A thoughtful commenter (Steve) posted a link to a recent NPR interview on the Diane Rehms show with Dr. Francis Collins. Steve asked what I thought.
Consider the background information for this interview. Collins is interviewing on NPR of all places. He is promoting his new book Language of God.
He really can't give churchy answers to this audience. He knows he will be cut to pieces by callers. So he punts all of the hard ball questions regarding the exclusive claims of Christianity and political hot potatoes like human embryo stem cell research and global warming. He issues non-answer answers.
He presents a very soft view of Christianity. It almost comes across as deism rather than Christianity.
One, he makes his faith extremely personal. Repeatedly in the interview he personalizes his faith and avoids calling it objectively true.
Two, he presents God as far off. For example, a caller asks a thoughtful question about God answering prayers of all religions. Rehms asks, did God answer Bin Laden's prayers for a successful attack on Sept. 11th? Collins says no. But he adds, "it would not be fair to ask God to step in a miraculous way and stop 9/11 either becauses our world would be a very chaotic place". In other words, a God who intervenes would be highly disruptive. This answer, interestingly enough, appears to contradict a statement Collins gives earlier in the interview when he asserts that he believes in a God who listens to and answers prayers. So which is it? Rehms failed to call him on this apparent contradiction.
Three, Collins chooses to believe that Genesis 1 and 2 are allegorical. Collins repeats the oft used "Genesis is not a scientific text" mantra.
Four, Collins depicts faith as giving comforting answers rather than faith revealing objective truths about the world.
Five, Collins distances himself from intelligent design and claims they will be discredited.
Six, Collins firmly believes in macro evolution.
Seven, Collins distances himself from young earth creationism.
Eight, Collins criticizes Christians for being overly harsh in their criticisms of other "great" belief systems.
It does not get much softer than that. Collins can and surely will be quoted by both sides as supporting evidence in the culture wars on evolution, stem cell etc.
I am giving Collins the benefit of the doubt. He was interviewing on NPR for goodness sake. I would like to hear him interviewed by the Reasons To Believe apologists. Collins would have a friendly audience of Christians listening and Drs. Rana and Ross could ask targeted questions.
If I were to interview him, I would ask :
- What do you believe about hell? Is it a real place? Who ends up in hell?
- What is the hermeneutical principle that leads you to conclude that Genesis 1 and 2 are allegorical stories, but the resurrection accounts are not allegories?
- You seem to argue that irreducible complexity commits the god of the gaps fallacy, yet you then cite information in the cell as an argument for belief in God. How do you escape a god of the gaps fallacy in your own belief?
- You encourage everyone to search for truth. How do you define truth? What guidelines can you suggest on discerning truth?
- Do you believe that God still intervenes in our world on a daily basis?
My perception is that Dr. Collins is an outstanding scientist but a weak theologian. To his credit, he does not claim to be a theologian. He claims to have had a religious experience in the Cascade mountains and to have accepted Christ. I do not doubt the sincerity of his belief in Christ. I perceive that he feels his purpose in life is to help scientific atheists be nicer to people of faith, and people of faith to be nicer to scientific atheists. He will accomplish this by throwing bones to both groups.
The problem, of course, is the worldviews of scientific atheism and Christian theism don't agree on objective truths about reality. For one to be right, the other has to be wrong. For Collins strategy to work, moreover, one has to separate science from philosophical naturalism. I know of one DT reader who claims that science is philosophical naturalism. Therefore, even the soft, user friendly view of Christianity presented by Dr. Collins will ultimately be rejected by the scientific elite (who according to polls quoted in this interview, are hard core philosophical naturalists).
To his credit, Dr. Collins is getting friendly interviews with NPR. Let's not over look the fact that he is reaching an audience that few Christians are invited to speak to.
Jeff -- my thinking about some of these issues has "evolved" during this past year. I think you're largely wrong about Collins, and missing the point of much of what he's saying. Your last bullet point sums up the confusion:
Do you believe that God still intervenes in our world on a daily basis?
Theistic evolution proponents like Collins would answer with a resounding "yes," because they view everything as dependent upon God's sovereign, sustaining will. It is not a Deistic "wind it up and let it go" position.
Whether God "intervenes" regularly in a miraculous way -- outside the ordinary contingent processes He has established in the created order, for example through miraculous healings -- is a different question, but not I think the one you're trying to ask.
And, whether God "intervened" in natural history outside the ordinary contingent processes He built into the creation to bring about specific life forms is yet again another question. The related question is whether we today can "detect" such interventions as evidence of "design." This is the point I think you're getting at.
On this later set of points, I think Collins would probably say "no" and "no." But I don't think that reflects theological confusion. Rather, it reflects a consistent theology of God's sovereignty and of creation. The theology is that God sovereignly designed into creation the natural laws and processes that support life; that such natural laws and processes are not necessary within the potential range of possible created orders, but are entirely contingent on God's will; and that God continually supervenes over the outworking of those laws and processes so that creation evolves as He ordains. "Miracles," in contrast, are different sorts of limited interventions into the created order that God uses usually to convey a particular message or to validate a faith claim. We would expect "miracles" to stand out from the contingent processes of creation, but the ordinary development of biological life probably would not.
A good place to explore this theology of creation is in the work of Thomas Torrance. It seems to me to be a thoroughly Reformed position. And, it's consistent with our everyday experience -- I would say that the thunderstorms we had in New Jersey last week were explainable both in terms of ordinary natural forces and as creative acts of God, for example.
So to dig a little deeper, the real point of contention is a point of hermenuetics, not a broader point of theology: how should we read Genesis 1-4? Here I'd suggest that the "allegorical" / "non-allegorical" distinction you want to draw isn't helpful. Do you really read Genesis 1-4 "literally?" You take the "days" to be figures of speech signifying indeterminate periods of time, so the answer is "no." You take (I presume)the "serpent" of Genesis 3 to be a figure of Satan, not literally a talking snake, so again, the answer is "no."
We could go on and on trying to understand the figures of speech in Genesis 1-4, and that's exactly the point: it isn't by anyone's reckoning (even, I would argue, by many of the arguments young earth proponents often advance), a simple historical narrative. It's a unique literary genre that has to be handled carefully in relation to categories such as our modern notion of "science" that are foreign to it. In this regard, check out Peter Enns' Inspiration and Incarnation (I reviewed it here), which IMHO is the best book out there right now on the hermeneutical questions from a conservative, Reformed perspective.
Now, would I agree with Collins on every point of interpretetion with respect to Genesis 1-4? Probably not. In contrast to many (maybe most) in the "strong" theistic evolution camp, I don't think Genesis 1-4 can be considered merely "broken myth" or otherwise completely unhistorical. And, I think the beauty, order, and teleology of creation, including evolutionary processes inherent within it, suggest "design" to rational, honest inquirers, and may not be fully explainable even at a basic process level without reference to God. But nevertheless, I think Collins is on the right track in trying to reach a wholistic understanding of these questions that doesn't inevitably cast "faith" and "science" into combative culture war camps.
Posted by: dopderbeck | July 27, 2006 at 16:12
Thanks, David. I'll respond next week. Got a lot going on. You raise some good issues to yap about.
Posted by: Mr. Dawntreader | July 27, 2006 at 16:57
Based on what you've written here, I really like the guy! :)
Then again:In other words, a God who intervenes would be highly disruptive. This answer, interestingly enough, appears to contradict a statement Collins gives earlier in the interview when he asserts that he believes in a God who listens to and answers prayers.Wait, what? A Christian made contradictory claims? Stop the presses, for truly this is an event unprecedented in the course of human history! :)
OK, I'll stop now.
Posted by: tgirsch | July 27, 2006 at 17:52
I think it would be good to take a glance at Collins' book. I haven't read it but I skimmed a lot of the relevant parts in about 20 minutes. If I recall correctly, he addresses a lot of the points you raise. (Especially, I am pretty certain he attempts to explain why Genesis 1 and the resurrection accounts are different.) I think his book also tended to feel a little airy at times. (By the way one of the reasons he gives for not liking ID, if I recall correctly, was something to the effect that it's a bad idea to rely on missing information to make an argument, because you never know when someone will come along and explain the hole.)
And for a different take on Collins...
Posted by: Ben Martin | July 28, 2006 at 03:11
Dopderbeck:
Theistic evolution proponents like Collins would answer with a resounding "yes," because they view everything as dependent upon God's sovereign, sustaining will. It is not a Deistic "wind it up and let it go" position.
(snip)
I would say that the thunderstorms we had in New Jersey last week were explainable both in terms of ordinary natural forces and as creative acts of God, for example.
Another way to approach the issue is through human genetics. Most, if not all, Christians believe that each person is a unique creation and that our specific characteristics are part of the working out of God's soveriegn will. We aren't who we are just by chance or happenstance. On the other hand, you can sit down with stack of the American Journal of Human Genetics and run through pedigrees of actual human families until you are convinced that the inheritence of genes in those families is entirely consistent with the natural forces described by Mendel's laws of inheritence.
Once you are convinced that your own existence can be both God's will and the result of Mendel's principles of segregation (first law) and independent assortment (second law), then reconciling macroevolution with God's sustaining activity is small potatoes
Posted by: Nick | July 28, 2006 at 09:31
Ben,
It does not look like PZ Myers has become a Christian yet. ;)
Good advice about reading his book. I am just sharing observations about Collins as I see them -- but you are right, I don't have the full picture yet.
Posted by: Mr. Dawntreader | August 01, 2006 at 09:36
David,
Let's start with this Collins quote:
"it would not be fair to ask God to step in a miraculous way and stop 9/11 either becauses our world would be a very chaotic place"
Unpack what you think Collins is claiming here.
The word "unfair" is an odd choice, don't you think?
Posted by: Mr. Dawntreader | August 01, 2006 at 09:44
The word "unfair" is an odd choice, don't you think?
Yeah. I'm not sure if that was deliberate or just a result of answering off the cuff in an interview. I just grabbed Collins' book and haven't read it yet, so I'm not sure how he'd answer a question like that more reflectively. I think the question was about religious pluralism and the exclusive claims of Christianity, but I think Collins answered it as though it were a theodicy question.
On the theodicy question, here's a big picture question I would ask of anyone who takes a strong theistic evolution perspective: do you believe God fully knows and is in control over the future? Some, not by any means all, theistic evolution folks tend towards "open theism," which I do think is highly problematic. If by using the word "unfair" Collins were suggesting that God allows events to unfold without having knowledge or exercising sovereignty over how they will unfold, I'd have a problem with that.
I'm not sure that's the case, though. I take it more as "it's an unfair criticism of God to expect that God will always or even ordinarily intervene to stop bad things from happening." What he was really responding to, I think, was a critique based on theodicy -- why do bad things like 9-11 happen if God is a loving God? Some of the people who died on 9-11 surely were Christians (I know that's the case because a couple were from my church), and some of those who died probably had a little time of devotional that very morning during which they prayed for God to watch over them during the day. Why did God let them die that kind of horrible death?
Huge question, obviously, but maybe one piece of it is that, because God gives us free will, and because the laws of cause and effect mean that our free choices will have some predictable effects, and because the regularity of cause and effect are essential to the exercise of the goods of human reason and free will, God doesn't typically suspend the laws of cause and effect, even when the cause is a terrorist's choice to destroy a building and the effect is good people dying.
And yet, it's even a bigger question than that. I know one Christian who worked for that bond trading company that was nearly wiped out by one of the planes. She was scheduled to work in the WTC that day, but her alarm didn't go off, and by the time she got to the train the first plane had already hit. She believes God providentially cared for her on that day, and I believe that too. Why did God allow her to live and yet allow the husband and father from my church to die in the attack? I wonder if that's the sort of really big question Collins was hearing during that interview.
Posted by: dopderbeck | August 01, 2006 at 11:11
I went back and listened to the interview.
For those interested, load the interview in Realplayer and fast forward to th 45th minute and let it play. That is where Collins comments on God answering prayer.
I think you are right, David, that Collins is taking a swing at a theodicy in this answer.
The first thing he says after the caller asks the question, is
"Can we trust religion?" (since bad things like 9/11 are associated with religion).
He goes on to say that it is unfair to blame God and unfair to blame Islam. He throws in that it is unfair to blame Christianity for the Crusades.
He says "we people are flawed" and "we are rusty containers"
That is the context of his comment about the world being a "chaotic place" if God were to answer prayers to avert a 9/11 attack.
This is a very C.S. Lewis-ish type theodicy -- the free will defense, if you will. The C.S. Lewis influence on Collins conversion is well documented.
The reason I went down the deism trail in my post was Collins use of the term "chaotic" ... and to a lesser extent, the term "unfair".
I don't associate the term "chaos" with theodicy -- I associate it with someone who loathes the idea of God "meddling" in the realm of natural (physical) laws.
But given the context of his answer about the inherent goodness of religions, I suspect his use of the term "chaos" refers to God meddling with man's free will.
If that is true, I would like to hear more about how Collins views prayer. Prayers of petition are an invitation for God to move and act in this world -- which would seem to violate man's freedom.
Like you said, perhaps he is an open theist and views God as a kind of cheerleader up in the sky watching events unfold here on earth.
I am sure you will learn more as you read his book. I look forward to the review.
Posted by: Mr. Dawntreader | August 01, 2006 at 16:51
Keep in mind that Collins came to Christianity largely through reading C.S Lewis
I think Collins' responses to religious questions makes a lot of sense if you view him as a C.S Lewis Christian. Lewis' positions, when it came to specific doctrine tended to be quite vague. (See the introduction to Mere Christianity) He was more interested in the general framework of theism and his "mere Christianity." Lewis purposely avoided getting into technical theology because he felt that bogged people down and caused them to ignore the big picture.
Posted by: Benzion Chinn | April 23, 2008 at 20:45