Dr. Francis Collins is apparently in the news again. He claims to be an evangelical Christian, and pushed Christians to wear cloth masks and get vaccinated. Should Christians trust Collins as a scientific authority? Or is he just a willing pawn of the secular left? Let’s take a look at an article from Megan Basham, and find out.

This article from February 2022 is originally from Daily Wire, but full text here. The title is “How The Federal Government Used Evangelical Leaders To Spread Covid Propaganda To Churches”.

Excerpt:

In September, Wheaton College dean Ed Stetzer interviewed National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins on his podcast, “Church Leadership” about why Christians who want to obey Christ’s command to love their neighbors should get the Covid vaccine and avoid indulging in misinformation.

[…]Their conversation also turned to the subject of masking children at school, with Collins noting that Christians, in particular, have been resistant to it. His view was firm—kids should be masked if they want to be in the classroom. To do anything else is to turn schools into super spreaders. Stetzer offered no pushback or follow-up questions based on views from other medical experts. He simply agreed.

[…]Collins participated in a livestream event, co-hosted by Christianity Today… During the panel interview, Collins continued to insist that the lab leak theory wasn’t just unlikely but qualified for the dreaded misinformation label. “If you were trying to design a more dangerous coronavirus,” he said, “you would never have designed this one … So I think one can say with great confidence that in this case the bioterrorist was nature … Humans did not make this one. Nature did.”

I blogged previously about how several federal government departments now think that this is the most plausible theory, and how the CIA bribed experts to change their testimony about the lab leak theory. So Collins was actually the one spreading misinformation.

Collins takes secular left positions on abortion and transgenderism:

He has not only defended experimentation on fetuses obtained by abortion, he has also directed record-level spending toward it. 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.

He further has endorsed unrestricted funding of embryonic stem cell research, personally attending President Obama’s signing of an Executive Order to reverse a previous ban on such expenditures.

[…]When it comes to pushing an agenda of racial quotas and partiality based on skin color, Collins is a member of the Left in good standing, speaking fluently of “structural racism” and “equity” rather than equality. He’s put his money (or, rather, taxpayer money) where his mouth is, implementing new policies that require scientists seeking NIH grants to pass diversity, equity, and inclusion tests in order to qualify.

[…]Having declared himself an “ally” of the gay and trans movements, he went on to say he “[applauds] the courage and resilience it takes for [LGBTQ] individuals to live openly and authentically” and is “committed to listening, respecting, and supporting [them]” as an “advocate.”

[…]Under his watch, the NIH launched a new initiative to specifically direct funding to “sexual and gender minorities.” On the ground, this has translated to awarding millions in grants to experimental transgender research on minors, like giving opposite-sex hormones to children as young as eight and mastectomies to girls as young as 13. Another project, awarded $8 million in grants, included recruiting teen boys to track their homosexual activities like “condomless anal sex” on an app without their parents’ consent.

Megan’s got the names of the people who promoted him in her article: Tim Keller, Rick Warren, N. T. Wright, Ed Stetzer, Russell Moore, and David French:

Keller, Warren, Wright, and Stetzer all publicly lauded him as a godly brother.  When presenting Collins to Southern Baptists, Moore gushed over him as the smartest man in a book club he attends…

[I]nfluential evangelical pundit David French deemed Collins a “national treasure” and his service in the NIH “faithful.”

I notice that Seth Gruber, who I’ve met in person during his early pro-life training, had a very recent article about Dr. Collins.

He writes:

But after Megan Basham’s Daily Wire article that caused Big Eva to start collapsing in on itself like a dying star, Daily Wire reached out to those five men to ask if they had changed their views on Collins given these revelations. NONE OF THEM RESPONDED. And that remains true to this day. None of these supposedly godly Christian leaders has anything to say about his “brother in Christ” funding the live dissections of infants for fresh organs, sexualizing teenage boys, carving the breasts off of healthy teenage girls, chemically castrating children, praising eugenic abortions, and buying the organs of our preborn brothers and sisters. In fact, Megan Basham once found herself waiting to board the same flight as Dr. Moore. When she approached him to question him about his involvement with Collins, he promptly ran away.

And this was the part that is so unlike almost all of the popular Christian leaders of today – Seth named names:

Russell Moore, Rick Warren, Ed Stetzer, David French, Tim Keller (in his day), and the rest of Big Eva all have one thing in common with the “progressive” revolutionaries of today’s culture: the belief that God’s children are indeed for sale. They only differ on the price tag and form of payment. Like Lot, if provided with the right incentives, our theological betters will not hesitate to toss God’s children into the arms of the mob.

Dr. Collins is a Darwinian evolutionist, so you can guess how evidence-based his views are about the origin of life and the Cambrian explosion. I think Christians need to be skeptical of believers in naturalistic religion: Darwinism, man-made catastrophic global warming, abortion, transgenderism, etc. It’s pretty clear that these naturalistic views are not the result of study and debate. People who jump on the speculations of the secular left, and pronounce them as infallible, are not doing it to promote truth. They do it because they want the respect of powerful secular leftists. Dr. Collins is not an independent thinker. He is someone who adopts the views of secular leftist elites automatically and without thinking. He wants to get ahead in the world. That’s it.

We recently did an episode of the Knight and Rose Show with Dr. Fazale Rana of Reasons to Believe about the origin of life. In that episode, we talked about all of the components that have to be present in the first living cell in order for it to perform the minimal functions of a living system. One component that was not specifically talked about is the DNA repair.

First we will look at an article, but don’t let complexity bother you, because there is a Discovery Institute animated video that goes with it. The article just provides scientific evidence to support the cartoon.

Here’s an article about that from Evolution News:

Damage to the “factory” of the cell occurs on two levels: damage to the stored information (either during replication or by natural degradation over time) and damage to the manufacturing machinery (either from faulty production of new machinery or damage incurred during use). Each type of damage requires specific repair mechanisms that demonstrate foresight — the expectation that damage will occur and the ability to recognize, repair and/or recycle only those components that are damaged. All known life requires these mechanisms.

So, from a Darwinist perspective, you would have to be able to show that DNA repair can evolve a little bit at a time, with each iteration providing a little more functionality. But what if science found that all the functionality has to be there right at the beginning, or there is no DNA repair? That would look more like design.

More:

The initial process of DNA replication is facilitated by a polymerase enzyme which results in approximately one error for every 10,000 to 100,000 added nucleotides.1 However, no known life can persist with such a high rate of error, if left uncorrected.2 Fortunately, DNA replication in all life includes a subsequent proofreading step — a type of damage repair — that enhances the accuracy by a factor of 100 to 1,000. T

[…]Following the replication of DNA, a daily barrage of DNA damage occurs during normal operating conditions. Life therefore requires sophisticated and highly specific DNA repair mechanisms. In humans, DNA damage response is estimated to involve a hierarchical organization of 605 proteins in 109 assemblies.4 Efforts to make the simplest possible cell by stripping out all non-essential genes has successfully reduced DNA repair to a minimal set of six genes.5 But, these six genes are encoded in thousands of base pairs of DNA, and the machinery to transcribe and translate those genes into the repair enzymes requires a minimum of 149 genes.6 Thus, the DNA code that is required to make DNA repair mechanisms easily exceeds 100,000 base pairs.

And this is the key point:

Here, we encounter a great paradox, first identified in 1971 by Manfred Eigen⁷: DNA repair is essential to maintain DNA but the genes that code for DNA repair could not have evolved unless the repair mechanisms were already present to protect the DNA.

And at the very end of the article, the most common response from Darwinian naturalists is rebutted:

Those who promote unguided abiogenesis simply brush off all of these required mechanisms, claiming that life started as simplified “proto-cells” that didn’t need repair. But there is no evidence that any form of life could persist or replicate without these repair mechanisms. And the presence of the repair mechanisms invokes several examples of circular causality — quite a conundrum for unintelligent, natural processes alone. Belief that simpler “proto-cells” didn’t require repair mechanisms requires blind faith, set against the prevailing scientific evidence.

A good article to bookmark, especially if the origin of life is one of your main arguments.

And here is the short video that they made to go with it:

If you’re looking for a good simple podcast about the need for a Designing Intelligence to explain the origin of life, check out our episode with Dr. Fazale Rana.