Assailing a Christian Scientist

The National Institutes of Health conducts and supports medical research, funding over 325,000 researchers at more than 3,000 institutions. Its aim is to find ways to prevent and treat a wide range of diseases, improve public health and save lives. Its director must have managerial competence and a scientific background, which is why Francis Collins was nominated for the job.

Dr. Collins is an M.D., earned a Ph.D in physical chemistry from Yale where he was named a Fellow in Human Genetics, and was appointed to a professorship at the University of Michigan. As head of the Human Genome Project (HGP), he led over 2,000 scientists in creating a "DNA instruction book" that may provide the keys to curing myriad conditions and diseases. The HGP came in ahead of schedule, under budget and Dr. Collins received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work.

So far so good - he sounds thoroughly qualified. Except for one thing: he's (gasp!) a Christian.

According to the New York Times, the doctor is suspect because of his "very public embrace of religion. He wrote a book called "The Language of God" and he has given many talks and interviews in which he described his conversion as a 27-year-old medical student." Atheist Peter Atkins was quoted by Michael Gerson of the Washington Post as saying, "I don't think (he) can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because (religion and science) are such alien categories of knowledge."

Apparently faith somehow disqualifies a person from participating in scientific inquiry and only someone without faith can do so objectively.

Really?

The more we learn, the more amazing the underlying organization of the universe, our world and our bodies is found to be. Mathematical probability rules out the random, accidental creation of all this and we're left with the question, "If it didn't "just happen" then how did it come to be?" The logical answer is "God made it," and this is what Dr. Collins believes. Despite popular opinion, it fits the facts and God's involvement becomes ever more evident as the body of scientific knowledge grows.

Atheists, who are apparently preferred by Dr. Collins's critics, have a problem: they can't plausibly explain the origins of the universe or of life or many other issues. God fills in the unexplained spaces in scientific theory and provides a coherent explanation for how and why nature operates. Atheists can dismiss the idea of God but then they're left guessing to fill in the gaps.

Science and faith aren't mutually exclusive. They're complementary and it takes both to paint the whole picture. It's a telling sign of our times when a qualified, open-minded Christian scientist who understands this is knocked while others, whose minds are closed to the idea of God, are regarded as paragons of objectivity.

Copernicus, Galileo, Isaac Newton and Louis Pasteur - all of whom were Christians - would have found this new paradigm wryly amusing.


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