Quotes from Francis S. Collins

Faith and reason are not, as many seem to be arguing today, mutually exclusive. They never have been. The letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament defines faith as 'the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of the things not seen.

What, to use Noble Laureate Wigner's classic phrase, accounts for the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics'?

But there is, alas, no doubt that we are becoming a vocabulary-deprived nation—nay, planet. Words have been dropping off all through this century, but the loss increased radically in the sixties with the immorality of "limited vocabulary.

In fact, genetic medicine has brought the problems of rare genetic conditions right to my own door.

Discoveries about genetics are not limited to just those 6,000 conditions of a strongly hereditary nature, however. We are now in the midst of a genetic revolution that will touch all of us in numerous ways:

an essay in the Human Rights Reader, Rorty suggested that the basis for human rights is not rationality or moral law but "what Baier calls 'a progress of sentiments.'…It is the result of what I have been calling 'sentimental education.'"17 So the basis for morality, in Rorty's view, is "sentiment." We are back to preferences and tastes. But whose sentiments? Rorty's? A Nazi's? Or someone else's?

The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming

In that context, I find theistic evolution, or BioLogos, to be by far the most scientifically consistent and spiritually satisfying of the alternatives. This position will not go out of style or be disproven by future scientific discoveries. It is intellectually rigorous, it provides answers to many otherwise puzzling questions, and it allows science and faith to fortify each other like two unshakable pillars, holding up a building called Truth.

The pure, clean water of spiritual truth is placed in rusty containers, and the subsequent failings of the church down through the centuries should not be projected onto the faith itself, as if the water had been the problem.

Science's domain is to explore nature. God's domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science. It must be examined with the heart, the mind, and the soul—and the mind must find a way to embrace both realms.