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« Back to Francis Collins, Reconciling God and Science, Part 1 main page    Transcript for: Francis Collins, Reconciling God and Science, Part 1DNA the genetic code that defines our bodies and our lives has been the focus of Dr. Francis Collins work. As head of the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health and as an internationally renowned scientist, Dr. Collins and his team successfully mapped the entire human genome. Francis Collins is a Christian of great religious faith and the author of the best selling book entitled “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.” The topic before the house: Reconciling God and Science. This week on Think Tank.BEN WATTENBERG: Dr. Francis Collins. Welcome to Think Tank. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: It’s great to be here, Ben. BEN WATTENBERG: Let us begin, as we so often, by-- let me ask you-- just to give us a word, a biography. Where were you born? Where’d you go to school? Who your parents were. I know you drive a motorcycle. Give us a little bit about it. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: All of that. Well, I grew up on a small farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. I had a rather unconventional upbringing and my parents were doing the ’60s thing, except it wasn’t the ’60s yet. They bought a small dirt farm with no plumbing and tried to live off the land. That didn’t work out so well so my dad went back to teaching. And he taught at a local college. And he was a drama professor. My mother was a playwright. BEN WATTENBERG: Wow. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: A summer theatre was started and the grove of oak trees up above our farmhouse, which is now in its 55th consecutive season. BEN WATTENBERG: I-- I worked summer stock in Virginia at the Bull Run Summer Theatre. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: Ah, yes. BEN WATTENBERG: Long-- about 100 years ago. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: Well, this is the Oak Grove Theatre-- near Stanton, Virginia. Which is a wonderful place-- with magical theatre that happens in the great outdoors, surrounded by oak trees. It’s a great place to do Midsummer Night’s Dream. And I loved growing up that way. And I had lots of opportunities to learn about music and literature and theatre and the arts. Didn’t learn a lot about science. Although, I was taught at home by my mother till the sixth grade. Then I went to public school. I encountered science as a high school student. Fell in love with the science of chemistry, which is sort of the first one I bumped into. And realized this was a way you could figure stuff out. And so I was energized and figured that must be-- that had to be my career. And I went off to the University of Virginia and majored in chemistry, of course. Did well at that. Decided I would go on to graduate school. And I went to Yale. Got a PhD in quantum mechanics, of all things. Which was great fun. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, all sort of piled in there together. Walking around at night with my boxes full of computer cards, ’cause that’s what you had to do in those days if you wanted to calculate anything. But then I had change-- BEN WATTENBERG: When-- when were you born, Francis? DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: 1950. So-- BEN WATTENBERG: You’re a child. Right. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: Well, I’m-- we could say that, I suppose. I appreciate your saying it. I had a change of heart. Near the end of that PhD, I began to realize that I was being drawn more in the direction of science that had to do with life. I had initially been turned off by biology. It seemed all very descriptive and not very, you know, quantitative, not very digital, not all that interesting. But stuff was happening. Recombinant DNA was getting invented. It looked like we might actually be able to understand how life works and even apply it to ourselves. And the more I looked at that opportunity, the more I wanted to be part of it. BEN WATTENBERG: And then, of course, when you start approaching life, you start approaching God. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: Indeed. And it was an interesting parallel, sort of, series of steps in my scientific life and my spiritual life. I had not grown up in a home where faith was considered important. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: So, for me, a person growing up in-- this-- environment of theatre and the arts, but not much faith, I became an agnostic by the time I was in college. I just didn’t think I could ever sort it out and didn’t really want to try too hard. It was one of those, sort of, woeful blindness things. When I got to graduate school, you know, working with all these equations and physics. BEN WATTENBERG: This was at Yale, also? DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: At Yale. I was increasingly more inclined to be an atheist. And, in fact, I would’ve called myself that as a graduate student. I had no use for anything that was outside of my-- equations and my physical laws. But then I went to medical school. So my scientific interests were leaning more towards humans. And that put me in touch with humans. Some of them who had terrible illnesses. And as I sat at the bedside of people who were facing certain death, realizing that my medical skills and the whole realm of medicine was not going to save them-- and I listened to them talk about their personal faith and how that comforted them and gave them a sense of peace-- I was puzzled by that. If that was a psychological crutch, boy, it was a powerful one. And one afternoon, an elderly woman with terrible heart disease-- and we’d run out of options to offer her-- told me about her faith. And then turned and looked me square in the eye and said, 'Doctor, you haven’t said anything. What do you believe?' Nobody ever really asked me that question. And it surprised me how difficult it was to find an answer. I stammered, I struggled. I said something, like, 'Oh, I’m not really quite sure.' And I realized that my atheism was very thin all of a sudden. It didn’t have much substance. It didn’t have much foundation. I had never really looked at the evidence for and against the existence of God, and I was supposed to be a scientist who makes conclusions based on evidence. That was a problem. I decided I’d better go out and see what knowledgeable people had come up with in terms of arguments pro and con. And so I began reading some of the theology and philosophy and even scientific arguments for and against God. And I was surprised to discover that faith was not a purely emotional business. That faith and reason were not actually separate. BEN WATTENBERG: A scientist named Albert Einstein basically came to that same conclusion. That-- that there’s something out that he couldn’t deal with, with all his equations. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: And, indeed. I admired Einstein, of course, as somebody who studied quantum mechanics. He was the originator of so much of the ideas that I was studying. And I didn’t quite realize that he did have this sense of the supernatural. Famous things that he said such as, 'Science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind.' Doesn’t sound like the conversation of somebody who’s an atheist. And certainly, if you read Walter Isaacson’s wonderful new biography of Einstein, you’ll find many evidences of Einstein’s deism. That he did see the hand of God in the fact that mathematics actually works. That the universe obeys these mathematical laws that are simple and beautiful. That seems to reflect a mind, an amazing mind that put the whole thing in place. What-- what Einstein-- BEN WATTENBERG: A mind, a design, an intelligence-- something. We-- I-- I be loath to put an actual name on it, but it-- something’s going on. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: I think a mind is probably about as close as I can get without really trying to define what I mean by that. But Einstein didn’t buy into, though, was the idea that this mind, this God, if you will go there-- actually cared about human beings. Einstein’s view was, okay, yeah, responsible for the physical laws. But probably not too concerned about the activities of homo sapiens. In that regard, as I was struggling to figure out what are the evidences for and against faith, something that influenced me a great deal was encountering the writings of C.S. Lewis. Now, here’s an Oxford scholar. BEN WATTENBERG: Catholic. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: He was an Anglican, actually. BEN WATTENBERG: Oh, I see. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: But he started out as an atheist. Just like-- as I was. And he was upset because some of his faculty members said something about being believers. And he couldn’t imagine how that could be so he set about to try to disprove their position. And ultimately was won over by the evidence. And in his wonderful book, Mere Christianity, in the first chapter of that, he talks about the moral law. The knowledge of right and wrong that we humans have. Which seems to be universal, in all cultures, over all of human history. And yet, sort of, defies an explanation. Why should that be there? Why should we have this sense that there is such a thing as good and there is such a thing as evil. And we’re called to do the right thing. Even though we often decide to disobey it using our free will. It’s not easy to explain that away. Even with the current efforts in sociobiology. I think you fall far short of finding an explanation for that very human, very prominent feature of what it means-- to be us. And that’s interesting. And if you were looking for a signpost towards a God who not just started the universe, but actually cares about humans, it would be a interesting place to find it, wouldn’t it? There in your heart, written on all of us, moral law. Which we struggle to obey and often fail. Which is pointing us towards the need to try to strive for goodness. And maybe, also, pointing us towards the source of that goodness. Who must be even-- (OVERTALK) DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: --more good than we can imagine. BEN WATTENBERG: One of the great documents-- in history, obviously, can be read-- I think I read it once-- in 24 seconds. It’s called the Ten Commandments. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: Well, certainly, when you look at the great religious traditions, much of it is in fact about the moral law. And about calling us to be more noble than, perhaps, our animal nature would normally expect us to be. When you look at the-- the teachings of the prophets and of Jesus, they’re very much about this golden rule. Of doing things to help people, not to hurt them. And that’s kind of contrary, actually, to what evolution would expect us to do. Evolution, as-- the-- the proponents will tell you, and I am a proponent of evolution. I believe it explains almost everything in biology. But it doesn’t explain the moral law. Evolution would ask-- BEN WATTENBERG: Well-- well, you know-- you know, let’s go back a step. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: Yeah. BEN WATTENBERG: If you say that evolution, among other things, is designed to make you feel good-- I mean, it’s to have a sense of yourself, and you accept the idea that it’s better to give than to receive, then this might be an evolutionary bonus. To say I want to give things away to my children, to causes I believe in, not because I’m such a nice guy, but because it makes me feel-- feel so good. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: But evolution doesn’t care if you feel good. Evolution only cares if you pass on your DNA. That’s the only point-- to evolutionary pressure. QUESTION Yeah, but people who feel good are gonna-- are more likely to survive, are-- are more likely to pass on their beliefs as well as their-- their-- their genes. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: Certainly. And that indirect way, something that causes you to feel good, to survive, to reproductively be successful, that-- evolution will certainly encourage that. BEN WATTENBERG: It beats-- it beats psychiatry. (LAUGHTER) You know, giving things away to people you love and to causes you love. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: It does, indeed. But why is that? That part. I mean, why should it-- let’s take an extreme example. Take an Oscar Schindler who risks his life to save people he doesn’t know, who are from another tribe, if you will, than he was. We look at that example and we admire it as a noble act that we wish there was more of around us. Evolution looks at Oscar Schindler and says, 'You blew it. You didn’t have a-- a right focus here in terms of what your goal was.' Which was to have lots of children. And preferably, be able to out compete those other people, not save them from the gas chamber. So what’s going on here? Evolution would call Oscar a scandal. And yet, we humans look at that and we say, 'That’s the real meaning of human nobility. That’s what we’re called to do. That is what God wants for us.' How can those two things-- be completely explained on a naturalistic basis? I don’t think you can get there. And I find that, to this day, interesting. Now, the evolutionists will already be, like, jumping out of their chairs at this point saying, 'Well, wait a minute. Wait a minute. What about kin selection? And what about reciprocal altruism?' And all of the, sort of, just so arguments that are put forward to explain altruistic acts. But they won’t get you to Oscar. They just won’t. BEN WATTENBERG: So what-- should have faith, God-- reason-- whatever. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: I should be careful here in that I’m not trying to establish a proof of God’s existence. We will not find one of those. Faith will remain faith. Faith can be integrated with reason. It’s not the opposite of reason. Faith and reason go hand in hand. But at the same time, you’re not going to be able to, by pure intellectual argument, convince an atheist that God exists. At the same time, I think you can and should, if you’re a rational person, look around and say, 'Are there pointers? Are there bits of evidence that suggest that God is real and that God cares about human beings?' And I find this moral law to be a pretty interesting example of that sort. Especially because it goes beyond Einstein’s God. And it gets you all the way to the God of Abraham, the God that cares about individual human beings and wants relationship with them. Which is the God I believe in. But-- throughout the Old Testament and-- and in-- among every people in the world, bar none, there are histories of-- of massacre and genocide-- DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: Indeed. BEN WATTENBERG: And-- those of us who are Jewish would like to say there’s less in the Hebraic tradition, but there are portions there where they came down on the Emnil Kites (PH) and slew them and slew their animals and-- DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: There’s a lot of slewing going on. BEN WATTENBERG: --took their women and just-- I mean, it-- it’s-- there aren’t any perfect peoples, are there? DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: There are not. And that is, I think, one of the great difficulties for a believer. The, sort of, theodicy problem about why there is there suffering and why do people-- go through terrible trials? Admittedly, a lot of suffering in this world is done by humans, by to each other. And if you wish to live in a world where you have free will, and you want God to give you that, and it seems that he has, then the inevitable consequence of that is going to be humans doing bad things to each other. ’Cause we use our free will in just that way all too often. And we shouldn’t blame God for that kind of circumstance, if it is a human who’s conducting themselves according to their own exercise of that free will. It’s harder, though I think, when you look at cases of suffering where you cannot point to a individual human decision as being the responsible agent. A child with cancer. Or people who are killed in an earthquake or a tsunami. That’s a tough one. John Polkinghorne, who’s a physicist-- turned Anglican priest writes, I think, very cogently about this. As basically, a natural and unavoidable consequence of the mechanism that God chose to create. And that involved the movement of tectonic plates in order to have an earth like hours with the ability to support the kind of life that we see, including ourselves. And it involved copying DNA in order for creatures of wild diversity in their body plans to come into being. But that same copying has to be there for-- able to create mistakes occasionally. And some of those mistakes, many of them, are actually bad. And so you can’t have one without the other. It’s all part of the biological, physical package which is both wonderful and, at times, fearful. BEN WATTENBERG: Of course, the other view is that this is all a great cosmic accident. That there are hundreds of millions of stars and planets and stuff like that. And one of them is bound to produce more or less what we have here. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: And certainly one can take that perspective and nobody can prove you’re wrong. I would say at the moment, while I would not want to attach any great theological significance to it, that the actual origins of life on this planet is an area of complete disarray scientifically. We really don’t have a clue how that first self replicating organism came to be. And it had to happen in a pretty narrow window, between about four billion years ago and about 3.85 billion years ago. Because four billion years ago, there was clearly no life. And 3.85 billion years ago, there was lots of unicellular b-- bacterial like life all over the planet. So what gives? How do you get to something like that? BEN WATTENBERG: I mean, you-- you actually can date-- skeletons-- a paramecia amoeba. I guess amoebas don’t have skeletons-- DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: Oh, yeah, right. The-- the residues, the leftovers, you absolutely can. And there seems to be not much disagreement that that is the window I which life appeared. And people have proposed that maybe the first self replicating molecule was RNA. Because RNA has some of the right properties. It can both copy itself, ’cause it can be-- BEN WATTENBERG: RNA stands for-- DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: Ribonucleic acid. Yeah. Let me-- let me define my terms here. DNA is the information molecule of all living things. Passes from parent to child. Carries information pretty much like a book. It’s a funny language, DNA has. It has only four letters in its alphabet, A, C, G and T, we abbreviate them. And it takes three billion of those to specify all the biological properties of a human being. That is all of our DNA, our genome of-- all the genome is all of the DNA. Now, DNA is-- is the book, but it doesn’t carry out the instructions. RNA is copied from the DNA. It’s, sort of, the message. It goes out, gets turned into protein in a-- an amazing process called translation. And it’s protein that really does the work. Now, you look at that and you go, wait a minute. How could this have all come together just as a random, spontaneous event? There are too many parts to this. But maybe RNA, because it is a somewhat-- intermediate molecule that can both carry information and can actually, in some instances, be an enzyme-- maybe it started all this. But it’s a real stretch to get there ’cause RNA’s not very stable. In any calculations you do about the likelihood of that kind of an event are-- BEN WATTENBERG: So-- so you are saying is some greater being, sort of, blew life into-- DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: I don’t know. BEN WATTENBERG: Said-- start it. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: And I want to be very careful here ’cause that would be, sort of, a God of the gaps-- theory that says, okay, science hasn’t figured this out yet. So that must be where God is. And history would tell you that hasn’t gone so well. But it’s possible, I suppose, that science isn’t going to come up with an answer. And I would not rule out the possibility that this was God’s specific action. BEN WATTENBERG: Science-- science-- DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: But I wouldn’t want to go there specifically. BEN WATTENBERG: Science is never going to come up with an answer to the unmoved mover. I-- I mean, you can always say-- say, okay, there was-- the planets, there was the sun, there-- but when you get to the end of the-- regression, you say, 'Well, what was before that?' DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: The first cause. BEN WATTENBERG: The first cause. And-- and that yields a belief in supernatural, spiritual something. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: And Ben, I think actually carrying that argument on, you can find some pretty interesting things to point to that do suggest the existence of that first cause. An atheist would say first cause, shmirst cause. We don’t need it. It’s like a-- it’s all just fancy on your part. Well, okay. Then how did the universe get started? Nature has not been observed to create itself. There was this thing called the Big Bang. What made that possible? How did you get to that amazing singularity that exploded and gave rise to our universe? There’s no answer that science can provide to that. There’s this other really interesting set of observations, only really appreciated in the last 20 years. If you look at the constants that determine how matter actually is put together and energy-- things like the gravitational constant, the weak and strong nuclear force. BEN WATTENBERG: Oh, that. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: All of that stuff. (LAUGHTER) You know, those are things that you cannot derive the value of those constants. You can’t figure out why gravity should have exactly the strength that it does. It just does. Now, if gravity was one part in a hundred million million weaker than it is, just a tiny little tweak of that value, then after the Big Bang, everything would’ve continued to just fly apart. There would not have been enough gravity to actually result in coalescence of galaxies and stars and planets and us. And if gravity was a tiny bit stronger, yeah, it would’ve come together, but it all would’ve collapsed back in a big crunch long before there was time for life to develop. Who set the dial? How did it happen-- just happen that it had the precise value-- probability almost infinitesimally small necessary for our world to exist and for us to be here. And it’s not just gravity. There are 14 other constants that are also precisely tuned. Now either you have to say that there’s actually an infinite number of parallel universes that all have different values-- and, of course, we have to live in the one where we could be-- which is the multi verse hypothesis. Or, you have to postulate somebody actually set these things for exactly this way. BEN WATTENBERG: Some-- somebody or some force or something or-- DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: Some force or some mind. BEN WATTENBERG: Or some mind. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: As Einstein would say. In fact-- BEN WATTENBERG: Some-- some design. Something was going on. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: Some designer had a plan. Now which of those is a simple explanation? BEN WATTENBERG: All lot of what we were talking about leads you, as I understand it, to a belief in a specific religion-- Christianity, Jesus, the-- the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Whatever it is. And can you explain to me how you get from a belief in God, or a mysterious force to a belief in a specific religion? DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: That’s a very important question. And I think every person has to find their own pathway through those very difficult and challenging issues about, okay, what-- what do the great world religions tell you and which seems to be the truth for you? Again, I started as an atheist. I first came to a realization that God was a plausible being and I decided to believe in God. And then I had to figure out what is God like? And I read about the world’s religions and tried to understand as best I could what they stood for. And I was impressed by how much they have in common. Which was reassuring that there some very core, central truths there that everybody agrees to. But I encountered the person of Christ as a unique figure amongst these religions, who claim not only to know God, but to be God. Which was a radical claim and one that seemed to require me to pay some attention to. BEN WATTENBERG: Well-- the son of God and preordained by the Old-- Old Testament belief of a Messiah and he-- who must be of the house of David and allegedly, in terms of the genealogy, Jesus was. So it-- DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: And, again, as a non believer, I had approached the story of Christ as a myth. As something that was, you know, a sort of oral tradition. And I was surprised to learn that even atheists agree the historical evidence for Christ is extremely strong. Some would say we know as much about Christ as we do about Julius Caesar, which is a startling statement for me, coming to this, thinking this was all just-- sort of loose-- loose talk. And ultimately, I found that the person of Christ an extremely appealing character. With all of the teaching he did, which was radical for his day. But he seemed not to be calling me just to listen to him as a teacher, but also to accept the other aspects of his divinity. And as I learned more about the evidence for his life and even evidence for the resurrection-- I mean, the literal resurrection, I found that very compelling. Again, as I say this to you, Ben, knowing other people are listening who have different views about faith, I don’t want to, in any way, come across as saying, 'Well, this is the perfect answer for everybody.' It was, for me, something I found very compelling. It had the ring of truth. And ultimately, I found I wanted to give myself to that. BEN WATTENBERG: Do you think if you were born a Muslim or a Jew or a Hindu, rather than of a Christian family, albeit not a practicing one, that that is the conclusion you would’ve come to? DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: I think if I was in a religious tradition that was very strong from the moment I was born, it would be very difficult to arrive at a different conclusion than what I saw around me from other people that I respected, including my own family. But that’s not my story. I wasn’t born into such a tradition. I really didn’t have a religious background to speak of. BEN WATTENBERG: But you were born into a Christian society. DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: A society, yes. And in a certain way, maybe this makes my conclusion of deciding to embrace Christianity a bit suspect. Because it is, after all, the majority view-- here in the United States. But I did arrive at that after some consideration of the other options. Perhaps influenced a bit by society, but not entirely so. BEN WATTENBERG On that note we’re going to have to hold it for a moment. Thank you so much for joining us on Think Tank and thank you. Please remember to join us for a future episode when we will continue our discussion with Dr. Collins and please remember to send us your comments via email. We think it makes our program better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. 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