Francis Collins headed the Human Genome Project, a big part of the scientific effort that cataloged our species' genes, so he is a scientist par excellence. He is a believer in the theory of evolution. A noteworthy Christian as well, he does not see any conflict between the two.
Everybody knows that many Christians disagree on this. Of those who think evolution is anti-Christian, Parker writes, "Their objections haven't changed much since Billy Sunday first articulated them almost 100 years ago and revolve around the fear that acceptance of evolution negates God."
That, then, is the heart of the matter. If Christians could come to see that evolution does not — repeat, does not — negate God, the world would be a better place.
"To that end," writes Parker, "[Collins] created the BioLogos Foundation and last month launched a Web site — BioLogos.org — to advance an alternative to the extreme views that tend to dominate the debate ... Through the foundation and Web site, Collins is hoping to help home-schoolers and other Christian educators come to grips with their scientific doubts. Among other projects, he intends to develop curricula that combine faith and science."
To which I say, more power to him!
We Christians need to embrace evolution, I would say, because for some of us to hold out against it not only splits the church, it splits society at large along fault lines that don't really need to be there. It unnecessarily puts off people who are not yet believers. It makes all religion seem, to some, foolish and dispensable.
Plus, Parker cites Collins as arguing that:
The problem of not believing in evolution as one might not believe in, say, goblins or flying pigs has repercussions beyond the obvious — that the United States will continue to fall behind other nations in science education. Collins says that many creationist-trained young people suffer an intense identity crisis when they leave home for college, only to discover that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Talk about messing with your mind.
Collins says he hears from dozens of young people so afflicted. Most susceptible to crisis are children who have been home-schooled [as was Collins himself, until the sixth grade] or who have attended Christian schools.
I am well aware how hard it is to get evolution opponents to, so to speak, see the light. Darwin's theory (as brought up to date over the century-and-a-half since he published On the Origin of Species in 1859) is hard to grasp. It demands belief in things that seem wholly counterintuitive, like the ability of hereditary material — genes, DNA — to stay basically the same from one generation to the next, and on to the next, except of course when it does change.
That is what "mutations" are, changes in genetic material, and they happen a lot. It's just that, as there are so many genes per organism, "a lot" turns out to be an exceedingly tiny percentage of the total number of genes passed to offspring from their parents. Too, most mutations either make no tangible difference to survival chances, or if they do make for palpable change, they can get snuffed out in the offspring that bear them because they make that offspring less well adapted to the environment.
Such "survival of the fittest" is key to evolution. In a dangerous world, more offspring are produced than can possibly make it to adulthood and produce yet more offspring. Which ones produce their own posterity and which ones don't is often determined by which ones have genetically derived characteristics that fit them best to the circumstances under which they find themselves living.
Darwin's name for this reality was "natural selection." Evolutionists emphasize that it is purposeless and blind. Even so, along with the mutations that occur at random in genetic material and the "superfecundity" which ensures that there are way more offspring born than can possibly survive, it is the guarantor of evolutionary change.
If one is an evolutionist, one also has to believe that changes in the stuff of heredity, when they are not vetoed by natural selection, take uncountably long amounts of time — hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years — to make major changes in what their host organisms look like or how they function, very occasionally leading over eons and eons to the actual emergence of a brand new species.
Still, our planet's fossil record seems to show — "fossils" are remains of living organisms that have been preserved somehow — that there are bursts of "speciation" in which large numbers of new species arrive all at once. These short bursts punctuate much longer periods of stasis and equilibrium. There are also occasional "mass extinctions" in which large numbers of species rapidly perish.
To get a new species to emerge, nature first has to find a way to make sure two populations of a single ancestor species get "reproductively isolated" from each other, perhaps owing to the interposition of a geographic barrier. One branch will then start adapting to a changed environment and, typically millions of years later, Bob's your uncle (as the British say). If the barrier is then removed, the two formerly isolated groups will no longer interbreed; they are separate species.
Geologically, the Earth is something like 4.6 billion years old, and the first organisms, single-celled bacteria or the like, appeared perhaps 2.7 billion years ago. To our minds, things remained pretty dull until the seemingly rapid appearance of most of today's major groups of complex organisms around 530 million years ago, in the Cambrian explosion.
As of about 65 million years ago, dinosaurs roamed the Earth. When they went extinct, little organisms who fed their young on milk — the early mammals — began to have a field day. For the first time, the world was their oyster.
By some five to seven million years ago our closest living cousins, the chimpanzees, were well-established in Africa. From them, the first species of our own genus, Homo, split off. (See Human evolution in Wikipedia.) Our own particular species, Homo sapiens, is all that is left of that genus. Its earliest known examples, called "archaic Homo sapiens," arose less than one half million years ago. It's hard to be absolutely sure these early humans were precisely of our species, though most scientists say they were.
Roughly 250,000 years ago, in a time between two ice ages, Homo sapiens proper appeared. By 160,000 years ago, the first "anatomically modern" version of our species had arrived.
Less than 10,000 years ago, certain humans began worshiping a single God, Yahweh. The earliest known copy of the Torah dates from the 7th century B.C.E., about 9,000 years ago. From it and its Abrahamic tradition descend the Judaism, Christianity, and Islam of today.
The Torah — the most holy scripture of Judaism, revered by Christians as the first five books of their Old Testament — begins with the book of Genesis, whose first chapter describes how the Lord, the One God, in his power and might created the world and everything in it, including all living kinds and mankind itself.
Today's creationists insist that this creation story must be read literally, for it must be literally true or true not at all. If it is literally true, the theory of evolution cannot be right.
I say the creationists are dead wrong in their belief. Genesis, chapter one, was written (or written down, out of earlier oral tradition) by and for a pre-scientific people who could not have understood today's scientific evolution theory. The point of the story was, and remains, the establishment of the fact that the Lord God is a unique deity of incomprehensible power and might.
God is supernatural, and how He creates the world is beyond our categories of thought. Yet stories must be told. But why would we who believe in Him want to cage His unimaginable power and might to create the world as He sees fit within any particular story and its entirely human categories of thought?
Francis Collins, according to Kathleen Parker, puts it this way: "To Collins, Darwin is a threat only if one thinks that God is an underachiever. Collins doesn't happen to believe that. His study of genes has led him to conclude that God is both outside of nature and outside of time. He's big, in other words. The idea that God would create the mechanism of evolution makes sense."
No comments:
Post a Comment