Biologist Francis Collins has returned to the limelight this fall with a new book, The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust. The book covers an array of topics, one of which is intelligent design (ID). Among other things, Collins uses the book to dust off his old refutation of biochemist Michael Behe and other scientists who see evidence of ID in biology. 

Unfortunately for Collins, his new attack is a dud. The debate has moved on, and he clearly hasn’t kept up.

First, Some Context

Before serving as Director of the NIH (2009-2021), Collins was probably the nation’s best-known scientist who identified as an evangelical Christian. This was due mostly to his bestselling book The Language of God (2006), which supplied a moving account of how Collins came to embrace Christianity. The book secured for Collins a large group of enthusiastic followers among many Christians.

Post-NIH and post-COVID, Collins’s reputation was tarnished for many traditionally minded people of faith, especially those who are pro-life. Under his leadership, the NIH funded macabre experiments using tissue from aborted babies and spent millions of tax dollars to harvest tissue and body parts from aborted babies for research. Collins’s anti-life record should not have been a surprise to anyone who knew his pre-NIH comments on the issue, but many of his pro-life supporters blithely ignored his stated views before his tenure at the NIH.

Collins retired from the NIH at the end of 2021. He then served as acting science advisor to President Biden in 2022. His new book seems to be an attempt to re-enter the public conversation as an authoritative spokesperson for science. 

When it comes to the relationship between science and faith, Collins’s new book basically recapitulates the views he previously expressed in The Language of God. 

That is both good and bad.

The Language of God was uneven in its arguments. On the positive side, Collins essentially embraced the idea of intelligent design when it comes to cosmology — suggesting that the Big Bang and the fine-tuning of the laws of physics point to a supernatural Creator. Collins also indicated that Darwinian biology was inadequate to explain morality. On the negative side, Collins uncritically embraced Darwinian evolution as the only credible explanation for the development of living things, and he launched a full-throated critique of intelligent design in biology.

“A Certain Amount of Hubris”

The title of Collins’s original book was ironic because it seemed to suggest he thought DNA was “the language of God,” reflecting the specific intentions of an intelligent Creator. Yet Collins actually argued in his book that our genome is riddled with useless “junk DNA” produced by the haphazard process of Darwinian evolution. Collins acknowledged that it required “a certain amount of hubris… for anyone to call any part of the genome ‘junk,’” but that didn’t stop him from doing so anyway. At one point, he asserted that nearly half “of the human genome” is “made up of… genetic flotsam and jetsam.” (p. 136) For Collins, this provided decisive evidence against intelligent design in biology because in his view an intelligent Creator wouldn’t have included so much useless junk. 

As I have written previously, the specifics of Collins’s original attack on intelligent design in biology have not aged well, especially his reliance on the concept of ubiquitous  “junk DNA,” an idea that has been largely discredited by mainstream science. 

Sound Familiar?

In his new book, Collins reaffirms that naturalistic evolution can’t explain morality (Kindle edition, p. 139, 168). He again points to fine-tuning (pp. 140-142), and he offers a brief argument about the Big Bang supporting a supernatural Creator that sounds very much like Stephen Meyer in Return of the God Hypothesis (p. 140).

But things go off the rails in the realm of biology, where it becomes clear Collins is still haunted by Darwin’s ghost.

So he takes up the cudgel once more against intelligent design, although his argument has been reduced. For example, you won’t find him invoking “junk DNA” as a defeater for ID in his current book. But Collins can’t resist going after biochemist Michael Behe one more time.

Behe became famous for proposing that many molecular systems are “irreducibly complex,” meaning they require all their parts to perform their function. Behe argues that such systems cannot be produced by an unguided step-by-step process like Darwinian evolution because the individual parts don’t have value for the system until they are all in place; hence, natural selection would never have selected them one at a time. Behe’s iconic example of an “irreducibly complex” system is the bacterial flagellum, a sophisticated molecular propeller that enables bacteria to move through liquid. 

In The Language of God, Collins confidently assured readers that producing the flagellum would pose no problem for Darwinian evolution because there is a less complex “type III secretory apparatus” that the flagellum could have evolved from. 

Science has not been kind to that argument. Biologists now think the flagellum originated before the type III secretory apparatus, and thus cannot have been its ancestor. Either the type III secretory apparatus devolved from the flagellum, or it originated independently from it. Either way, the flagellum existed first, and the secretory apparatus came later. Contra Collins, the secretory apparatus offers absolutely no explanation for how the flagellum came to be through a Darwinian process. 

A Sweeping Statement

Someone must have informed Collins of this problem, because the “type III secretory apparatus” is nowhere to be found in his new critique of Behe. Instead, he offers the new sweeping statement: 

[P]rogressive scientific advances have shown that nanomachines like the flagellum have actually been assembled from components that had their own previous important functions, making the outcome understandable on the basis of traditional evolutionary mechanisms… Ultimately, ID theory has fallen victim to advances in science that reveal natural explanations for constructs that were claimed to require supernatural explanation.

p. 153

Notice that Collins offers no specifics in this new statement. No examples. No actual evidence. Nor does he provide any citations whatsoever to back up his sweeping claim. He simply asserts that “progressive scientific advances have shown.” 

Contrary to Collins’s science by sound bite, those “progressive scientific advances” don’t appear to exist according to several scientists I consulted. Michael Behe himself told me: “As I showed in Darwin Devolves, Darwinists can’t even account for a crummy disulfide bond, let alone a fantastically complex molecular machine like the bacterial flagellum. Francis Collins simply ignores all difficulties and pledges allegiance to the only explanation academia permits.”

To be sure, evolutionists continue to speculate that irreducibly complex structures must have been cobbled together from simpler parts with different functions through an unguided process. But they definitely haven’t “shown” that they were “actually… assembled” in that way. Indeed, the main concrete example they proposed for this hypothesis with regard to the flagellum (the type III secretory system) has been shown not to fit the hypothesis.

Going Deeper

But the problem with Collins’s position goes deeper.

Suppose evolutionists could identify an array of simpler systems that preceded in time an irreducibly complex molecular machine like the flagellum and resembled some of its parts. In and of itself, this would not prove their case.

Behe points out the flaw: “Even if there were resemblances to other machines, it would still beg the question of whether the resemblances were common design and if the ‘assembly’ process were random or guided. Collins is simply ignoring all such difficulties.”

Ultimately it isn’t intelligent design that “has fallen victim to advances in science.” It is Darwin’s outdated theory. Collins needs to brush up on the current state of evolutionary theory. If he did, he might realize that the “traditional evolutionary mechanisms” he places his trust in are increasingly being recognized as insufficient to explain the kinds of complex systems we see in life.

A Final Observation 

Collins presents the only available explanatory options as “natural explanations” or “supernatural explanation[s]” — without explaining what he means by “natural” or “supernatural.” Perhaps a clearer description of the choice to be made is this: Can the origin of an irreducibly complex system be wholly explained by an unguided/unintelligent process, or does it require a process guided by an intelligent agent?

Sadly, Collins avoids the hard work of actually trying to answer that question.