Francis Collins

Dr. Francis Collins (born April 14, 1950), a former atheist who converted to Christianity. He is a theistic evolutionist, the founder of BioLogos an organization that promotes evolution in the church, and former head of the NIH. He was director of the National Institutes of Health until his resignation in December of 2021, he was appointed to that position by President Barack Hussein Obama in 2009. Pope Benedict XVI has also appointed him to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Formerly, Collins was the head of the Human Genome Project at the National Human Genome Research Institute.

He is the author of "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief" and is a speaker for the Veritas Forum at college campuses. He cites C.S. Lewis's writings on Christianity in turning him away from atheism, which he now renounces as the least rational worldview.

Views

Collins promotes theistic evolution, which he calls BioLogos. He believes a non-literal interpretation of creation as it appears in Genesis. However, he believes the fine-tuning of the physical constants and the existence of a Moral Law prove the existence of a loving God.

Creation Ministries International declared concerning Collins theistic evolutionary views:

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All Christians, creationists included, can find much to like in The Language of God. Collins’ personal story is fascinating. His intention in writing the book is excellent: to spread the word that faith is reasonable. Like Collins, we want to see an end to the widespread false impression that faith and science are incompatible. However, we must sadly conclude that most of Collins’ arguments—his means to the laudable ends that we all want to further—are going down the wrong path. Instead of creating a harmony between faith and science, theistic evolution subsumes the authority of Scripture to the authority of the latest scientific paper, leaving philosophical confusion in its wake.

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BeliefNet wrote concerning Collins' views on abortion:

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In a 1998 book he co-authored, Principles of Medical Genetics, he considers a bioethical situation where a genetic counselor is discussing with a (married) mother, 8 weeks pregnant, whether to abort her child because there’s a 7 to 8 percent chance the child will have a mild learning disability. Should the mother indicate an interest in aborting, Collins and his two co-authors commend to the counselor a stance of “respect for [patient] autonomy” and “nondirective counseling.” In other words, the medical professional in this context should be morally neutral.

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Collins is also an advocate for therapeutic cloning without the use of embryonic stem cells. In 2020, he was awarded the Templeton Prize.

Collins is on record stating he does not definitively believe, as most pro-lifers do, that life begins at conception, and his tenure at NIH has been marked by extreme anti-life, pro-LGBT policies. Other than his proclamations that he is, himself, a believer, the NIH director espouses nearly no public positions that would mark him out as any different from any extreme Left-wing bureaucrat. He has not only defended experimentation on fetuses obtained by abortion, he has also directed record-level spending toward it.

Impact as NIH Director

Greenlighting implanting mice with cells from aborted infants and related experimentation

Among the priorities the NIH has funded under Collins — a University of Pittsburgh experiment that involved grafting infant scalps onto lab rats, as well as projects that relied on the harvested organs of aborted, full-term babies. Some doctors have even charged Collins with giving money to research that required extracting kidneys, ureters, and bladders from living infants.

When asked about the NIH funding experiments such as University of Pittsburgh studies that involved harvesting body parts from babies at various stages of development and grafting infant scalps onto lab rats and others, Collins did not deny knowing about or green lighting such projects.

Evangelical leaders like Russell Moore have been under fire since The Daily Wire detailed their praise and promotion of Collins despite his record of the NIH funding controversial transgender research on minors and experimentation on organs collected from aborted infants.

Abuse of position to influence Evangelical views

Francis Collins has asked pastors to repeat views to their congregations put forward by the CDC and NIH. During a interview[1] by Wheaton College dean Ed Stetzer on the podcast "Church Leadership" former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins said,

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I want to exhort pastors once again to try to use your credibility with your flock to put forward the public health measures that we know can work. -former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins

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Megan Basham from [[Daily Wire|The Daily Wire has warned:

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Francis Collins has been an especially successful envoy for the Biden administration, delivering messages to a mostly-Republican, Christian populace who would otherwise be reluctant to hear them. In their presentation of Collins’ expertise, these pastors and leaders suggested that questioning his explanations as to the origins of the virus or the efficacy of masks was not simply a point of disagreement but sinful. This was a charge likely to have a great deal of impact on churchgoers who strive to live lives in accordance with godly standards. Perhaps no other argument could’ve been more persuasive to this demographic. This does not mean these leaders necessarily knew that the information they were conveying to the broader Christian public could be false, but it does highlight the danger religious leaders face when they’re willing to become mouth organs of the government -Megan Basham for the Daily Wire via Illinoisfamily.org

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Both Collins and Stetzer were hardly shy about the fact that they were asking ministers to act as the administration’s go-between with their congregants.

Carl R. Trueman, fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has stated:

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Francis Collins was lauded as a faithful presence by a number of evangelical leaders upon his retirement, even though, as The Daily Wire’s Megan Basham [15] recently demonstrated in painful detail, Collins’ “faithful presence” at the National Institutes of Health does not seem to have gone beyond that of faithfully turning up to work. In the real world, there are humble employees all over the country for whom “faithful presence” of the truly Christian kind comes with significant personal discomfort and professional cost -Carl R. Trueman

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Rob Dreher, author of the bestselling book Live Not by Lies, said of this revelation:

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it shows how we can allow ourselves to be used and deceived by those in whom we place authority. Though Evangelicalism is not my world, nor is science, I have for years uncritically assumed that Francis Collins was a Good Guy™, was One Of Us™, and so forth. Why? Because others I knew and trusted said so. That was it. It really was. That Collins was so useless as a Christian when it came to the ways he ran NIH came as a shock to me when I first read about it last fall. I assumed that because the people I know and trust vouched for him, he must be fine. We all do this, and we have to do this, because nobody can get through life being radically skeptical of everybody else. All of us have a network of people we trust as authoritative. What none of us really know, though, is whether or not those who have our trust deserve it. -Rob Dreher

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See Also

• Anthony Fauci
• Faucism
• NIH
• BioLogos

External links

• How The Federal Government Used Evangelical Leaders To Spread Covid Propaganda To Churches |(original article with paywall from The Daily Wire)
• How The Federal Government Used Evangelical Leaders To Spread Covid Propaganda To Churches |(free reprint from Illinoisfamily.org)
• House Republicans Accuse Top Bide Health Officials Of ‘Stonewalling’ Probe Into COVID-19 Origins | Daily Wire
• [2]
• BioLogos: House of Heresy & False Teaching | Answers in Genesis
• In Leaked Audio Former NIH Director/New Biden Science Adviser Laughs Over Threatening Unemployment To Force Vaccines, Blames Trump For COVID-19 Deaths

References

• The Language of God, 2006