Francis Collins on receiving
the Templeton Prize
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| Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, testifies before a U.S.House appropriations subcommittees hearing, Washington, 4 March 2020 (AFP) |
In an interview with Vatican News, 2020 Templeton Prize
recipient Francis Collins talks about his surprise at the nomination and about
how science and faith can dialogue with each other.
By Sr Bernadette Mary Reis, fsp
On 20 May of this year, it was announced that the annual
Templeton Prize was awarded to geneticist and physician Francis Collins. The
statement that announced the news cited Collin’s ability to demonstrate that
“religious faith can motivate and inspire rigorous scientific research” and his
advocacy “for the integration of faith and reason”.
Dr Collins is most well-known for heading the Genome Project
at the turn of the century. Since 2009, he has directed the National Institutes
of Health in the United States. The general public became acquainted with Dr
Francis Collins through The Language of God: A Scientist Presents
Evidence for Belief, published in 2006. The book chronicles his own journey
from atheism to agnostism to Christian Faith. In October 2009, Pope Benedict
XVI appointed him to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Surprise at being a Templeton Prize recipient
In an interview with Vatican News, Dr Collins expressed his
surprise at having been named the Templeton Prize recipient for 2020.
“I never would have thought of myself anywhere near this
category”, he said. He never considered himself as an “expert in theology”.
Being in the company of past recipients such as “Mother Theresa, Billy Graham
and Archbishop Desmond Tutu”, he said, is “an incredible honor”.
Straddling two worlds
As the Templeton Prize statement itself acknowledges, Dr
Francis Collins’s work has been recognized by two worlds: the scientific world
and the religious world. These worlds are often kept apart from each other. Yet
Dr Collins believes these two worlds can instead be in dialogue with each other
because God wrote the book that each one uses.
“I think God gave us two books. The book of God's words the
Bible which I've read every day and the book of God's works, which is
creation”. As a scientist, Dr Collins said that through science he can
“appreciate the grandeur of God's creation” which he says is a form of worship.
One such place where this dialogue takes place is at the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Dr Collins says that among his peers are “some
of the most visionary scientists in the world”. While not all are believers, he
characters the atmosphere among them as one in which they can “learn from each
other and perhaps perceive a little bit more than we did before the amazing
creation that we've been given by God himself”.
Affinity with Pope Francis’s ecological vision
Dr Collins says that he “totally resonates” with Pope
Francis’s ecological vision in Laudato si’ rooted in the
Gospel of creation. While we “cannot prove God’s existence through science,” he
said, “there are certainly aspects of what we learn by studying nature that
seem to call out for an explanation”.
There science points to the fact that there is a “Creator
who has incredible intelligence, who's a pretty good physicist and a
mathematician, but who also has left all kinds of signposts that the Creator is
interested in us and getting to know us”.
Problem of suffering
Dr Collins expressed an urgency in finding a vaccine for
Covid-19, in the statement he released on the announcement that he was this
year’s Templeton Prize recipient. He wrote that “almost my every waking moment
is consumed by the effort to find treatments and a vaccine for Covid-19”. He
also wrote that the suffering caused by the virus brought some doubts to the
fore regarding how a loving God can permit all this suffering.
“The question of why a loving God allows suffering has got
to be the toughest one” that believers and non-believers face. His own faith
tells him that God understands our difficulty. “Jesus Christ suffered in ways
that I could not possibly imagine in his death on the cross. And so I don't
have to explain to God why suffering is a terrible thing”.
Covid-19 research
As a physician who has dealt with suffering all of his
professional life, Dr Collins says that he looks to Jesus who spent a lot of
time healing people. “I think we were called to do the same. And so if God has
given us tools through science to find ways to address medical problems
including now Covid-19, I think we’re called to do everything we can to bring
that forward, to alleviate suffering and to prevent deaths”.
This is his primary task right now as he works from home:
“trying to find ways for those vaccines and those treatments and those
diagnostics to get developed faster than anybody could have imagined and I'm
not regretting every minute that I have to spend on this. Lives hang in the
balance.”
Is there a God?
To anyone on the same search for God that he had chronicled
in his book The Language of God, Dr Collins has this message:
“Is there any question more important for us to address
as we are given this brief blink-of-an-eye to live on this planet than this
one? Is there a God and does that God care about me? I avoided that question
for my first quarter century. It made me uncomfortable. I didn't have anything
really to lean on to know where I might find answers and I thought maybe there
just weren't going to be any…so better spend my time on something else. Then my
eyes got opened to the fact that there are serious ways to explore that and
they lead you into interesting insights about yourself and about God. It’s
ultimately the most important exploration I've ever done. I've searched the
human genome. I've had the chance to work on cancer and sickle cell disease and
heart disease and a whole variety of other conditions. But the most important
significant exploration I ever did was trying to find out for me – is there a
God it does He care about me? And the answer is yes. And I would encourage
anybody … who hasn't taken the time to do so the start down that path. Maybe
start with the Book of John in the Bible. If you need a more contemporary view
of exactly how people who believe in science and can also see faith is
important check out the Biologos website or maybe, modestly, have a look at my
book The Language of God to see how I traveled that path and
see if it makes to you.”
About the Templeton Prize
The Templeton Prize is awarded annually in recognition of
those scientists resonate with “Sir John Templeton’s philanthropic vision:
harnessing the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the
universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it”.
Some recent Templeton Prize recipients include King Abdullah
II of Jordan in 2018, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks in 2016, Tomáš Halík in 2014,
Desmond Tutu in 2013, the Dalai Lama in 2012, Billy Graham in 1982 and Mother
Teresa in 1973. Dr Collins will be receive the Prize later in the year in a
virtual ceremony.
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