing force or do you sense any greater push toward ecumenism in America among religious leaders than in the recent past?

A: It’s difficult to generalize, but, to the contrary, I think that around the world there is a great deal of fear. I think war and terrorism and other issues have made people frightened, and that has often driven them back to their social ethnic and religious roots, and that has distanced people more than it has brought them together. What I would desire and hope for is that we would find our common ground, be able to be respectful of our differences and be able to fairly hear one another in terms of what are our beliefs and persuasively speak on behalf of our beliefs.

Q: How would you describe yourself?

A: I am the son of an immigrant from Europe. I grew up in metropolitan New York City and northern New Jersey, was educated in public schools there, went to Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, graduate school in Colorado and [got] a doctorate in California. For 30 years I have been senior pastor of Wooddale Church in suburban Eden Prairie, and most of all what I am is a pastor in terms of what I do professionally.

Q: Why did you settle in Minnesota?

A: I love Minnesota. Minnesota represents to me the best of America in terms of people being kind to each other and gracious and having variety and being welcoming. Minnesota is where we have the first or second longest life expectancy, the lowest unemployment, the greatest voter turnout. I think the statistics indicate we have had more immigrants from Africa in the last 5 or 10 years than the rest of America combined together. Minnesota is a wonderful place.

Q: There is also a seeming political schizophrenia in Minnesota, the state of Senator Paul Wellstone and Governor Jesse Ventura, of the first Muslim congressman, Keith Ellison, and Michele Bachman, a very outspoken evangelical Christian Republican candidate who fits the classic stereotype that you think mischaracterizes evangelicals. What do you think it says, the election of both Ellison and Bachman to Congress?

A: I think that reflects what is happening in America, that we have a growing Muslim population, so you would expect that at some point there would be a Muslim elected to Congress. We have many people who are very conservative in terms of their beliefs and their commitments, and so you would expect that in their district they would elect someone who would reflect their positions.

Q: Living side by side.

A Yes, but of course they are from very different congressional districts. People elect those that reflect their points of view and who they are.

Q: E.O. Wilson says that up to half of the 10 million or so species could be gone by the end of this century unless we take some action. He wants what he calls the two most powerful social forces on earth, science and religion, to put aside their differences and work together to save biodiversity, which he calls also “the Creation.” He writes this in the form of a letter to an imaginary Southern Baptist pastor. You are a real Southern Baptist minister. How do you respond to him?

A: I believe that as Christians we have an obligation and a responsibility for creation care, and I think there are points at which we can make common ground. It’s interesting that when he’s making the self-interested argument — you know, human beings need to preserve the species because it’s good for human beings — he uses one of the examples that I use in the book that I wrote in 1992 called THE EARTH IS THE LORD’S: the rosy periwinkle. The rosy periwinkle is this little tiny flower that was on the verge of extinction in the Amazon rainforest when they discovered that there’s an enzyme that was previously unknown that can be extracted from the rosy periwinkle (and now, of course, can be made chemically) that is one of the most important treatments we have for leukemia and for other diseases of the blood. And the argument that I made is that if we believe as Christians that God created everything — God is a God of order, not a God of discord, not a God of chaos — and if he created everything he created everything for a purpose and we ought to, as an act of stewardship, try to keep some of everything that God created alive until we discover God’s purpose for it and then use it for that purpose. I use the rosy periwinkle as an example. [Wilson], coming at it from a slightly different direction, uses the same example of the rosy periwinkle. I would say that as a Christian we believe that the earth is the Lord’s. It is divine ownership. God owns the Earth, we don’t own it. We don’t have the right to treat it as if we own it. Secondly, we have human responsibility. Genesis chapter 1 tells us that God put man in charge under his headship. Human beings have dominion and are given dominion, but then that’s tempered by Genesis chapter 2, where man is put into the garden to till it and to keep it. The word “keep” means to guard and to protect. We would call it Earth-care creation here. To till it means to cause it to bring forth its fruit, to plow it, to cultivate it. We’re not to just worship nature in its pristine form. We have a divinely mandated responsibility to both develop the Earth for human betterment and to protect it and guard it and keep it and to exercise creation care. And we will give an account of our stewardship.

Q: The word “stewardship” means different things to different people. I think to Professor Wilson it means taking very, very good care of all the species and not using them, perhaps, to their destruction for our own purposes. Where do you differ with Professor Wilson? It sounds, as you say it, as if there’s no difference, but I suspect there is on this question of to what extent we should make it a goal of ours as people to preserve all 10 million species.

A: I think that one of the areas where there would be profound disagreement is in the nature of humanity as a species and humanity’s place in creation. On page 54 of his book he says, “Let us think upon what we and the other aliens are doing to the rest of life, and to ourselves.” He’s talking about alien species that have been brought into places which are not their natural habitat. Now what he’s clearly saying — and he defines nature, by the way, exclusive of humanity; he does that earlier in the book. Nature with a capital “N” is exclusive of human imprint on nature, i.e. the human species. He looks upon human beings as an alien species to the habitat of nature and that we are the ones that are destructive and that we have been a catastrophic event. Nature would have been far better off without human beings. As a Christian we believe that God created the creation for humankind and that he created it for humankind, and he placed humankind within it. So while we are to give respect to all life, God made a covenant with all of life, with every living creature in Genesis chapter 9, and we don’t have the right to treat any life with disrespect. We must treat human life with reverence, and there is in Christian theology a hierarchy of species, and there is a firebreak between human beings and the rest of creation. It is human beings that God gave a soul. It is human beings that are treated as different in kind, not just in degree or sophistication, and I think that most of the differences that I would have with Dr. Wilson and he would have with me would arise from that one pretty serious distinction and one serious difference.

Q: Do human beings have the right to destroy other species for our benefit?

A: To destroy? No. To use? Yes. One of the distinctions I make, for instance, is if we need to cause the death of some animals, as painlessly as possible, but if we need to cause the death of some animals to create a Salk vaccine? We haven’t only the right to do so, we have the obligation. I don’t think we have the right to cause animals pain or cause animals discomfort to create new cosmetics, but medicines for human betterment? Yes.

Q: I don’t think that’s what he’s talking about. He’s talking about the preservation of the species, all the species, and that’s the issue. Do we have the right for our purposes to destroy some other species?

A: No. No, we don’t have the right to destroy them. We do have a right to make value judgments about whether human beings are more important than other species. I’ve been accused of being a “speciesist.” That’s valuing your own species more highly than you ought. I do value human beings more than I value the rest of creation. Just to use a mundane example: I think God created spotted owls, and we ought to try to keep some spotted owls alive. But if the choice is between keeping all the spotted owls alive and causing 10,000 families the loss of their livelihood, I say keep some of the spotted owls alive, not all of them.

Q: Professor Wilson says scientists who have worked on this estimate that by the end of this century half the plants and a quarter of all the other living things could disappear. If that’s true, do you believe that we as human beings have a right, a duty, to do heroic things to try to prevent the disappearance of as many species as we possibly can?

A: I think it depends on what you mean. The difficulty is in the details. We certainly need to do all we can without causing grievous harm to human beings. There’s the difference — without causing grievous harm to human beings. To use a controversial example, the Kyoto Protocols, if they were to be implemented, it is estimated, would cause the global temperature to go down .5 degrees Fahrenheit by the middle of this century, and the immediate economic impact world wide, particularly on people at the margins, people who are at subsistence level, would be catastrophic. It would be fairly significant on people at the margins in North America, which is why when it was brought up in the Senate it was voted down 99 to zero. Should we try to do things that will mitigate global warming? My argument has always been to people who say, well, global warming hasn’t been proven, I don’t think it’s been proven that human beings are the main cause of it. But, you know, I take the same attitude toward climate warming that I took toward the military capabilities of the Soviet Union. I would rather overestimate their capabilities and be wrong than have underestimated their capabilities and pay the consequences. But I think we have to always put in the factor of what is the human cost, and how do we mitigate the human cost? For instance, I’m a far stronger believer in human ingenuity, human technology to help us solve these problems without catastrophic decreases in human standards of living.

Q: So when Professor Wilson says he is reaching out his hand to the imaginary Southern Baptist pastor he is writing to, asking that we set aside differences, for instance, over evolution and work together to preserve the species, do you agree with that?

A: I do. Work together when we can and where we can, understanding that we do have, in many cases, diametrically opposed worldviews which happen to meet at the point of contact of creation care. We both believe that we have an obligation as human beings for creation care, for different reasons, for different purposes. By the way, in the book and others as well have said that there are a lot of Christians who think that we should just ignore the environment, we should just ignore the creation because the Lord’s coming back soon and we shouldn’t worry about it. Well, I personally have never met an evangelical Christian who believes that. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s a mythic figure. First of all, there’s a lot in the Bible about creation care. Secondly, there’s a very specific statement by Jesus himself who says no man knows the hour, the day of his coming. And anybody who thinks he knows doesn’t, and so we have an obligation and a responsibility. He put us into the garden and he said that we have a responsibility to till it and to keep it. I think it’s important for people to understand that as long ago as 1992 I wrote a book called THE EARTH IS THE LORD’S: CHRISTIANS AND THE ENVIRONMENT. It talks about a theological ethic of the environment and creation care. It talks about divine ownership, human responsibility, and personal stewardship. So there’s a far greater base of Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, who understand the responsibility that they have for creation care. But we are going to have some divergences, and the biggest one is going to be the priority that is given to human beings.

Q: The idea that Christ is going to come again, that history is going to come to an end as we know it sometime, perhaps in our lifetime, this whole idea of the imminent end times, and if that’s going to happen we don’t need to worry about protecting the environment or any species — you specifically disagree with that?

A: I would specifically repudiate it. As someone who deeply believes that history will culminate in the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ to redeem human kind and creation — the Bible is very clear about this, that part of Jesus’ mission is to reclaim the creation, which is also marred by sin. That’s another difference of opinion between Dr. Wilson and myself. We as Christians do not see nature as the benign ecosystem that he does. We believe that, as the Apostle Paul puts it in Romans, the whole creation groans and travails together until now, waiting for the redemption, the redemption that will be brought about in the culmination of Jesus Christ’s second advent. But at the same time I’m a Christian, and I have a Bible, which is my lifestyle manual, and the Bible says that we are to be stewards of God’s creation. It says that we are to till it and to keep it and that we’re going to give an account of our care of God’s creation. I believe that history will culminate in a radical second advent of Jesus Christ to judge the quick and the dead and to redeem his creation and humankind. But I specifically repudiate that you can draw from that that we can ignore the biblical admonitions and the biblical commands to exercise creation care.

I think that is a false theology and one which has in the past and in the present led to a rapaciousness concerning God’s creation and has caused far too many human beings, religious and otherwise, to believe that they have the right to despoil and use up God’s creation as if it were their own and to treat living things as if they were inanimate objects.

The Bible is very clear that God made a covenant with every living creature, which means that while I may eat steak (and I do; as a Texan I consider it my patriotic duty to eat steak) we should seek to treat cattle as humanely as possible, and when it is time for them to have their lives end to be used for human good that that should be done as humanely as possible, and we do not have the right to deliberately mistreat or neglect any living creature.

Q: You said that the differences between you and E.O. Wilson on these things meant that although the idea of working together to protect the Earth and protect the species was attractive, there would be places where your different points of view about that would make working together very difficult. What would be a major example of where that would happen?

A: I think Dr. Wilson would be far more ready far more quickly to adopt policies to protect the environment and to protect species that would cause a radical reduction in the living standards of human beings than would I. I think that human beings have preeminence in the creation over other species.

Q: He would argue that that doesn’t have to follow, that you can protect the species and not only preserve but improve the standard of living of human beings.

A: To the extent that that’s true we have no disagreement. But I read his book, and his book does have a fundamentally different viewpoint about humanity and its relation to nature. He defines nature with a capital “N,” deliberately excluding humanity from it as a species, and he describes human beings as an alien species on the planet. He makes the same analogy for human beings to the planet that he does for red ants being transformed from South America to North America. In North America they’re an alien species doing damage. That’s his analogy for human beings on the planet. I fundamentally disagree.

Q: He says that if human beings spent $30 billion one time to preserve the ecosystems in something like 25 areas of the Earth where there’s a lot of biodiversity, it could be preserved. In his terms an “umbrella” could be put over it. Would you think that makes sense?

A: Sure, as long as it can be done by not severely damaging the human beings who are in that eco-culture or a provision is made to make certain that they are not negatively impacted by the preservation of the eco-structure. Sounds like an awfully good priority for the Clinton Global Initiative.

Q: How do you think Southern Baptists in general will respond to E.O.Wilson’s proposals?

A: It’s always dangerous to try to predict how Southern Baptists in general are going to respond to anything. Southern Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination in the country, and there’s a significant amount of diversity among us. I mean, after all, I’ve voted against [three] Southern Baptists in my lifetime who were running for president — Jimmy Carter twice, Bill Clinton twice, and Al Gore. So they were Southern Baptists with whom I have some diversity. But I find that Southern Baptists are very responsive to the issue if it’s framed in a way that they don’t turn it off. For instance, I talk about creation care. I talk about our biblical mandate to be good stewards of God’s creation. I assiduously avoid the phrase “global warming,” because I find that if I want Southern Baptists and Southern Baptist audiences to listen to me, that’s a phrase I should avoid, because when I use it they either turn me off or they begin to look at everything else I say with a jaundiced eye. They understand what the Bible teaches about creation care. Creation care and stewardship of the earth is a far less controversial than global warming, so I just assiduously avoid it. I talk about what our obligation and responsibility is both individually and societally for creation care and for conservation and for stewardship and talk about some of the possibilities for technological advances that could help us meet some of Dr. Wilson’s goals, and goals that I would certainly share without radical reductions in human standards of living. Another area I do avoid completely is population control, and that’s also an area where Dr. Wilson and I would disagree. I look upon human beings as resources, each one, not as a burden, and I think if you unleash human ingenuity we can preserve the environment, and this Earth can sustain a lot more people than we now have.

Q: You spoke about differences among Southern Baptists, and I would broaden that to differences among evangelical Christians in general on lots of things. Within the evangelical movement, would you agree that there are major differences about how to take care of the environment?

A: Yes, there are. There are even among those who are committed to creation care, and I think that most, at least abstractly, are committed to creation care. There would be a major split between those who want to immediately assume that there have to be drastic reductions in human and certainly Western standards of living, as opposed to those who are far more optimistic about human ingenuity and human technology and applying human ingenuity and human technology to try to, at the same time we preserve the environment, not cause undue burdens on human beings.

Q: Earlier this year, 86 evangelical leaders signed a statement about global warming. You and 20 or so others signed another letter saying global warming is not a consensus issue.

A: Well, it’s not. That’s a simple fact.

Q: But it seems that within the evangelical Christian movement as a whole there is a growing willingness and conviction that the environment needs to be better protected.

A: Oh, I think that’s right. I think it’s a growing consensus among evangelicals and a growing consensus among Western civilization in general, and evangelicals are a part of that. The devil’s going to be i the details. It’s going to be in how do we address this? Do we address this through technology or do we address this through radical reductions in human standards of living?

Q: That’s a red herring Wilson would say, I think. You don’t have to reduce the standard of living in order to protect.

A: Well, it may be a red herring for Wilson. The Kyoto Protocols, if they were to be implemented, would have dramatic impact on Western standards of living in the immediate future, and it would impact those least able to afford it the most, so the Kyoto Protocol is not a red herring.

Q: Do you find yourself moving toward a position that humanity needs to do more about protecting the earth?

A: No, not at least in the last 20 years, because my views on this were fundamentally changed in 1970 when I read Francis Shaeffer’s book POLLUTION AND THE DEATH OF MAN. Francis Shaeffer probably had as much impact on me and my own intellectual and spiritual development as any person in my life, and I’m not alone in that regard. There’s a whole generation of us evangelicals who look upon Francis Shaeffer as our St. Francis. He really did help us to understand the full-orbed responsibilities of Christians in relation to society, in relation to culture, in relation to public affairs, and in relation to the environment, and in 1970 he wrote that book, and it was a very radical book at the time, and I read it within a month of its publication when I was a first-year seminary student, and so I don’t think my views have changed much over the last three-and-a-half decades I’ve been committed to creation care. I became the head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission in 1988, and in 1991 our annual seminar was on the subject of creation care.

Q: How do you define creation care?

A: God is the owner of the Earth. He’s made human beings his vice-regents. Genesis 1 says human beings are to have dominion, but that dominion is then circumscribed by the fact that in Genesis 2 he put us into the garden, and he said you are to till it and to keep it. Till it is to guard it and protect it; till it means to cause it to be developed for human betterment, and so we have an obligation and a responsibility to treat creation as God’s, not ours, and we’re going to be giving an account to him of our stewardship of his creation.

Q: And what does stewardship mean? Taking care of but not necessarily preserving all species?

A: I believe God is a God of order. I believe God is a God who if he created something he created it for a purpose, and we certainly should strive to preserve some of all that God has created.

Q: And you and E.O. Wilson would differ on that definition of “some”?

A: Yes, we would, I suspect. An example I would use is deer in the United States. We’ve preserved more deer than we can deal with. Dr. Wilson would say that’s because human beings are the problem; there are too many human beings getting in the way of the deer. That’s where our differences begin to arise. Remember, he defines nature without human beings, and he describes human beings as an alien species doing damage to nature in the same way that red ants are an alien species to North America doing damage to the habitat of North America. We fundamentally disagree on that. We believe that human beings are an integral part of nature and that we are more important to God in the creation than any part of the creation, although we are not separate and distinct from the creation.

Q: But we do have a duty, in your judgment, to preserve all the species?

A: I think we do. I think we do. I think we have an obligation and a responsibility to try our best to keep some of everything God created alive, because God created it for a purpose and God wants us to discover that purpose, the rosy periwinkle being the classic example.

Is God really there? Or does the search for the existence of a supernatural being, so pervasive in all cultures ever studied, represent a universal but groundless human longing for something outside ourselves to give meaning to a meaningless life and to take away the sting of death?

While the search for the divine has been somewhat crowded out in modern times by our busy and overstimulated lives, it is still one of the most universal of human strivings. C.S. Lewis describes this phenomenon in his own life in his wonderful book SURPRISED BY JOY, and it is this sense of intense longing, triggered in his life by something as simple as a few lines of poetry, that he identifies as “joy.” He describes the experience as “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” I can recall clearly some of those moments in my own life, where this poignant sense of longing, falling somewhere between pleasure and grief, caught me by surprise and caused me to wonder from whence came such strong emotion, and how might such an experience be recovered.

As a boy of ten, I recall being transported by the experience of looking through a telescope that an amateur astronomer had placed on a high field at our farm, when I sensed the vastness of the universe and saw the craters on the moon and the magical diaphanous light of the Pleiades. At fifteen, I recall a Christmas Eve Where the descant on a particularly beautiful Christmas carol, rising sweet and true above the more familiar tune, left me with a sense of unexpected awe and a longing for something I could not name. Much later, as an atheist graduate student, I surprised myself by experiencing this same sense of grief, at the playing of the second movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony (the Eroica). As the world grieved the death of Israeli athletes killed by terrorists at the Olympics in 1972, the Berlin Philharmonic played the powerful strains of this C-minor lament in the Olympic Stadium, mixing together nobility and tragedy, life and death. For a few moments I was lifted out of my materialist worldview into an indescribable spiritual dimension, an experience I found quite astonishing.

More recently, for a scientist who occasionally is given the remarkable privilege of discovering something not previously known by man, there is a special kind of joy associated with such flashes of insight. Having perceived a glimmer of scientific truth, I find at once both a sense of satisfaction and a longing to understand some even greater Truth. In such a moment, science becomes more than a process of discovery. It transports the scientist into an experience that defies a completely naturalistic explanation.

So what are we to make of these experiences? And what is this sensation of longing for something greater than ourselves? Is this only, and no more than, some combination of neurotransmitters landing on precisely the right receptors, setting off an electrical discharge deep in some part of the brain? Or is this an inkling of what lies beyond, a signpost placed deep within the human spirit pointing toward something much grander than ourselves?

The atheist view is that such longings are not to be trusted as indications of the supernatural, and that our translation of those sensations of awe into a belief in God represent nothing more than wishful thinking, inventing an answer because we want it to be true. This particular view reached its widest audience in the writings of Sigmund Freud, who argued that wishes for God stemmed from early childhood experiences. Writing in TOTEM AND TABOO, Freud said, “Psychoanalysis of individual human beings teaches us with quite special insistence that the God of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relationship of God depends on the relation to his father in the flesh, and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.”

The problem with this wish-fulfillment argument is that it does not accord with the character of the God of the major religions of the earth. In his elegant recent book, THE QUESTION OF GOD, Armand Nicholi, a psychoanalytically trained Harvard professor, compares Freud’s view with that of C.S. Lewis. Lewis argued that such wish fulfillment would likely give rise to a very different kind of God than the one described in the Bible. If we are looking for benevolent coddling and indulgence, that’s not what we find there. Instead, as we begin to come to grips with the existence of the Moral Law and our obvious inability to live up to it, we realize that we are in deep trouble and are potentially eternally separated from the Author of that Law. Furthermore, does not a child as he or she grows up experience ambivalent feelings toward parents, including a desire to be free? So why should wish fulfillment lead to a desire for God, as opposed to a desire for there to be no God?

Finally, in simple logical terms, if one allows the possibility that God is something humans might wish for, does that rule out the possibility that God is real? Absolutely not. The fact that I have wished for a loving wife does not now make her imaginary. The fact that the farmer wished for rain does not make him question the reality of the subsequent downpour.

In fact, one can turn this wishful-thinking argument on its head. Why would such a universal and uniquely human hunger exist if it were not connected to some opportunity for fulfillment? Again, Lewis says it well: “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world.”

Could it be that this longing for the sacred, a universal and puzzling aspect of human experience, may not be wish fulfillment but rather a pointer toward something beyond us? Why do we have a “God-shaped vacuum” in our hearts and minds unless it is meant to be filled?

In our modern materialistic world, it is easy to lose sight of that sense of longing. In her wonderful collection of essays, TEACHING A STONE TO TALK, Annie Dillard speaks about that growing void:

“Now we are no longer primitive. Now the whole world seems not holy. Ö We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism. ÖIt is difficult to undo our own damage and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it. We are lighting matches in vain under ever green tree. Did the wind used to cry and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of the earth, and living things say very little to very few. Ö And yet it could be that wherever there is motion there is noise, as when a whale breaches and smacks the water, and wherever there is stillness there is the small, still voice, God’s speaking from the whirlwind, nature’s old song and dance, the show we drove from town. Ö What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn’t us? What is the different between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are they not both saying: Hello?”

BOB ABERNETHY: Several recent best-selling books have sharpened the old debate between some scientists and some religionists over creation, evolution and, among other issues, stem cell research.

We want to re-run today a story we carried this past summer about a man who is both a research scientist and an evangelical Christian, and sees no conflict between the two fields. He is Dr. Francis Collins, who led the massive effort to discover the human genetic code. His book is called “The Language of God.”

From the National Institutes of Health, just outside Washington, Francis Collins led an international team that deciphered most of the human genetic code by the year 2000.

Dr. FRANCIS COLLINS (Director, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health and Author, THE LANGUAGE OF GOD): The Human Genome Project was this audacious, absolutely unheard of, ambitious effort to read out all of the letters of the human DNA code, all three billion of them — an enormously challenging problem. And yet, over those next 13 years, we finished the job early, two years ahead of schedule and actually under budget, which surprised everybody, especially in Washington, D.C.

ABERNETHY: When President Clinton announced the achievement, Collins spoke about it both as a scientist and as a man of religious faith.

Dr. COLLINS (at Press Conference): 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.

ABERNETHY: Collins describes the decoding, for him, as both a great scientific experience and an experience of worship. Now Collins says the new knowledge of how genes work, and in disease how they sometimes don’t work, is beginning to revolutionize the practice of medicine. Already, a drug based on genetic understanding is controlling adult leukemia, and…

Dr. COLLINS: Cancer is very much at the front end, because cancer is a genetic disease.

It comes about because of mistakes in DNA. So there are dozens of drugs now in clinical trials that are based on understanding the cancer genome. And they won’t all work, but some of them will.

ABERNETHY: Not far behind, says Collins, is the development of drugs for Alzheimer’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease, asthma and diabetes. Collins is also a strong supporter of stem cell research, and he thinks there’s a way to do this that, for him, removes the moral objections to destroying a human embryo. Collins favors what’s called somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which the nucleus of an egg is replaced by the nucleus of, for instance, a cell of skin.

Dr. COLLINS: Now that is very different in my mind, morally, than the union of sperm and egg. We do not in nature see somatic cell nuclear transfer occurring. This is a purely manmade event. And yet somehow we have attached to the product of that kind of activity the same moral status as the union of sperm and egg. I don’t know quite how we got there.

ABERNETHY: Meanwhile, as grateful as Collins is for the healing his work will make possible, he’s troubled by its contribution to the battle between some believers and most scientists over evolution — what Collins calls the “flash point” between science and faith.

Dr. COLLINS: What I want to say about this I also want to say with great love and understanding for my fellow believers, who have a different view. But for me as a scientist, when I look at DNA — our own, that of the human species — the evidence that we are all descended from a common ancestor is overwhelming. Some might wish that not to be so. It is so. Does this conflict with Genesis 1 and 2? I don’t believe it does.

ABERNETHY: The genetic code, says Collins, supports other evidence that human beings evolved from about 10,000 “founders” between 100-150,000 years ago, probably in East Africa.

Dr. COLLINS: One of my greatest heartaches is that at the present time serious believers, [who] believe that they have to defend a literal interpretation of Genesis in order to defend their faith, find themselves contradicting facts that God Almighty has given us the ability to discover.

ABERNETHY: For Collins, a supernatural God created human beings through the natural processes of evolution, and for religious believers to deny that is to invite ridicule of their faith.

ABERNETHY: But what about the theory of intelligent design, the argument dividing school boards around the country over whether life is so complex the theory of evolution can not explain it, thus there had to have been a designer?

Dr. COLLINS: Intelligent design, while a thoughtful, well-argued perspective, I do not think is taking us to the Promised Land.

I think this will be an argument which ultimately will not do damage to science; it will do damage to faith. The problem is the examples that intelligent design puts forward we are learning a lot about. And the notion that those are examples of irreducible complexity is showing serious cracks.

ABERNETHY: As a child and young man, once a lanky guitar-playing college student, Collins was not religious.

Dr. COLLINS: And when I got to graduate school studying physics and chemistry and mathematics I became an atheist, and a fairly obnoxious one at that. Everything, in my mind, could be reduced to second-order differential equations. That’s all that mattered.

ABERNETHY: But then Collins discovered C.S. Lewis, especially his book MERE CHRISTIANITY, and not long after he became a Christian. At a recent conference on Lewis, Collins spoke of the painful conflict for many students raised to believe the Genesis creation story is literally true.

Dr. COLLINS (conference on C.S. Lewis, to audience): It breaks my heart to see young people raised in Christian homes who are told that they have to believe that perspective or their faith is in doubt or they’re somehow betraying God Almighty. And then faced with the facts that science tells us about the age of the earth, what a terrible quandary they’re placed into. Do they reject their faith? Do they reject science?

ABERNETHY: As Collins sees creation, the Big Bang reveals that the universe had a beginning — about 15 billion years ago — and the fundamental laws of the universe, what Collins calls “constants,” suggest an intention for life.

Dr. COLLINS: One does have to wonder: Did the universe know we were coming or did God, who created the universe, choose those constants just so?

ABERNETHY: Like C.S. Lewis, Collins finds evidence for God in the universal sense of right and wrong and in humanity’s longing for something beyond itself.

Dr. COLLINS: If God who is outside space and time chose to create a universe and populate it with creatures in his image with whom he could have fellowship, who are we to say that the process that we as scientists have uncovered — the Big Bang, the formation of stars and planets and the mechanism of evolution to create life and ultimately human life — is not the way we would have done it? It’s an incredibly elegant, remarkably beautiful way to conduct that marvelous act of creation. Nothing that I know as a scientist is in contradiction to that. Nothing that I know as a believer is in contradiction to that.

ABERNETHY: Meanwhile, Collins notes that 45 percent of Americans tell pollsters they believe the Genesis account of creation, not Darwin’s and Collins’s, and he fears increasing polarization between science and some believers.

Dr. COLLINS: Neither of those outcomes will be good for us in the long term. We need science if we’re going to survive in a complicated world and if we’re going to treat terrible diseases that cry out for some form of alleviation. And we need faith if we’re going to keep ourselves in perspective. So we must seek out the ways in which these worldviews can happily coexist. It’s perhaps our strongest mandate right now, if we’re really concerned about our own future in this world.

ABERNETHY: While the battle of worldviews continues, Collins finds comfort in music, and he brought his guitar to our interview.

Dr. COLLINS (Playing guitar and singing hymn): “When I survey the wondrous cross, on which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride.”

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Developments this week in the national battle over how to teach evolution. In Dover, Pennsylvania, where the school board had voted to teach both evolution and competing theories, eight of the nine board members were up for reelection, and all eight were defeated. Meanwhile, in federal court the trial over the issue ended, with a decision expected by early January.

In Kansas, a different course. The conservative majority on the state board of education opened the way for teaching intelligent design along with evolution. Fred de Sam Lazaro reports.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: … two, draft three. All in favor signify by raised hand.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The vote was six to four to allow both evolution and alternative ideas to be taught in science classes.

Kansas’s board of education has seesawed three times on this issue since 1999. On Tuesday, evolution critics, once again a majority, voted to revise and rewrite science standards.

Evolution, the theory that all organisms descended from a common ancestor, is widely accepted as a cornerstone of biology. Kansas will now also permit other ideas, including intelligent design. It holds that some biology is so complex that it could only be the result of design. No designer is mentioned, but critics say intelligent design is disguised creationism, a religious view.

JANET WAUGH (Kansas Board of Education): Comments have been made by board members such as, “Evolution is an age-old fairy tale and you can’t believe in evolution and the Bible; you must make a choice,” among others, you know. But those are ones that came to mind. I think that — why not be honest and admit it? It’s a faith issue.

KENNETH WILLARD (Kansas Board of Education): Any introduction of any criticism of evolution or the consideration of it is a challenge to the blind faith in evolution that some people want to hold. Now that’s where the faith issue comes, as far as I’m concerned.

DE SAM LAZARO: Supporters insisted the revised standards broaden the science curriculum. But the National Academy of Sciences disagreed and revoked its permission for Kansas to use its national science guidelines. The academy said the Kansas board had changed the definition of science by omitting a key sentence that says science can rely only on natural explanations. But the board’s chairman insisted that does not mean allowing for the supernatural.

STEVE ABRAMS (Kansas Board of Education): And you keep saying it’s supernatural. It’s not supernatural. There’s nowhere that it is supernatural, that it’s mentioned, and consequently, that’s not the case.

SUE GAMBLE (Kansas Board of Education): Well, if this other — but, Mr. Chairman, in all due respect, if they are not natural — if they are not natural explanations — what other kinds are there?

Mr. ABRAMS: It is to discuss what is the natural, to discuss ideas and origins and explanations for natural phenomen[a]. Period.

DE SAM LAZARO: In a room packed with media, there was concern for Kansas’s image.

Ms. WAUGH: We’re becoming a laughingstock not only of the nation but of the world.

Mr. WILLARD: I just went to a national meeting, and nobody laughed at me. And as a matter of fact, I had a number of people come up and tell me that, to keep up the good work.

DE SAM LAZARO: The new standards approved by the board face a few hurdles before they can make it into a classroom. For one thing, rewriting those standards will take months, a period that will see new elections to the state board of education. There could also be lawsuits to invalidate the new standards. For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Fred De Sam Lazaro in Topeka, Kansas.

ABERNETHY: As many Americans debate evolution and intelligent design, Pope Benedict XVI on Wednesday used language some observers interpreted as a reaffirmation of divine guidance. He described the natural world as “an intelligent project.” Here at home, televangelist Pat Robertson said the voters in Dover, Pennsylvania who threw out eight members of their school board had rejected God.

BOB ABERNETHY: Are you a mainline Protestant? An Evangelical Protestant? What are you?

DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: I guess I’d call myself a serious Christian. That is someone who believes in the reality of Christ’s death and resurrection, and who tries to integrate that into daily life and not just relegate it to something you talk about on Sunday morning.

ABERNETHY: As briefly as you can summarize it, what is the Human Genome Project?

COLLINS: The Human Genome Project is a multifaceted effort to understand our own instruction book, to read those 3 billion letters in the DNA code that makes up that book, and to develop methods that help us understand what it’s telling us.

ABERNETHY: And what’s the promise of it?

COLLINS: All of biology and all of medical research is going to be divided by what we did before we had this information and what we can do after we have it. We shouldn’t overstate the immediacy of the promise because, after all, most of the letters in this instruction book won’t make sense to us immediately. But having it is a historic moment. It will really alter the way in which we approach problems in medicine in a profound way. And before long, that will begin to have a serious impact on the practice of medicine, as well.

ABERNETHY: What are we looking at as realistic possibilities?

COLLINS: In the next five to seven years, we should identify the genetic susceptibility factors for virtually all common diseases — cancer, diabetes, heart disease, the major mental illnesses — on down that list. Out of that will come the ability to make predictions about who’s at risk and, in many instances, that itself can be extremely helpful by allowing you to take advantage of surveillance, so that you are diagnosed early before a real problem arises. In the longer term — perhaps ten or 15 years — this will lead to a new generation of therapies that is going to be much more successful and effectively targeted towards the basic problem than what we have now.

ABERNETHY: What are the diseases that you think might be able to be prevented or cured because of this knowledge?

COLLINS: I think in another 20, 25 years, we should be able to prevent or cure most cases of cancer, of diabetes, of heart diseases, of multiple sclerosis, of asthma. Not to say that we will all live forever. The death rate will still be one per person. Something will get us, I suppose. But the current situation where far too many people are stricken with illnesses while still young or in the prime of life will be much improved by this.

ABERNETHY: I’ve heard people talk about the possibility of living to be 150 or something like that. If you could do that, would you want to?

COLLINS: I’m not sure that I’d look forward to living to be as old as Methuselah. I think, actually, there’s a certain appropriateness of the life span being limited in certain ways. But I sure hope that the life span I have will be spent in a healthy life style and not dealing with chronic, severe illness.

ABERNETHY: And what’s your greatest hope for this?

COLLINS: I’m a physician. I’ve spent far too much time in clinical situations where I didn’t understand the illness and I didn’t know what to do about it. My greatest hope is that this project, which is part of the long tradition of medical research, will give us the tools to understand and treat and cure diseases that we currently don’t have enough to offer for.

ABERNETHY: Do you have some favorite phrases that you like to use to describe what this is?

COLLINS: I think it is a fairly decent analogy that the genome is our instruction book. It is maybe a bit of a grandiose statement to call it the “Book of Life,” ’cause there’s a lot more to life than this biological set of parts. But it does sort of bring up to mind an analogy that’s pretty decent. It is, after all, a book that’s written in a simple, linear fashion. It only has four letters instead of 26, and it’s a book that we will take a long time to try to understand. It’s a very large book. It’s a very mysterious book. It’s also basically important to think of this as not more than it is. It is, after all, a set of instructions; but it does not really tell us what being human is — nor, would I argue, it ever will.

ABERNETHY: Tell me how you see it as a religious person discovering God’s creation. And how does what you’re doing fit into your beliefs?

COLLINS: Sure. I came to my faith sort of in a later time in life than many people. I didn’t really experience a conversion until I was 27. And I was already interested in genetics, and I worried that there was gonna be a collision here in terms of my interest as a scientist and what I’d come to believe as a person of faith. But, actually, this has been a wonderful, synthetic experience. For me, as a person who believes in a personal God, the opportunity to uncover something about us that nobody knew before but God knew is really a moment not to be missed. It expands the experience of discovery in ways that people who are not believers, I think, don’t quite get to experience. It’s an opportunity both for scientific exhilaration and actually for worship.

ABERNETHY: Do you worry that having a parts list will encourage the idea that our genes are us? Are all we are?

COLLINS: I agree that one of the greatest risks of this focus on the genome — and it’s certainly a focus I’m excited about — is that we overstate its significance and that we draw the conclusion that everything about us — from what we had for breakfast this morning to who we chose as our life’s partner — is something that’s hard-wired into our DNA, and free will goes out the window, and we move into this mind-set of genetic determinism. The scientific basis for that does not exist. So much of what we’ve learned about human behavior tells us that it’s a lot more than your genes that influence what kind of personality you have. And let me quickly say certainly, as a person of faith, that free will, which is often overlooked in these nature versus nurture discussions is not gonna go out of fashion just because we have the parts list in front of us; and that free will, which distinguishes us in a particularly obvious way from other species on this planet, is, in my view, the most important feature of this discussion when it comes to our relationship with God.

ABERNETHY: What’s your biggest fear?

COLLINS: Well, clearly, learning about the genome is a laudable activity. I think it’s something that God is enthusiastic about — that we’re uncovering the incredible intricacies of our own created being. At the same time, how we decide to use that knowledge might be for good, or it might not be. Virtually every new scientific discovery carries that risk, and this one particularly so because this is about us. I can imagine scenarios where people would use this information in discriminatory ways to try to beat up on each other: “Oh, you’ve got a risk of this disease. We’re not gonna give you health insurance,” or, “We’re not gonna give you a job.” Those risks are with us right now. I can imagine other scenarios where we try to take charge of our own biological situation by trying to optimize the characteristics of future generations. A technology to do that right now doesn’t exist, but one can’t be too sanguine that it won’t become possible. And I would personally find that very deeply troubling. In fact, I would say the idea that we go in and begin to manipulate our own germ-line gene pool is something that, unless very, very strong argument can be brought forward to the benefit and the theological and philosophical positives, is something we shouldn’t do.

ABERNETHY: But how can you manipulate the genes or replace certain defective genes in a way that will prevent disease without at the same time passing on the new characteristics to all the future generations?

COLLINS: So, my sense is we should not at the present time — even for the attempt to reduce the likelihood of disease — alter the germ line. That is the DNA that’s going to get passed on to future generations. We don’t know the consequences of that. And if this is an alteration which has other effects that we aren’t able to perceive until a couple of generations go by, what have we done? I think we should have an absolutely strict moratorium on any manipulations of the human germ line for the present time, because we don’t know how to do that safely.

ABERNETHY: But you can cure disease and develop ways to prevent disease without affecting the germ line

COLLINS: Absolutely. The germ line is the part of the DNA that does get passed to the next generation. Most of our DNA is not germ line. The DNA in my lungs is not gonna get passed to the next generation. If I had cystic fibrosis and I wanted that cured in my lungs and you could change the genes in my lungs that have that glitch, I’d want you to do that. But that would not affect my offspring. I think that’s a critical distinction. And all of the promise that I see for genetic therapies for diabetes, or heart disease, or cancer does not require you to go into the germ line to make those changes.

ABERNETHY: What about enhancement? Should I be able to do that?

COLLINS: Well, we’ve had a lot of debate about the “designer baby” scenario. Some of it’s very deeply troubling, I think, to most people. It is to me, too. Scientifically, we don’t know how to do most of the things that people project. We have no idea what the genetics are of intelligence, musical ability, athletic capabilities, attractiveness. We can’t even define a lot of those things, much less identify the genes that are responsible. Suppose we were able to learn some of that — and we will — it will still be a pretty sloppy business if you’re counting on using this to optimize the characteristics of your offspring. You can get pretty disappointed, because all of these things have profoundly important environmental contributions. Again, I don’t think we should be doing those sorts of things if it means manipulating the germ line, because the safety aspects of that are unknowable — and are essentially unknowable without taking risks with future generations that we shouldn’t take.

ABERNETHY: Is it realistic to think that some day we might be able to transform ourselves into a whole new species?

COLLINS: Well, people have talked about, “Okay. Suppose we get really effectively able technologically to go and manipulate our own gene pool in ways that are safe, where we don’t face this risk of uncertain, downstream consequences. Is that something we should contemplate? Are we stuck in an evolutionary state that could, in fact, advance if we took charge of our own evolution? I find that deeply chilling, to be honest. I think of our species as having a unique character in terms of our relationship with God. What do we do to that relationship if we go in and alter ourselves? How are we in a position to be able to know what’s an improved characteristic? There’s a certain arbitrariness to that. And, who gets to decide what’s an improvement? It’s a bit of a worrisome question, given our history here, even in the past hundred years, of trying to use genetic manipulation to improve certain aspects of humanity. That didn’t work so well the last time.

ABERNETHY: What do you say to people of faith who are troubled that we may be reaching for very forbidden fruit?

COLLINS: Yes. If we were able to play God the way that God does, then perhaps people wouldn’t worry so much. God’s m- — effective oversight of His creation is done in a benevolent way. We fallen creatures unfortunately can’t be counted on to act with that same benevolence. In that regard, the idea of our trying to change our own identity on a biological basis becomes immediately suspect in terms of what the motivations would be. Now, whether you call that “playing God,” which is such an overused phrase it’s sort of become almost meaningless, or whether you simply say, “That is territory we shouldn’t go into,” I’m gonna say it’s territory we shouldn’t go into.

ABERNETHY: We’re not only morally, but in physical ways we’re flawed?

COLLINS: Yes.

ABERNETHY: Surely, if we can shouldn’t we do that?

COLLINS: If we could develop a way of reducing the prevalence of a particular, very deleterious gene — say Tay-Sach’s disease or sickle cell anemia — in a fashion that did not involve actually going in and trying to change the germ line DNA, then I think you could make a moral argument that that is an acceptable activity for human beings, because it is a direct effort to alleviate human suffering and reduce illness. But that’s a pretty limited set of boundaries that will be both technically demanding and I think, in social terms, acceptable. Outside of that, when you start talking about enhancements or changes in character traits, you immediately bump into what’s an improvement and what isn’t and, there, who are we to say that in most instances, as fallen creatures with our own set of agendas.

ABERNETHY: You worry about a possibility of developing a sense of “us versus them,” the “superior” versus the “inferior”? As you suggested, there have been experiments with Nazi Germany that remind us of the dangers of that.

COLLINS: Yes.

ABERNETHY: The disabled worry about being discriminated against. To what extent is that a danger, and what should we do about it?

COLLINS: Yes. Certainly, you can bring to bear on this whole argument against enhancement efforts the fact that they will be unlikely, if attempted, to be evenly available to all. And that puts us, then, in a moral position that’s pretty untenable. If this whole area, if we were to allow it, increases the separation between the haves and the have-nots, what are we doing here? One of the strongest principles of humanity is this notion of equality. Could this be done in that fashion? It seems doubtful. And you are right. There’s also this issue of what are we saying to people who are disabled if the effort becomes to basically avoid that kind of outcome? Does that mean that their existence is considered secondary in terms of its value, compared to the mythical perfect person? I think there’s a serious issue here in terms of our attitude towards diversity in our ranks — diversity of all sorts, including disabilities. If we set up a goal to try to eliminate some segment of our own population, what are we saying about our benevolence, about our willingness to accept differences?

ABERNETHY: So, what do we need? New laws? What should they be?

COLLINS: Well, right now, we need laws to prevent genetic discrimination. This is a matter of some urgency. People who are in a position of finding out that they’re at risk for some illness, whether it’s breast cancer, or heart disease, are afraid to get that information — even though it might be useful to them — because of fears that they’ll lose their health insurance or their job. The Human Genome Project has studied this issue. We have this ethical, legal and social implications program. We have ten years of good scholarship on this, and it’s clear that we need effective federal legislation to make that not possible. And there are bills that have been written and introduced, and we just need to get them passed and be done with it. It’s clear what has to be done here.

ABERNETHY: And what about patenting? At what point should this information be privately owned?

COLLINS: Patenting tends to get people’s juices flowing when you put the word “gene” and the word “patent” in the same sentence. And understandably so. This is stuff we’re carrying around — all of us — inside all of our cells. Should somebody be able to lay claim to it? I think, though, it helps with patenting to step back from a sort of strong moral stance and think of patenting, really, as a construct — a legal construct — that is supposed to provide public benefit. There are situations where being able to have intellectual property claim on a gene — which is not to say you own it, but you have this claim — provides an incentive to develop a product which the public needs, and without which that product would not occur. And in that instance, I think a gene patent makes sense. Even though it may make you sort of uneasy at some fundamental level, if the point of it is public benefit, it’s probably being achieved. Where I take exception, though, is people applying for patents on genes that they don’t know the function of, do not have an idea of a pathway of how this is gonna lead to public benefit, and basically are just engaged in staking claims and putting fences around parts of the genome, hoping that somebody will have to pay them later when they find out what this is all about. That we should not do.

ABERNETHY: And does that take an act of Congress? Should Congress prevent that?

COLLINS: Well, I’m heartened by the actions the U.S. Patent Office has taken in the course of the last few months. They are clearly moving the bar significantly higher before they will allow you to get a patent approved on a gene sequence, and they are requiring you to provide significant evidence of what that gene does and how it could be useful before they’re going to grant you that patent. It’s not completely clear how this is all gonna settle out, but it looks more encouraging than it did a year or so ago.

ABERNETHY: On the question of ownership, is it your feeling that each individual should have the absolute right to decide who sees his or her genetic profile?

COLLINS: Absolutely. A cardinal principle that we must not stray from — no exceptions — is that your genetic information is your business in terms of who sees it. Nobody should be gaining access to that information without your explicit permission, and nobody should be requiring you to take a genetic test unless you decide that that’s what you want to do.

ABERNETHY: Would you like to know your genetic profile?

COLLINS: I would like to know about the things in my DNA that place me at risk for some illness down the road that I could do something about if I knew about it. I’d like to have that information. I suspect in a few years, as the number of such possibilities comes along fairly rapidly, I’m gonna be one of the people saying, “Okay. Tell me. I need to know this. Let me prepare myself for a way to avoid that illness that may otherwise be lurking there, waiting for me.”

ABERNETHY: Something for which there is no cure — and no prospect of a cure? So to what extent would knowledge of my genetic profile affect the way I live? Would it reduce my ability to be spontaneous and hopeful?

COLLINS: I think people will vary in their interest in this information, particularly in circumstances where there’s nothing you can do about it. For myself, I’m not sure I want to know about those illnesses that may be at heightened risk for me, but for which nothing can be done. I may say “no, thanks” to that. And we should preserve that option. Nobody should be forced to find out everything. You should be able to decide which parts of this panel do you want to sign up for and which parts do you want to pass up. I mean right now, we know how to test for about half of the hereditary risks for Alzheimer’s disease. But there’s nothing you can do if you’re found to be in that high-risk category. I don’t want that information, and very few other people do, either.

ABERNETHY: What do you say to these people who argue that spending $3 billion on this is all very well, but essentially it’s not going to affect more than a small number of people; and that same money could alleviate hunger, educate, etc.? Why is this such a high priority? Why should it be?

COLLINS: I think if you believe that one of our strongest mandates as human beings is to try to heal the sick, that we then look at an opportunity of this sort as a gold moment to be able to, in a whole new way, understand why disease strikes some people at certain times and what to do about it. The actual investment we’re talking about here is actually quite modest on the scale of things. The Human Genome Project, despite the public attention it has received, is less than two percent of the budget that the United States puts into medical research through the National Institutes of Health. We’re a rather modest investment, to be sure. And, actually, the Project (Collins cont.) ended up costing less than people expected and got done sooner. If your notion is that it is a good thing to try to cure disease, this is the best thing going right now to be able to go beyond what is currently often a rather empirical approach, a rather descriptive approach, an approach that looks all too often at downstream consequences instead of the fundamental problem and change all of that. This is shining a light into that black box that we’ve had to live with for cancer and heart disease and diabetes for so many years, and really illuminating at a fundamental level what the problem is. How could you not do that?

ABERNETHY: Many say there’s got to be a really serious national debate … and there isn’t one. And the religious community has got to pick itself up and really get informed and become a real part of this.

COLLINS: I think it’s critical that we engage a broad set of participants in the debate about where we go from here with genetics and the Genome Project. And, in particular, the Church needs to be engaged, needs to be heard from in a much more significant way than has been the case up until now. I think many people of religious persuasions are alarmed about this in a general sort of way without having enough information to know where are the areas that most need attention, and which ones of these are actually science-fiction scenarios that one need not bother spending a lot of time on right now. Scientists have something to bring to this, which is the facts of the matter. But scientists are not in a special position here as far as deciding the consequences for society or making moral choices about going this direction or that. That has to be done in a much broader community, and the Church, of all those communities, is probably the one in the strongest position to bring this long tradition of ethical thinking to the table. It troubles me that that has not happened; that in some instances sort of the reverse has happened.

There seems to be a polarization — not necessarily based on facts, but just based on fears — and we really need to get past that. Some churches are making very significant efforts, and they deserve a lot of credit. But the real synthesis of the thinking here has not happened.

ABERNETHY: Could you tick off the diseases that now plague us that this knowledge might lead us to prevent or cure?

COLLINS: In another 20 to 25 years, based on this genetic analysis and understanding of common diseases, we should be able to prevent or cure many cases — maybe even most cases — of cancer, of diabetes, of heart disease by a combination of strategies focused on prevention, early diagnosis — maybe even before you have symptoms — and therapies that are much more effectively targeted to the problem than what we have now.

ABERNETHY: What does that mean?

COLLINS: Will we be able to extend the normal human life span beyond the sort of 100 years that we seem to currently enjoy if things go well? I don’t know. What I do think we’ll be able to do is to offer to people a much better chance of living out that life span in a healthy status, instead of being plagued by chronic disease. And who knows? We may understand genes for aging in another 30 or 40 years even to the point of being able to push back the limits on that normal life span, although I doubt that that’s going to be very straightforward. There are many, many factors at work here, and it’s not clear how easy they will be to manipulate.

ABERNETHY: Do you want to live to be 150?

COLLINS: I’m not sure I have a great desire to push beyond these hundred years. When I’m 95, I may say — (chuckling) — differently. It seems to me that the advantages of going on forever are not necessarily overwhelmingly compelling. (Chuckling) — and having a life span of a hundred years seems pretty reasonable right now.

ABERNETHY: And we shouldn’t mess with what’s passed on to the future generations.

COLLINS: In my view — and this is shared, I think, by most ethicists and most scientists — we shouldn’t be messing with the germ line. We don’t know enough about what we’re doing not to be taking terrific risks not only with that person, but with people who are not giving their consent to this, their future children and grandchildren.

ABERNETHY: A hundred years from now, what do you think historians will say about this moment and the knowledge that is about to be completed?

COLLINS: I think historians will look back on this as the greatest scientific adventure that humankind ever went on — at least up until this point. Maybe we’ll go on some other ones in the next hundred years. But compared to anything we’ve ever done in science, this beats it all. Splitting the atom was incredibly important and powerful. Going to the Moon — wow, what an adventure that was. But this one is about ourselves. This is hard to overstate in terms of its significance. Having said that, a hundred years from now, we’ll still be trying to figure out what this instruction book is telling us. We’ll know a lot of it, but the mysteries will not be completely unraveled.

ABERNETHY: Why is it so important?

COLLINS: I think if you’re interested in medicine, if you’re interested in human biology, if you’re just interested in what’s it mean to be human, the idea of having this book of instructions read out for the first time is pretty powerful. We only have to do this once. You don’t have to go back and do it over and over again. If we do it right, it’s gonna be there. And it will change entirely the way that we approach research questions. It will change our view of ourselves — hopefully, incredible, responsible ways. And it will change the whole way that science gets practiced from here on out.

ABERNETHY: To what extent are you concerned, or worried, perhaps even jealous or resentful that private organizations have joined this search and pushed it very, very fast and essentially are competing with you?

COLLINS: We always said that if the Genome Project was going to be successful, it would have to engage the private sector — that we would want vigorous activity in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical arena. The fact that that’s happening is terrific. That means that the future benefits to the public are much more likely to happen than if this was a purely academic, basic-science activity. So, the fact that there is so much activity in the private sector is the strongest endorsement you could have of the way in which this is perceived as a valuable activity. I think there’s been far too much made about the notion that there is some sort of a race going on. It’s the wrong metaphor. We’re all trying to get the information. There are different missions involved. The public project exists to give its data away, and we do that every 24 hours, without any restrictions on its use whatsoever. Private industry can’t afford to do that. Their stockholders would throw them out if they did such a thing. So, there is some tension here, some competition. But in the long run, this is a good thing. This is not an unfortunate outcome. Ten years from (Collins cont.) now, this whole hoo-ha about what is perceived as a race won’t seem very interesting. What will matter is: Did we get the human genome sequence in a timely fashion? Did we do it right? Did we do it so we didn’t make a lot of mistakes? And, was it available to every scientist who had a good idea and wanted to figure out what it meant?

ABERNETHY: But are there dangers in the competition right now that it won’t be done right?

COLLINS: I don’t think there’s much risk of a bad outcome. Almost 90 percent of the human sequence is already in the public domain, derived by this International Sequencing Consortium. There is no risk that somehow this will all end up being privatized, or commodified, or inaccessible, or done in a strategy that turns out not to work. It’s too late for that risk to be worried about too much. And that’s a good thing. I think there’s a common assumption that you cannot both be a rigorous, show-me-the-data scientist and a person who believes in a personal God. I would like to say that from my perspective that assumption is incorrect; that, in fact, these two areas are entirely compatible and not only can exist within the same person, but can exist in a very synthetic way, and not in a comp- — compartmentalized way. I have no reason to see a discordance between what I know as a scientist who spends all day studying the genome of humans and what I believe as somebody who pays a lot of attention to what the Bible has taught me about God and about Jesus Christ. Those are entirely compatible views. Science is the way — a powerful way, indeed — to study the natural world. Science is not particularly effective — in fact, it’s rather ineffective — in making commentary about the supernatural world. Both worlds, for me, are quite real and quite important. They are investigated in different ways. They coexist. They illuminate each other. And it is an — a great joy to be in a position of being able to bring both of those points of view to bear in any given day of the week. The notion that you have to sort of choose one or the other is a terrible myth that has been put forward, and which many people have bought into without really having a chance to examine the evidence. I came to my faith not, actually, in a circumstance where it was drummed into me as a child, which people tend to assume of any scientist who still has a personal faith in God; but actually by a series of compelling, logical arguments, many of them put forward by C. S. Lewis, that got me to the precipice of saying, “Faith is actually plausible.” You still have to make that step. You will still have to decide for yourself whether to believe. But you can get very close to that by intellect alone.

ABERNETHY: Do you find in science grounds for, and encouragement for, faith?

COLLINS: I think it’s probably difficult to take the investigation of the natural world and say, “I can prove to you, because of the elegance and beauty of all of this, that there must be a creator God.” You can certainly use those arguments, but I think they alone will not carry the day for a skeptic. Once one has become a believer, this is, in fact, a very satisfying aspect of all of this — that you see things that God knew before, and now you get to see them, too. And that is an exhilarating experience. But as an argument to say, “Well, flowers are so beautiful,” or, “This DNA sequence is particularly elegant; therefore, you have to believe in the creator God” — I have not found that in itself to be compelling to a skeptic.

ABERNETHY: What do you say to your fellow Christians who say, “Evolution is just a theory, and I can’t put that together with my idea of a creator God”?

COLLINS: Well, evolution is a theory. It’s a very compelling one. As somebody who studies DNA, the fact that we are 98.4 percent identical at the DNA level to a chimpanzee, it’s pretty hard to ignore the fact that when I am studying a particular gene, I can go to the mouse and find it’s the similar gene, and it’s 90 percent the same. It’s certainly compatible with the theory of evolution, although it will always be a theory that we cannot actually prove. I’m a theistic evolutionist. I take the view that God, in His wisdom, used evolution as His creative scheme. I don’t see why that’s such a bad idea. That’s pretty amazingly creative on His part. And what is wrong with that as a way of putting together in a synthetic way the view of God who is interested in creating a group of individuals that He can have fellowship with — us? Why is evolution not an appropriate way to get to that goal? I don’t see a problem with that. The only problems that get put forward are by those who would interpret Genesis 1 in a very literal way. And that interpretation in many ways is a — is a modern one. Saint Augustine in 400 AD, without any reasons to try to be an apologist to Charles Darwin, agreed that that was not a particularly appropriate way to interpret the words that are written in that first chapter of the Bible.