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Francis Collins

Francis Collins (born 1950), American geneticist who led the Human Genome Project and later directed the US National Institutes of Health. He defended Evolutionary Creation in The Language of God (2006) and founded the BioLogos Foundation in 2007.

History

Early life and conversion

Collins was born on 14 April 1950 in Staunton, Virginia, and grew up on a small farm, schooled at home for his early years. He took a chemistry degree at the University of Virginia (1970) and a PhD in physical chemistry at Yale (1974), then changed course to medicine and earned an MD at the University of North Carolina (1977) (Wikipedia, secondary).

By his own account he was an agnostic in college and an atheist, “a fairly obnoxious one,” in graduate school. In medical school a dying patient asked him what he believed, and he found he had no answer and had never looked at the evidence. He set out to confirm his atheism. A minister who lived down the street gave him C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and after nearly two years he became a Christian at 27: “I fought that for a long time, terrified of its consequences” (PBS Religion & Ethics Newsweekly interview, 2006). In The Language of God he adds that the decision came on a hike in the Cascade Mountains, at the sight of a frozen waterfall (Christianity Today sermon illustration quoting The Language of God, p. 225 (secondary)).

Scientist and administrator

At the University of Michigan in the 1980s, Collins helped develop “positional cloning,” a way of finding a disease gene by its place on a chromosome without knowing what the gene does. His lab, with Lap-Chee Tsui’s group in Toronto, found the cystic fibrosis gene in 1989, and later work contributed to finding the genes for neurofibromatosis and Huntington’s disease (Wikipedia, secondary).

In 1993 he became director of the US genome research centre, later the National Human Genome Research Institute, and ran the public Human Genome Project. On 26 June 2000 he stood in the White House with President Clinton and Craig Venter of Celera to announce a first draft of the genome. Clinton said, “Today, we are learning the language in which God created life.” Collins said it was “humbling for me and awe-inspiring to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God” (transcript, genome.gov). The project was completed in 2003.

President Obama appointed him director of the National Institutes of Health in 2009. He stayed through the Trump administration and into Biden’s, stepping down on 19 December 2021, then served as acting presidential science adviser in 2022. He retired from the NIH in early 2025 (Wikipedia, secondary). He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2007) and the Templeton Prize (2020).

Influence

The 2000 announcement made Collins the public face of genomics, and he used that platform to argue that a working scientist could be a convinced Christian. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press, 2006, Archive.org) became a bestseller. In 2007 he and his wife Diane Baker founded BioLogos to argue for “harmony between science and biblical faith” (Templeton Prize announcement). He gave up its leadership on joining the NIH in 2009, and later presidents Darrel Falk and Deborah Haarsma made it the main institutional home of Evolutionary Creation among evangelicals (Wikipedia, “BioLogos”, secondary). He followed with Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith (2010), The Language of Science and Faith with Karl Giberson (2011), and The Road to Wisdom (2024).

Key ideas and contributors

The moral law points to God. Collins’s main argument for belief comes straight from Lewis. Every human culture has a sense of right and wrong that binds people even against their interest, and it can drive acts, such as costly self-sacrifice for strangers, that evolution “would be scandalized by.” He treats this as a clue to a moral lawgiver (PBS interview). The idea echoes Paul on a law “written on their hearts” (Romans 2:14–15).

Evolution is how God created. Collins accepts common descent as settled: “the evidence that we are all descended from a common ancestor is overwhelming” (PBS interview). He points to shared “junk” DNA and broken genes in the same places in humans and other primates as the kind of evidence a designer starting from scratch would not leave. In the book he proposed the name “BioLogos” for the view that God created life through evolution, the position this map calls Evolutionary Creation.

Genesis need not be read as science. Collins argues that Genesis 1 is a theological account of who made the world and why, not a description of how. He appeals to Augustine, whose Literal Meaning of Genesis warned Christians against making claims about the natural world that unbelievers can see are false (PBS interview).

Against “God of the gaps.” Collins rejects intelligent design, calling it “a ‘God of the gaps’ theory” that will collapse as science explains what it now cannot. He also rejects Young Earth Creationism as incompatible with the evidence. Faith, he argues, should rest on what science cannot in principle explain, such as the moral law and the existence of a universe fit for life (PBS interview; Creation and Evolution).

Collins stands in a line of evangelical scientists who accepted evolution, but his fame gave the position a reach it had not had. Karl Giberson, Darrel Falk and the geneticist Dennis Venema carried the argument forward through BioLogos.

Key controversies

From young-earth creationists. For young-earth critics, Collins and BioLogos let science overrule Scripture. Answers in Genesis ran a piece charging that “BioLogos is guilty of exalting man’s fallible ideas above God’s Word” and warning that it undermines the historical Adam and the Fall (John UpChurch, “The Danger of BioLogos,” Answers, 2011). The underlying issue is Biblical Inerrancy and how far the early chapters of Genesis bind the reader on matters of history and nature (Scripture and Inerrancy).

Adam and Eve. The sharpest theological pressure came over human origins. Collins argued from human genetic diversity that the ancestral population “numbered something like 10,000, not two individuals” (Christianity Today, June 2011, summarizing The Language of God (secondary)). That rules out all humans descending from a single couple a few thousand years ago, and it pushed BioLogos writers to propose alternatives: an Adam chosen from a larger population, or an Adam read as a figure for Israel or humanity. Critics answered that Paul ties sin and redemption to one man (Romans 5:12–19), so the doctrine of the Fall cannot survive without him.

From intelligent design. The Discovery Institute circle objected that Collins’s arguments from “junk” DNA assumed function would not be found, and that later research found function in much non-coding DNA. They also argued that a God who leaves no detectable trace in biology is hard to tell apart from no God (unverified: summary of the debate, no single source checked).

From the new atheists. Collins debated Richard Dawkins in Time in 2006 (“God vs. Science,” Time, November 5, 2006). When Obama nominated him to the NIH in 2009, Sam Harris argued in the New York Times (“Science Is in the Details,” July 27, 2009; reprint on samharris.org) that a man who believed God had inserted crucial components into human nature, the moral law among them, should not be entrusted with the future of American biomedical research. His defenders pointed to his scientific record.

Bioethics and public health. As NIH director Collins carried out the Obama administration’s 2009 expansion of funding for human embryonic stem cell research, which put him at odds with many pro-life Christians who otherwise welcomed a believer in the post. During the COVID-19 pandemic, critics faulted his role in dismissing the Great Barrington Declaration and his oversight of grants related to coronavirus research (Wikipedia, secondary).

What remains unresolved

Collins showed that a leading scientist could hold historic Christian belief in public without apology. He did not settle how that belief fits the evidence. Evolutionary creationists still disagree among themselves about Adam, the Fall and the origin of death, and young-earth and old-earth critics still hold that those questions show the cost of the synthesis.