Best 73 quotes of Francis Collins on MyQuotes

Francis Collins

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

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

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    A lot of people think PMI is the genome project 2.0. No. This is about all the influences on disease - genetics is in there, but the environment is in there as well, health choices, behaviors, all the factors that are important, otherwise we're not doing what we promised we would do - which is in a holistic way look at how people stay healthy or how do they fall ill.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    A lot of science doesn't require big "ns" but if you're trying to understand something about human health and you're looking at interventions that are not going to be either killing you or making you live forever - they're going to have some tweaking on the outcome - you need big numbers or you don't have enough power.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

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

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

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

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    But full sequencing? No. Very hard to interpret. At some point probably we'll all have that opportunity but most of what's there will be stuff that we don't know what to say much about. So it's a great research tool, but for clinical purposes to advise somebody to practice better health maintenance, it's not necessarily gonna be a big one for a while.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

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

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

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

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    C.S. Lewis had a big influence on me in this spiritual realm - this sort of sense of longing. A longing for a knowledge that is just outside of our reach, a knowledge for a spiritual connection.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    [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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

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

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    God is an awesome mathematician and physicist.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

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

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    If God made the natural laws, why could he not violate them when it was a particularly significant moment for him to do so? And if you accept the idea that Christ was also divine, which I do, then his Resurrection is not in itself a great logical leap.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    I had the analysis of a million or so SNPs [single nucleotide polymorphisms] just to see what was there. That's partly because I was writing a book about DNA and personalized medicine and I thought it would be a little bit disingenuous to talk about what could be done without actually having the experiment done on yourself.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    I'm a pretty informal guy. I ride a Harley.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

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

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    I'm enormously interested to see where neuroscience can take us in understanding these complexities of the human brain and how it works, but I do think there may be limits in terms of what science can tell us about what does good and evil mean anyway, and what are those concepts about?

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

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

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

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

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    It's not like you're closing the old doors and that investigators working away in a laboratories on a unique hypothesis are no longer needed. My gosh, they are indeed. But this becomes a real engine for hypothesis generation and even for proof if you have interventions that you can carry out in this kind of large scale and conduct them in a rigorous way. I guess, yeah, it's different. But it's different in a good way.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

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

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    [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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    My daughter is a practicing physician so believe me I get a lot of the frustration from her. You get it from patients. For me personally, when I ask my doctor to send me my record, what I get is a scanned PDF of his hard copy! This is not good. It would be hopeless to work with a million people if you had to do this on paper, and one of the reasons this is the right time for this is because of the existence of EHRs.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

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

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

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

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Francis Collins

    Science's tools will never prove or disprove God's existence.