Jeff is blogging about Francis Collins, a Christian who is head of the National Genome Research Institute. My thinking about the faith-science interface continues to evolve (pun intended), and I really want to do a longer essay on where I am in that journey. For now, I’d like to note a few potential misunderstandings about Collins’ position.
Collins is a proponent of theistic evolution. Jeff wonders if Collins is theologically confused, and offers some questions he’d like to ask Collins, concluding with this one:
Do you believe that God still intervenes in our world on a daily basis?
Theistic evolution proponents like Collins would answer with a resounding “yes,” because they view everything as dependent upon God’s sovereign, sustaining will. It is not a Deistic “wind it up and let it go” position.
Whether God “intervenes” regularly in a miraculous way — outside the ordinary contingent processes He has established in the created order, for example through miraculous healings — is a different question. And, whether God “intervened” in natural history outside the ordinary contingent processes He built into the creation to bring about specific life forms is yet again another question. The related question is whether we today can “detect” such interventions as evidence of “design,” as intelligent design advocates suggest.
On this later set of points concerning natural history, I think Collins would probably say “no” and “no.” But I don’t think that reflects theological confusion. Rather, it reflects a consistent theology of God’s sovereignty and of creation. The theology is that God sovereignly designed into creation the natural laws and processes that support life; that such natural laws and processes are not necessary within the potential range of possible created orders, but are entirely contingent on God’s will; and that God continually supervenes over the outworking of those laws and processes so that creation evolves as He ordains. “Miracles,” in contrast, are different sorts of limited interventions into the created order that God uses usually to convey a particular message or to validate a faith claim. In this view, we would expect “miracles” to stand out from the contingent processes of creation, but the ordinary development of biological life probably would not look “miraculous” in this sense.
A good place to explore this theology of creation is in the work of Thomas Torrance (whose work I’ve only begun to digest). It seems to me to be a thoroughly Reformed position. And, it’s consistent with our everyday experience — I would say that the thunderstorms we had in New Jersey last week were explainable both in terms of ordinary natural forces and as creative acts of God, for example.
So to dig a little deeper, the real point of contention is a point of hermenuetics, not a broader point of theology: how should we read Genesis 1-4? Jeff is afraid that Collins views Genesis 1-4 as merely an “allegory.” I’d suggest that the “allegorical” / “non-allegorical” distinction isn’t very helpful anymore. Certainly old earth concordists like Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe don’t read this part of the Bible strictly “literally.” They take the “days” of Genesis 1 to be figures of speech signifying indeterminate periods of time, not literal days, for example, and the “serpent” of Genesis 3 to be a figure of Satan, not a literal talking snake.
We could go on and on trying to understand the figures of speech in Genesis 1-4, and that’s exactly the point: it isn’t by anyone’s reckoning a simple historical narrative. Even the young earth creation advocates who claim they provide a simple narrative reading of these passages, in my view, fudge on lots of details (such as why bacteria probably didn’t die before the fall, for example, or the talking snake again).
The truth is that the early chapters of Genesis represent a unique literary genre that has to be handled carefully in relation to categories of thought, such as our modern notion of “science,” that are foreign to it. In this regard, I’ve found Peter Enns’ Inspiration and Incarnation (I reviewed it here) to be the best book out there right now on the hermeneutical questions from a conservative, Reformed perspective.
So, I think Collins’ position is a legitmate one for evangelicals of a Reformed bent. Would I agree with Collins on every point of interpretetion with respect to Genesis 1-4? Probably not. In contrast to many (maybe most) in the “strong” theistic evolution camp, I don’t think Genesis 1-4 can be considered merely “broken myth” or otherwise completely unhistorical. And, I think the beauty, order, and teleology of creation, including evolutionary processes inherent within it, suggest “design” to rational, honest inquirers, and may not be fully explainable even at a basic process level without reference to God. But nevertheless, I think Collins is on the right track in trying to reach a wholistic understanding of these questions that doesn’t inevitably cast “faith” and “science” into combative culture war camps.