Francis Collins is a geneticist who is famous not only for being the former head of the US Human Genome Project—and a widely rumoured choice to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health—but for being a devout evangelical Christian.
He sees no contradiction between those roles. In his 2006 best-seller, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, he argued that science is perfectly compatible with religious faith, properly understood—and that faith, in particular, need not be synonymous with absolute-literal-truth-of-every-word-in-the-Bible fundamentalism. God operates through natural law, Collins declared. Humankind is the product of Darwinian evolution. And the scriptural accounts are best read metaphorically.
Collins’ arguments earned him howls of derision from the more stridently atheistic quarters of science, but praise from many other parts of the research community (including a BioLogos.org: a Web site that, in the words of its mission statement, “addresses the core themes of science and religion, and emphasizes the compatibility of Christian faith with what science has discovered about the origins of the universe and life.”
At the heart of the site are essays that attempt to answer 33 of the most frequently asked questions about religion and science. Examples range from the basics—“”What is evolution?" href=“https://biologos.org/questions/what-is-evolution/” id="bk0l">What is evolution? "—to that freshman bull-session classic, "If God created the universe, what created God?" The BioLogos.org also provides reading lists and other resources. Future plans include curriculum materials for parents who are home-schooling their children, and looking for alternatives to the abundant materials provided by creationist and intelligent-design organizations.
No word yet on whether the founding of BioLogos.org will affect Collins’ chances for the NIH directorship. But if his book hasn’t knocked him out of contention already, it’s hard to imagine this Web site will. And besides, the choice is up to US president Barack Obama, who invited televangelist Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration, and who seems to love bridging cultural divides.