Francis S. Collins > Quotes

“Will we turn our backs on science because it is perceived as a threat to God, abandoning all the promise of advancing our understanding of nature and applying that to the alleviation of suffering and the betterment of humankind? Alternatively, will we turn our backs on faith, concluding that science has rendered the spiritual life no longer necessary, and that traditional religious symbols can now be replaced by engravings of the double helix on our alters?

Both of these choices are profoundly dangerous. Both deny truth. Both will diminish the nobility of humankind. Both will be devastating to our future. And both are unnecessary. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate and beautiful - and it cannot be at war with itself. Only we imperfect humans can start such battles. And only we can end them.”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

“There were long stretches of DNA in between genes that didn't seem to be doing very much; some even referred to these as "junk DNA," though a certain amount of hubris was required for anyone to call any part of the genome "junk," given our level of ignorance.”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

“At this point, godless materialists might be cheering. If humans evolved strictly by mutation and natural selection, who needs God to explain us? To this, I reply: I do. The comparison of chimp and human sequences, interesting as it is, does not tell us what it means to be human. In my views, DNA sequence alone, even if accompanied by a vast trove of data on biological function, will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal search for God. Freeing God from the burden of special acts of creation does not remove Him as the source of the things that make humanity special, and of the universe itself. It merely shows us something of how He operates.”
― Francis s. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

“while the long history of religious oppression and hypocrisy is profoundly sobering, the earnest seeker must look beyond the behavior of flawed humans in order to find the truth. Would you condemn an oak tree because its timbers had been used to build battering rams? Would you blame the air for allowing lies to be transmitted through it? Would you judge Mozart’s The Magic Flute on the basis of a poorly rehearsed performance by fifth-graders? If you had never seen a real sunset over the Pacific, would you allow a tourist brochure as a substitute? Would you evaluate the power of romantic love solely in the light of an abusive marriage next door? No. A real evaluation of the truth of faith depends upon looking at the clean, pure water, not at the rusty containers.”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

“I do not believe that the God who created all the universe, and who communes with His people through prayer and spiritual insight, would expect us to deny the obvious truths of the natural world that science has revealed to us, in order to prove our love for Him.”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

“Yeah, it’s true we’re all dealt a set of cards. But it’s also true that it’s up to us to figure out how to play the hand.”
― Francis S. Collins

“...let us recognize that a large fraction of our suffering and that of our fellow human beings is brought about by what we do to one another. It is humankind, not God, that had invented knives, arrows, guns, bombs, and all manner of other instruments of torture used through the ages. The tragedy of the young child killed by a drunk driver, of the innocent young man dying on the battlefield, or of the young girl cut down by a stray bullet in a crime-ridden section of a modern city can hardly be blamed on God. After all, we have somehow been given free will, the ability to do as we please. We use this ability frequently to disobey the Moral Law. And when we do so, we shouldn't then blame God for the consequences.”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

“Faith and reason are not, as many seem to be arguing today, mutually exclusive. They never have been. The letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament defines faith as ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of the things not seen.”
― Francis S. Collins, Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith

“As the leader of the international Human Genome Project, which had labored mightily over more than a decade to reveal this DNA sequence, I stood beside President Bill Clinton in the East Room of the White House...

Clinton's speech began by comparing this human sequence map to the map that Meriwether Lewis had unfolded in front of President Thomas Jefferson in that very room nearly two hundred years earlier.

Clinton said, "Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind." But the part of his speech that most attracted public attention jumped from the scientific perspective to the spiritual. "Today," he said, "we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God's most divine and sacred gift."

Was I, a rigorously trained scientist, taken aback at such a blatantly religious reference by the leader of the free world at a moment such as this? Was I tempted to scowl or look at the floor in embarrassment? No, not at all. In fact I had worked closely with the president's speechwriter in the frantic days just prior to this announcement, and had strongly endorsed the inclusion of this paragraph.

When it came time for me to add a few words of my own, I echoed this sentiment: "It's a happy day for the world. It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring, to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God."

What was going on here? Why would a president and a scientist, charged with announcing a milestone in biology and medicine, feel compelled to invoke a connection with God? Aren't the scientific and spiritual worldviews antithetical, or shouldn't they at least avoid appearing in the East Room together? What were the reasons for invoking God in these two speeches? Was this poetry? Hypocrisy? A cynical attempt to curry favor from believers, or to disarm those who might criticize this study of the human genome as reducing humankind to machinery? No. Not for me. Quite the contrary, for me the experience of sequencing the human genome, and uncovering this most remarkable of all texts, was both a stunning scientific achievement and an occasion of worship.”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

“a discussion about the miraculous quickly devolves to an argument about whether or not one is willing to consider any possibility whatsoever of the supernatural”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

“In this modern era of cosmology, evolution, and the human genome, is there still the possibility of a richly satisfying harmony between the scientific and spiritual worldviews? I answer with a resounding yes! In my view, there is no conflict in being a rigorous scientist and a person who believes in a God who takes a personal interest in each one of us. Science’s domain is to explore nature. God’s domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science. It must be examined with the heart, the mind, and the soul—and the mind must find a way to embrace both realms.”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

“There are many subtle variants of theistic evolution, but a typical version rests upon the following premises: The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time. Once evolution got under way, no special supernatural intervention was required. Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes. But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

“...to apply scientific arguments to the question of God's existence, as if this were somehow a showstopper, is committing a category error.”
― Francis S. Collins, Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith

“Arno Penzias, the Nobel Prize–winning scientist who codiscovered the cosmic microwave background radiation that provided strong support for the Big Bang in the first place, states, “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five Books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

“Studies of the interaction between genetic and environmental risks are pinpointing critical parts of our health that derive from environmental variables.”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine

“Today, we have discovered that everyone is born with dozens of genetic glitches. There are no perfect human specimens. But not all our glitches are the same, so one treatment often does not fit all sufferers of a given disease.”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine

“Science is progressive and self-correcting: no significantly erroneous conclusions or false hypotheses can be sustained for long, as newer observations will ultimately knock down incorrect constructs. But over a long period of time, a consistent set of observations sometimes emerges that leads to a new framework of understanding. That framework is then given a much more substantive description, and is called a “theory”—the theory of gravitation, the theory of relativity, or the germ theory, for instance.”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

“…to apply scientific arguments to the question of God’s existence, as if this were somehow a showstopper, is committing a category error”
― Francis S. Collins, Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith

“It is the awareness of right and wrong, along with the development of language, awareness of self, and the ability to imagine the future, to which scientists generally refer when trying to enumerate the special qualities of Homo sapiens”
― Francis S. Collins

“When we proclaim that someone is subhuman, we not only remove for them the possibility of change and repentance, we also remove from them moral responsibility.”
― Francis S. Collins, Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith – Dr. Francis Collins' Definitive Reader on Rationality

“Faith and reason are not, as many seem to be arguing today, mutually exclusive. They never have been. The letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament defines faith as 'the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of the things not seen.”
― Francis S. Collins, Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith

“But there is, alas, no doubt that we are becoming a vocabulary-deprived nation—nay, planet. Words have been dropping off all through this century, but the loss increased radically in the sixties with the immorality of “limited vocabulary.”
― Francis S. Collins, Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith – Dr. Francis Collins' Definitive Reader on Rationality

“What, to use Noble Laureate Wigner's classic phrase, accounts for the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics'?”
― Francis S. Collins, Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith

“In fact, genetic medicine has brought the problems of rare genetic conditions right to my own door.”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine

“Discoveries about genetics are not limited to just those 6,000 conditions of a strongly hereditary nature, however. We are now in the midst of a genetic revolution that will touch all of us in numerous ways:”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine

“an essay in the Human Rights Reader, Rorty suggested that the basis for human rights is not rationality or moral law but “what Baier calls ‘a progress of sentiments.’…It is the result of what I have been calling ‘sentimental education.’”17 So the basis for morality, in Rorty’s view, is “sentiment.” We are back to preferences and tastes. But whose sentiments? Rorty’s? A Nazi’s? Or someone else’s?”
― Francis S. Collins, Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith – Dr. Francis Collins' Definitive Reader on Rationality

“The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

“In that context, I find theistic evolution, or BioLogos, to be by far the most scientifically consistent and spiritually satisfying of the alternatives. This position will not go out of style or be disproven by future scientific discoveries. It is intellectually rigorous, it provides answers to many otherwise puzzling questions, and it allows science and faith to fortify each other like two unshakable pillars, holding up a building called Truth.”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

“The pure, clean water of spiritual truth is placed in rusty containers, and the subsequent failings of the church down through the centuries should not be projected onto the faith itself, as if the water had been the problem.”
― Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

“A recent cross-sectional study in two states, Ohio and Florida,37 showed that the rate of death in those states was strongly associated with political party affiliation—after May 2021, when vaccines were freely available to all adults, the death rate for Republican voters was 43 percent higher than for Democratic voters. The long echo of the negative public response to COVID-19 has led to greater resistance to all forms of vaccination, putting children at risk for diseases like measles and polio that had almost been eradicated in the developed world. This may be the most consequential example of distrust of science in modern history. This circumstance is utterly contrary to the way a person or a nation should respond to a threatening pandemic: political party should be set aside in favor of clearheaded and objective assessment of the facts. But with our current separation into divisive tribal communities, the opportunity for thoughtful considerations of options—for achieving wisdom—has mostly been lost. The consequences have been truly tragic.”
― Francis S. Collins, The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust