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The Language of God. Francis Collins. Reviewed by Howard Taylor.Francis Collins is a very distinguished scientist who was head of the human genome project which mapped out the whole multi-billion ‘letter’ map of the whole human DNA sequence. It is likely to be the source of much medical and scientific research in the years to come. It was a great achievement.
Significantly he was converted from atheism to Christianity. His conversion did not come from his discoveries of the ‘language of God’ (the DNA is coded information) but from the moral argument outlined so strongly in C. S. Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’.
The book is meant as a defence of his Christian beliefs. He writes as a scientist accepting one form of evolution or, as he calls it ‘biologos’ or ‘theistic evolution’.
The story of his conversion is quite touching and his view of a universal moral imperative quite persuasive.
However the general apologetics in the book is surprisingly elementary for such a great scientist. He gives an overview of the discoveries of the finite nature of the universe and its apparent fine tuning which allows stars and our planet earth and therefore us to exist.
He says he is against both creationism and intelligent design. However his criticism of them both betrays a lack of understanding of what they really are. He thinks the scientific case for intelligent design rests solely on the irreducible complexity of Michael Behe’s argument. He claims to have a response to this. Actually I doubt whether the response is adequate. However I wouldn’t want to get into a technical discussion in biology. The far more powerful argument of ID is that there is code of language in the simplest DNA and languages or codes are always (without exception) generated by intelligent minds. Judging from the title of this book I would have thought that this would have been one of his major points. But it isn’t.
Now we turn to the issue of the origin of life (before the alleged processes of evolution can get started.) Interestingly Collins does not even mention this most fundamental of fundamental issues. He does , however, briefly refer to the former atheist Anthony Flew who says that Richard Dawkins failure to give any convincing response to this problem led him (Flew) from atheism to theism. Flew said: “It seems to me that Richard Dawkins constantly overlooks the fact that Darwin himself, in the fourteenth chapter of The Origin of Species, pointed out that his whole argument began with a being which already possessed reproductive powers. This is the creature the evolution of which a truly comprehensive theory of evolution must give some account. Darwin himself was well aware that he had not produced such an account. It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design”.
This is one of the main planks of scientific arguments of the ID movement which Collins does not mention.
But what about the development of life? (Once it has got started). Here Collins does not really deal with the need to explain the increase in information that would be needed to explain the difference between a mouse and a human. Actually, as Collins tells us, there is little difference between the coding parts of the respective DNA languages.
He seems to be saying that mice and humans must
have a common ancestor because the alleged faulty parts of their
genome are very similar.
Collins’s interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis takes the usual line of theistic evolutionists, namely that these chapters are not scientific texts but contain a powerful spiritual or theological message. Of course they are not scientific texts but they do relate to the physical world. It is very bad theology to make this separation of the physical from the spiritual. They always belong together. Surely we can learn from Genesis that God did not create everything all at once. There were a small number of creative acts. This means that science should expect to find in nature a small number of discontinuities. In the beginning there was nothing, and later there was matter and energy and then later there were living things and then later there were conscious living things and at the end of the process there were conscious living things that were aware of good, evil and beauty and who could reason abstractly. We should expect to find that at each of these stages there was a discontinuity in nature that can only be explained by a creative act from outside nature.
Later in the book Collins does concede that God may have intervened in the mutations of the DNA. They may appear random to our physical sciences but in reality they are controlled from beyond.
Three comments: 1. Denis Alexander of Rebuilding the Matrix does not accept this. He thinks truly random mutations and natural selection are enough to explain our existence. God’s place is that He ‘wills’ this to happen. (Whatever that means.) 2. One interpretation of Quantum Theory does allow for apparent randomness in the behaviour of the electron because there could be a non-physical cause (not detectable by physical science) of the seemingly random behaviour. 3. If Collins does accept this Divine intervention causing the mutations in the DNA leading to God’s purposes being fulfilled, then he does, after all, adhere to one form of ID. (One that allows for common descent.)
The end of the book is another moving account of the moral argument with more quotations from C. S. Lewis.
The final part of the book is a discussion of some of the very important issues that arise in human bioethics.
Howard Taylor. (October 2006)
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