In the Washington Post, Michael Gerson writes about Francis Collins, President Obama’s nominee for director of the National Institutes of Health, as a scientist and an evangelical. He points to Collins’ assertion that there are two ways of knowing:
The first category is scientific knowledge—the kind achieved through testing, weighing and probing. And within its competence, according to Collins, science is supreme. He is, for example, a strong defender of Darwinian evolution, a theory he calls “absolutely incontrovertible.” Collins is particularly compelling when discussing the genetic evidence for the common ancestry of all living things—the precise similarities between our DNA and that of other species, and the precisely located mutations that can be explained only by common origins. Religious texts, in his view, must be interpreted in light of these scientific facts.
But Collins argues that there is a second way of knowing—a realm of morality and metaphysics that involves not physical proof but probability based on evidence. Some scientists assert that anything beyond the possibility of touching and testing is equally mythological—from unicorns to God to morality to hope to meaning to love. Collins calls this kind of reductionism a “logical fallacy.” By definition, science yields information about only the physical world, which does nothing to prove that the physical world is all there is. As human beings, we still seek to know why things exist and how we should live. Science is silent on these matters; we need not be. Collins contends that the moral law within us, and the fine-tuning of physical constants in the universe, provides “signposts” (not proofs) that lead toward God. (See Collins’s book, “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” for his full and informed explanation.)
For Collins, modern science and Christianity are not competing answers to the same question; they are ways of thinking about two very different sets of questions, both of which should be taken seriously.
Read the full article here.