Francis Collins famous quotes

As an atheist evolving to agnosticism, and seeking answers to whether or not belief in God is potentially rational, my life was turned upside down 35 years ago by reading C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity.
-- Francis Collins

#Atheist #Reading #Years

Prayer is, for me, not an opportunity to ask God to do stuff for me. Prayer is an opportunity to open myself, to try and understand his will, and oftentimes it's a prayer of thanksgiving, and sometimes it's a prayer of supplication, and sometimes it is just worship.
-- Francis Collins

#Prayer #Opportunity #Trying

There are 15 constants- the gravitational constant, various constants about the strong and weak nuclear force, etc.- that have precise values. If any one of those constants was off by even one part in a million, or in some cases, by one part in a million million, the universe could not have actually come to the point where we see it. Matter would not have been able to coalesce, there would have been no galaxy, stars, planets or people
-- Francis Collins

#Strong #Stars #People

What wakes me up at night is this next generation and what's happening to them. And they're invariably excited about the science that they're doing, but invariably anxious about where there's a future.
-- Francis Collins

#Night #Generations #Next

There are good reasons to believe in God, including the existence of mathematical principles and order in creation. They are positive reasons, based on knowledge, rather than default assumptions based on a temporary lack of knowledge.
-- Francis Collins

#Believe #Order #Atheism

I'm a serious Christian. I take my faith seriously.
-- Francis Collins

#Christian #Serious

The tragedy of young-earth creationism is that it takes a relatively recent and extreme view of Genesis, applies to it an unjustified scientific gloss, and then asks sincere and well-meaning seekers to swallow this whole, despite the massive discordance with decades of scientific evidence from multiple disciplines. Is it any wonder that many sadly turn away from faith concluding that they cannot believe in a God who asks for an abandonment of logic and reason?
-- Francis Collins

#Believe #Views #Discipline

I think God appreciates that we appreciate his creation
-- Francis Collins

#Thinking #Appreciate #Creation

The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate, and beautiful.
-- Francis Collins

#Beautiful #Majestic #Creation

The blooming of a flower is, in my mind, not a miracle. It's something that we can understand on the basis of molecular biology these days
-- Francis Collins

#Flower #Miracle #Mind

I believe in the literal rising of the body of Christ. It's the cornerstone of my Christian faith.
-- Francis Collins

#Christian #Believe #Rising

Proponents of intelligent design don't accept that some of the very complex nanomachines that we have inside ourselves could have come about solely on the basis of natural selection.
-- Francis Collins

#Intelligent #Design #Natural

What more powerful form of study of mankind could there be than to read our own instruction book?
-- Francis Collins

#Powerful #Book #Science

Addressing the conclusions of The God Delusion point by point with the devastating insight of a molecular biologist turned theologian, Alister McGrath dismantles the argument that science should lead to atheism, and demonstrates instead that Dawkins has abandoned his much-cherished rationality to embrace an embittered manifesto of dogmatic atheist fundamentalism.
-- Francis Collins

#Atheist #Atheism #Argument

All illnesses have some heredity contribution. It's been said that genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger.
-- Francis Collins

#Gun #Environment #Illness

When does life begin? When does the soul enter? That's a religious question. Science is not going to be able to help with that.
-- Francis Collins

#Religious #Soul #Doe

I think history would say that medical research has, throughout many changes of parties, remained as one of the shining lights of bipartisan agreement, that people are concerned about health for themselves, for their families, for their constituents.
-- Francis Collins

#Party #Thinking #Light

I'm aware there are certain products that are being advertised - food products - with 'no chemicals whatsoever.' Well, that would be pretty hard to arrange, since everything around us is made up of atoms and molecules - chemicals - including ourselves.
-- Francis Collins

#Molecules #Atoms #Would Be

It's interesting when you read the life of Christ how much of his time he spent healing the sick. There must have been a reason for that - he was modelling for us what it is we are intended to do by following his path.
-- Francis Collins

#Healing #Sick #Interesting

The word 'living' has so many connotations that I'm almost reluctant to try to define it scientifically because it sounds as if I'm then downgrading all the other significances of that word.
-- Francis Collins

#Trying #Sound #Connotation

People who are in a position of finding out that they're at risk for some illness, whether it's breast cancer, or heart disease, are afraid to get that information - even though it might be useful to them - because of fears that they'll lose their health insurance or their job.
-- Francis Collins

#Jobs #Cancer #Heart

We are still working with an incomplete compass. The time is right to bring the full power of genomics to bear on the problem of cancer.
-- Francis Collins

#Cancer #Compassion #Bears

A virus is not just DNA; a virus is also packaged up, covered over with a series of proteins in a nice, elegant, well-compacted form.
-- Francis Collins

#Nice #Dna #Viruses

God gave us free will, and we may choose to exercise it in ways that end up hurting other people.
-- Francis Collins

#Hurt #Exercise #People

God is an awesome mathematician and physicist.
-- Francis Collins

#Mathematician #Physicist

I believe God did intend, in giving us intelligence, to give us the opportunity to investigate and appreciate the wonders of His creation. He is not threatened by our scientific adventures.
-- Francis Collins

#Believe #Adventure #Opportunity

I'm a pretty informal guy. I ride a Harley.
-- Francis Collins

#Guy #Harley

I'm a serious Christian. I take my faith seriously. I try to practice it every day of the week, not just on Sunday.
-- Francis Collins

#Christian #Sunday #Practice

I'm always feeling like I'm lacking wisdom. This reassurance that one can ask God for that and it will happen is certainly reassuring to me.
-- Francis Collins

#Feelings #Reassurance #Reassuring

I've never heard God speak out loud to me. That's not an experience I have had.
-- Francis Collins

#Speak #Loud #Heard

If God is real, and I believe he is, then he is outside of nature. He is, therefore, not limited by the laws of nature in the way that we are.
-- Francis Collins

#Real #Believe #Law

In my own experience as a physician, I have not seen a miraculous healing, and I don't expect to see one.
-- Francis Collins

#Healing #Physicians #Miraculous

Are we using science in ways that it wasn't intended to, in which case we should be a little careful, or are we using faith in ways that faith wasn't really designed for? There are certain questions that are better answered by one approach than the other, and if you start mixing that up, then you end up in ... conflict.
-- Francis Collins

#Faith #Mixing #Littles

The airman must possess absolutely untroubled nerves.
-- Francis Collins

#Nerves #Airmen

By investigating God's majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a means of worship.
-- Francis Collins

#Mean #Majestic #Worship

To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles.
-- Francis Collins

#Hands #Knives #Littles

When I discover something about the human genome, I experience a sense of awe at the mystery of life, and say to myself, 'Wow, only God knew before.' It is a profoundly beautiful and moving sensation, which helps me appreciate God and makes science even more rewarding for me.
-- Francis Collins

#Beautiful #Moving #Appreciate

God is most certainly not threatened by science; He made it all possible.
-- Francis Collins

#Made

By committing the scientific method to religious claims you're committing a logical fallacy
-- Francis Collins

#Religious #Scientific Method #Logical

Evolution, as a mechanism, can be and must be true. But that says nothing about the nature of its author. For those who believe in God, there are reasons now to be more in awe, not less.
-- Francis Collins

#Believe #Evolution #Reason

As our closest relatives, they (chimpanzees) tell us special things about what it means to be a primate and, ultimately, what it means to be a human at the DNA level.
-- Francis Collins

#Mean #Dna #Special

Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.
-- Francis Collins

#Dna #Doubt #Records

God decided to create a species with whom he could have fellowship. Who are we to say that evolution was a dumb way to do it? It was an incredibly elegant way to do it.
-- Francis Collins

#Dumb #Fellowship #Way

[Decoding the human genome sequence] is the most significant undertaking that we have mounted so far in an organized way in all of science. I believe that reading our blueprints, cataloguing our own instruction book, will be judged by history as more significant than even splitting the atom or going to the moon.
-- Francis Collins

#Believe #Book #Reading

[Locating, from scratch, the gene related to a disease is like] trying to find a burned-out light bulb in a house located somewhere between the East and West coasts without knowing the state, much less the town or street the house is on.
-- Francis Collins

#Knowing #Light #House

The problem [with genetic research] is, we're just starting down this path, feeling our way in the dark. We have a small lantern in the form of a gene, but the lantern doesn't penetrate more than a couple of hundred feet. We don't know whether we're going to encounter chasms, rock walls or mountain ranges along the way. We don't even know how long the path is.
-- Francis Collins

#Couple #Wall #Dark

I took biology in high school and didn't like it at all. It was focused on memorization. ... I didn't appreciate that biology also had principles and logic ... [rather than dealing with a] messy thing called life. It just wasn't organized, and I wanted to stick with the nice pristine sciences of chemistry and physics, where everything made sense. I wish I had learned sooner that biology could be fun as well.
-- Francis Collins

#Appreciation #Fun #Nice

It is certainly true in the United States that there is an uneasiness about certain aspects of science, particularly evolution, because it conflicts, in some people's minds, with their sense of how we all came to be. But you know, if you are a believer in God, it's hard to imagine that God would somehow put this incontrovertible evidence in front of us about our relationship to other living organisms and expect us to disbelieve it. I mean, that doesn't make sense at all.
-- Francis Collins

#Mean #People #Mind

As you kind of get over the anxiety about [science and evolution], it actually adds to your sense of awe about this amazing universe that we live in, it doesn't subtract from it at all.
-- Francis Collins

#Anxiety #Add #Evolution

Science is...a powerful way, indeed - to study the natural world. Science is not particularly effective...in making commentary about the supernatural world. Both worlds, for me, are quite real and quite important. They are investigated in different ways. They coexist. They illuminate each other.
-- Francis Collins

#Powerful #Real #Religion

What faith has not been used by demagogues as a club over somebody's head?
-- Francis Collins

#Clubs #Used

Successful weight management really means a permanent change in lifestyle - and success in this arena provides that person with a great opportunity to model that behavior for friends and family.
-- Francis Collins

#Life Changing #Mean #Successful

The best diet is the one that can be sustained over the long term, combined with other healthful lifestyle behaviors.
-- Francis Collins

#Long #Lifestyle #Behavior

One must dig deeply into opposing points of view in order to know whether your own position remains defensible. Iron sharpens iron.
-- Francis Collins

#Views #Order #Iron

A technological advance of a major sort almost always is overestimated in the short run for its consequences - and underestimated in the long run.
-- Francis Collins

#Running #Long #Technological

As a scientist, you're not supposed to make decisions without the data.
-- Francis Collins

#Data #Decision #Scientist

Nobody gets argued all the way into becoming a believer on the sheer basis of logic and reason. That requires a leap of faith.
-- Francis Collins

#Leap Of Faith #Way #Becoming

Research is so unpredictable. There are periods when nothing works and all your experiments are a disaster and all your hypotheses are wrong.
-- Francis Collins

#Research #Disaster #Periods

I trained initially as a physical chemist, and then, after becoming interested in biology, I went to medical school and learned how to be a physician. So, I'm a physician scientist.
-- Francis Collins

#School #Physicians #Becoming

I think there are people who's lives have been saved because of the study of the genome.
-- Francis Collins

#Thinking #People #Study

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.
-- Francis Collins

#World #Want #Way

Scientists must venture outside their comfort zones to show the public how cool - and how important - their work really is.
-- Francis Collins

#Important #Comfort #Venture

We give our kids vaccinations. That's a biological enhancement that's considered not just acceptable but actually admirable.
-- Francis Collins

#Kids #Giving #Enhancement

Sometimes you develop a passion for something because of some personal experience.
-- Francis Collins

#Passion #Sometimes

So much of what we are currently seeing as far as human suffering and misery comes from diseases that should have been preventable but were not.
-- Francis Collins

#Suffering #Disease #Misery