Francis Collins

Francis Collins (b. 1950) is an American physician-geneticist best known for leading the Human Genome Project (1993–2008) and serving as director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (2009–2021). Trained in chemistry at Virginia and Yale before completing an MD at North Carolina, Collins identified the genes responsible for cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, and Huntington's disease. Raised in a nonreligious household and a former atheist, he converted to evangelical Christianity in his twenties, influenced by C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. In The Language of God (2006) he argues that scientific discovery and theistic belief are complementary: the fine-tuning of cosmological constants, the universality of the moral law, and the elegance of the genetic code are presented as pointers toward a creator, while biological evolution is accepted as God's mechanism of creation. He coined the term "BioLogos" and founded the BioLogos Foundation (2007) to promote evolutionary creationism among evangelicals, positioning himself between Young Earth creationism, intelligent design (criticized by Collins as scientifically untenable), and the antitheistic naturalism of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Critics—including Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, and Sam Harris—argue his theological inferences exceed the evidence and conflate moral intuition with metaphysical proof, while some evangelicals reject his accommodation of common descent. Collins remains a leading voice in science-and-religion dialogue.