Discover: Second Story
I am slowly reading through the rest of the February Issue and I found another article that provoked some thought. It's The Discover Interview: Francis Collins (Interviewed by David Ewing Duncan). He is an American geneticist that is "raising eyebrowns by talking openly about his faith, as a true believer in stem cell research and as a devout Christian".
Here is a small excerpt from the piece (pages 44-47, 75.)
Duncan: A devoted Christian, Collins defends evolution and embryonic stem cell research. He dismisses religious extremists and scientist-atheists as equally shrill and believes that both sides push their beliefs on a public who prefers that science and religion remain separate.
Collins: "You use the tools of science to understand how nature works, but you also recognize that there are things outside of nature, namely God, for which the tools of science are not well designed to derive truth. The middle-ground position [between the view that there is only science and the idea that an intelligent being directs human affairs] is that there is more than one way to find truth, and a fully formed effort to try to answer the most imporant questions wouldn not limit you to the kidns of questions that science can answer, especially the eternal one: Why are we all here, anyway?"
Here is something that could be interesting for those who are unsure about their view on abortion:
Duncan: Do you believe that personhood begins at conception?
Collins: You mean, is that when we get a soul? Now we're into theology, and it's an area where science isn't really going to give you an answer. The only thing that science can say is that whatever line you draw between the fusion of sperm and eff and the birth of the baby is somewhat arbitrary. On the other hand, that doesn't prove that the soul exists right at the moment of fusion. Identical twins do not have the same soul, yet they started out as the same union of sperm and egg.
The issue of religion in today's society...
Duncan: Doesn't Scripture sometimes explicitly contradict science?
Collins: I don't find any troubling examples of that in the Bible, as long as you recognize that the point of Scripture was not to teach science.
Duncan: And yet people have been burned at the stake over this issue.
Collins: Before we start trashing religion, we should recognize that religion down through history has been misused by lots of people in terrible ways. But it's also done some profoundly good things. What has atheism done to help people? The worst examples of human carnage in the 20th century came from the atheist regimes of Stalin and mao. The principles of faith are generally altruistic, gentle, and loving. The problem is when someone takes those principles and twists them to suit their own purposes - that was the Inquistion, and that is the suicide bombers.
Thoughts, anyone?
Hannah.
posted by Hannah @ 3:43 PM
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