Genome Scientist Sees God's Hand in Evolution

WASHINGTON — God loves mathematics.

That's what Francis Collins, director of the National Institute of Human Genome Studies, believes.

Collins, an evangelical Christian who oversaw the government's role in the successful effort to map the human genome, also thinks evolution guided the creation of all living things, including human beings.

Collins maintains there is no conflict between that view and his belief in God.

He dismisses "intelligent design," the idea some groups have used to challenge the teaching of evolution in public schools, as non-science.

"God, who is not limited in space or time, created the universe and established natural laws that govern it," he writes. "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."

In "The Language of God," (Free Press, $26), Collins describes his personal journey from atheist to believer.

He grew up in a mildly agnostic family and had decided he was an atheist by the time he entered the University of North Carolina medical school.

But in his third year of medical training, he said, a woman in her 70s who was hopelessly and painfully ill spoke of her religious faith and asked him what he believed.

"Boy, that was not the question I would have wanted," Collins recalled in a recent conversation with young scientists at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) here. Unwilling to add to her pain, he mumbled something about not being "really sure."

But the conversation haunted him for several days, he recalled, and "I suddenly realized that my position wasn't all that well considered."

He still believes the universe was born in the "Big Bang," which he describes as "an unimaginable singularity of energy about 13.7 billion years ago."

But conditions at this moment of creation had to be too finely tuned for chance to explain them, he says.

For example, within a few seconds of the original explosion, matter coalesced from energy, Collins says. Tiny pieces of stuff called quarks appeared, some in the form of matter and some as antimatter.

Original conditions seem likely to have produced these opposite quarks in equal numbers, but for some unexplainable reason there was an extra matter quark for about every 1 billion pairs.

These extra quarks survived and went on to become protons, atoms, molecules, galaxies and, Collins believes, human beings.

Another mystery, he says, is the force of gravity. Had it been weaker by a factor of one part in 100 trillion, matter could not have coalesced from the expanding ball of energy, Collins says. A little stronger and the whole thing would have collapsed back into the singularity too soon for a complex universe and life to have developed.

There are about 15 of these "constants" that underlie the elegant and beautiful formulas of physics, Collins said.

"If you tinker with any one of these constants, you come up with a universe that is incapable of supporting the kind of complexity that we take for granted," he said at the AAAS meeting.

"The simplest explanation is that this is not an accident, that these parameters have the value they have for a purpose," he said. He believes that purpose came from "a God who loves math and who is interested in having a universe exist in the first place."

Collins' change of belief seems to have relied most heavily on a pair of observations: the fact that the universe appears too complex to have "just happened," and the presence in the human heart of what he calls a moral impulse to do good that he does not believe natural selection would have created.

Other scientists ridicule the notion that it is easier to ascribe complicated aspects of physics to a divine plan than to chance.

And in his book "The God Delusion" (Houghton Mifflin, $27), Oxford University scientist Richard Dawkins argues that the human conscience could be nothing more than evolution that has misfired.

Small bands of prehistoric human ancestors may not have survived, Dawkins says, without developing compelling impulses of altruism, generosity and kindness that encouraged cooperative behavior.

Although the conditions that drove the development of these characteristics may no longer exist, the characteristics remain, he says, in much the way an evolved urge to put food into an open, squawking beak causes a pair of warblers to "work themselves to the bone" feeding a cuckoo chick in their nest.

Collins says he is aware of these arguments, but is not swayed by them.

He says the love of a Mother Teresa or the heroic acts of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to save thousands from the Holocaust, "is an absolute scandal to evolution, which would disapprove of every iota" of their motivation.

After studying the world's great religions, he gradually concluded that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus provides the explanation.

"My desire to draw close to God was blocked by my own pride and sinfulness," he writes. "The crucifixion and resurrection emerged as the compelling solution to the gap that yawned between God and myself, a gap that could now be bridged by the person of Jesus Christ."

Mapping the human genome, often described as one of the great achievements of science, has opened the door to unseen moral dilemmas, says Collins, who supports such science as therapeutic cloning.

He believes those dilemmas cannot be solved by science alone, and that the war between science and faith threatens to make solutions even harder to reach.

"It is time to call a truce in the escalating war between science and spirit," he writes. "Science is not threatened by God. It is enhanced. God is most certainly not threatened by science. He made it all possible."