Is the Genesis Account of Creation Meant to be Understood Literally?
I just read The Language of God by Francis Collins. He is a physician and one of the world's leading scientists who headed the Human Genome Project and currently serves as the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is also a self-confessing Christian. In this book he argues that belief in Christianity is compatible with science, and evolution in particular. He endorses a view he calls theistic evolution, in which God-who exists outside of time and space-through the process of evolution over an extremely long period of time brought man forth and endowed him with a spiritual nature, which sets him apart from the rest of living things. He arrived at this conclusion based on the accepted understanding of geology, the fossil record, and molecular biology; his findings in the painstaking process of mapping the entire human genome; and the existence of a universal Moral Law and search for God, as well as his own personal spiritual experience and study of the Bible.