The Language Of God – Collin’s Personal Position

Collins is a Theistic Evolutionist but he doesn’t like the label because scientists are confused by the theistic part – what or who is a theist? Theologians are wary of the evolutionist part fearing that God is losing out in the label.

(A Theistic Evolutionist believes that God designed and started the evolutionary process and occasionally tweeks it to keep it on the planned track (ID??) as opposed to a Deistic Evolutionist who believes that god designed and started the evolutionary process and then lost interest or went away, leaving evolution to fend for itself.)

He prefers the term BioLogos. Biologists understand the Bio part – meaning life and the Logos part will be understood by some to be a Greek word meaning word or communication and might be OK with that. Christians love the word Logos - identifying it with Jesus and would be OK with the Bio part, suggesting life and Jesus somehow combined.

The basic tenants of Theistic Evolution or BioLogos as defined by Collins are as follows.

One – The universe came out of nothingness about 14 billion years ago.

Two – Despite massive improbability, the universe appears to be precisely tuned for life.

Three – The precise origin remains unknown but once occurring, the process of evolution produced simple and complex life.

Four – Once evolution got underway, no supernatural intervention is required to produce the universe as we know it.

Five – Humans are a part of this evolutionary process and share a common ancestor with the great apes. Except….

Six – Humans are unique in ways that defy evolution and point to a spiritual nature as exemplified by the universal (or at least earthly) nature of a moral code in all humans and also by the universal characteristic of a search for God in all humans.

Quite convenient and Collins believes that almost anyone from all of the great religions of the world wouldn’t have a problem with BioLogos thus defined.

Collins and ID

Dr. Collins summarizes (and dismisses)ID as being founded on three (inadequate) principles.

Straw man one: ID was created to overthrow evolution with an apparently scientific theory and as such is not science. Not actually an argument.

Straw man two: ID does not make predictions based on a hypothesis that can be tested and therefore is not science. Also not actually an argument and I don't think completely true.

Collins third argument is quite limited, but the most interesting argument concerning what he believes to be the cornerstone of ID - irreducible complexity. While I wouldn’t say that irreducible complexity is the foundation of ID; it is a significant argument. For instance the bacterial flagellum (locomotion device) is surprisingly complex requiring about 30 different protein components to work; if any are missing, a tow truck is required. The flagellum has a motor, driveshaft, CV joint, and propeller to name a few of the critical components. The ID argument goes like this. Evolutionary mechanisms save mutations that benefit an organism because they give the organism an advantage in the survival of the fittest. Mutations that do not give an advantage tend to be lost because the large population of organisms without the mutation have an equal or greater survival potential and the larger pool will swamp out the single mutation or the new organism becomes a meal for a more fit organism. An organism with a motor, driveshaft, CV joint, and propeller would have greater mobility in catching prey or eluding a predator and therefore greater survival value. An organism with a motor and drive shaft with no CV joint would twist its tail off and that would be the end of that innovation.

For the flagellum to survive, all the components would have to mutate (or be created) at once; if any are missing, the organism would be just a more complex meal. The odds of 30 mutations occurring at once are so poor that it is difficult to conceive of it happening outside a laboratory with a bunch of engineers designing the project, ergo Intelligent Design. Collins argues that recent scientific discoveries lead him to believe that the 30 in fact do not need to arrive at once because individual components could have survival value all alone. One of those discoveries is a bacteria with a stinger made from the same stuff as the drive assembly of the flagellum. Evolution would predict that the stinger came first, and then was co-opted as a drive shaft when motor mutation happened. I guess this innovation would allow the stinger to be used as a drill so the bacteria could inject poison into its target even if the target happened to have a shell. This argument is less than compelling. I wonder how many different proteins there are that have the stiffness, strength, and shape to be used as both a stinger and a driveshaft. Collins leaves that to our imagination or future scientists.

Collins completely ignores the foundation of ID which asks the question of how you can recognize an object or pattern created by chance or intelligence. For instance if you were walking on a beach and you saw a complex ripple pattern in the sand; you say that it is complex, but not specific and could have been caused by a riptide. If you saw the letter “A” in the sand, you could say that it is specific, but not complex. It might possibly have been caused by a snake lying on the sand which was caught by a hawk and dropped a couple of time before the hawk successfully dispatched the snake and carried it off. On the other hand if you saw “Gilmore was here” written in the sand you would assume an intelligent source. The pattern is both complex and specific. These rules have been identified and studied for a long time. The SETI project has looked for and found thousands of signals from outer space and found none that met the complex specificity requirements of a message designed by an intelligent neighbor somewhere in space. Collins completely ignores complex specificity as an important argument.

Rats – To be continued AGAIN…….

The Language of God by Francis Collins …. Cont.

Dr. Collins believes absolutely that the evidence for evolution is compelling. He also believes that science doesn’t provide adequate answers to some critical questions relating to what he perceives as universal belief in a moral law and a universal search for God. Starting from this foundation he has come to believe in a God who started the evolutionary chain of events and who intervenes at crucial times. This makes him a Theistic Evolutionist; as opposed to a Deist who would believe that God possibly started the ball rolling then lost interest or at least went somewhere and does not interfere in the affairs of his creation.

Collins believes that Scientific Creationism and Intelligent Design (ID) positions are harmful to Christianity and are in somewhat the same position as the church was when it opposed the views of Copernicus and Galileo; views which were ultimately proved correct and from which the church ultimately had to back down. This type of position makes Christians look stupid and so should be avoided.

Scientific Creationism:   Collins accuses various people of creating ‘straw man’ arguments and is quite willing to point them out. This doesn’t stop him from doing the same thing. He dismisses Scientific Creationism as an ignorant position of those who feel that evolution is threatening to God. As evidence he describes the ‘apparent age’ argument which makes which he says makes God the “Great Deceiver”. Because we can see stars which are so far away that even with light from those stars traveling at the speed of light, we couldn’t see them unless the universe were billions of years old or if God ‘deceived’ us by creating them a few years ago and making it’s light appear immediately to us.

It is difficult for me to understand how such an intelligent man as Collins could make such a dumb statement. Miracles such as the jars of oil and flour from which the poor woman in Sidon fed him and which did not run dry would have to be summarily dismissed using the same argument. God did not supply olives to press or the DNA of the olives; he gave ‘apparently aged’ oil. Not DNA or wheat seed or even wheat but ‘apparently aged’ flour. What about Adam? Was he created as a baby? Zygote? DNA strng? Not!

Collins is puzzled by the persistence of the belief in a literal creation in view of the overwhelming (his opinion) evidence for evolution. He finds this mystifying at best and dangerous at worst.

To be continued (again)

The Language of God by Francis Collins

All in all an interesting book to read. His primary argument is that Darwinian evolution is an unassailable fact and not inconsistent with a belief in a personal and awesomely intelligent creator God. Collins is a theistic evolutionist, but doesn’t like the title because biologists don’t know what theistic means but are suspicious of the term before hearing an argument and Christians are suspicious of the evolution part. Neither can with an open mind carry on the discussion. He would like the theistic evolutionist be call by the term ‘BioLogos’; a term that might be acceptable to both theologian and scientist.

His arguments when directly related to his work with DNA and the human genome are convincing while not reaching the level of being compelling. This is natural since he was the leader of the team that successfully completed the Human Genome Project; therefore it is to be expected that his strongest argument is tied to the human genome project.

The argument is similar to a tool of textual criticism that literary critics use to identify the copying hierarchy whereby they identify which copies of a text are older and how each are related to other copies. For instance if I sent this document out and someone retyped it and in the process misspelled interesting as “intresting” and sent it to someone else who then copied the error accurately and sent it to twelve people and added a new error changing ‘book’ to ‘bok’. Those twelve copies were then accurately replicated the copies and sent them on. Three hundred years later someone collected all available copies and compared them. The errors would be noted and it could be argued that all the copies with both ‘intresting’ and ‘bok’ were copies of the ones with only the error ‘intresting’ and the one without either error is a predecessor of the ones with errors. If there are only one or two errors, the confidence level would be low, but if multiple copy errors are found in each document and placed in the hierarchy; the confidence level concerning which were parent and which were child documents can become an almost certainty.

Dr. Collins uses gene ‘errors’ and ‘junk DNA’ to trace similar or the same errors or junk DNA throughout the human genome and beyond to the genomes of multiple species. Geneticists have identified genes with flaws so great that they cannot function. They have also concluded that approximately 80% of the genome serves no useful function at this time and have been copied from some ancestor who either had a use for the surplus genes or they were in themselves errors that didn’t hurt the organism and so allowed by evolution to survive the war of the fittest. His argument is that if the same ‘error’ or ‘junk DNA’ is found in multiple species you can conclude with a high level of confidence that the two species have a common ancestor.

To some extent his argument is a negative argument tied to what is not known, an ‘evolution of the gaps’ theory but never-the-less is interesting and convincing.

….to be continued.