Recently President Obama nominated Dr. Francis Collins to lead the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Collins’s view of the compatibility between science and religion raises particularly intriguing questions about the proper understanding and use of the Scriptures.

Dr. Collins, a convert to Christianity at age 27 and author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, is well-known for his contention that there is no conflict between science and revealed religion, that these ways of knowing are compatible and complementary. In this regard he has become a kind of poster child for many Christians, providing a persuasive response to secularists’ contention that there is no place for committed Christians and the Christian God in scientific theory and practice.

At the same time, Collins’s commitment to the truth of Darwinian evolution is clear and strong:

The evidence is overwhelming…Evolution is now profoundly well-documented from multiple different perspectives, all of which give you a consistent view with enormous explanatory power that makes it the central core of biology. Trying to do biology without evolution would be like trying to do physics without mathematics.

 

…nearly all scientists agree upon descent from a common ancestor, gradual change over a long period of time, and natural selection operating to produce the diversity of living species. There is no question that those are correct.

             (interview in Books and Culture, June/August 2009)

So how does he do it? How does he put his evolutionary science and his Christian faith together? In asking these questions, I recognize that there are Christian scientists who affirm some version or measure of evolution and yet approach the issue of compatibility and complementarity with revealed religion differently than Collins does. I’m specifically interested here in Collins’s own approach and the questions it raises.

In speaking of his conversion, Collins says,

I’m sure there were a lot of people in that church who were taking Genesis literally and rejecting evolution. But I couldn’t take Genesis literally because I had come to the scientific worldview before I came to the spiritual worldview. I felt that, once I arrived at the sense that God was real and that God was the source of all truth, then, just by definition, there could not be a conflict.

This argument from autobiographical chronology seems odd and will surely be unpersuasive, especially to those for whom the chronological sequence of convictions was different from his. But, in any case, having settled his Darwinian convictions before his conversion, Collins saw no reason to question those convictions on the basis of his reading of Scripture. In fact, he says,

I think we should all read the Bible, and I believe in the priesthood of the believer. It’s biblical to do so; it’s certainly the way that Christ seems to be teaching us, but that means responsibility to read the Bible at more than the most superficial level.

So reading Genesis as history, taking it as a trustworthy, historical account of God’s creation of the universe, is apparently, in his view, reading at “the most superficial level.” The website of the BioLogos Foundation, which Collins founded “to address the escalating culture war between science and faith,” includes numerous implications and applications of this “deeper” reading of the biblical text in light of Darwinian science, including the judgment that Adam and Eve need not be understood as individual, historic persons. Given the many references throughout the Scriptures to Adam and Eve as particular persons, Collins appears to be more concerned about the possibility that the Bible might contradict science than that the Bible might contradict itself.

Collins’s approach to compatibility and complementarity between science and revealed religion is too easy: Wherever it appears that revealed religion conflicts with science, believe the science first and call uncooperative readings of the Bible superficial.

By his logic, the Scriptures, at least on a non-superficial reading, do not and cannot offer grounds for questioning Darwinian science, about which, in his words, “there is no question.” I want to ask, Does he mean this in general? Does the Bible speak at all to the conclusions held by the prevailing scientific consensus?

At the end of the day, Collins’s solution to the science-and-revealed-religion compatibility problem isn’t really a solution; it just makes the problem disappear. If one first comes to conclusions about virtually anything, and then reads the Bible in light of those conclusions – Voila, compatibility. For those of us committed to a Reformed and evangelical understanding of the authority of the Scriptures, this will not do. A Reformed approach would involve a greater confidence in the authority and perspicuity of the Scriptures as the very words of God, a more humble assessment of the findings of science, and a willingness to examine earnestly and honestly both our current understanding of the Scriptures and the current scientific consensus, believing that God’s truth, fully understood, is one.

If Dr. Collins assumes leadership at the National Institutes of Health, I trust that he will lead wisely and well, and that during his tenure Christian faith would be more respected in the scientific community. At the same time, I hope that God’s people will not follow him in his unsatisfactory version of compatibility and complementarity between science and revealed religion.

What does this have to do with Covenant College? For us, situated as we are in the historic stream of Reformed, evangelical Christianity, the Bible provides the frame of reference for all we do, both inside and outside the classroom. Because of this, we are committed to a more difficult path than the one Collins proposes, a path that includes eager and rigorous scientific investigation in the context of foundational conviction about the truth of God’s Word, a path along which, while we willingly and continually test our current understanding of the Scriptures, biblical understanding does not simplistically follow science wherever it goes.