More About Christian Evolution

One day this week, in my email, there was a link to a beliefnet article.... an interview with Francis Collins, the well known Christian scientist who is the author of the book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. It is the same guy who participated in the Time Magazine debate I mentioned in my last post. I am going to take a few quotes from the interview.

It's also now been possible to compare our DNA with that of many other species. The evidence supporting the idea that all living things are descended from a common ancestor is truly overwhelming. I would not necessarily wish that to be so, as a Bible-believing Christian. But it is so. It does not serve faith well to try to deny that.

Well, that pretty much sums that up. With his credentials...and his faith, it is hard to simply ignore what he has to say.

About God's purpose of making mankind:

I believe God used the mechanism of evolution to achieve that goal. And while that may seem to us who are limited by this axis of time as a very long, drawn-out process, it wasn't long and drawn-out to God. And it wasn't random to God.

[He] had the plan all along of how that would turn out. There was no ambiguity about that.
While it may seem to us that this whole process has the risk of randomness and, therefore, an unpredictable outcome, that was not the case for God.

Concerning prayer he says:

For me, in my Christian belief, prayer is not an opportunity to manipulate God into doing what you want him to. Prayer is an opportunity to have a conversation with God to try to get in tune with what his will is.

The words in the Lord's Prayer are not "my will be done", but "your will be done.

He looks at DNA research as an opportunity to worship:

To be able to look, for the first time in human history, at all three billion letters of the human DNA--which I think of as God's language--it gives us just a tiny glimpse into the amazing creative power of his mind.

When asked what he wished scientists knew about believers and visa versa he said:

They draw the conclusion that belief is something that is arrived at purely by emotion. They (Scientists)don't perceive the notion that faith can be a completely rational choice, as it was for me.

Forty percent of scientists are believers in a personal God to whom one can pray and expect an answer. That's proven by various surveys.