Consciencebound

The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.  by Francis Collins.

Francis Collins is a geneticist and the former director of the Human Genome project and every Christian should read his book.  But why would I suggest every Christian read a book about a man explaining his reasons for belief?  Christians already believe don’t they? Allow me to explain…

There are two aspects of this book that I one might find interesting and helpful.  Collins’ reasons for faith, and Collins’ explanation of genetics and evolution.  The reason that I recommend this book is because of the latter.  I didn’t find the arguments presented  by Collins to be particularly well reasoned and convincing for why one should believe in God or why they should become a Christian.  What i did find fascinating though was his very good explanation of how genetics work and what the genetic evidence is for common ancestry (evolution).  I hesitate to even state this for fear that many Christians will automatically rule Collins out as a “liberal” evolutionist who is opposed to the faith.  But Collins is not that.  He is an Evangelical Christian who believes that the Bible is the word of God, that Jesus is the second person of the holy Trinity, and that salvation is by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.  But even though he believes these things, he is convinced because of his work that there is no doubt that all life on earth has a common ancestor.

I believe that he presents some very compelling reasons for why the belief in evolution is so wide spread among scientists today.  It is not as though there is a big conspiracy or that they are so committed in their stance against God that they try to force the facts to fit the evolutionary hypothesis.   Collins, like more and more believers, feels compelled by the evidence and believes that nature is a revelation from God that we are to understand to the best of our God given abilities.

Some of what I thought was most fascinating in the book was his discussions of the disease curing potential that the work on the human genome gives us.  It is truly amazing the amount of suffering that we can potentially alleviate by studying the human body and understanding why our bodies work the way that they do.  Much of our problems and diseases come from mutations of certain chromosomes in our dna which make us susceptible to certain illnesses and by mapping the human genome we can be much more precise in our treatment and prevention of many of the terrible diseases that we experience today.

There have been some pretty heavy critiques of The Language of God by people like Sam Harris’ found here  and I agree with much of those critiques, but I do find value in the book primarily because it is a conservative Christian who is espousing very good arguments for evolution.  Another outstanding review of this book which goes into much more detail on the scientific and genetic material is found here. As I have posted elsewhere, I think that Christians are setting themselves up for a big fall by juxtaposing beliefs in the Bible against accepting evolution.  The more I have tried to honestly look at the arguments for evolution the more convinced I am that it is primarily because of religious grounds that people reject it and the more i am convinced that it is only a matter of time that believers will see that the evidence for evolution is nothing short of overwhelming.

What I felt was weak in the book was that Collins pretty much just parrots C.S Lewis’s moral argument and doesn’t do a very good job at that.  The moral argument is what he feels is the strongest evidence for God but I don’t believe he demonstrates how this is the case at all.  He quickly dismisses alternative explanations of morality from an evolutionary point of view and it seems that he is not consistent in his reasoning about the adaptability of orgainisms through natural processes.  For a while I was waiting for him to make a solid, reasoned case for why a designer was necessary in the first place given the fact that he accepts that “apparent design” in nature is accounted for by natural selection.   But when it came down to it, it seemed that  his belief was actually not justified as I had hoped.

Regardless of it’s shortcomings, I celebrate the fact that more and more Christians are articulating their faith and their recognition of evolution together and not trying to force the evidence to fit a modern young earth point of view that turns a blind eye to so may advances that we have made in the sciences in the last century.

Jeff

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