Francis Collins: The Language of God: A Believer Looks at the Human Genome

now dr. Collins has a lot to say and I do not want to cut into his time on the other hand if I do cut into his time like what's he gonna do right you know with this even with all his degrees and awards and everything there's really nothing that he can do all right that's what an education is worth in this culture nothing now listen there are some Socrates in the city speakers that need no introduction very very few but there are some that need no introduction and I would I put it to you that dr. Collins is one of those Socrates in the city speakers he really does not need much of an introduction but for those of you who don't read the papers let me just say that for his role in leading the Human Genome Project Jeannot Jeannot me eno ma not Noam some of my friends they said all that pseudoscience I said not know its genome that's the kind of people that I hang out with yeah yes Leslie that's right it's sad but anyway genome ok genome just just followed by the end of the evening this will all come together genome project so for his role in leading the human genome project you say genome genome Geno genome evidently its genome you know and he he would know I guess for his role in leading the Human Genome Project he has been fetid at the White House by two presidents not simultaneously by two presidents Clinton and Bush he is also gotten him I'm referring to dr. Collins he's also gotten the Presidential Medal of Freedom let's be honest who hasn't gotten one of those but still in this case it was very splashy was in the papers and you know whatever he wanted me to say that so it's a big day it's important to him all right and you got it I'm not trying to kind of put it there not everybody's gotten one but so many people have at this point that it's just it's cheap and the value of the Presidential Medal of Freedom but for for dr. Collins evidently it was a special experience and he got to meet the president and so all right he's also appeared on the cover of Time magazine and there's probably not thirty of us that have appeared on the cover of Time so that's that's pretty special right we know who we are but cover of Time magazine very important in 2003 he his was the biography of the year on the A&E Network it was voted the number one biography of the year and he beat out Valerie Bertinelli by one vote is that amazing unbelievable unbelievable one vote incredible I think she was in the middle of divorcing uh you know what they it was like a big year for her but he beat her round this is the man you said who could do that in that year the beer everybody's talking Bertinelli Bertinelli he'd been around by one vote oh my gosh um of course dr. Collins has also been on Charlie Rose and who hasn't been on Charlie Rose but again it was particularly wonderful performance there and he's been on The Colbert Report yes Wow into the Lions Den how sad that they applauded that and not Charlie Rose you see that's why we do Socrates in the city we got educated Cowen's know it's it really it's wonderful it's wonderful dr. Collins has just left the head of the National Center for Human Genome Research just stepped down recently but continues to be a very very big shot in the highest government circles no kidding this is true yesterday I got an email from dr. Collins saying that at 5:30 today he needed a private room can I say this will I get like taken out by snipers or something what are they gonna do he said it needed a private room at 5:30 in the club could he have a private room because he has to have a special conversation you know with the Obama transition team right now a lot of us are on those calls every day again but the idea that it was just actually we thought it was it was a joke it took me a second to say well no you know what as I read the email again and again it doesn't seem to be any sense of irony or anything this is I think this is real Justin where's Justin I'm not making this up right and so anyway at 5:30 we had to take him to a special room so he could have his his special phone call with the Obama transition team they take guys that's the team and he had a call with them and you know I I saw him in there you know talking on the phone and whatever and I got to say this is where it gets kind of sad because we want everybody wants to cling to power you know and I realize I happen to know his cell phone is broken it's not working and that and to go through this exercise to convince just a handful of us who already are impressed with dr. Collins that he's still that he's still important even though he stepped down that he still you know he's still I said Wow that's just that's just a picture of you know hey who who isn't like down like that okay we're not--we're no different okay I lie all the time and I do that kind of stuff because I just want people to think you know that I got the juice that I got the Mojo and a and I thought but if dr. Collins could behave like that it must be okay right so I just want to say he's a human beings no different than the rest of us okay but it was quite an acting job he was pacing and stuff and I said that the phone's dead it said it said yeah all right well it's just a I just want I know it's it's probably okay that I shared that right anyway well look obviously I love this guy well otherwise I wouldn't wreck them off the the way that I came to here dr. Collins talk about what he's going to talk tonight was at Socrates in the city in San Francisco there's only one other legitimate Socrates in the city franchise run by Scott Sherman in San Francisco it was about a year ago we have branched out to San Francisco that night I heard him speak and I said we absolutely must figure out a way to bring dr. Collins to New York and granted we Manhattan nights we might not be as sophisticated as the people who live in San Francisco but that's not going to stop us from having sophisticated speakers and so ladies and gentlemen tonight I'm very very pleased to give you dr. Francis Collins well in the two minutes I have left Eric are you speaking anywhere in the next few months that I could introduce you just let me know I've already made a few notes I think I think that would be a lot of fun for me if not for you that was what do I say memorable that's what it was it was memorable and it is a great pleasure to be here with most of you this evening in this really remarkable venue and Eric I'm not insulted you're insulted your wife much more than me so I'm not worried oh no no all in good fun and what an amazing gathering this is here at the University Club in New York City and what a privilege it is for me to have a chance to speak to you this evening about a topic that I think is much on people's minds especially these days when there are a lot of shrill voices out there talking about whether faith has become irrelevant and this is this question of science and faith science and God and all that now I'm going to show some images up there on that screen and I know that there is an economic downturn but I don't know that the chiropractor's should have a particularly good time tomorrow so if you all would like to move your chairs a little bit to avoid some unfortunate damage to the vertebra in your neck then please feel free to do so in order to get a better look at what's up there and I will hope not to dwell too much upon those in case your view of them is not precise as those people in the back of the room may otherwise be somewhat disadvantaged so yeah we're going to talk about science because I'm a scientist and a physician and I'm also going to talk about faith because I'm a believer and that surprises people because they assume that those two categories don't get along very well right now and in fact looking at some of the things that are out there on the airway on the bookshelves you might think there was a bit of a battle going on well I don't think that battle is necessary in fact I don't think that battle is in fact as difficult as it's being portrayed but let me try to explain to you why I say that and let's be clear here we are following the Socratic model which is to follow the argument wherever it leads to see what are the facts that might help us with this question about whether the scientific and the spiritual world views are in fact incompatible or whether they can be harmonized well let me start with genetics and of course if you've been passing by newsstands it's been pretty hard to get away from this stuff it's been all over the place Time magazine talking about genetics the future is now Newsweek talking about the genome can we all say that together now genome it's not genome genome and it's certainly not just gnome as you heard this is the genome this is our instruction book this is marvelous stuff here's another cover of Time magazine solving the mysteries of DNA this one published at the time of the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA which happened to be also a seminal moment for the understanding of our instruction book because this happened at the same time that we had finished reading out all of the letters of that code as I'll describe in a moment notice here Adam and Eve appear on Time magazine's cover as well you might notice that all three of those covers have two things in common one is DNA the other is naked people now what about that I think that means that editors of magazines have figured out that DNA does not sell and apparently surprise surprise they know what does so what is this anyway well DNA really is it's a pretty good metaphor it's an instruction book it is a the way in which all of those instructions that you need in order to go from being a single cell which you all once were to a pretty fancy organism could come to pass you have to have the instructions to make that possible and it's a pretty elaborate instruction book but it's written in this rather strange but ultimately on the surface of it rather simple language that just has four letters in its alphabet and it's it is the genome all the DNA of an organism is its genome and it is in fact encoded within this double helix called DNA that Watson and Crick figured out the structure of back in 1953 when I was three years old and basically the way it carries information is by the series of chemical bases which are abbreviated AC G and T and it's the order of those letters those bases that carries out the information that then gets passed from parent to child down through the generations now if you had to guess assuming you didn't know the answer how many of those letters of the instruction book does it take to specify the biological properties of a human being what number would you guess it can't be infinite you have to have this inside each cell of your body every time the cell divides it's got to copy the whole thing so you wouldn't want it to be larger than it had to be at least not by much well the answer is about three billion even today three billion is a big number even in Washington it's a big number although some might debate that but it's hard to think about that number and to think of fact you have that inside each cell of your body if we if we decided right now because this is a special evening and this is Socrates in the city we should read the human genome what do you think sure we can do that I'll start over here and you can start reading ACGT T G C T and so on and when you get tired you can pass it to the next person and we'll just keep going until we're done you wouldn't mind that right that would be memorable well you might not survive because seven days a week 24 hours a day we could be at that for 31 years and then we'd finally be done and you have that information inside each cell of your body which is just a phenomenal thing to contemplate and you got that from your parents and the genome is in fact the thing that you could think of as the most fundamental part of trying to understand human biology understand the instruction book and the exciting thing to tell you is that we have now in fact through a focused effort involving some 20 laboratories in six countries over the course of several years a project that I had the privilege of leading we have read out all of those letters and we have gone from the double helix in April 1953 to having the complete DNA sequence of Homo sapiens in April 2003 and the team of 2005 hundred scientists that I had the privilege of working with made the decision all the way along that this was such fundamental information such basic pre-competitive information that it ought to be made available to everyone and so it was placed on the internet every 24 hours and that information has empowered them this newest generation of biologists and geneticists to begin to figure out what it all means but that's a hard problem because we are just beginning readers even now trying to read this instruction book it is very hard to sort it out but we've made some real progress now a major area focus right now for those of us who are interested in the medical applications of human genetics which is most of us that's why we got into this is to try to understand those slightly scary-looking ticking time bombs that are working within the DNA that place each of us at risk for something if you came here tonight thinking you were the perfect genetic specimen and there's some good candidates in the room on a superficial level I'm sorry even Eric Metaxas even Eric Metaxas does not have a perfect genome I'm sorry I know that's that's a shock I'm sorry it came from your father I'm sure so we'd like to understand these to the extent that we could use that information to try to understand how each of us may be at risk for some future illness that we could prevent if we knew what was lurking there you know we practice prevention now not very effectively kind of in a one-size-fits-all approach but we're not one-size-fits-all we're all individuals and we all have a different collection of these genetic risk factors wouldn't it be nice to be able to apply that in a evidence-based method to be able to focus what you need to do for your particular risks instead of just trying to do what everybody else is doing in a generic way well we're coming along with that so I will tell you that until a couple of years ago while we had been very successful in finding genetic factors in highly heritable conditions diseases like cystic fibrosis we had been really quite stymied trying to discover those for things like diabetes or the common cancers or heart disease the things that fill up our hospitals and clinics and afflicts so many of us in our families all that has changed I'm going to show you a diagram here that I think will make this point what you're looking at there and a slightly washed out view is a cartoon of the human chromosomes DNA is not arranged in one long strand it's in these separable chromosomes that you can actually see under the microscope and each chromosome has hundreds of genes on it a gene being a packet of information that codes for a particular instruction in 2005 for the first time we had sufficient power to be able to scan the whole genome and say where is the ticking time bomb or bombs for a particular disease and the first success right there on chromosome 1 over there and what you can't quite read it was for a disease called age-related macular degeneration common cause of blindness in the elderly I'm sure there are people in this room who have family members with that problem that had been a complete mystery didn't seem like it was likely to be very heritable it doesn't come along until you're 70 or 80 years old but what do you know a discovery here of a gene that nobody would have guessed had anything to do with this disease and there it was and it's already pointed us to severe exciting new ideas about prevention and treatment so we began to think this is going to work well that was 2005 we had one success 2006 we had three more but now look and see what happens without paying any attention to the details just look at the banners that are appearing here 2007 I'm breaking it down by quarters because otherwise it would be too much at one time first quarter second quarter third quarter fourth quarter each one of those a gene for diabetes or heart disease or asthma or Crohn's disease or the common cancers you can go down the list of common diseases and they were yielding up their secrets 2008 the first quarter the second quarter and this is as of October 1st and pretty soon pretty soon I'm gonna have to remake the slide because we're not done yet so these are happening day by day no issue of the most prominent journals of nature science and sale comes out without a few more of these popping up by the hard work of people who are taking the tools from the Human Genome Project and shining a bright light into areas that were previously very much obscured and telling us things about the causes and the prevention and ultimately the cure of disease that we desperately needed to know and now we finally can have the power to see what's there and this is very exciting because it promises the opportunity to really revolutionize medicine what we need to do is to move from the top of this diagram to the bottom I haven't put a label on that time axis because it's going to travel at a different pace for different diseases but what I've just shown you is already happening in enormous proliferation of information these discovery of genetic risk factors for common diseases now in some instances such as for instance certain types of cancer where knowing that you're at risk and getting appropriate surveillance allows the detection of a cancer before it is already spread that can be incredibly empowering and powerful to save lives and that's already happening colon cancer breast cancer in that category in other instances we're learning how to practice better pharmacology and something called pharmacogenomics the idea here being that our individual reactions to drugs that we may be given for a particular illness are not all the same some people may get a good response some people may get a toxic effect some people may get no response at all what's that all about a lot of that is differences in our DNA and if we knew about that well enough to make a prediction we could choose the right drug at the right time at the right dose for the right person instead of just doing the one-size-fits-all approach which doesn't always work as well as we want it to and ultimately these discoveries like that gene for macular degeneration I mentioned point us to new ideas about treatment therapeutics that we never would have guessed at otherwise and in my view that may be the biggest payoff at all of all but it actually is also the one that takes the longest time because you have to go from that lightbulb experienced to developing an idea about how to develop a drug and then going through animal testing and ultimately clinical trials and that is a long slow and expensive process and we as a nation need to be prepared that this is not going to happen overnight but that we have the best chance we've ever had to make huge differences in the diseases that are so much a problem for us and for our families so I have reason I think here to come before you being pretty excited about all of this because I do think that we have crossed a bridge into new territory where we have the chance in a much more fundamental and comprehensive way to understand how life works and how sometimes it doesn't quite work because of one of these glitches and what we might do about it and that is truly an exciting thing to say but let me come to the second part of what I want to tell you about and that is maybe introduced by these two images on the left you see a beautiful stained glass window this happens to be the Rose window of Westminster Cathedral on the right you see maybe an unfamiliar view of DNA but that's DNA you're looking instead of from the side you're looking down the long axis so you can see the radial pattern that all those base pairs and the double helix make for you when you're looking at it from that perspective so I ask you to look at those two images and contemplate whether in fact in terms of deciding on your own world of view is it necessary to make a choice between those two or is it in fact possible for a thoughtful mature individual to find a way to embrace both of those and define them complimentary if you'd asked me that question when I was 25 I would have said no way at that time I was a graduate student studying physical chemistry I thought that all that mattered could be described in the laws of physics and chemistry and mathematics and I had no use for anything of the spiritual sort I had not been raised in a family where faith was considered particularly important and I had grown further and further away from any consideration of the faith aspect of life then I changed my path and decided to go to medical school because I became aware they were excite things happening in human biology and I wanted to be part of that but I discovered that studying medicine was not just about equations it was also about people people who were facing severe challenges some of them facing death and I was surprised to discover that some of them seemed to be at peace about that resting upon their faith in confidence that what they were facing was not so terrible after all and I looked at myself and I realized I would not feel that way I would be terrified I would be angry I would be anything but at peace and one day one of my patients after telling me about her faith which I felt sort of uncomfortable hearing about turned to me and said in a very simple way doctor what do you believe and I realized that my atheism had never really been based upon much in the way of real consideration of the evidence and that was not a good thing for a scientist to realize and so over the course of a couple years I embarked upon an effort to try to understand what do believers believe and why do they believe it and is it something that somebody like me who imagined myself completely driven by reason could in fact embrace as well and over those two years I realized that I'd missed out on a profoundly compelling series of arguments that indicate that atheism is in fact the least rational of all choices and that belief in God is in fact supported not only by spiritual and theological arguments but even by some pointers from nature now that was a surprise I realized that naturalism my worldview had limits yeah science was a natural reliable way to understand how the natural world works but science provides no answers to some very powerful important questions such as why am I here what does love mean I'm not talking about eros here I'm talking about love between friends love that you feel for people you've never met because they are people whose concerns are your concerns what happens after I die and is there a God the big one is it not immediately apparent that can't help you with those questions so if you're going to be an atheist you have to basically decide those are irrelevant or find some other kind of approach to them that involves a non naturalistic series of approaches well also as I said I began to realize that there there were pointers to the existence of something outside of nature from nature itself this is perhaps a trivial but it's not trivial at all when you think about it a statement there is something instead of nothing there's no reason that should be there is the Big Bang the fact that the universe had a beginning about 13.7 billion years ago in an unimaginable flash where the universe at that time smaller than a golf ball exploded and has been blowing itself apart ever since as the galaxies receded from each other and continued to do so today our laws of physics and mathematics can't really deal with what happened before that they break down so doesn't that cry out for an explanation have we observed nature to create itself I don't think so that seems almost by definition to imply a creator who must be outside of nature and frankly must be outside of time as well as space otherwise you have not solved the problem of who created the creator as soon as you admit the idea the creator has to be outside of time then that so-called infinite regress problem goes away Wigner's phrase the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics after all I was a student of physical chemistry I used those equations with the full confidence that they describe the behavior of matter and energy it never occurred to me wonder why they would work why should that yeah why should the universe why should gravity follow an inverse square law there's no reason that should be the case but it does begins to make you think that creator who's outside of time and space is also a pretty darn good mathematician and a pretty good physicist because there is this amazing observation really only coming to light in the last 30 years that the constants that determine the way in which matter and energy behave things like the gravitation constant have been precisely tuned to take on values that are necessary in order for any meaningful complexity to exist in the universe much less life if you take the gravitational constant and you allow it to be just slightly weaker than it currently is then after the Big Bang everything flies apart and there's never any coalescence of galaxies stars planets if it's a little too strong just by a tiny bit one part in a billion then in fact things do come together but a little too soon and the Big Bang is followed by a big crunch before we ever show up and that's one of 1515 physical constants which if you tweak their values by a tiny fraction I mean a very tiny fraction the whole thing doesn't work anymore faced with that evidence I think one is either forced to say there must be a multitude of parallel universes with different values of these constants which we can never observe where this was intentional now which of those requires more faith I had a trouble imagining this multiverse hypothesis was something I could embrace and yet it seemed more compelling to imagine that this was not an accident and then especially when it came to looking at ourselves asking okay if there is a God does God care about me or is God one of those deist kind of concepts that started the universe going and lost interest shortly thereafter I read CS Lewis his book Mere Christianity that first chapter of CS Lewis has an amazing title it's called right and wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe if you haven't read mere christianity that would be the first book i think anybody should look at who's interested in some of these arguments it changed my life and the argument he's making and that is a familiar one down through the centuries but it was unfamiliar to me and that is if you were looking for evidence in yourself of the existence of a creator who cared about human beings and you looked around and what you found was this inexplicable part of human nature which is this knowledge of right and wrong a constant across cultures and down through history although we interpret it differently we don't disagree that it's there and a desire to do the right thing even though we often don't and then we make excuses which only proves that we're under the law after all or we wouldn't feel the need to make those excuses wouldn't that be an interesting place to find written in our own hearts evidence of a Creator God who cares about human beings and who must be good and holy and is calling us to do the same I was compelled by that argument at age 26 I'm compelled by it today now you may say this is all about evolution that in fact human beings have been forced by natural selection to be nice to each other because that helps us all survive and you'd be right in certain instances such as if you're being nice to your own family because they share your DNA or you're being nice to people who might be nice to you next week so you're gonna have some reciprocal benefit but what do you do about those most radical acts of altruism where somebody reaches out to someone they've never met not even of their own group and does something that potentially puts their own life at risk we're in New York a little more than a year ago Wesley Autrey a African American a construction worker watched as a young man standing next to him on the subway platform went into an epileptic seizure and fell into the tracks in front of the oncoming number 1 train West the young man was white Wesley was black Wesley standing there with these two little girls asked a passerby to hold their hands and left onto the tracks realizing as he did so that there wasn't time to pull the young man to safety and so he covered that young man with his own body wedging them between the tracks as the train rolled over them miraculously with only a tiny fraction of an inch clearance they both survived and here is a photograph from the next day as Wesley standing next to the young man's father tells this story now are you not inspired by that is that not an example of what we consider human nobility ought to be of course it often isn't but we all look at that I mean yeah that's what that's what we should do and when called into action when we see an Oscar Schindler giving his own potential life a serious chance of ending by saving Jews from the Holocaust we admire that we think that's what we're called to do when we see a mother Theresa giving of herself to the dead and dying in Calcutta when we see Jesus talking about the Good Samaritan reaching out to one who others had passed by and reaching out to the one not of his own tribe we feel that was a lesson and we resonate with that lesson don't we well that's a scandal to evolutionary mechanisms but it is an absolutely compelling pointer towards something within us that seems to be calling us to be better than we would be in our own natural state and therefore may be in fact a connection to a Creator God who cares about us as individuals not just as a process of his creation of no particular subsequent interest all I've said to you here is what many have said better Immanuel Kant the wonderful philosopher wrote this sentence which is just what I've said two things fill me with constantly increasing admiration and awe the longer and more earnestly I reflect on them the starry heavens without it's all 19 and the moral law within okay I'm there okay you may say that all sounds fine and I became a believer at age 27 and a follower of Christ you're a believer and a geneticist isn't there a problem here doesn't your head explode after all you're the guy studies DNA don't you realize that DNA teaches us something about our relationship to other animals that is absolutely impossible for a Christian believer to accept isn't evolution incompatible with faith well many have asked that question I will tell you right now I have never seen a problem here but many have and I thought for fun I would show you an example of someone who posed that question in front of several million viewers somewhat to a white knuckled experience for me so can you guess who that might be there we go let's see my guest tonight is a DNA expert and the author of the language of God sorry doctor God doesn't speak DNA he speaks English please welcome dr. Francis Collins coming on a pleasure to be here you're going to take the heat man I'm ready hit me up you in the colbert autoclave and sterilize your ideas all right now you got a book here I'm getting right to it okay let's move some paper still the language of God all right a scientist presents evidence for belief wait science and belief you're a scientist you believe in that science stuff and you're a Christian correct absolutely are you going to be the only Christian in hell cuz you believe in evolution all that stuff right like me monkey man well you know actually some 40% of working scientists are also believers in a personal God who answers prayer sounds a bit like your God too so I guess I'll have company if we're all down there but you know what I don't think we will be where do you think we got the ability to do science you misused God's gifts you questioned God rather being obedient to his word no no this is an ability to see God's creation and all of its awesome glory for us to be able to appreciate that is a way to worship Him is it not and I don't know it's not maybe all my pain if you're asking me to render judgment here and I judge not lest I be judged yes I can check that first me man I don't think that we need to question what happens though we live our lives you know and I wish we were all still shepherds you know why do you think that we can weaken God's the beauty of the world and God's creation can be revealed through science like well show me what is this thing is a merry-go-round well it will rotate but it's not exactly a merry-go-round so this is DNA this is the stuff of life this is the information molecule of all living organisms and this is in my view also the way that God spoke life into being as a believer who's also somebody who studies this stuff it seems to me there's something pretty profound here all right I'll bite all right what what what day did you do this song people that you believe that God prayed the world seven days everything in the seven days six days and seven day rested or or other parts of the Bible you don't accept um I think they're parts of the Bible that maybe weren't intended to be absolutely literally interpreted I mean those those say God loves and forgives everyone like you okay I want that part to be yeah well we all want that part of any part of the Bible sir throughout all of it okay how long were those days those first three before there was a Sun you see this watch they see the little hand it goes around twice that's a day you suppose for one of these smarty acts and you don't that's a date so so Steven I think you need to understand something about evolution which seems to be such an enemy to you evolution is your friend you don't have to be dismayed about it all have imaginary friends but we grow out of it evolution is really God's plan for giving upgrades you're you're a fruit fly it doesn't work so well you need to do more than that you're you're a mammal but you still have that thumb that isn't in the right place upgrade you need a bigger brain in order to be able to have your intelligence we're still in evolution but that doesn't evolution imply that God makes mistakes like weren't the dinosaurs a big oops-a-daisy they were pretty cool while they were around yeah but God said enough of that that applies someday we could be extinct and I don't buy that well they needed to get the dinosaurs out of the way so you'd have your chance you know if they hadn't gone extinct I don't think us mammals would have had a niche to sort of land in so I don't think you ought to be too unhappy about that particular outcome now you are the head of the Human Genome Project that's correct okay so can we let's get into the science here for a second let's do do are we gonna be able to patent genes am I gonna be able to say I own my genes cuz I hope people gonna want a copy well people and I can see why that would be but I already know a lot of formula 401 and I want to make sure I'm rockin a clone mmm well I think you're okay on this because any genes that haven't already been patented can't be because we put all the DNA sequence in the public domain and now it's called prior art and nobody can claim it that was one of the goals of the human genome project is to stop all this patenting of fundamental information about our own genome that you can seem to be in the genome project you read the entire the entire DNA of the of human 3 billion of the letters that you see there in fact I brought you along here that's a DVD that has all 3 billion of those letters you can take it home and start reading through them AC GTG GTCC's you um did you read all three billion or did you skip over some of them like the like the whale chapter in Moby Dick that's a really good question there were people who proposed the idea of skipping over the stuff that they thought was junk but you know I don't think we're smart enough don't know what was junk and I bet you'd agree with that since it's God's language do you believe in cloning cloning as defined by human reproductive cloning another person I think that's a very bad thing just too bad cuz I was hoping the one good thing that had come out of this Human Genome Project was you as a Christian go to Turin get some of Jesus off the shroud and make another you know somebody tried to get a little bit of that cloth and see if they could get DNA out of it and ask the question what's the DNA of God but you know what the Shroud turned out to be a little too recent it was only for those of a little faith where me it's still very old doctor thank you for stopping by the human genome will be right back so I know that's filmed about two blocks from here and I think that was the widest my knuckles have ever been so okay Steven what's the problem here what really is the evidence for the theory of evolution let me just spend a couple minutes on this because it's such a stumbling block for so many people and yet I think it need not be so so do we in fact now almost 150 years after the publication of the Origin of Species Darwin's book came out in 1859 so next year is going to be a big Darwin year do we have evidence for this notion of descent from a common ancestor affected by random changes acted upon by natural selection to result in significant events over long periods of time well let's even ask it harder does it affect humans because this is clearly a place where many people begin to have some difficulty and let's be honest Darwin's theory is very counterintuitive it is not the sort of thing that you would have come up with just looking around you but what's the evidence well let's first compare genomes we've done our own genome well guess what we've done a bunch of others the mouse of the chimpanzee the dog the honeybee could have a Sisir chin the macaque even the Platypus has had its genome completed and about 30 others as well so what happens if you take those DNA sequences and you put them into a computer and you ask the computer to tell you what happened here the computer draws a tree a tree that looks like an evolutionary tree right down to the details of how various animals are placed onto that diagram including humans up there at the top and matches quite precisely to what had already been inferred by anatomy and by the fossil record that doesn't mean it's right but it's certainly interesting and fairly compelling that it comes down with the same answer but you could also say and certainly I've had people who are troubled by this say well you know God in the process of creating all of those different species used the same motifs over and over again so it wouldn't be surprising that their DNA sequences would be similar just on that basis that does not prove common descent but there are other issues when you start looking at the details make that position very difficult to sustain human chromosome 2 is an interesting one I showed you chromosomes a little bit ago here they are ordered in a slightly different way one through 22 and then there's the X and the y and now and underneath it are the chromosomes from a chimpanzee and they look a lot alike except there's one difference we humans have a big chromosome to the next the largest ones and chimps don't have that they have two smaller ones and when you look at those chimpanzee chromosomes and by the way the gorilla looks like the chimp we're the outlier here you can imagine that maybe those two chimpanzee chromosomes somewhere way back when or more specifically the ancestor of the chimpanzee who also looked like this there was a fusion of those chromosomes in the line that led to us that would be interesting hypothesis well now that we have the complete DNA sequence we can test that and we can test it in a specific way because it turns out that at the tips of all human and chimp and every other mammal chromosomes are specific sequences called telomeres that don't happen anywhere else well guess what in the human they do happen one other place they happen in the middle of chromosome two these colored circles that you see there including that one that's in the middle of a chromosome where it doesn't belong or basically the DNA signatures of the ends of chromosomes and our chromosome 2 in exactly the place you would have predicted based on that hypothesis of an ancestral fusion you find the DNA fossil showing that that's exactly what has happened now unless you're gonna postulate that God placed that sequence there to test our faith then you're in a tough spot to say that we humans are not part of this amazing tapestry of life let me give you another example why did those sailors get scurvy what is the deal about us and vitamin C why do we need this because many other mammals don't well I can tell you why here's a stretch of genes on the human the cow and the mouse that happened to be in the same order three of them this is taken from somewhere in the middle of the genome I'm not going to bother you about what these names mean but interestingly they're all lined up in a similar space with one exception which I will now show you that in the human that gene in the middle called gula which stands for glue no lactone oxidase but don't worry about that actually has a huge deletion in the middle of it that renders it completely non-functional and that is the gene that you need to make the enzyme that synthesizes ascorbic acid vitamin C and that's why the sailors got scurvy because they like all of us have a non-functional GU ello gene but isn't it interesting that there's a remnant of it there you can see it it's lost most of its original abilities to do anything but you can still find this DNA signature left over from that deletion event and it's in exactly the place in between these two other genes that common descent would predict it's very hard to look at that and not conclude that we are in fact part of this process and I could give you many other examples as well so I think it's fair to say and this is largely data now coming from the study of DNA and not so much for the fossil record the Darwin was right that common ancestry was correct that gradual change over time being operated on by natural selection has resulted in an amazing diversity of individual species and also in Homo sapiens well if evolution is true does that leave any room for God there's certainly many people who would argue you have to make a choice here and you have to resist evolution if you're a believer because it basically forces you into an atheistic perspective that my friends is really not the truth and let me explain how that I think is a misunderstanding even by those who are very much experts in this field you may have seen this book by Richard Dawkins a distinguished expositor of evolutionary theory an incredibly gifted writer who has written about evolution going back to the 1970s with his famous book The Selfish Gene and explained things like the non-intuitive aspects of this in ways that I think compelled many people to understand finally what Darwin was talking about but Dawkins has arrived in a different place now later in his career and is putting most of his effort into taking the evolutionary naturalistic perspective and arguing that that requires atheism and his book The God Delusion one of those rare books that requires no subtitle is his manifesto of that sort but don't you see immediately the problem here Dawkins is trying to argue the non-existence of God based on scientific grounds if God has any meaning unless you're a pantheist then God is at least in part outside of nature science has no ability to comment about things that are outside of nature it's a category error to try to do so and so to use scientific arguments to say yes or no to the existence of God is not a productive pathway and yet it is the main thesis of this book and perhaps Chesterton said it well in terms of atheism and its problems the most daring of all dogmas the assertion of a universal negative requiring in a supreme degree of confidence to say I know there is no God suppose the knowledge of God's existence just happens to be outside of what you know at the moment I debated Dawkins on this topic a couple of years ago you can still find this up on the internet if you want to read the arguments that went back and forth and ultimately Dawkins did at the end of the interview say well you know I can't rule out the possibility that there might be something grand in comprehensively complex that our human minds could not possibly get their minds about that might be outside of nature well okay he got it a convert right there but he's not subsequently repeated that statement on a regular basis but I think Dawkins problem frankly is that his view of faith is such a narrow one that he really has not taken the time to understand what mature believers believe and so he caricatures it and then finds it easy to dissemble well okay you may be wondering if I'm so confident there's not a problem here how in fact can evolution and faith be reconciled so let me conclude with what I see is a totally comfortable synthesis it is a synthesis which I think that 40% of scientists who are believers have largely arrived at many of them thinking they were the first ones to think of it but actually it's a fairly obvious pathway to put this all together and here it is Almighty God who is not limited in space or time created our universe 13.7 billion years ago with those parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity not by accident by intention over long periods of time God's plan included the mechanism of evolution to create this marvelous diversity of living things on our planet and most especially that plan included Homo sapiens human beings but after evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced house if you can call it that the human brain which was necessary for complicated things like spirituality they have a possibility then God gifted humanity and this is what Adam and Eve's story is all about with the knowledge of good and evil that's the moral law with free will and with an immortal soul and if you will Homo sapiens then became Homo Davina's we humans used our free will to break that moral law leading to our estrangement from God for me as a Christian Jesus Christ is the solution to that estrangement which otherwise would prevent me from being able to have relationship with God just as I have discovered God's existence so this is often referred to as theistic evolution but it's an unfortunate term because I think it turns a lot of people off it sounds like evolution is driving this it's the noun after all in theistic who knows what that means anyway so I jested alternative what I'm really talking about here is life BIOS the Greek we're talking Socrates here so it's okay to use Greek right by us life through logos the word in the beginning was the word the first chapter of John and the word spoke us into being or simply BioLogos if you will God's speaking life into being in that case yes DNA perhaps can be thought of metaphorically as the language of God there are objections to this synthesis of course we may be talking about them in a minute in the Q&A didn't evolution take an awfully long time well yeah for our perspective remember God's outside of time might have been a blink of an eye isn't evolution a purely random process doesn't that take God out of it well not if God pre-loaded the whole enterprise again being outside of time with full knowledge of the outcome or perhaps God inhabits the process in ways that we can't interpret or perceive the intelligent design movement would say well you're all well and good about common descent but don't tell me that evolution could produce these marvelous nano machines that we have inside of our cells or the bacteria have like the flagellum those require some sort of special intervention and that is the position that intelligent design has taken it is not a productive pathway because in fact many of those so-called irreducibly complex structures like the flagellum are turning out to have multiple intermediate steps that evolution could have well produced and one does not therefore have to postulate a supernatural intervention and frankly this is not only turning out to be bad science maybe it's not very good theology either that God had to step in and fix the process that had had so many flaws that it required numerous supernatural interventions to get the whole thing to work and of course especially from people who have grown up in a faith tradition that has taught them that the interpretation of Genesis must be one of literal 24-hour days this seems to conflict with that well is that interpretation required by the words of Genesis 1 and 2 if you haven't recently looked at Genesis wanted to have a look tonight and you will see that there are two stories of creation and they don't quite agree in the first story the plants appear before humans and the second story humans appear before plants now surely that was to indicate to us that we're not to interpret this in an absolutely literal way or already before you get halfway through Genesis 2 you've got a big problem my favorite theologian who wrote about this 1,600 years ago when he could hardly be accused of making apology for Darwin was Saint Agustin Augustine was absolutely obsessed it seems to with the whole issue of how to interpret Genesis and wrote no less than four books about it and summed all of that up in this marvelous paragraph that I wish was read more frequently in matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision this is writing about Genesis we find in holy scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received in such cases we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that if further progress sounds like science in the search for truth just Leander mines disposition we to fall with it I fear that the tension that has now especially in America come to the fore between those who see this truth of evolution based upon science and those who see the truth of scriptures based on the reading of the Bible has very much lost this sense of the way in which God's truth really can't contradict God's truth and I believe God gave us two books one was the book of God's Word that's the Bible and the other was the book of God's works which is nature and I think God gave us intelligence and curiosity and expected us to use those to go and learn about the details of God's creation and to celebrate what we discovered as a glimpse of God's mind as an opportunity to worship and I wrote about that in this book called the language of God but others have written about it beautifully as well and I'm relieved to see that it's not only the atheists who are writing strongly-worded books about science and faith mostly arguing that faith ought to be considered no longer relevant but some beautiful books are being written by people like my friend Darrell fog coming to peace with science my friend Carl Giberson are writing a book just out this summer called saving Darwin all of these scientists who are strong believers oh and Gingrich astronomer at Harvard writing a beautiful book called God's universe and recently David Myers at Hope College a friendly letter to skeptics and atheists basically trying to point out that the arguments coming from Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harrison Daniel Dennett the Four Horsemen of the Atheist apocalypse need not necessarily be embraced on the basis of reason they are in fact violating the usual rules of reason so here we are back to those two images one of the things I've been working on since the book came out as an effort to try to put up answers to the most frequently asked questions that get posed to me in emails and letters over the last two years in another couple of months that will be up on a website with the URL wo wo logos org and I hope people who are looking for a debate about that I will find that site and can engage on it in a way that should be pretty interesting and now I hope that perhaps some of those questions may be posed by all of you thank you very much

Channel: socratesinthecity

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Keywords: EricMetaxasSocrates, Socrates in the City, Eric Metaxas, Metaxas, Francis Collins, Genetics, DNA, Geneticist, NIH, Genesis, Stephen Colbert, doctor, Medical, Human Genome Project, genome, physician, cosmology, Richard Dawkins, eric Metaxas, socrates in the city, atheism, new atheism, evolution, biologos, geneticist, genetics, genomic research, science and faith, Christianity, intellectual, science, faith, scientist, eric metaxas, metaxas, francis, collins, francis collins, Templeton

Id: fR4RgZ5R9io

Length: 57min 7sec (3427 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 02 2020