Francis Collins

In the media, it’s not unusual for an interviewer and interviewee to hold similar views on whatever subject they are discussing. Radio show hosts and podcasters, for example, commonly interview friendly guests. But imagine if Paul Allen interviewed Bill Gates on the merits of Microsoft, and then published the interview as an independent journalistic article in Wired magazine. Not only would it would read like a paid advertisement, but critics would begin wondering if Wired was in business to promote Microsoft products. The Microsoft example is of course fictional, but something like it happened recently when Karl Giberson (executive vice president of the BioLogos Foundation) interviewed Francis Collins (the president of BioLogos), and then published the interview in Christianity Today‘s Read More ›

This is the final installment of three posts responding to Stephen Barr. The first post can be found here, and the second post can be found here.

The Collins/Barr Approach: A God Who Misleads?

Stephen Barr identifies himself with the position of Francis Collins who argues that although evolution looks like “a random and undirected process,” it nevertheless could have been guided by God. “Evolution could appear to us to be driven by chance, but from God’s perspective the outcome would be entirely specified.” [Collins, The Language of God, p. 205.]

Barr takes me to task for highlighting Collins’ use of the word “could” because I implied that “Collins is not sure whether God did in fact know beforehand. Anyone who has read Collins’s book, however, should realize that Collins absolutely and unequivocally holds the belief that God knows all events from all eternity.” Really? In the same book that Collins says that God “could” have known and specified the outcome of evolution, he also claims that much of our DNA is basically junk that certainly was not the product of God’s intentional design. In particular, Collins goes on at length about “Ancient Repetitive Elements,” which he disparages as “genetic flotsam and jetsam” that make up “roughly 45 percent of the human genome.” Collins concedes that “some might argue that these are actually functional elements placed there by the Creator for a good reason, and our discounting of them as ‘junk DNA’ just betrays our current level of ignorance. And indeed, some small fraction of them may play important regulatory roles. But certain examples severely strain the credulity of that explanation.” [Language of God, p. 156, emphasis added] In other words, Collins rejects as credulous the idea that such DNA were planned by God for a reason. So much for the idea that God knew and specified the outcomes of evolution from eternity.

Sometimes after explaining how the now-defunct junk-DNA mindset was encouraged and fostered by neo-Darwinian evolution, evolutionists respond by asserting that nonetheless some individuals from their camp explored function for junk-DNA. This, they claim, absolves their neo-Darwinian camp from any charges of science-stopping, and shows that the neo-Darwinian paradigm did not hinder research into junk-DNA. But if a 2003 article in Science is any indication, then it seems that the neo-Darwinian paradigm did indeed impose a taboo on research into function for junk-DNA. As the article stated: Although catchy, the term ‘junk DNA’ for many years repelled mainstream researchers from studying noncoding DNA. Who, except a small number of genomic clochards, would like to dig through genomic garbage? However, in science Read More ›

In his book The Language of God, theistic evolutionist scientist Francis Collins contends that diversity within populations of stickleback fish demonstrates that there is no distinction between “macroevolution” and “microevolution.” According to Collins, “It is not hard to see how the difference between freshwater and saltwater sticklebacks could be extended to generate all kinds of fish. The distinction between macroevolution and microevolution is therefore seen to be rather arbitrary; larger changes that result in new species are a result of a succession of smaller incremental steps.” (p. 132) Aside from the fact that this provides another example refuting the Darwinist myth that ID proponents invented terms like “macroevolution” or “microevolution,” a closer look at the facts shows that Collins’ story Read More ›