Yes, it’s Francis Collins again, director of the National Institutes of Health and an evangelical Christian. I previously mentioned the Christian Scholar’s Conference at Pepperdine University in California, noting that Collins was scheduled to give a keynote address: “Reflections on the current tensions between science and faith”.

He delivered it on June 16, and although the speech doesn’t seem to be online, the gist of it has been reported by The Christian Post (CP) and The Malibu Times (MT). I guess the content was predictable from what we know of Collins’s views, but I nevertheless find it infinitely depressing that America’s most prominent scientist goes around saying, as Collins did, that science gives us evidence for God. I thought he was going to stop that kind of stuff when he resigned his position at BioLogos and took over the reins of the NIH, but apparently not. But before I get to the substance of his talk, let me highlight the halfway decent things he said (and even the three points below are not unalloyed win):

According to both the CP and the MT, “Collins stressed that he was speaking at the conference as a private citizen, and not as a representative of the U.S. government” (MT). Well, I’m glad he said that, and the man has every right to promulgate woo on his own, but I still think that his position as NIH director gives extra credibility to his assertion that science proves God. It’s really no different from him going around and saying that he believes in the efficacy of homeopathy or spiritual healing. Yes, he has the right, as a private citizen, to say what he wants, but what he said at Pepperdine is an embarrassment to scientists everywhere and the NIH in particular.

Collins asserted that the Earth was old and that evolution was true (thank Ceiling Cat!), though his version of evolution is a theistic one: the process was created and directed by God to a specific end: the evolution of Homo sapiens:

“God is the author of it all and we just learn something more about the how,” said Collins. “God is an awesome mathematician and physicist … God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to achieve that, to create this marvelous diversity of living things on our planet.” His view of evolution being a part of God’s creation plan is called theistic evolution, or another term is biologos. Bio is the Greek word for “life,” while Logos means “word.” So biologos would mean God speaking life into being. (CP) Unlike most scientists, Collins argued that God created the universe, bestowing it with evolution as the mechanism that would shape its eventual form. From evolution, man was gifted with free will, consciousness and morality. Thus man was made “in God’s image,” Collins said. (MT)

Collins admitted that the facts of genetics show that Adam and Eve could not be the literal ancestors of all humanity. But, like a good theologian, he said that that actually makes things better.

Quote from CP: “So I think you can preserve the idea of a literal, historical couple (Adam and Eve) as long as you don’t try to say they were the only humans and we are all descended from just them,” contended Collins. “That second part science won’t support.” . . . . . . The former director of the Human Genome Project said based on genetic research, it is impossible to support the belief that people today all came from only Adam. Another benefit of accepting that there were thousands of people besides Adam and Eve is being able to answer questions from the Bible like: Where did Cain find his wife? Who was Cain afraid would kill him? How was Cain going to build a city with just his family? “People in the world are hearing you can’t have both. It has got to be one or the other,” said Collins about choosing between science and creation. “The essential thing is we’re about the truth. A faith that basically asks people to disbelieve facts is not about the truth. If there are aspects about our Christian faith that has gone down that road, it is up to all of us to try to pull that back. “Look at the facts, look at the truth, and in the process, admire all the more and worship all the more God the creator. But in the nonessential things, let’s not get too worked up about those options about Adam and Eve as long as they’re consistent with the facts.” (CP)

But “we’re about the truth”? Indeed, only when it concerns the “nonessential things” like Adam and Eve or the Genesis story of creation. (Incidentally, how does Collins now preserve the idea of a “literal, historical” Adam and Eve? Who were they?)

But what about the “truths” that people cannot come back to life when they’ve been dead for a couple of ways, or that there’s no known way for a human female to give birth through parthenogenesis? Oh, I forgot—the virgin birth and Resurrection are essential things, so let’s just ignore the science there. Apparently Collins defines the “essential” things about Christianity as “those claims whose scientific accuracy can’t be checked directly.” I strongly suspect that Collins believes in a literal resurrection and in miracles. And, by the way, theistic evolution is not how scientists understand evolution, which is as a purely materialistic and unguided process that was not aimed at coughing up H. sapiens as its ultimate product. Theistic evolution is really a watered-down form of creationism.

So what is the woo that Colllins peddled at Pepperdine? He highlighted two phenomena that, he said, science cannot explain, ergo Jesus:

1. Fine-tuning. This is rapidly becoming accomodationists’ favorite argument for God. Here’s a Collins quote from the MT:

“If [those constants] were set at a value that was just a tiny bit different, one part in a million, the whole thing wouldn’t work any more, because after the Big Bang it would have just the right balance of forces to enable matter to come together,” Collins said. “If you are an atheist, either it’s just a lucky break [and the odds are enormous], or you have to go to this multiverse hypothesis, which says that there must be an infinite number of parallel universes that have different values of those constants. And of course we are here, so me must have won the lottery, we must be in the one where everything worked.?”

(Note: Collins here is espousing the strong anthropic principle [SAP], not merely the idea that we are the result of a lucky break, because if those constants were otherwise (so Collins claimed), we wouldn’t be here to make the observation. As Victor Stenger notes in the article and book below, the SAP posits that the universe must have the properties it has to allow life to evolve. But of course we could be simply the result of a lucky break!)

Collins sees the answer in God, of course:

“And there are serious scientists who believe that, and sort of are forced to, because the alternative is you have to see the hand of a creator who set the parameters to be just so,” Collins concluded.

Well, there are alternatives to God. Collins dismisses the multiple universe theory too quickly, and he’s apparently not familiar with Lee Smolin’s theory of cosmological natural selection—granted, a controversial view—nor with Victor Stenger’s many solid criticisms of the “fine-tuning” argument, including the idea that maybe the universe isn’t so “fine-tuned” at all, or that there are underlying reasons that we don’t yet understand for the physical constants to be what they are. To see the scientific counter to Collins, read Stenger’s piece “Is the universe fine tuned for us?” [pdf at link] or his new book, The Fallacy of Fine Tuning.

We don’t yet understand why the physical constants of our Universe are what they are, much less how much they could vary and still allow life, nor do we know whether “multiverses” actually exist (these are not, by the way, an idle speculation of physicists designed to save secular science: this idea falls directly out of some notions of physics). But to posit an immensely complex spiritual being as the answer is simply foisting a God-of-the-Gaps argument on the American public as a “scientific” conclusion. “See, those atheistic scientists haven’t yet given us a good explanation for the SAP. Therefore God exists, and not just God, but the Christian God with the whole armamentarium of Mary, Jesus, and miracles.” Collins has yet to tell us why fine-tuning (or morality; see below) is evidence for his god rather than the gods of Hindus, Muslims, Jews and so on.

Francis Collins is to physics what Michael Behe is to biology.

2. Morality and altruism. Collins sees the ingrained morality of humans (he calls this “The Moral Law”) as strong evidence for God, since evolution couldn’t produce such feelings and behaviors. From the MT:

“As a scientist, how do you explain random acts of kindness from an evolutionary perspective?” Collins asked. Collins pointed to the case of Wesley Autrey, a black man who jumped from a subway platform in New York City in 2007 to cover a white man who had fallen onto the tracks after having a seizure. Incredibly, neither was hurt as an onrushing subway train passed over them. Collins said there was no reason, evolutionarily speaking, for Autrey to put himself in danger to help a total stranger who on the surface was different from him. Rather, he should have been thinking about self-preservation. “Evolution, in its simplest form, would say ‘Wesley, you got it all wrong here. That’s not what you were supposed to be thinking about,’” Collins said. “But when you look at that, are you not moved by it? Are you not taken with the sense that this is human nobility in the form that we’re called to do? So what’s this about?”

What’s this about? Not necessarily about Jesus!

Morality itself is not a problem for evolution: my own view is that it’s a combination of sentiments and behaviors that were evolutionarily advantageous in our ancestors, who lived in small groups that would promote some sort of morality, along with reasoned morality: non-evolved sentiments that we have worked out through rational thought. It’s my contention, and I’ll have a piece out on this soon, that human morality reflects a combination of evolved behaviors and the rationality that was a fortuitous byproduct of the big brain vouchsafed us by evolution.

It’s hard to deny that reason itself can produce morality, for what humans see as “moral” has changed drastically over the last few centuries. In many places ethnic minorities, gays, and women, for example, are treated much better than they were about 200 years ago. That change, and the sentiments behind it, could not have come from God (unless He changed his mind about slavery, women and homosexuals), nor from evolution either, for the transformation happened too fast to be explained by genetic change.

The observance of human altruism (and it can’t be denied that some people sacrifice their lives for non-relatives) is only a conundrum if you think that altruism—and by that I mean sacrificing your life for a complete stranger—is a) based solely on genes in our DNA promoting that behavior and b) evolved precisely so we’d sacrifice our lives for strangers. Natural selection, except for an unlikely form of group selection, can’t promote such “sacrificial” genes. But there are two non-goddy sources of altruism like that shown by Wesley Autrey: one evolutionary and one based on reason.

The first is simply that acts like Autrey’s reflect an ancestral morality that is now being applied in situations where it’s not adaptive. Evolution could have instilled in us the sentiment to risk our lives for our relatives or members of a small band of individuals whom we know might reciprocate. We no longer live in such bands, but we still have the genes that evolved over the long period of our evolution in small groups (remember that the last two millennia constitute only 0.03 percent of the time since we diverged from our common ancestor with the chimp).

This is not an idle speculation, for every day humans behave in ways that contravene our evolved nature. This happens each time a man puts on a condom, or a couple adopts a baby. Both of those behaviors are modern and nonadaptive responses to impulses instilled in us by evolution: the desire to copulate and to have children. It would have, of course, been manifestly maladaptive for australopithecines to use condoms or nurture the babies of completely unrelated individuals, and genes for those behaviors could not have survived because they subvert gene’s “desires” to propagate themselves. (Note to Mary Midgley: I’m using shorthand here.) What we see with adoption is similar to what Autrey did in New York: the nonadaptive coopting of ancestral behaviors that were once evolutionarily advantageous. And this could explain all of those other “random acts of kindness” that don’t involve potential sacrifice of reproduction: they’re simply the byproducts of an evolved morality.

Second, pure altruism could reflect simply our realization that such behaviors are moral or at least admirable. That is, they could result from secular reason. This is Peter Singer’s thesis in The Expanding Circle: as we become familiar with other individuals and think about things, we realize that one’s gender, race, or sexual preferences are completely irrelevant to how they should be treated, because morality can’t privilege one group over another. And our evolved tendency to be moral toward our own group simply expands to others based on that reasoning. This, I think, is really the only explanation for why (in many places) morality, both in terms of moral codes or individual behavior, is improving. It cannot be due to evolution, and it cannot be due to God, unless he changed his mind. (God: “I used to approve of slavery and the stoning of nonvirgin brides. But I had second thoughts.”) And if we can reason our way toward a more inclusive morality, extending morality beyond our small group and our kin to the world at large, then we can be altruistic towards strangers.

None of this appeals to Collins, because, after all, he saw that frozen waterfall that convinced him of the Trinity. But as a scientist he really has the responsibility to consider, and talk about, the non-Jesus explanations for “fine tuning” and morality. His going around giving lectures on how physics and human behavior proves God is an embarrassment to the NIH, to scientists, and, indeed, to all rational people.