The Language of God

My brother-in-law lent me a copy of Francis Collins's The Language of God over the winter break as a kind of sorbet to watching Ben Stein's Expelled. Collins, if you don't know (I didn't) is the director of the Human Genome project, so it's considered a big deal that a scientist with his standing is also a very vocal born-again Christian. The point of his book is to advance a middle path between atheist Darwinism and the Intelligent Design/Creationist ideologies. He wants fellow scientists to know that it is okay to believe in God and fellow Christians to know that God probably used evolution -- so they better get used to learning it and ditching Intelligent Design.

In Stein's film, Intelligent Design is depicted as a perfectly reasonable alternative to atheist Darwinism -- but there are two big problems with this depiction. First, the film falls prey to the same polarizing tendencies which it tries to unravel. Stein claims to be defending intellectual freedom, not Intelligent Design per se. Nevertheless, he only shows Intelligent Design as the intellectual rival to atheistic Darwinism. That's the first problem. The second problem is that the film doesn't quite seem to grasp that Intelligent Design, as such, does in fact appear to have some major problems with it. If you aren't a geneticist (I'm not) then you would miss the subtleties of the evolution argument that Stein (who is also not a geneticist) misses. Furthermore, there are scientists, as Collins points out, who are ready if not welcoming of the idea of a Creator, but even they can't subscribe to the idea of Intelligent Design. Stein didn't seem to spend much time with these people because he rather foolishly decided to interview people who had appeared to have lost their jobs or funding over Intelligent Design for the sake of sensationalism.

To clarify, Collins points out that Intelligent Design means a very specific set of ideas -- most importantly the idea that any one given animal or human organ is so complex, so developed, and so reliant on all of its different parts, that it could not have been assembled through a random process of mutation and selection. The complexity of life, according to I.D., suggests that a Creator must have engaged in "special acts" of creation for individual species. Collins refutes this argument in essentially two ways. First, explains Collins, there is so much genetic overlap between any two species of animals that it makes God look thoroughly unoriginal if we are to assume he made each species individual. Plus, if God made each organism individually, then it leaves one wondering why he bothered to make vestigial organs or why there are obvious structural design flaws in the human body (like how our pelvis doesn't seem to want to belong to an animal that walks upright). Second, our understanding of genetics has actually become vastly more able to account for large scale mutations thanks to research like the Human Genome Project. Collins gives an example of how DNA occasionally burps and makes duplicate genes. The duplicate genes can mutate in the background without affecting the normal life of the animal. It is possible (and I'm obviously paraphrasing out of my field here) that the genes necessary for a complex organ can be developing silently in the background after long periods of mutation, and not actually be triggered until one last puzzle piece mutates into being. You really should read the book if you want the full argument...The main point is that I was pretty well convinced that Intelligent Design doesn't hold much water when Collins is done with it, and I had a similar sense watching Stein's movie, although I don't think he meant me to.

Incidentally, Expelled is far more persuasive when it shows atheists behaving badly than when it tries to show Intelligent Design theorists being scientific. This is also covered in Collins' book when he articulates how Darwinism gets a bad rap due to outlandish atheists like Richard Dawkins, who want to assert that evolution must deconstruct God when it does no such thing. It also doesn't help that people like Hitler abused Darwinism to defend eugenics. Rather, as Collins' title points out, evolution can reinforce a belief in God through what Collins calls BioLogos -- an approach to evolution that considers DNA as a language system where the signifiers point towards things far more complex than their simple molecular nature should. It should be noted that Collins does not believe that he has found a proof of the existence of God. Most of his conversion was through reading C.S. Lewis...whom he cites copiously, and then falling back on Augustine's arguments for allegorical exegesis to ward of fundamentalists.

I was a bit disappointed, however, that Collins didn't make more of this linguistics angle in his book. Perhaps his editor thought the book was already too long. Perhaps it is because Collins is a scientist and not a humanist steeped in traditions of language. I have the impression that if Collins teamed up with a linguist, he could have a much more compelling (and probably far more confusing) sequel.

Comments

[PeterTerp]

I was sent a link of Francis Collins doing his thing on the Colbert Report here:
http://tinyurl.com/7hmbkr

Watch to the end when Colbert brings in the Shroud of Turin.

Personally, I've always wanted to write a horror storywhere someone uses the Miracle of Lanciano to clone the Antichrist...

[Tommy]

This horror story cuts too close to the bone maybe? You are feeding the enemy ideas; I don't think we are that far off from someone making the cloning attempt! Think how willing scientists have been to grow human body parts on animals.

[Peter Terp]

Oh, I wouldn't worry too much about me giving the enemy ideas. It was already a plot to an episode of Star Trek Next Generation. Worf has a vision of the resurrected Klingon messiah, only to find out that the object of his religious devotion was genetically engineered and brainwashed.