Evening Conversation with Dr. Francis Collins and James K.A. Smith

good evening thank you for coming out on this very hot evening for a wonderful presentation if you're still looking for a seat there are some rooms in the balconies up on either side we're delighted to have a full house my name is Deborah Hersman I'm an astronomer and I am president of BioLogos and it's my pleasure to welcome you here this evening so tonight is the culmination of a series of talks that have happened over the last two years sponsored by the Trinity forum in partnership with Church of the Advent and with Viola goes I am president of BioLogos that's the organization founded by Francis Collins so I'm particularly delighted to be here tonight we titled this series discovery and doxology so discovery scientific discoveries from the vast to the tiny things from the multiverse we've talked about in this series we talked about genetics and am I more than my genes we've talked about neuroscience and how our brains are wired but it's been about more than discovery also doxology how do we understand this in the context of our faith science is limited it can tell us the what and the how but we need more than science to understand the why and the who how does it relate to who we are how does it relate to God and that's what this series has been about we've talked about our origins in this cosmos we've talked about what it means to be human in light of genetics the soul and neuroscience just a few little topics like that and it's been an amazing conversation so we're pleased tonight to bring the last in this series here in Christian thought discovery quickly leads to doxology or praise last week I was in Chicago and I had the privilege of spending an afternoon at the Art Institute and calling around looking at those amazing paintings I wished sometimes that I had a chance to meet the artists and to thank them for their work well in science we're discovering the work of an artist and we have an opportunity to speak to the Living God in prayer and to praise Him and thank him for his work and that is the wonderful place where discovery and doxology comes together for me as a Christian and an astronomer if you don't get enough tonight and in this series about science and faith there's several events coming up I just want to highlight one from BioLogos next March we are having a three day long conference if you like it so much that you'd like to spend three days thinking about science and Christian faith I encourage you to join us in Baltimore and just sign up at our table there if you'd like to be on our email list to get information about that it's been a pleasure in this series for BioLogos to partner with the Trinity forum so I am pleased to introduce the president of the Trinity forum Cherie harder please welcome [Applause] Thank You Deb for that introduction on behalf of all of us at the Trinity forum welcome to tonight's evening conversation on moving beyond conflict science and faith in harmony it's a real pleasure to be able to welcome you all to tonight as well as to work with our partners with Deb harsman at BioLogos as well as the folks from Church of the Advent were really delighted that Deborah Templi and Dan and gentleman from Church of the Advent are here as well as Deb who you just met we're deeply grateful to the Templeton and religion trust for their role in underwriting the series it's been a very generous grant we've been really delighted to be able to bring the series to you and as Deb mentioned tonight is the fruition of a two-year initiative where we have looked at questions of the multiverse we've looked at Gene's self and soul we've struggled with questions about mind matter and our Maker and tonight not to put too much pressure on him our speaker is going to bring it all home and look at not only what it means for science and faith to be in harmony but also what some of the applications and the consequences of that could mean going forward I also want to acknowledge a few special guests that we had here tonight in addition to our partners church of the admin and BioLogos also delighted that our chairman of the board price Hardeen is here along with some of his guests and trustees Richard and Phoebe miles are here as well we're also delighted that each and every one of you is here and as you can tell it is a very full room and there are always inevitably people who wanted to come who could not so if you know people like that fear not there is an opportunity to follow along with our livestream going on as the name indicates live now which you can channel through our Facebook site it'll also be on our website later likely on the websites of BioLogos as well we'll also be offering some opportunities to tweet your thoughts and responses you can follow along on Twitter as well as our Facebook page for those of you who are new to the Trinity forum part of our mission is to provide a space and resources for leaders to with life's greatest greatest questions in the context of faith and one of the great questions of life is the proper relationship between the claims of science and of faith and our quest to understand who we are how were formed and what were formed for certainly we live in an exciting time of scientific discovery every day we learn more about the extraordinary complexity of the makeup of our minds and bodies about the ways in which they interact the ways in which they change and our changed by experience many of these new discoveries can be unsettling as well as exciting challenging long-held conceptions about our own rationality autonomy memory free will and even self identity we also live at a time where the findings of science and the doctrines of Orthodox Christian faith are often believed to be in conflict new discoveries about our genes our brains or our origins have at times been interpreted in the most reductionistic of ways and trumpeted as proving that we are at our essence spiritless and of little matter a mere circuit of hardwired neurons or a gaggle of selfish genes lost in a vast and meaningless cosmos bereft of any meaning we do not ourselves construct via our own dubious imagination meanwhile there are people of faith who fear that scientific discovery is somehow undermining of spiritual truth or Christian orthodoxy and requires rebuttal rather than pursuit for others the very real and valid concerns about the uncritical acceptance even celebration of new technological applications leads to a reflexive suspicion of the whole enterprise but part of our hope for this series over the last two years is to offer and explore a different hypothesis that science and faith actually have a great deal to say to each other and to us and abling us to better understand ourselves our minds are world and its originator and designer and that contemplating the complexity of our cosmos and the mystery of our self and soul may in fact cultivate a new sense of wonder awe and even worship a doxology admits discovery so tonight we'll hear from a geneticist and a philosopher about the prospect of science and faith moving beyond an assumed conflict to live in harmony what that means what it signifies for our own understanding of our genes self soul and world and why it matters so much and it is hard perhaps even impossible to imagine a thinker and a speaker who could wrestle with this topic with more gravitas and grace extraordinary expertise and infectious enthusiasm wisdom and wonder as our speaker tonight dr. Francis Collins Francis Collins is a geneticist physician and the director of the National Institutes of Health before being appointed by then President Obama to serve as the head of NIH a term that was later extended by President Trump he led the International Human Genome Project which mapped the entire human genome and did so perhaps even more miraculously under time and under budget his work with the human genome project provide which provides in essence a human DNA instruction book led to the discovery of the connection between certain genes and various diseases and helped revolutionize our own understanding of our genetic makeup dr. Collins has been elected to the Institute of Medicine the National Academy of Sciences and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom as well as the National Medal of Science in addition in 2009 he was appointed by the Pope to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences before serving as the director of the NIH Francis founded and served as the president of the bio Lobos foundation our partners tonight and wrote a number of books on science medicine and religion including the New York Times bestseller the language of God he's also an avid motorcyclist guitarist and vocalist who has delighted in playing in rock bands and has performed a TED conferences and we're delighted that his wife the accomplished Diane Baker has joined us this evening as well responding to Francis will be philosopher James ka Smith Jaime is a philosopher as well as a professor at Calvin College where he holds the Gary and Henrietta biker chair and applied reformed theology and worldview he is the award-winning author of Who's Afraid of postmodernism desiring the Kingdom the excellent work you are what you love the spiritual power of habit as well as his latest perhaps greatest book awaiting the kingdom reforming public theology which was released late last year and which we had the honour of hosting him in this very room to discuss he's also the co-editor of two recent books on the intersection of faith and science including evolution and the fall and all things hold together in Christ a conversation on faith science and virtue his popular writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times The Wall Street Journal USA Today books and culture first things and many other publications in addition he is a senior fellow of cartas serves as the editor of comet magazine and last but certainly not least is a senior fellow of the Trinity forum after Francis and Jaime's presentations we'll have an opportunity for extended audience Q&A and with that Francis welcome [Applause] [Applause] shuri you do that about as well as anybody on the planet may I say what a wonderful introduction and what a great opportunity it is to be here this evening sponsored by BioLogos in the Trinity forum and Deb harsman Tobiah logos thank you also for coming from Grand Rapids for this and gracing us with your words in your presence and thanks also to the Church of the Advent for sponsoring this discussion which I've been really looking forward to and I have to tell you I am here this evening as a private citizen this is an important statement for me to make yes I am a member of the federal government currently appointed by President Trump prior to that by President Obama but tonight I'm just Francis Collins so glad to get that clarified and this whole theme that we're here to talk about in this which is a series that has been going on which I've had the privilege of listening to several the other presentations so much appeals to me with the idea of discovery and doxology in trying to think about what I might contribute to that I've divided what I'm going to say up into two segments and one is a bit more autobiographical because I thought it might be useful and to point out to you the perspective that I've arrived at as a scientist and as a follower of Jesus and then I'm going to put in front of you the second part of this talk the first part looks like it's all going to be really easy the second part how should believers view my advances in biotechnology because it seems like an appropriate moment where things are happening particularly in a field called gene editing that a gathering like this would be an appropriate one to talk about how do we feel about the opportunity to actually reinvent ourselves is this something we can embrace because it has great potential in medicine or is it something we should think a little more deeply about before we plunge in and I hope we can get engaged in a discussion so that's the nature of what I want to put in front of you with that let me start with the autobiographical Copart perhaps a bit more revealing than i should be yes that's me on the farm that I grow up on which was about three hours from here in the Shenandoah Valley and I grew up in a family that cared about theater and that cared about words and music didn't have much use for science and certainly didn't have much use for faith I as that kid that you see there standing by the fence got interested in science a little later got interested in music thought maybe I'd be a musician discovered that was not going to be the way to pay the bills and so decided I would be a chemist and off I went to the University of Virginia where I got an undergraduate degree in chemistry really enjoyed the experience of plunging into that branch of science went off to Yale to get a PhD in quantum mechanics but along the way I realized I'd kind of left out a part of my scientific education which was actually biology that seemed really messy and I tried to avoid it as long as I could but something happened I realized actually biology has principles too and it actually makes sense when you know about this molecule which I only really discovered long after everybody else had in about 1972 as a second year graduate student in quantum mechanics DNA emerged in my vision as something of incredible mystery and promise and elegance this information molecule that shared by all living things it's digital but it's also an instruction book and I wanted to change whatever I was doing and study that but I wasn't quite sure how to do so and being a little unsure of myself at that point I decided it would be good to keep my options open so I went to medical school does that make sense well had I had any interest in being a physician before then only a very minor degree but suddenly it seemed like the thing to do and it was and I loved it going there now will tell you when I arrived in medical school after studying quantum mechanics and reducing everything to second order differential equations and being a very reductionist kind of person I had gone from being an agnostic to becoming an atheist and I was an atheist when I arrived in that medical school but I left that medical school as a believer so how did that happen well it happened by sitting at the bedside of people who were facing the end of their life and trying to understand how they would wrestle with that kind of circumstance when I had no idea how I would and realizing that my arguments about the irrationality of faith were those of a schoolboy and fortunately for me a Methodist preacher who lived down the street from me faced with my questions about how could people possibly believe in something like God much less Jesus he handed me this little book called mere christianity and CS lewis spoke to me spoke to me from his own experience which had been kind of like my experience and kicking and screaming over two years wanting to prove that my atheism was the right answer and ultimately realizing that as Chesterton said atheism is the most drastic of all the dogmas because it is the one you can least defend I became a believer and not just a believer in God but ultimately seeking a way to find a relationship with a holy God when I knew I was not discovered what Jesus Christ was all about so that was quite a bit of a change in this guy who was on his path towards studying that DNA molecule and wanted to be a geneticist and people said well your heads going to explode but it never has still here I went back to Yale to do a fellowship this time in human molecular genetics learned how to do those recombinant DNA things to try to track down the causes of various genetic disorders that desperately needed answers I got a job finally at the University of Michigan where I was a gene hunter trying to identify the causes of genetic illnesses it was tough going this was the 1980s there was no genome project there was no internet what you had to do to sift through three billion letters of the human DNA code and find the one that's out of place was absolutely exhausting and miserable and took years I had to go to a Michigan haystack and get somebody to take a picture of me holding up a needle say just how bad this was yeah that's a real chicken in the picture too so but fortunately it finally started to work and in 1989 my lab working with a lab in Canada as a wide open collaboration found the gene for cystic fibrosis we found the genes for Huntington's disease for neurofibromatosis and other common childhood disorders and more recently for the most common and most frightening form of premature aging hutchinson-gilford progeria syndrome all of those have been amazing detective stories and I have been greatly fortunate to work with other amazing trainees and other colleagues to be able to make those kinds of discoveries and then to carry them forward to the idea of treatment cystic fibrosis which when we found that gene in 1989 was a disease where survival generally was limited to your 20s and that was a big progress from where it had been a few decades earlier just in the last two or three years we've now seen the development of truly effective drugs based on understanding all the pathways that are revealed when you know what the genetic mutation is and this is an enormous ly exciting moment for cystic fibrosis where most individuals with that condition are now going to have the kind of therapy that essentially makes their lungs start to behave like they were normal lungs again and that is so gratifying to be part of that to have a chance to play a role in that kind of adventure that has just been amazing but then I got this call from the NIH it was 1992 and I really gotten excited about the idea that maybe we could read out all those letters of the human DNA instruction book the genome project had gotten brought forward as an idea it had just gotten off the ground the leader Jim Watson of Watson and Crick Fame was the exact right person to have credibility for this but then he got tangled up in a bit of an argument with his boss and suddenly he was gone and suddenly the phone was ringing and the NIH director at the time Bernadine Healy was saying Francis I think you're the one and I was saying Bernadine you're wrong I'm sure that's not me the one thing my mother told me never to do is to become a federal employee but I was gonna say no to the chance to lead the most significant project that's ever happened in human biology well that got harder and harder to defend and so I did come in 1993 and over the course of the next amazing 10 years we did in fact read out all of the letters of that human DNA instruction book bit by bit building the technology as we went along studying some simpler organisms to get practice and ultimately by 2003 there it was that is a milestone that people will write about in a few hundred years where we crossed a bridge from not knowing about our own biological instruction book to having it there for all time and that was exhilarating but it was also daunting because well what are you looking at Dan you're looking at this 3 billion letter book that's written in a language you can't understand just four letters AC G and T 3 billion of them that's it yeah but how do you read this how do you make sense out of it so I stayed on for a while and tried to figure out how we could apply this because I'm a physician to the application that we all dreamed of which is to help people who are ill or to help people not get ill in the first place and that took then a whole lot of other projects which then emerged as follow-ons and continued to emerge to the point where we are beginning to know how to read that instruction book and the consequences of what we have learned for human illness is getting more breathtaking by the day especially in areas like cancer in areas like inherited diseases many of the things that seem out of reach are now the kinds of things a graduate student could do in a month or two it's really quite amazing and gratifying how this course of events has led us to all these insights and for me as a believer as well as a scientist every time we discover something new that is a moment of doxology that is a moment of seeing the artist as Deb so articulately said and when we get to glimpse the work of the creator for the first time that makes science also a form of worship and it does feel that way to those of us who are believers we are not just detective people who are trying to uncover answers to questions we are also exploring God's creation and learning about it and it's elegance in a way that increases our awe day by day I got called back to NIH after taking a year off in 2009 to serve not just as the leader of the genome effort but of the entire National Institutes of Health something that I certainly never dreamed of remember that kid on the farm standing by the fence it's come a long way and yeah I did have to apologize to my mom this is the one time I disobeyed her and yeah Here I am again as a federal employee and astounding to me still as the NIH director since there has no previous example occurred where an NIH director stayed on when there was a change in presidents but I think what that says it's that medical research is one of the last bastions a bipartisanship in this very partisan town and I'm the beneficiary of that and I spent a lot of my time on Capitol Hill talking about medical research I've probably met with hundreds of members of Congress one on one to talk about this and I can't tell you a single one of those conversations that went badly and that's not because I'm so articulate and wonderful it's because what we are doing what we have the chance to talk about is so exciting it's so inspiring to see the progress that's happening which is really coming along now in an exponential way whether it's cancer or whether it's Alzheimer's disease which is what I was talking about this morning whether it's coming up with an answer to this opioid crisis which is what I spent most of the rest of my day on today whether it's figuring out what we could do to develop a vaccine against influenza that would protect us against that next pandemic that's looming out there somewhere or whether it is as I'm about to talk about coming up with ways to manage the terrible consequences of those thousands of genetic diseases where we know what the misspelling is but we don't yet have a way to treat it all of that is what's possible right now and that is incredibly exhilarating to be part but there is this issue about how do i as a scientists who thinks everyday about the ways that we could utilize the tools of science to make those discoveries how can I also see behind all of that a Creator God who is in fact responsible for everything thing we see around us and who's the source not only of natural creation but also the source of everything that I know about love I love this combination of images here what you're looking at there on the right is DNA but not in the usual fashion where you're looking at it from the side here you're looking down the long axis of DNA and it turns into this beautiful pattern which is not all that different than that Rose window that you see there in York Minster or that you might see if you go to the National Cathedral I think that is a visual way to point out the beauty of what it is that God has given us as a creation we ought not to miss that even as we get excited about its practical consequences science also has a chance to uncover beautiful things and we have that experience and sometimes don't stop to take note but people do ask me and so for a very quick riff I will give you my own quick pathway about how it is that I went from being an atheist to concluding that atheism was the least rational of the choices part of it is actually from nature I'm not going to tell you that nature will provide you a proof of God's existence but it will sure provide you some interesting things to think about starting with the classic philosophical question why is there something instead of nothing science can't answer that all right so this has to be an answer that comes from somewhere else and if you're going to be an absolute reductionist and a materialist you will say that's an irrational question and we shouldn't bother with it but I think it's a pretty interesting question and here theology can help you in science can another one this is big neurs words the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics why should Maxwell's equations describe the behavior of elec magnetism beautiful that they are and they are beautiful equations they're not just equations they're beautiful equations well why should gravity follow an inverse square law there's no reason I can think why that should have to be but it is nature is incredibly ordered it follows these mathematical rules that's unreasonable that makes you think about some intelligence that must have been an amazing physicist and mathematician that put this whole thing in place how else could you explain that outcome and then we have the Big Bang why how can you explain the idea that the universe seemed to have a beginning this does seem to cry out for something that would have created that beginning that could not be limited by space and time or you've created an infinite regress and you've not solved the issue a creator outside of space and time wow that sounds like God doesn't it and then you have this observation which I still think many Christians have not heard about sometimes called the anthropic principle that there are all these physical constants that determine the behavior of matter and energy we know about these beautiful laws that describe that but they have constants in them the speed of light the gravitational constant you cannot derive the value of those constants from theory you have to actually do an experiment and measure them so people ask suppose they weren't what they are suppose they were tweaked just a little bit and what takes your breath away is that any one of those dozen or so constants we're off by the tiniest amount one part in a billion the whole thing wouldn't work anymore you could have a big bang but after that you would have infinite either spreading a part of particles that never had the chance to come together into galaxies and stars or a Big Crunch that happened not long afterwards without much hope of the time for anything interesting to happen complexity of our universe only happens because of this extreme improbability of the way in which the dials were set so certainly one can revert to the multiverse hypothesis and that was something that was talked about at this very podium and Deb is much more expert on this than I am but you have to argue is a multitude an infinite multitude of universes that all have different values and we have to be in the one where complexity happened or we wouldn't be having the conversation or you have to say there's an intelligence behind this and those constants were set in a particular place for a reason which of those is a greater leap is a question what would Occam's razor have to say about that and then finally I'm very appealing but one which we have to be careful not to overstate there is this notion of good and evil the moral law CS Lewis got me on this one and we're Christianity in that very first chapter right and wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe that's the title of chapter 1 it's like whoa that sounds pretty heavy what's that about well it is this argument why is it that humans across all time have had this sense that there's such a thing it's right and wrong we as cultures figure out ways to decide which goes into which column of right and which column is wrong but we don't disagree that there is such a thing if you don't believe me go and read the appendix of the abolition of man where Lewis goes through all of the UH the many long historical examples where that is the case but what's that about why should that matter and does the moral law which we now call this basically makes sense from a purely evolutionary perspective well in some ways yes in other ways no how does that explain the behavior of people who exhibit radical altruism which basically causes them to do things that put their own life and therefore their future generations at risk which evolution cares about your future generations and yet it is the right thing to do why do we admire Oskar Schindler why do we admire mother Teresa why do we admire people like that who put their own life as secondary compared to others that seems like something that's calling out to us to think about and perhaps once we think about it to say where's that coming from if you were looking for a signpost for something outside of ourselves a creator who not only was a pretty good intellect and had a great sense of physics and how to set these constants but who also cared about us and who stood for everything that was good and holy wouldn't this be an interesting place to find that evidence right in your own heart calling you every day to be good and holy when many other things are asking you to do otherwise and yet you somehow know what is the right choice even though as we all know we fail to live up to it that's what got to me back there in North Carolina as a medical student and a resident that's what also got me to the point of realizing if that was the case then my heart is hardened and my heart is often leading me to do the wrong thing even though I know that that's not right and I need somehow to be able to approach a holy God and then the argument about Jesus Christ suddenly made perfect sense all those things about how Christ died for my sins which as a kid growing up hearing those words I thought were the most bizarre kind of phrasing I'd ever heard suddenly the rationale was crystal clear and it's crystal clear today and this is now 40 years later and I've never encountered as a scientist an experience where what I know as a scientist is in conflict with what I know as a believer and as somebody who looks at the words in the Bible as God's truth because faith and science are two ways of knowing but they are ways of knowing you have to decide which question you're asking before you decide which of these approaches is the one that's going to help you science answers how questions faith answers why questions that's an oversimplification but it's not a bad one so we're allowed as people on this planet to read both of the books and this is Francis Bacon's analogy but I like it a lot the book of God's words scripture and the book of God's works nature and both of those since they are God's books can't very well be in conflict with each other we humans on the other hand are very good at figuring out ways to identify conflicts most of which when you look at them closely are of our own making and certainly although I'm not going to get into the ways in which evolution and Genesis 1 can be put together there are in fact wonderful ways to do that through what BioLogos calls evolutionary creation but we people have managed to turn this into a problem especially in the United States we can make fun of it with cartoons like this which I actually think is really funny never-ending debates between cheddar and evangelical goldfish crackers yes we came from cheese we just appeared in the bag so and it's you've heard conversations like that that aren't quite this silly but sometimes they don't get very far there are ways folks had to resolve these issues that are intensely satisfying which many of us who are scientists and believers particularly working at biology I have found to be wonderfully satisfying and that's what I wrote about in this book that was graciously mentioned which is now getting a little old and desperately needs a second edition and if I ever get free of this government job I might actually write one but here's the simple synthesis of how science and faith fit together for somebody like me just quickly through it Almighty God who's not limited in space or time created a universe 13.8 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity and beauty over long periods of time God's original plan not added after the fact included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet most especially that creative plan included human beings after God's plan for evolution in the fullness of time billions of years had prepared a sufficiently advanced brain humanity was gifted with freewill consciousness and a moral sense and thus humans were granted special status as it says in Genesis made in God's image imago Dei we humans having been granted that opportunity used our free will to disobey God leading to our realisation of being in violation of the moral laws I realized as a medical student and then we were estranged from God our Creator who embodies all that is good loving and holy for Christians like me Jesus Christ is the solution to that estrangement nothing that I've said in those few brief sentences seems to me to be a violation of what the Bible teaches us about origins or what science teaches us about origins but we could have a long discussion about different views in that regard if st. Agustin was here I think he would agree with me just saying so what do we call this synthesis well that was a challenge because for a long time this was called theistic evolution and people hated that term as I did because it made theistic the adjective and evolution was the noun and everybody wondered wait a minute what are you sort of smuggling in here so a word got invented I guess by me BIOS that is life through logos the word or just put it all together by a logos as an alternative to using terms that people were not so happy with and basically God's speaking life into being that's what we mean I think the alternative that is now used by many people evolutionary creation I like that a lot now creation is the noun and evolutionary is the adjective that also says but it's BioLogos and I was fortunate before coming to this presidential appointment position to serve as the founder and the first president of the BioLogos Foundation now just called BioLogos this is a screenshot from their website I hope if you have not been there you will find a way to go and look tonight or tomorrow BioLogos org it is a wonderful meeting place for people who are interested in serious dialogue and civil dialogue about science and faith and how they fit together particularly in the area of biology and it has grown over the course of these years and now under Deb's very able leadership to be the place where many of those conversations happen with remarkable contributions from many people who write blogs for us from various perspectives from science from philosophy from theology pastors write in to talk about how this is affecting their flock people write in testimonials about how in a crisis of faith and I get many of those emails even now from people who are figuring that something is really a wrong here with the ability that they had to put together creation and what science is teaching us and BioLogos provides them with an opportunity to work that through and see that there's a harmony here this is not a cause for a personal crisis BioLogos recently put forward through a couple of the staff leadership a wonderful book about testimonials about people who came to realize that evolution could be not just something to apologize for but something to celebrate as God's means of creation and there are many of these blogs and here by way of opening up the second part of what I'm gonna say is a very recent one by none other than Jeff Hardin that you're the board writing about genome editing and the Christian and very ably putting forward some of the very points that I thought I might bring to you tonight so let's go to that second part now that I've put forward what I hope you will see as a foundation of where I'm coming from how do we apply those kinds of harmonious thoughts to a circumstance where believers and non-believers may come down in a somewhat different place about applications about biotechnology particularly when it comes to what it means to be human and who we are as creatures fearfully and wonderfully made as opposed to a more reductionist view view of what humanity is all about there are lots of ethical challenges in biotechnology the privacy of human DNA databases animal research especially non-human primates we've recently decided not to do research on chimpanzees anymore neuroethics which was talked about from this very podium by Bill Newsome one of the co-leaders of the brain initiative at NIH creating many interesting issues about what we should be doing as we begin to understand how the brain really works what those circuits are up to human embryonic stem cell research obviously one where that raises questions about the meaning of when human life begins human animal chimeras food are we doing that well not so much but there are people who want to if you want to make your own new heart well grow it in a pig oops wait a minute that's a human animal chimera is that okay questions of that sort will emerge dramatic life extension if we had the ability to help you all live to be 500 years old is that okay do you want that probably you want to know what kind of life that would be as far as quality but are we getting outside of what God's intention was but I'm not going to focus on any of those I'm gonna go to Jeana editing because otherwise we'll be here very very late and Jamie will never get to get up and say the really important part of the evening so gene-editing what am I talking about there is a revolution going on folks and it came really quickly and it's driven by this amazing science that came out of yoghurt of all places and the study of viruses that infect bacteria and at land - there's something called CRISPR caste 9 and I'm not going to tell you what CRISPR stands for because I can't remember nobody nobody else can either but it is basically a gene editor it is I mean you know you have your search and replace function on your word processor that's what this is like except what it's searching and replacing is a genome of a cell it can find that one letter that's out of place and it can fix it so it is achieving this kind of precise targeted editing of DNA that we didn't know how to do before we could do this but it was really clunky and it took forever and it was full of errors this is a quantum leap forward in our ability to manipulate DNA and not just a bacteria and not just of mice but ultimately of ourselves it's revolutionized basic molecular biology every lab I know of including my own up there at NIH is doing this everyday it's easy you the first time you set it up it works and the applications to human genetic disease are now being actively explored because this is a potential for those thousands of genetic diseases to have a solution this is one of my tweets I'm sure you are all following my Twitter feed I'm sure you're part of my 89.1 thousand people but this back in January we at NIH announced we were going to invest another 120 million dollars and try to figure out how we could take gene editing to actually attack some of these genetic diseases for which there is no solution but we said we were going to do it in somatic cells let me explain that because that's really important as we get into the ethical issues now there's a lot of promise here welcome to the Golden Age of human gene editing you can see things in the New England Journal about we're doing this for important issues like cancer or HIV there's already been a circumstance where this apparatus CRISPR Cass has been infused into a patient with a genetic disease and it's coming along every day in that regard but wait a minute is there peril here as well well Albert Schweitzer's quote comes to mind we must not allow our technology to exceed our humanity and here's some scarier headlines designer babies an ethical horror woe or a weapon of mass destruction what are they talking about well they're talking about what might happen if we take this enormously powerful technology and we actually begin to edit not just a cell here and there in your body but the part of the genome that gets passed from one generation to the next that we really start to redesign ourselves now it's not new to have these controversies about whether biotechnology is playing God goodness back in the 1970s back when I was just getting interested in this stuff one of the reasons was because recombinant DNA was being invented and in a certain way what we're talking about with CRISPR Cass it's just recombinant DNA but what's different is it's really good at it now we were so clumsy back then but people still got worked up about the consequences maybe that's good because we had a little time to think about genetic engineering well that's really recombinant DNA - so we're talking about the same issues cloning well some of the things that are now possible with stem cells make the kind of cloning that we talked about in the 90s also seem kind of clunky and we didn't resolve that yeah the Human Genome Project had some controversies too about whether privacy was gonna be available for your DNA where you're gonna be discriminated against synthetic biology where you actually don't just read DNA you it may be you write an entire genome maybe you write a human cell from scratch what does that mean about what it means to have a human cell and now we're with genome editing and you could even talk about people who want to do it yourself because it is easy and people say well any high school student can do this it's not quite that easy yeah I don't think there are too many garages that are doing CRISPR Cass but there might be a few and there might be more because it does provide some opportunities there so are we ready to play God and you can see the Sistine Chapel it's always brought to bear on these questions and this time whether the double helix inserted between the creator and the created so we've had those discussions that's good we shouldn't like go oh my gosh why didn't we think about it we have been thinking about it but it was kind of hypothetical the Catholic Church is thinking about this the fourth annual Vatican conference was on gene editing as well as some stem-cell therapy this was just a lesson two months ago a bunch of us went to this conversation because the Pope and the Cardinals really wanted to hear about what does the science have to offer I think the Catholic Church was concerned that they're often portrayed as standing in front of the oncoming science and saying stop as opposed to wait a minute let's understand this so it was a really good opportunity for those kind of conversations we heard from Pope Francis some other guy named Francis got an award sitting between a couple of Cardinals oh my gosh but it was a useful dialogue indeed there's a good example of science and the church talking to each other not shouting talking to each other so let me say what are the applications and why are we worried about this and I need to move this quickly forward again I'm worried about taking Jamie's time here so human gene editing you can divide into two categories one of which somatic cell gene editing is focused on a particular organ it doesn't affect the germline the germline is the part of the DNA that gets passed to the next generation and the one afterward so it doesn't have any consequence except for that person it holds the promise to cure many genetic diseases I'll give you an example in a second already being used for cancer immunotherapy where you take out immune cells you edit them to turn them into little ninja warriors and you turn them loose to go back and attack that cancer and people are alive today because of that which is remarkable and it doesn't seem to create ethical dilemmas in that situation it's a form of therapy clinical trials for a human genetic disease sickle cell anemia will begin this year and this is something that many of us are enormous ly excited about here this is the first molecular disease described in 1910 1949 we knew the inheritance 1957 we knew the genetic basis hemoglobin genes which are involved in this were identified 1980 there is a drug hydroxyurea but it is not as effective as you would like and there are a hundred thousand people African Americans for the most part in this country and millions more outside of this country that are affected with this condition without really much in the way of an effective treatment bone-marrow transplants work but most patients don't have a match just last year people began to approach this with gene therapy but this year before this calendar year is out will be the year where the first gene editing strategy is tried for sickle cell disease and I am pretty optimistic it's gonna work so how do you do this the problem is in the blood cells the blood cells are made in the bone marrow take out some bone marrow identify those bone marrow stems which we can sort for use crisper casts to take that single letter that should be a tea and it said hey and change that back to what it should be put them back in the bone marrow and there you go there's a few wrinkles along the way but that's the basic idea and and again I think this will be the first year where that gets tried and I think the chances are pretty good it's gonna work now that sickle-cell disease what about others well look at the number of diseases for which we now know the precise DNA mutation that causes a disease how many of these have a treatment 500 if we really want to find answers for these most of which are rare and they're not going to attract much private investment this could be the way to have an approach that's scalable that you could once you've worked it out figure out how to treat many of these now it's not as straightforward as sickle cell disease where you can take cells out treat them and put them back if it's a genetic disease that affects the brain you're gonna have to figure out how to deliver that CRISPR cast apparatus to the brain efficiently and that's a big hard problem and that's what we're spending our 190 million dollars on right now but the promise here is enormous ly appealing so this all sounds great okay and then there's the other part germline gene editing this does involve changing the DNA of a human embryo if therefore affects that individual and their future offspring to medical applications are actually to be honest hard to identify but the potential to go beyond treatment to enhancement is tempting to a lot of people if we actually could manipulate the genome couldn't we result in a better baby then what nature would have made possible okay that sounds like it might be intriguing but is it really a line we want to cross and frankly it is a discussion we've been having for decades but until now it's been pretty hypothetical and now it is much more concrete human embryos have been edited already they have not been reimplantation few days but that technology works this is a way in which you can change the very instruction book of a human being so where does that take us well again is there justification for this for a benevolent purpose for prevention of disease I would submit the specific examples are not very compelling to use this you would basically have to do in vitro fertilization you would have to take the embryos that have been generated in IVF and you'd have to do a DNA diagnosis on them to see which ones needed editing in the process you would identify some embryos that didn't need editing in almost every instance so why not just reimplantation genetic diagnosis so it is not so obvious why one needs this approach for medical purposes for prevention of disease but what about enhancement why am i squirrelly about this well there are scientific concerns there safety concerns there are huge philosophical and theological concerns there equity concerns who has access to this and frankly there are these problems about the boundaries where do you move from something that's medically considered to be a treatment or a prevention into something called an enhancement and this is where I think many of us get snarled up we think treatments good enhancements bad can you always really decide which thing you're talking about look at my graph here on the x-axis the horizontal axis is gonna be whether something is acceptable or unacceptable and sometimes even admirable on the y-axis the vertical axis is how soon could we actually do this so let's think of some things that might fit into this is it enhancement or is it not kind of category and see where they fall on the plot now these are my positions on the plot you may disagree with them hair coloring okay that's an enhancement people some of you have been enhanced in that regard in this room I'm pretty sure and that we would say is acceptable music lessons that's not just acceptable that's admirable I benefited from those that enhanced my brain function I hope some days more than others immunizations that is a biological enhancement when you get a vaccine you're actually causing your immune cells to rearrange their DNA to be ready when they see that pathogen the next time it comes around so yeah that's an enhancement but we think of that not just as a good thing it's an admirable thing and it's available now I'm gonna put prayer in here we enhance ourselves and perhaps what happens or in the world by exercising prayer that's admirable and it's available now and I would say you could call it an enhancement okay going to the other side viagra well okay it's available now and I guess we consider it acceptable sometimes the thing we're talking about might be an enhancement in one situation and a treatment in the other Ritalin for attention deficit disorder can be a great boon to kids who are though eyes having trouble in school but for college students taking exams well that's an enhancement and probably one that's not so good for them and so we'd say that's less acceptable drugs to treat morbid obesity we are working on that so I'm putting them and not be available now but for more but obesity people where this is a huge medical risk and may be the only other alternative is surgery that might be a good thing but if you want to offer it to people who are you know just wanting it to indulge in order to stay thin somehow that doesn't feel quite right you see where I'm going with this enhancement is not so easy to put your finger on human-animal chimeras I talked about that if you're gonna make it a transplantable organs for somebody who needs a new heart well okay that seems like a good thing but maybe it'd be better if we were making it without having to use that chimera build it in a dish and we're starting to learn how to do that to gene editing to cure sickle-cell disease I've already said gosh this is great we should do this to cure thousands of other diseases of the rare sort we should push Freud on that too but gene editing of human embryos to prevent disease I'm not convinced right now that there's a reason to say we to do that and to enhance performance I mean like make a child who's a better athlete a better musician has a higher IQ first of all we don't know how to do that those are genes that are numerous and have small effects and the environment is hugely important extension of lifespan do we want to go there that would be an enhancement 120 years we might succeed at that and another 10 or 15 to 500 years I don't know I'm gonna put that one out there aways downloading your consciousness to a computer well yeah that was a different conversation when we had the neuroscience part I'm going past that real quick and then yeah my last one here designer babies with precisely predictable outcomes this is really important as people get excited about okay we're gonna enhance our future offspring by dialing in exactly the properties we want it's gonna be a miserable failure because all of the things you'd want to optimize for are controlled by very large numbers of genes and the environment is uh probably a lot more important and so those parents that thought they were getting the perfect kid are likely to get a sullen kid who doesn't want to talk to them because they forgot to be parents you know so yeah a little a little sidelight here about why we have to think about enhancements a little bit more deeply before we say well we don't want to go there but sometimes we don't want to go there so how we gonna come to grips with this the good news is that both believers and non-believers tend to agree about the basic framework of ethics it can guide us it's unusual for me to be in a big discussion about bioethics and have a deep separation between the people who are both coming from a judeo-christian perspective overtly and those who are not because we are all sharing those same views respect for persons beneficence that is doing things to help people and justice and equity the better ways to divide this up but those are the basic fundamentals of what ethics is all about but make no mistake if we're really contemplating changing the human DNA in the germline the consequences of this are profound and I'm gonna argue this is not a line that we should be crossing right now I don't think the argument is convincing that we need to and there's so many things we don't know about this first of all we don't know the safety risks we say that CRISPR Cass is so incredibly precise that it goes and changes that one letter and nothing else happens it's pretty hard to be sure about that in a given circumstance maybe there's an occasional glitch somewhere else maybe your search and replace occasionally finds something that looks almost like the same thing and changes that to think about in terms of autonomy we have respect for persons when you change the germline of that individual all of their offspring and down through the generations are also without their consent having their biology altered as well is that ethical and who decides what's an improvement think about that one really hard because we've been down remember eugenics remember eugenics started in the United States look where that led us are we so advanced now that we could be confident that what we're calling an improvement is not just a reflection of our own prejudice if journal on editing actually turns out to provide benefits who's gonna have access and will this lead to further separation between the haves and have-nots this will be highly technical this could be an affront to justice and equity principles and then finally what does it mean to be human if that can be fundamentally altered by tinkering with our biological instruction book how would this affect our relationship with the Creator we are as Genesis says in the image of God how does this affect what we read in the Psalms about our relationship with the Creator Psalm 139 for you created my inmost being you knit me together in my mother's womb I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made your works are wonderful I know that full well my frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place when I was woven together in the depths of the earth I saw my unformed body all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be does gene-editing fit with that we were talking about changing the very essence of human biology the instruction book the genome all of us who are believers and especially those who know these words as Christians should think long and hard about whether that's a boundary that we're ready not to cross over I guess you could be somewhat reassured that the scientific community is paying attention to this the National Academy of Sciences put out this report human genome editing science ethics and governance they did open the door a crack towards germline editing for medical purposes came up with a few I think reasonably far-fetched examples where that might make sense but for the most part for enhancement they said no no we don't want to go there but in the absence of a consensus and I wouldn't say we're at one right now a science has moved forward groups in both in China and in the United States have done CRISPR Cass editing of human embryos to show that it's possible to do so they have not determined to try to create a baby but they have shown that the first steps of that are in fact scientifically possible now I have to say I probably at this point made you all pretty uneasy about oh my god we've got to figure out some way to stop this and maybe we do need to pay a lot of attention to that but I have to come back for one more minute before I stop with the reasons why we're doing this anyway which is to try to come up with answers for terrible diseases and I know no better example right now than this one spinal muscular atrophy is a disease that affects newborns they appear normal at birth but they're a little bit floppy and as they grow through a few months it's clear that their muscle tone is weaker and weaker and as you can see from this picture by the time they're eight month nine months old they have no muscle tone at all their muscles are basically failing not because the muscles are affected but because the nerves in the spinal cord those motor neurons that innervate those muscles are gradually dying this is like als except in a baby it's actually a fairly common disease and these babies never live more than about 12 to 14 months they die of suffocation it is one of the grimace conditions and up until now we have had nothing to offer to these kids Jerry Mandel at Nationwide Children's Hospital mounted a program using a gene therapy approach to this which seemed very high-risk but in the circumstance like this one wants to try high-risk things and with this a single intravenous infusion of a genetic therapy only so far in about a dozen kids all of whom were identified shortly after birth and the treatment started right away he has had truly dramatic results and I'll show you just one quick video of one of those kids remember these kids don't generally live past a year they never learned to sit up well here's Mateo he's two and a half years old he's going to work today I've got to find the elevator here now not only is he walking he's standing on his tiptoes is something unbelievable for a kid with SMA and then yeah a little later on he and his dad go out to the gym and there he is hanging on the monkey bars Matteo and his dad that is the kind of thing that we have dreamed of and that it's starting to happen and which we want to happen even as we carry the with us the responsibility of being sure these technologies get used for that kind of outcome and not for something that we later regret this is a somatic cell treatment this does not affect the germline so toward the future what's the balance how do we bring hope to those who are suffering that's an ethical imperative Jesus spent an awful lot of the time we know about healing people I think we were supposed to notice that doing nothing would be the most unethical of the options that's not something we can defend so we have to proceed but we have to proceed responsibly those long-standing ethical principles can help us form the cornerstone international consensus would be a really good thing but at the moment there is no international body that has the authority to arrive at that which means we're kind of trying to do this informally which worries me because there's no enforcement behind those kinds of agreements that academics might come to but people of faith have an important role to play but we have to be well grind grounded in the science to come to a conversation on topics of this sort those who are believers need to be prepared both to defend the things that should go forward and also to raise the questions about those where questions need to be raised I'm hopeful that conversations like this in a place like this can make it more possible for that kind of dialogue to happen I think the BioLogos website is a great place for those things to happen and I'm honored indeed to see the way in which that has developed over the years this is the painting that hangs over my desk at NIH and I looked at several times a day this is Jacob's Ladder in case you're wondering what that might be so painted by a no nogen Aryan artists at James Madison who just sent me a picture of it saying I think this might be for you and there it is and yes that's Jacob we all worship the God of Jacob Jacob in this case appearing to wrestle but maybe also to climb on that ladder we have this opportunity more than we ever had in our history to try to do the right thing in this space but we need to do so thoughtfully as I was preparing this lecture I took out a book I haven't read in a little while with CS Lewis was the abolition of man and it's a little chilling he wrote this book in the context of the Nazi eugenics horror and points out sort of what it means to try to change our very essence if any one age really attains by eugenics and scientific education the power to make its descendants what it pleases does that sound like gene editing of embryos all men who live after it are the patients of that power they are weaker not stronger for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have preordained how they are to use them once again Jack Lewis in a very artful and somewhat visionary statement warning us what we ought to be thinking about so with that I hope all of us in this conversation this evening and other opportunities can both celebrate the advances which are breathtaking and have so much promise to give hope to families who are desperate for those answers but also figure out how it is that we as children of God and need to take that responsibility with the greatest seriousness and respect that we are fearfully and wonderfully made and we might want to think very hard about remaking ourselves in that way thank you very much [Applause] how would you like to follow Francis Collins it's it's a humbling honor to be part of the conversation thank you so much I'm a terrible interlocutor because I'm just here as a student overwhelmingly learning along with you so let me and I don't disagree about anything so well we'll have to find something to fight about but uh let me just start them by sperm endearing and just adding to the chorus of dr. Collins championing of Christian investment and involvement in the natural sciences and this kind of technological development I still think I think some of us come from spaces forget that there are Christians who struggle to still imagine that these things go together and so I think this is such a crucial word to affirm that this kind of attention to the natural world to our bodies to our environments is actually one of the ways that we enact the image of God but that's how we live out imaging God is by attending to his world and and it's surely one of the scandals of being created in God's image is that he has actually commissioned us and deputized us to understand and unfold and steward this good but broken world in some of the most significant ways that we do that is through the sciences some some of the most significant ways that we care for the vulnerable is precisely through the work of the sciences and the technologies that grow out of that if you think of the history of how we improved caloric intake over the past century and a half so that we can deal with with hunger it's because of scientific developments I was thinking as Francis was speaking sometimes the Lord who heals with mud and spittle also heals because he Commission's people like Francis Collins to study the human genome it's the same spirit who's doing the same work of healing and we should be enthusiastically involved in both of those things so so let's talk about something that we could becomes interesting then I want to pick up on the gene-editing conversation and thinking through some of the implications of this and I want to think through both the opportunities and cautions and again I think amplifying and extending and thinking alongside dr. Collins so so let's start with an opportunity as Francis pointed out this possibility of editing human embryos raises really fundamental questions of what it means to be human and as he also suggested that is not a question that actually natural science can answer and so what happens is is we recognize this limit on any sort of technocratic hubris that we might be tempted by our our technological prowess raises questions that technology itself can't answer it draws on and it assumes those answers from elsewhere for some reason I always think of that scene from Top Gun where which tells you a little bit about sort of my high school career but do you remember when the commander takes a maverick a says son your egos writing checks your body can't cash and I just think we have to realize this conversation that we're inserted in tonight is at that liminal space between the the incredible capacities and possibilities of what science and technology affords and yet bringing us to the frontier of questions that it can't answer so the question is what story do we believe about what it means to be human this is actually where I see the opportunity even if sometimes the opportunity presents itself as a threat let me try to explain I think for generations now our society has been sort of trying on new answers to that fundamental question of what means to be human you might say that we've been editing our own identity and re narrating human nature in important ways and many of these have been reductionistic reducing us to either copulating pieces of meat or selfish cognitive bio machines or these islands of autonomous self-interest but when we start to actually tease out the implications of understanding ourselves in those flattened reductionistic ways I think Francis is right I actually think a lot of people many many people have severe hesitations at that point and while there might be influential Silicon Valley elites who are trying to write over centuries of understandings of human nature I actually think that there is a cringe and a pause from many people as they hear the narratives spun out further so I got I was playing with the editing metaphor and I wonder if we could think about human nature as a palimpsest do you know a pal so a palimpsest is in in ancient times when when they didn't have paper and they Scrolls were made of vellum and different kinds of skin and things like that was incredibly valuable so you would write one manuscript and then when you felt like you were done with that you would try to sort of scrub it and you would actually write over with your new manuscript over the palimpsest but if we think about human nature as this palimpsest what it means is there are might be all of these attempts to sort of scrub it and edit it and yet there's something about us made in God's image that keeps bleeding through that pushes back on those kinds of attempts this is where I believe that religious voices have an opportunity to contribute to our public understanding even if it might sometimes seems like the environment is hostile to hearing those voices I don't don't always um don't let a minority report from the op-ed pages of certain papers sort of that's not always a sample representation of actually what a society is longing to hue I think that we can offer wisdom to a society that is drowning in information precisely because we have a rich complex story to say to tell about what human beings are who we are and whose we are and we can embody that it's exactly what dr. coffins work does embodies the rich complexity of that story now I I'm sorry I just have to say we don't get the right to bear witness and testify to this rich story about what human beings are if we are willing to basically trade their dignity for political power so I absolutely think we need to speak up for human dignity and how integral that is to the human person and therefore we need to realize that you can't treat Pat lightly as if it's a pawn you can use in political negotiation but I digress what what I'm suggesting is we actually need to speak publicly from the specificity of our religious understandings and I'm saying religious understandings here a little bit generically here because I actually think on this these matters Jews Christians and Muslims share so much in common about what we can testify to about the historic understanding of human nature and so for us to speak out of the thickness and particularity of the biblical narrative and offer society a story of who we are as human beings what it means to be made into the image in the image of God you might be surprised actually how much openness there is to hearing the specificity of that story but by the way I want to make one plug for there's a journal called the New Atlantis published by the ethics and Public Policy Center here in DC to me the New Atlantis is actually the space where this kind of rich conversation is happening and so if you're intrigued follow up on that so what what does the biblical story have to say then about what it means to be human well of course it is a story of unconditional dignity that human beings are valued not because of what they can do and even not only because they are made by God but actually because they are loved by God but we also need to see it as an account of our creatureliness and and I think we sometimes underestimate the significance of this that the biblical story about being human is a story about creatureliness that our finitude is a gift precisely because it makes us dependent that is and I realize this will sound scandalous in a society that has come to prize autonomy and independence above everything else but I actually think there are signs that that story about being human is wearing out that that that story is not paying off and isn't working and we might be surprised how much our neighbors are open to hearing a different account of our creatureliness now here I want to try to articulate something very very carefully and in a way probably shouldn't bite this off in a short time but let me put it this way if our dignity if human dignity stems from being loved by God and our humanity manifests itself in this dependence then that means relations of dependence are at the very heart of being human does that seem like a fair conclusion to draw okay so this entails I think maybe a difficult truth and I'm even worried about how to articulate this but I wonder if it means that we actually have to say that suffering is sometimes how we learn to be dependent that is I do think there's something about the biblical story of what human beings are that also will push us to ask really really hard questions about suffering not because we want to romanticize it but because that it is a way that we learn to be dependent and it's part of what calls us to care of course absolutely we are called to alleviate and respond to suffering that is that is absolutely part of our calling but that is different than trying to eliminate it this seems to me indeed too often our desires to eliminate suffering is a manifestation of our desire to not be needy or to not be needed in other words it's us pushing back against this dependency our creaturely miss and even more frightening I think too often the desire to eliminate suffering becomes a project of eliminating needy people so what we construe as disabilities for example too often simply reflect the world that we've made that won't accommodate those who are suffering it's not just a question of who gets to decide what counts as a disability which is a huge question it's not just a matter of who gets to decide what is editable about human nature huge question it's also a question of whether we would be less human without our neediness and dependence and care this makes me think of Don DeLillo's most recent novel zero K which is anybody read zero K I commend it to you it's actually really really relevant to the conversation that we're having tonight the first line of the book is jarring ly direct everybody wants to own the end of the world everybody wants to own the end of the world and the story that unfolds in the novel is actually one of technological hubris where you get this naturalistic kind of Silicon Valley ish quest for immortality on our terms as a feat of our scientific achievement DeLillo skepticism and caution in the telling of this tale I think is actually a testimony to the opening and opportunity that I was talking about so Don DeLillo is not a religious writer fight by any stretch but the very effect of how he tells this story of the sort of human scientific quest for immortality in our terms is to meet a manifestation of a cultural openness that has some pause and caution and openness in fact what's striking is how often DeLillo the novelist has to resort to religious language and religious conceptuality to try to make sense of what what's at issue here me but there's a curious coda at the end of the novel very end of the know I'm not gonna ruin the story for you but after sort of all the action has taken place the narrator is on a bus in midtown Manhattan and the timing and angle of the bus is such just right that in this sort of fjord of midtown skate skyscrapers has become a cinema for a phenomenon that happens only once or twice a year where the sun's rays align perfectly with the local street grid he hears a wail of glee and fascination and he turns to see a boy looking at the Sun enraptured and he describes the scene this way I left my seat and went to stand nearby his hands were curled at his chest half fists soft and trembling his mother sat quietly watching with him the boy bounced slightly in accord with the cries and they were unceasing and also exhilarating they were pre-linguistic grunts I hated to think that he was impaired in some way macro cephalic mentally deficient but these howls of awe were far more suitable than words friends what would we lose if we edited that boy out of existence in what way is he actually the palimpsest of what we were made for a testimony of our nature as creatures made to worship to delight in awe to care and be cared for and to be loved by a God with scars thanks very much [Applause] we're in a little bit of a dilemma right here and that we are already over time but it is not possible to leave without at least some questions from the audience always the most dynamic part of our evening so those of you who have been here before know that we have three guide lines for questions we ask that you be brief and this is particularly important tonight all questions be civil and we ask that all questions be in the form of a question so we will take a few brief questions from the audience will ask for brief answers and just have a Q&A Blitzkrieg please wait for the microphone to come some questions right over here is there a microphone right over here I was just wondering about the possibilities of gene editing or what you're looking at in terms of mental illness I know schizophrenia has they found a few genes for that but I don't know really where they are in that process schizophrenia is one of those very complex genetic disorders where there clearly are factors in DNA that contribute to it the last count is 92 different places in the genome where if you had a T instead of an A it increases the risk by just a little bit but there's still a lot of missing heritability that we haven't discovered yet and it's also clear that there are other influences that are not genetic the usual way we assess that is by looking at identical twins who have the same DNA and they're not always concordant frisket siffredi so we have a lot to learn in that space I would say as a target for gene editing this would be a long way off because we wouldn't have a very good idea about exactly what edit to make it would certainly be a circumstance were for that individual you'd need to deliver the apparatus to the organ that's affected which is the brain which is something we don't know how to do yet so we're decades maybe away from that kind of an outcome but I wouldn't say it's impossible other questions the audience right in the back there there's a there was a lot of sort of anchoring and ain´t older philosophies modalities and things like that I was wondering ahead and and hence you're seeing like this upcoming cliff coming up I wonder if you could maybe speak to the natural tendency we have as humans to adapt ourselves to new circumstances and that those things were just being increasingly slide away and everything we're raising alarm for now 50 years of now yeah no big deal no what were they worried about that yeah good question what about the cringe factor does the cringe factor have a half-life that ultimately means it's not a cringe anymore it's a great question that there's doesn't it seem though like we're entertaining qualitative leaps rather than quantitative adaptations at this or or is that what we always say in retrospect right like it it all look like a qualitative leap beforehand people always talk about in vitro fertilization because that seemed very qualitative and yet now it's like a big deal mm-hmm yeah no it's it's a it's a great question I mean I think a big part of the question is how much are we collectively trying to discern what the good is as we're approaching that and I'm not sure I was really intrigued by your point that we don't have to we don't seem to have very good mechanisms to think about this globally intentionally in that regard and that that's worrisome just worries questions front row here microphone journey in the journey of everything wit is dark matter and dark energy factor in here as a wild card and the CERN project you're asking the biology to find let's just say it's really interesting and there's a mystery there waiting to be resolved I'm not going to be the one to resolve it maybe Deb horseman or her colleagues there's fundamental things about the universe that are still outside of our knowledge and discovering those will be another amazing moment of a glimpse of the creator's mind take other questions right there in the middle you could stand up and make it easier for be seen thank you dr. Collins I want to thank you my mother had stage four wreath roll cancer she was told to get her Affairs in order and now she's doing a neo therapy and the cancer can't be found anymore so so thank you for your work but because Cherie gives the instructions gonna ask you a question as well but um you talked about reluctance to used CRISPR to do things that affect the the germline how about people who are like fragile X carriers so you want to you know prepare the repair the reacts so their germline could be healthier which would be one that so yeah we could walk through that so fragile X is a inherited form of learning disability affecting boys because it's on the x-chromosome boys have one X and one Y and so if the X is affected that's the only one they've got mothers sometimes of boys are carriers they have one X it's okay and one that has this alteration on it so you might say why don't you then go in and edit that glitch out of there but how would you do it and again you'd have to do an in vitro fertilization you would have then a bunch of embryos it got formed by the sperm and the egg of the parents coming together you would want to know which of those are actually going to be affected males and it would be half of the males that would have this and half that would not by the time you've done all that you would know which embryos are not going to be affected because you've already done the DNA diagnosis the straightforward thing to do at that point because you can't reimplantation a terrible disaster just re-implanted aren't affected so gene editing theoretically could be a solution but practically it wouldn't be necessary to do something so elaborate when you have a simple solution right in front of you question right here on the second row you can you just stand so it's easier to be seen by the guy with a microphone stand stand up I'm from France and I moved to the United States to question first of all thank you so much it's quite enlightened if we take from Christian perspective to reconcile with science lately in Germany but if I'm aware of studies regarding the impact of fasting Christian practice on immunology well I'm sure you know much better that angle seems to be of interest and we don't need was the question one we can reconcile back the practice of fasting has a positive impact on health and my second question would you advise a package of what you said about to disseminate it in for high-schooler in particular in library to make it available up out of school after school so that they can explore I'm with UNESCO and I think I could convince to disseminate that knowledge not from antagonists perspective but just to immerse students families so thank you and I the first part of the question I didn't get one word which you were asking about which was was it fasting fasting okay thank you thank you that was a critical part of the question there is a lot of interest right now in whether fasting occasional fasting would not only be beneficial for one spiritual life and I think there's lots of arguments in favor of that but maybe also good for physical health and there are certainly strong advocates of that and we at NIH are actually running a few studies to try to see what might be the benefits in terms of what happens with such things as your blood pressure or your cholesterol and maybe we'll get some more rigorous data right now it's a bit more on the anecdotal side in terms of Education we are really hoping that the enormous excitement of science right now is something that young people hear about and decide that's what they want to work on because the next generation is going to be critical for making a lot of these great things come true these days most young people find their information on the Internet and so that's where we try to make sure this kind of thing can be readily found I will give a slight plug for the NIH website which is the most heavily traveled website in the United States for health information but also has a lot of science education so I hope it is getting looked at and of course they could join my Twitter feed and then have stuff to look at several times the day Jamie anything man okay we'll take the last question right there thank you so I think there are many areas in which Christians view imaging God as a positive thing be that caring for the poor or understanding the natural world or creating great art so I'm curious why in the realm of biotechnology playing God becomes such a negative scary thing I'll be I mean you you've yes so it's interesting we there's a difference between imaging God and being God and so we are to reflect you know we are to love what God loves and and to and to pursue those things I think the the hesitancy of course is that hinges on the creator creature distinction and precisely the fact that I am NOT holy right I am NOT I do not have perfect knowledge I do not have perfect power I do certainly do not have perfect goodness and therefore even though the the remarkable thing is how much in a way in the order of creation God has deputized to us and and in a way unleashed us to to do but we do that with a high degree of awareness or we ought to that we are not God and so there's a sense in which we are dependent on his word his revelation what we are learning from him and we need to I think one of the real dangers of part of our secularization is that we actually forget our finitude and we forget our limits and that's when people people should be most nervous when I think I know exactly what you need right and that there's just um it's and it's why communal labor is actually such a huge check in balance right so that we have our if we are collaborating then there's there's sort of a dependency that's worked out there I don't notice that if we played God the way that God does with perfect love and compassion and a sense of consequences and taking full account of those then this would not be so scary but history teaches us that we have not been so good in that regard we are fallen creatures was it Chesterton who said the one Christian doctrine that can be proven by daily experiences Universal sin yes it's why I'm a Calvinist well thank you for that so yeah I think when people say playing God it is out of that realization that we are not God and we are thought we have fallen short every time we've tried to pretend that we had that kind of benevolence because we always end up being self-interested on that note Frances Jamie [Applause] [Applause] so I am betting there are a lot of questions left in your mind clearly there is a lot left to discuss and happily there is opportunity to do so so dead if you could come on up and tell everyone a little bit about the opportunity to continue the discussion that would be great Thank You Sheree my name is Deborah toughly and I'm the executive director at church of the Advent and on behalf of Church of the Advent I'm delighted to be here partnering with the Trinity forum and by all logos and the Templeton religion trust to partner on this hosting this event Church of the Advent is an Anglican Church here in Washington DC we have two parish communities one that meets in Northeast DC in Brooklyn on Sunday mornings at 10:30 one that meets at Columbia Heights and the northwest quadrant at 5:00 p.m. on Sunday evening so if you're new to DC or looking for a church we love to see you there I'd love to have you visit our desire is a church is to be a church that is seeking the flourishing of Washington DC by building gospel center communities that practice generous hospitality and spiritual formation and missionary faithfulness in every neighborhood and one of our ways of pursuing missionary faithfulness is by partnering in events like this with the Trinity forum we began this relationship back in 2011 when we received a grant from scientists and congregations and that was funded generously by the John Templeton Foundation and at that time we hosted three events like this bringing together scientists and non-scientists as people that were interested in Sciences to discuss issues related to science and faith and bringing in theologians and scientists and philosophers and as part of that we also hosted follow-on dinners where people could in a more intimate setting discuss kind of the implications and questions that arose from these from these talks and so once again we're gonna be hosting I'd follow-on dinner discussion that will be on Monday July 16th and so we'd love for you to come to that you may ask now why is search of the Advent here and why are we engaged in this kind of discussion well we initially applied for the grant back in 2011 because we had a number of parishioners some of them were scientists some of them not scientists who had a deeply held interest in the sciences and I know that I'm preaching to the choir here but uh you know we understood that there was this perception that there's this divide between the world of science and the world of faith and we believe of course that science actually is really our impulse to understand the good world that God created and we wanted to provide a place where we could bring together people to talk about science and faith and to realize that there's no there doesn't need to be a conflict between those two things and so we wanted to provide an environment where a scientist could discuss you know their faith in a kind of an intelligent way and also those of us who are decidedly not scientists could get over our fear that maybe if we were to discuss the complexities of cosmology and neuroscience and genetics and evolution that we would lose our faith in the process and so these are these conversations are really important and this follow-on discussion will also be a great opportunity to continue to talk about the issues and things that were raised tonight so if you would like to come to this dinner it's free of charge so we ask that you RSVP will provide dinner and dessert and drinks and we'll have our Pastor Dan Buell moon will be leading that that conversation with some of our parishioners you can sign up at this table right over here on your way out or you can also go to our website Church of the Advent or the website of the Trinity forum and we hope to see you there Thank You Deb for that and as we wrap up this evening I'm going to ask you to turn your attention from contemplation of the mysteries of the universe to the invitation on each of your chairs which is to join the Trinity forum Society your membership in the Trinity forum Society is what helps make evenings like this possible we have been building a community in DC across the nation even across the world of people who are interested in wrestling together with the great questions of life in a way that is both intellectually rigorous warmly hospitable and grounded in faith there are very few other opportunities to do this in the same way we sincerely hope that you will accept our invitation become a member of the Trinity Forum Society of course there are benefits when you do so among the benefits are our quarterly readings where we take examples of the best literature and letters and human civilization we add an introduction explaining context and background discussion questions in the back so that is essentially a book club and a bag along with our monthly Podcast are daily what we're reading curated feeds and as a special bonus for the first ten people who joined tonight you will get a special collection of readings including the birthmark which as a bit of background was actually the first story that the head of the President's Commission on bioethics asked all the commissioners to read as a way of framing and grounding in the discussion on bioethics it's actually a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne but raises the big questions of life and helps one grapple would there were their application so my colleagues Kaleem O'Malley Elissa Abraham if you could just hold up your hands they are great people to contact if you have any questions about becoming members of the Trinity Forum society they would love to help you out with that we do have a table right in the back Margaret and drew if you could raise your hand that is a great place to sign up to become a member of the tranform society as well as to check out our various readings I would also just want to let everybody know we will have pictures up on our Facebook page as well as on Twitter tag your friends share tonight as you can imagine a fascinating discussion that we'd love to share with others as well we also hope that you will join us for future evening conversations tonight is actually the final event in this series on discovery and doxology that was generously underwritten by the Templeton religion trust if you happen to be someone who is interested in this series continuing please let me know let Colleen know we would love to talk to you about keeping these discussions alive finally as we wrap up it is always appropriate to end in thanks as you might imagine an evening like this does not happen without many people to thank so we'd like to thank again our sponsor the Templeton religion Trust for their generous support the additional support that we received from the Murdock Trust our excellent partners BioLogos with Deb harsman and Church of the advant led by rector Tommy Henson I also would like to thank dialogue with staff like to Luke to Lee and Church of the admin staff Liz Downey for their help along with our uber photographer clayback Blackmore most valuable volunteer Hannah wolf our rockstar interns Rene coupe Ryder Houston Wilson drew Hallett and Margaret Whitworth along with my fantastic colleagues Colleen O'Malley Rebecca noise and ELISA Abraham finally thank you again to our incredible speakers Francis Collins and Jamie Smith to all of you for coming and good night [Applause]

Channel: The Trinity Forum

Views: 8,341

Rating: 4.7916665 out of 5

Keywords: science, faith

Id: r1dVnUg970I

Length: 102min 42sec (6162 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 19 2018