The Language of God

The Language of God

Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence For Belief (New York: The Free Press, 2006), x + 305 pp.

Regular readers of my blog know that I am a Christian, and I have some serious problems with how evolution is taught--particularly the dogmatic, "We've got all the answers nailed down" approach that is used by many primary and secondary science teachers. I support discussion of Intelligent Design, not necessarily because it is correct, but because it raises some useful questions, and tends to lead to a better form of science teaching--one that emphasizes that science is a process, not Revealed Truth.

Similarly, I have no patience with those who insist that the Earth is 6000 years old (okay, maybe 10,000 years old). It could be--but only if God created a world that was an enormous fraud, with a million details to give the impression of great age. This is not at all consistent with the God of the Bible.

I've mentioned previously that there are two reasons that Young Earthers stick so tenaciously to this idea: because of a mistaken belief that the Bible teaches it (it does not); and because a Young Earth simply leaves no time for evolution. As it turns out, the more fossil evidence of early life that geologists and paleontologists find, the more of a problem even a 4.4 billion year old Earth becomes for the "blind, random chance" evolutionary theory. Our planet goes from oven hot because of the Late Heavy Bombardment to astonishingly sophisticated life in 300-500 million years.

Collins is the director of the U.S. Human Genome Project--a profoundly ambitious effort to sequence the entire genetic code of a human being. As such, his scientific credentials are impeccable--and what better Christian to write a book than this? Even more amazingly, Collins's Christianity is not the result of growing up in a Christian home, and somehow holding onto his faith while going to college. By his own admission, he grew up in a very unreligious, even somewhat antireligious home, of freethinking academic parents.

Collins describes how an encounter with an older woman, suffering from "severe untreatable angina" while he was in medical school caused him to reconsider his smug agnosticism--and the more he tried to come up with answers, the more he realized how limited his understanding really was. I had a similar realization, sitting in a symbolic logic class, trying to come up with a completely consistent and logical code of ethics from first principles--and realizing how sterile were the results. Collins was more influenced by C.S. Lewis's teachings than I was, but still, I find enough parallels in how both of us have dealt with hard and sometimes painful issues that I am charmed by The Language of God, even where I sometimes find myself not completely agreeing with Collins.

One of the areas where I found myself disagreeing with Collins--and yet wishing that I could have had a conversation with him before he wrote it--is his position about Intelligent Design. Yes, he is correct that much of what has driven the development of Intelligent Design is that the scientists and philosophers behind were definitely starting with a Christian perspective. But so what? So were Galileo, Newton, Boyle, and thousands of other scientists, great and minor, throughout the last few centuries.

He also makes the point that Intelligent Design has staked itself on challenging evolution because of questions such as the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum. Collins worries that as science fills in the gaps in our knowledge, it will somehow demolish a faith built around those questions. Except that Christianity is not built around those questions. Even though some of the proteins required to produce the flagellum have now been demonstrated to have other uses (and thus potentially impair the "irreducible complexity" question), we are still quite a ways from solving that question--and for that reason, ID serves a useful function, even strictly from the standpoint of poking scientists to figure out how we got something as miraculous as a flagellum!

Collins also argues that ID isn't really a scientific theory, because it isn't testable. I agree. But a critique of a theory doesn't have to be a full fledged useful theory--it only has to point out holes or flaws in an existing theory to serve a useful function in science--and I'm a bit disappointed that Collins couldn't see that.

What I found most peculiar, however, is that Collins calls himself a "theistic evolutionist," while seeming to act as if Intelligent Design scientists such as Professor Michael Behe or Professor Scott Minnich are not. A theistic evolutionist believes that God created a situation that made life not only possible, but guided and directed it by changing the environment--a position that while Collins never says in quite those words, he clearly believes. I do not know the exact position of Professors Behe or Minnich, but it is rather difficult to imagine that this is not also their position. I don't quite see why Collins found it necessary to draw an artificial division between theistic evolution and ID. They aren't incompatible; in fact, I would argue that they make more sense together than separately.

Finally, Collins objects to the idea of too direct of a God-involvement in the species on this planet by pointing to the "junk DNA"--segments of DNA that are clearly leftover from earlier times, but no longer used. He finds the presence of these segments in almost exactly the same locations in multiple, highly different species, as evidence that these are leftovers from the earliest life forms, and thus a form of evidence against intelligent design.

These "junk DNA" segments, I would argue, are hardly signs of a lack of intelligence however. If you have ever worked on a large software project, you know that even there is clearly intelligence behind every large software project (sometimes an intelligence that fancies itself God-like, when sufficiently stimulated by coffee)--and yet the equivalent of "junk DNA" is there. You find functions or methods that served a useful purpose at one time, but are no longer being executed. Why are they still there? Not because the code develops randomly, or blindly (although it can appear so, when you are the testy maintainer of it)--but because the effort to remove it was not worth it. It did no harm; removing it might complicate the rest of the code.

Perhaps the most powerful statement of Collins' book, however, is that Collins at one point acknowledges that life seems to have developed in as little as 150 million years after the planet became habitable. If I were Collins, I would have emphasized rather strongly how implausible such a rapid movement from inorganic molecules to self-replicating life (with all the informational and chemical complexity that this involves) really is. To believe that blind, random processes did this without a little direction or guidance--that takes a rather remarkable faith, too!

Anyway, I'm glad that I read it, and I suspect that even for the discussion of the human genome project, many people will enjoy reading it, too. I suspect that if I ran into Dr. Collins on an airplane somewhere, we could have a fascinating conversation.