Kathleen Parker on Francis Collins

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker's piece about Francis Collins, A Physician-Geneticist Seeks to Foster Both Faith and Science, is a must-read for anyone interested in the question of whether one can be a Christian and believe in evolution, too.

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."

Does Evolution Contradict the Bible?

I'd like to propose a possible way of demonstrating that Darwin's theory of evolution not only does not contradict the Bible, it upholds it!

I'll lay my method of reasoning out in this and subsequent "Does Evolution Contradict the Bible?" posts to this blog. In this post I'd like to begin to sketch out my reasoning process and the worldview that goes along with it. Then I'd like to follow up in subsequent posts by going into more detail on each of the steps of reasoning involved.

In discussing my point of view about evolution and religion, I want to be as openhanded as I can. I don't want to "snow" anyone into feeling that they need to agree with a position that is fundamentally incomprehensible to them, or even downright offensive.

So let me be crystal clear right up front: my whole argument depends on analogies. The way I look at things depends on "reasoning by analogy," as I call it. I'm going to try to draw certain analogies between what science teaches us and what the Bible teaches us.

I know a great many people are uncomfortable with analogical reasoning, so let this stand as a fair early warning. If you read any further into this post and those that follow, you are apt to be confronted with ways of looking at things that you may find disturbing ... even if you can't say why they disturb you. One reason they may make you uncomfortable is that there is analogical reasoning going on here, and many people don't care much for that type of reasoning.


Science teaches us that life on earth evolved from primitive, single-celled life forms into a panoply of species, one of which is Homo sapiens: us. This happened over the course of billions of years, as the age of the earth is dated at roughly 4.6 billion years.

Many people who take the Bible seriously and want to read it in as literal a way as possible have trouble with Darwin's theory of evolution because it seems to contradict the creation story in chapter 1 of Genesis. This is the familiar story of how the Lord God created the world and everything in it — including all types of living creatures, culminating in man — in six days. Then God rested on the seventh day.

In 1859, Charles Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species and said that all species developed slowly and gradually out of the first forms of life on earth, in response to what we today understand to be genetic mutations. Mutations can be beneficial if they cause some organisms to be better equipped to win the struggle known colloquially as the "survival of the fittest." Natural selection is the name survival of the fittest is more formally called by.

In the last three or four decades, scientists have begun to augment that standard Darwinian story of evolution. They have begun to study two theories that are thought to relate closely to Darwin's: the theory of chaos and the theory of complexity. These two theories provide a way for us to explain the evolution of life on earth as an example of change that happens at the "edge of chaos."


Chaos theory tells us that, in addition to two very familiar types of orderly change, certain systems are capable of undergoing a third type of change: chaos.

Chaotic change happens when a "nonlinear dynamical system," as it is formally called, is following a path or trajectory that leads it to, as a well-known song puts it, "who knows where, who knows where." Orderly systems either never change at all or change in a cyclical, predictable way. For example, on earth day follows night in a regular, orderly fashion. Our day-night cycle is definitely not in thrall to what chaos theorists have called a "strange attractor," one whose eventual destination is "who knows where."

However, the weather on this planet is on such an attractor. The weather on our planet is unpredictable beyond a horizon of a few days into the future, because the weather is fundamentally chaotic. Scientists are wont to say that it is subject to the "butterfly effect": a butterfly beating its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas.

Here's where my penchant for analogical reasoning enters the picture. I claim that it is a valid analogy to identify chaotic behavior with what theologians and religious believers call "demonic activity."


In a later post, I'll try to better justify this analogy. At that time I'll go into greater detail than I'll go into here. But here, for what it's worth, are some samples of my reasoning.

First of all, let me suggest that there are no chaotic systems in heaven.

Summon up whatever standard images you have of heavenly life (whether we are religious or not). Are there storms? Are there tornadoes? Is there even "weather" as we know it?

True, there is air to breathe. There are perhaps gentle breezes, even fluffy white clouds for harp-plucking angels to recline on. But no storm clouds, no hurricanes, no monsoons. In fact, the weather in heaven never changes!

This tells us, I would suggest, that the strange, chaotic attractor that the weather on earth is in thrall to doesn't exist in heaven.

Another thing that doesn't exist in heaven is heart attacks. A common kind of heart attack here on earth is ventricular fibrillation, and it's always fatal if not reversed by the medical intervention called defibrillation. "V-fib," as it's called for short, is an instance of chaos. Our ordinary, endlessly repeated, regular heartbeat careens off on a strange, chaotic attractor, and then we die. That's definitely not something than can happen in heaven.

So I claim that it makes sense, at least provisionally, to think of chaotic activity as something totally out of place in God's own kingdom. Which suggests that, if you are at all inclined to believe in sin and Satan, it makes sense to think of chaos as satanic or demonic.


OK, I can hear you saying, so what? So what if we can draw some kind of analogy between chaotic behavior and demonic activity? Does such an analogy have any import, any meaning?

In order to answer that question I need to note, first of all, that Judeo-Christian religion has historically looked at certain things that occur here on earth as inspired by Satan. Satan, by whatever name you want to call that personage, has been called "Prince of This World," because he is said to reign here just as God reigns in heaven.

Now, that kind of talk today seems to us old-fashioned, even medieval. Those who are not religious believers will disparage it in exactly those terms, and a lot of those who do have religious faith will also find such talk quaint and outdated. (I count myself in that latter group, by the way.)

So why even bring it up?

I bring it up because I think granting such a notion credence and then drawing the aforementioned analogy between chaos as science studies it and satanic activity as religion envisions it gives us a way to harmonize evolution with the Bible. Along the way, it gives us a way to make sense of what philosophers and theologians call the "problem of evil," also known as the "problem of pain."

Let's look at pain. Significantly, there is no pain involved in the creation story we find in Genesis 1. Nothing in the process by which God created everything over the course of six days entails pain or suffering. God experienced no pain, even if he did see fit to rest on Day 7. Nor did any of his freshly minted creatures suffer in any way whatever.

Not so, though, in the second creation story in the Book of Genesis.

This is the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Everything was idyllic for them ... until they were tempted by a serpent to do precisely what God had instructed them not to do. Once they ate of the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, God had no choice but to evict them from Paradise, telling Eve that all of her female descendants would accordingly suffer what we today call "labor pains" whenever they do exactly what God later on was going to tell the biblical patriarchs to do: be fruitful and multiply.

So if we read between the lines just a little bit, the second creation story is as fraught with pain as the first is pain-free.

That second creation story introduces Satan (the serpent was the devil in disguise) and sin. Believers in the Judeo-Christian God call the sin of Adam and Eve "original sin" and say that it besmirches the souls of all of us descendants of Adam — with the important exception, if you are a Christian believer, of Jesus and his mother, the Virgin Mary.


Now, if you even begin to go along with my aforementioned analogy between satanic activity as religion talks of it and chaotic change here on earth — a kind of change unknown in heaven — you may be able to see why I think the "edge of chaos" that some scientists speak of is extremely important.

The "edge of chaos" is a poetic way of referring to a fourth type of behavior that dynamical systems can undergo. We have the two types of order, static and cyclical. We have a third type of behavior: chaos. And we have Type IV behavior, as what goes on at the edge of chaos is called.

Type IV behavior happens at the edge of chaos. Systems that exhibit it combine the surprise and unpredictability of chaotic behavior with the graceful stability and dogged persistence of orderly behavior.

Life on earth, as it evolves, is just such a system that exhibits the generation of surprising novelty along with graceful stability and dogged persistence.

To be precise, the earth's biosphere is a nonlinear dynamical system whose behavior — not its fundamental character, its behavior — is Type IV. Because the biosphere's behavior is Type IV, it operates at the edge of chaos and is capable of both graceful stability and unprecedented novelty. If it couldn't generate novelty, new species could never originate. If it didn't exhibit graceful stability, new species could not survive.

Nonlinear dynamical systems that exhibit Type IV behavior are said to be "complex adaptive systems." Their behavior exhibits "complexity," as distinct from "chaos." As such, their behavior is "adaptive" — meaning that a system exhibiting such behavior "evolves" in such a way as to "keep on keeping on," no matter what sorts of threats it faces to its survival.

Think of the extinction of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. At that time, reptiles ruled the planet, and our mammalian forebears were but small rodent-like critters. Then something catastrophic happened. We are not totally sure what it was, but it may have been an asteroid impact that kicked up so much dust into the atmosphere that sunlight couldn't get through to keep most plants alive. Many dinosaurs depended on plants for their diet, while others who were meat-eaters ate other plant-eating animals. Result: every last dinosaur starved to death — except for those that had evolved into birds, which survive to this day.

But, let's get back to how the biosphere responded to the chaos that it was presumably thrown into at the time of that initial catastrophe, whatever it was. Complexity theory has it that a system thrown into chaos — a system which engages in Type III behavior — can be capable of restoring itself to the edge of chaos, which is Type IV behavior. As that happens, the system generates new ways galore of keeping itself going. When such a system is a planet's biosphere, those "new ways galore" amount to the advent of new species.

In the wake of the extinction of the dinosaurs there was a rapid burst of speciation, the term scientists use to refer to the origins of species. New mammal species appeared in particular, which led to yet more new species of mammals ... which, many millions of years later, led to us.

The origin of species and the post-catastrophe return out of chaos to the fecund edge of chaos are two ways of describing the same thing. The same system — the earth's biosphere — is capable of either Type III behavior, which is chaos, or Type IV behavior, which is evolution.

Neither type of behavior is found in God's own kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven. We are talking about events here on earth. But clearly, God prefers Type IV behavior (evolution) to Type III behavior (chaos). Here is another reason to say that there is a strong analogy between chaos as science talks about it and demonic activity as religion construes it.

But Type III behavior (chaos) is something that any system which is capable of Type IV behavior (evolution) is also capable of. It is as if there is an intrinsic moral dimension to the behavior of nonlinear dynamical systems.


Notice that a complex adaptive system's seemingly magical ability to evolve new strategies of survival and thus to find its way back out of catastrophe and chaos does not imply that it has a mind or is capable of making conscious moral choices.

At the same time, we know that evolution has over the millennia generated creatures that do have minds and can make conscious moral decisions, for we ourselves are such creatures.

We also know that the tree whose forbidden fruit Adam and Eve ate of was called the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Before they ate the fruit, they were like complex adaptive systems as science studies them: unaware of the moral choices they were, willy-nilly, already making. And they experienced no pain ... just there is no reason to think that a biosphere-in-progress which suffers a catastrophe that wipes out its reigning (reptilian) forms of life undergoes any conscious suffering as a result.

Yet that same biosphere eventually produces conscious, morally aware creatures (Homo sapiens) who have definitely eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, who definitely are prone to sin and the blandishments of Satan ... and who definitely undergo suffering and experience pain.

These, then, are the lineaments of my thinking about how the theory of evolution (as augmented by the sciences of chaos and complexity) not only doesn't contradict the Bible, it upholds and reinforces the Bible! I'll have more to say in later entries in this blog ...