But the pilgrim continues his progress: next, we learn that Collins's uncertainty about the identity of God could not survive a collision with C. S. Lewis. The following passage from Lewis proved decisive:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says He is a poached egg—or else He would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
Collins provides this pabulum for our contemplation and then describes how it irrevocably altered his view of the universe:
Lewis was right. I had to make a choice. A full year had passed since I decided to believe in some sort of God, and now I was being called to account. On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God's creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ. 70
This is self-deception at full gallop. It is simply astounding that this passage was written by a scientist with the intent of demonstrating the compatibility of faith and reason. And if we thought Collins's reasoning could grow no more labile, he has since divulged that the waterfall was frozen into three streams, which put him in mind of the Holy Trinity. 71 It should go without saying that if a frozen waterfall can confirm the specific tenets of Christianity, anything can confirm anything. But this truth was not obvious to Collins as he "knelt in the dewy grass," and it is not obvious to him now. Nor was it obvious to the editors of Nature, which is the most important scientific publication in any language. The journal praised Collins for engaging "with people of faith to explore how science—both in its mode of thought and its results— is consistent with their religious beliefs." 72 According to Nature, Collins was engaged in the "moving" and "laudable" exercise of building "a bridge across the social and intellectual divide that exists between most of U.S. academia and the so-called heartlands." And here is Collins, hard at work on that bridge:
As believers, you are right to hold fast to the concept of God as Creator; you are right to hold fast to the truths of the Bible; you are right to hold fast to the conclusion that science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence; and you are right to hold fast to the certainty that the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted. 73
God, who is not limited to space and time, created the universe and established natural laws that govern it. Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living creatures, God chose the elegant mechanism of evolution to create microbes, plants, and animals of all sorts. Most remarkably, God intentionally chose the same mechanism to give rise to special creatures who would have intelligence, a knowledge of right and wrong, free will, and a desire to seek fellowship with Him. He also knew these creatures would ultimately choose to disobey the Moral Law. 74
Imagine: the year is 2006; half of the American population believes that the universe is 6,000 years old; our president has just used his first veto to block federal funding for the world's most promising medical research on religious grounds; and one of the foremost scientists in the land has this to say, straight from the heart (if not the brain).
Of course, once the eyes of faith have opened, confirmation can be found everywhere. Here Collins considers whether to accept the directorship of the Human Genome Project:
I spent a long afternoon praying in a little chapel, seeking guidance about this decision. I did not "hear" God speak—in fact,
I've never had that experience. But during those hours, ending in an evensong service that I had not expected, a peace settled over me. A few days later, I accepted the offer. 75
One hopes to see, but does not find, the phrase "Dear Diary" framing these solemn excursions from honest reasoning. Again we find a peculiar emphasis on the most unremarkable violations of expectation: just as Collins had not expected to see a frozen waterfall, he had not expected an evensong service. How unlikely would it be to encounter an evensong service (generally celebrated just before sunset) while spending "a long afternoon praying in a little chapel"? And what of Collins's feeling of "peace"? We are clearly meant to view it as some indication, however slight, of the veracity of his religious beliefs. Elsewhere in his book Collins states, correctly, that "monotheism and polytheism cannot both be right." But doesn't he think that at some point in the last thousand years a Hindu or two has prayed in a temple, perhaps to the elephant-headed god Ganesh, and experienced similar feelings of peace? What might he, as a scientist, make of this fact?
I should say at this point that I see nothing irrational about seeking the states of mind that lie at the core of many of the world's religions. Compassion, awe, devotion, and feelings of oneness are surely among the most valuable experiences a person can have. What is irrational, and irresponsible in a scientist and educator, is to make unjustified and unjustifiable claims about the structure of the universe, about the divine origin of certain books, and about the future of humanity on the basis of such experiences. And by the standards of even ordinary contemplative experience, the phenomena that Collins puts forward in support of his religious beliefs scarcely merit discussion. A beautiful waterfall? An unexpected church service? A feeling of peace? The fact that these are the most salient landmarks on Collins's journey out of bondage may be the most troubling detail in this positive sea of troubles.
Collins argues that science makes belief in God "intensely plausible"— the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of Nature's constants, the emergence of complex life, the effectiveness of mathematics, 76 all suggest to him that a "loving, logical, and consistent" God exists. But when challenged with alternate (and far more plausible) accounts of these phenomena— or with evidence that suggests that God might be unloving, illogical, inconsistent, or, indeed, absent—Collins declares that God stands outside of Nature, and thus science cannot address the question of His existence at all. Similarly, Collins insists that our moral intuitions attest to God's existence, to His perfectly moral character, and to His desire to have fellowship with every member of our species; but when our moral intuitions recoil at the casual destruction of innocent children by tidal wave or earthquake, Collins assures us that our time-bound notions of good and evil cannot be trusted and that God's will is a perfect mystery. 77 As is often the case with religious apology, it is a case of heads, faith wins; tails, reason loses.
Like most Christians, Collins believes in a suite of canonical miracles, including the virgin birth and literal resurrection of Jesus Christ. He cites N. T. Wright 78 and John Polkinghorne 79 as the best authorities on these matters, and when pressed on points of theology, he recommends that people consult their books for further illumination. To give readers a taste of this literature, here is Polkinghorne describing the physics of the coming resurrection of the dead:
If we regard human beings as psychosomatic unities, as I believe both the Bible and contemporary experience of the intimate connection between mind and brain encourage us to do, then the soul will have to be understood in an Aristotelian sense as the "form," or information-bearing pattern, of the body. Though this pattern is dissolved at death it seems perfectly rational to believe that it will be remembered by God and reconstituted in a divine act of resurrection. The "matter" of the world to come, which will be the carrier of the reembodiment,
will be the transformed matter of the present universe, itself redeemed by God beyond its cosmic death. The resurrected universe is not a second attempt by the Creator to produce a world ex nihilo but it is the transmutation of the present world in an act of new creation ex vetere. God will then truly be "all in all" (1 Cor. 15:28) in a totally sacramental universe whose divine infused "matter" will be delivered from the transience and decay inherent in the present physical process. Such mysterious and exciting beliefs depend for their motivation not only on the faithfulness of God, but also on Christ's resurrection, understood as the seminal event from which the new creation grows, and indeed also on the detail of the empty tomb, with its implication that the Lord's risen and glorified body is the transmutation of his dead body, just as the world to come will be the transformation of this present mortal world. 80
These beliefs are, indeed, "mysterious and exciting." As it happens, Polkinghorne is also a scientist. The problem, however, is that it is impossible to differentiate his writing on religion—which now fills an entire shelf of books—from an extraordinarily patient Sokal-style hoax. 81 If one intended to embarrass the religious establishment with carefully constructed nonsense, this is exactly the sort of pseudoscience, pseudo-scholarship, and pseudoreasoning one would employ. Unfortunately, I see no reason to doubt Polkinghorne's sincerity. Neither, it would seem, does Francis Collins.
Even for a scientist of Collins's stature, who has struggled to reconcile his belief in the divinity of Jesus with modern science, it all boils down to the "empty tomb." Collins freely admits that if all his scientific arguments for the plausibility of God were proven to be in error, his faith would be undiminished, as it is founded upon the belief, shared by all serious Christians, that the Gospel account of the miracles of Jesus is true. The problem, however, is that miracle stories are as common as house dust, even in the twenty-first century. For instance, all of Jesus' otherworldly powers have been attributed to the South Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba by vast numbers of living eyewitnesses. Sai Baba even claims to have been born of a virgin. This is actually not an uncommon claim in the history of religion, or in history generally. Even worldly men like Genghis Khan and Alexander were once thought to have been born of virgins (parthenogenesis apparently offers no guarantee that a man will turn the other cheek). Thus, Collins's faith is predicated on the claim that miracle stories of the sort that today surround a person like Sathya Sai Baba—and do not even merit an hour on cable television— somehow become especially credible when set in the prescientific religious context of the first-century Roman Empire, decades after their supposed occurrence, as evidenced by discrepant and fragmentary copies of copies of copies of ancient Greek manuscripts. 82 It is on this basis that the current head of the NIH recommends that we believe the following propositions:
1. Jesus Christ, a carpenter by trade, was born of a virgin, ritually murdered as a scapegoat for the collective sins of his species, and then resurrected from death after an interval of three days.
2. He promptly ascended, bodily, to "heaven"—where, for two millennia, he has eavesdropped upon (and, on occasion, even answered) the simultaneous prayers of billions of beleaguered human beings.
3. Not content to maintain this numinous arrangement indefinitely, this invisible carpenter will one day return to earth to judge humanity for its sexual indiscretions and skeptical doubts, at which time he will grant immortality to anyone who has had the good fortune to be convinced, on Mother's knee, that this baffling litany of miracles is the most important series of truths ever revealed about the cosmos.
4. Every other member of our species, past and present, from Cleopatra to Einstein, no matter what his or her terrestrial accomplishments, will be consigned to a far less desirable fate, best left unspecified.
5. In the meantime, God/Jesus may or may not intervene in our world, as He pleases, curing the occasional end-stage cancer (or not), answering an especially earnest prayer for guidance (or not), consoling the bereaved (or not), through His perfectly wise and loving agency.
Just how many scientific laws would be violated by this scheme? One is tempted to say "all of them." And yet, judging from the way that journals like Nature have treated Collins, one can only conclude that there is nothing in the scientific worldview, or in the intellectual rigor and self-criticism that gave rise to it, that casts these convictions in an unfavorable light.
Prior to his appointment as head of the NIH, Collins started an organization called the BioLogos Foundation, whose purpose (in the words of its mission statement) is to communicate "the compatibility of the Christian faith with scientific discoveries about the origins of the universe and life." BioLogos is funded by the Templeton Foundation, an organization that claims to seek answers to "life's biggest questions," but appears primarily dedicated to erasing the boundary between religion and science. Because of its astonishing wealth, Templeton seems able to purchase the complicity of otherwise secular academics as it seeks to rebrand religious faith as a legitimate arm of science. True to form, Nature has adopted an embarrassingly supine posture with respect to Templeton as well. 83
Would Collins have received the same treatment in Nature if he had argued for the compatibility between science and witchcraft, astrology, or Tarot cards? On the contrary, he would have been met by an inferno of criticism. As a point of comparison, we should recall that the biochemist Rupert Sheldrake had his academic career neatly decapitated by a single Nature editorial. 84 In his book A New Science of Life, Sheldrake advanced a theory of "morphic resonance," in an attempt to account for how living systems and other patterns in nature develop. 85 Needless to say, the theory stands a very good chance of being utterly wrong. But there is not a single sentence in Sheldrake's book to rival the intellectual dishonesty that Collins achieves on nearly every page of The Language of God. 86 What accounts for the double standard? Clearly, it remains taboo to criticize mainstream religion (which, in the West, means Christianity, Judaism, and Islam).
According to Collins, the moral law applies exclusively to human beings:
Though other animals may at times appear to show glimmerings of a moral sense, they are certainly not widespread, and in many instances other species' behavior seems to be in dramatic contrast to any sense of universal Rightness. 87
One wonders if the author has ever read a newspaper. The behavior of humans offers no such "dramatic contrast"? How badly must human beings behave to put this "sense of universal Rightness" in doubt? While no other species can match us for altruism, none can match us for sadistic cruelty either. And just how widespread must "glimmerings" of morality be among other animals before Collins—who, after all, knows a thing or two about genes—begins to wonder whether our moral sense has evolutionary precursors? What if mice show greater distress at the suffering of familiar mice than unfamiliar ones? (They do. 88 ) What if monkeys will starve themselves to prevent their cage mates from receiving painful shocks? (They will. 89 ) What if chimps have a demonstrable sense of fairness when receiving food rewards? (They have. 90 ) What if dogs do too? (Ditto. 91 ) Wouldn't these be precisely the sorts of findings one would expect if our morality were the product of evolution?
Collins's case for the supernatural origin of morality rests on the further assertion that there can be no evolutionary explanation for genuine altruism. Because self-sacrifice cannot increase the likelihood that an individual creature will survive and reproduce, truly self-sacrificing behavior stands as a primordial rejoinder to any biological account of morality. In Collins's view, therefore, the mere existence of altruism offers compelling evidence of a personal God. A moment's thought reveals, however, that if we were to accept this neutered biology, almost everything about us would be bathed in the warm glow of religious mystery. Smoking cigarettes isn't a healthy habit and is unlikely to offer an adaptive advantage—and there were no cigarettes in the Paleolithic— but this habit is very widespread and compelling. Is God, by any chance, a tobacco farmer? Collins can't seem to see that human moral
ity and selfless love may arise from more basic biological and psychological traits, which were themselves products of evolution. It is hard to interpret this oversight in light of his scientific training. If one didn't know better, one might be tempted to conclude that religious dogmatism presents an obstacle to scientific reasoning.
There are, of course, ethical implications to believing that human beings are the only species made in God's image and vouchsafed with "immortal souls." Concern about souls is a very poor guide to ethical behavior—that is, to actually mitigating the suffering of conscious creatures like ourselves. The belief that the soul enters the zygote at (or very near) the moment of conception leads to spurious worries about the fate of undifferentiated cells in Petri dishes and, therefore, to profound qualms over embryonic stem cell research. Rather often, a belief in souls leaves people indifferent to the suffering of creatures thought not to possess them. There are many species of animals that can suffer in ways that three-day-old human embryos cannot. The use of apes in medical research, the exposure of whales and dolphins to military sonar 92 — these are real ethical dilemmas, with real suffering at issue. Concern over human embryos smaller than the period at the end of this sentence— when, for years they have constituted one of the most promising contexts for medical research—is one of the many delusional products of religion that has led to an ethical blind alley, and to terrible failures of compassion. While Collins appears to support embryonic stem-cell research, he does so after much (literal) soul searching and under considerable theological duress. Everything he has said and written about the subject needlessly complicates an ethical question that is—if one is actually concerned about human and animal well-being—utterly straightforward.
The ethics of embryonic stem-cell research, which currently entails the destruction of human embryos, can be judged only by considering what embryos at the 150-cell-stage actually are. We must contemplate their destruction in light of how we treat organisms at similar and greater stages of complexity, as well as how we treat human beings at later stages of development. For instance, there are a variety of conditions that can occur during gestation, the remedy for which entails the destruction of far more developed embryos—and yet these interventions offer far less potential benefit to society. Curiously, no one objects to such procedures. A child can be born with his underdeveloped yet living twin lodged inside him—a condition known as fetus in fetu. Occasionally this condition isn't discovered until years after birth, when the first child complains about having something moving around inside his body. This second child is then removed like a tumor and destroyed. 93 As God seems to love diversity, there are countless permutations of this condition, and twins can fuse in almost any way imaginable. The second twin can also be a disorganized mass called a teratoma. Needless to say, any parasitic twin, however disorganized, will be a far more developed entity than an embryo at the 150-cell stage. Even the intentional sacrifice of one conjoined ("Siamese") twin to save the other has occurred in the United States, with shared organs being given to the survivor. In fact, there have been cases where unshared organs have been transferred from the twin that is to be sacrificed. 94