Francis Collins

head of Human Genome Project after Francis Crick

Religious Cult member - Deism?

in Christianity Today magazine - *Science is our most powerful tool for studying the natural world, but science doesn't necessarily help us so much in trying to understand God; that's where faith comes in... If God decided to use the mechanism of Evolution to create human beings, who are we to say that was a bad way to do it?... The very promising embryonic Stem Cell research might potentially provide remarkable cures for those disorders. We don't know that, but it might. And at the same time, many people feel, I think justifiably, this type of research is taking liberties with the notion of the sanctity of human life, by manipulating cells derived from a human embryo.

for PBS - It's the most important organizing principle in my life... But, unless one chooses to make an absolutely literal interpretation of the book of Genesis and the story of creation - which I believe is not a choice that people made even before science came along in the last century to cast some doubt upon the timing of the creation events - other than that I am not aware of any reasons why one cannot be a completely dedicated person of faith who believes that God inspired the writings in the Bible, and also be a rigorous, intellectually completely honest scientist, who does not accept things about the natural world until they're proven... Science's domain is the natural. If you want to understand the natural world and be sure you're not misleading yourself, science is the way to do it... The spiritual world is another part of human existence. I would argue a very critical one, and just as you would not expect necessarily theology to always get it right when it comes to arguments about the structure of molecules, you should expect science to get it right when it comes to the spiritual aspects of human existence...I don't think science is ever going to answer the question, why are we here? Why is there a universe?