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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

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Francis Collins
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: April 14
Author
Chemist
Geneticist
Physician
Physicist
Virginia
United States
Francis S. Collins
Francis S Collins
F. S. Collins
F S Collins
Francis Sellers Collins
Faith
Basis
Reason
Believer
Way
Bases
Logic
Requires
Gets
Argued
Nobody
Sheer
Becoming
Leap

More quotes by Francis Collins

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What faith has not been used by demagogues as a club over somebody's head?
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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.
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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.
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What does it take to get people interested, what does it take to get people engaged, what does it take to get them to give a biospecimen? What does it take to get people like Jim [Ostell] to get interested and engaged, versus someone like my mother?
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[The tests agreed] that I was at higher risk than the average person for Type 2 diabetes, which is what my lab works on. In fact, some of the things they were testing for were variants that we had discovered.
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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
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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
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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.
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I've never heard God speak out loud to me. That's not an experience I have had.
Francis Collins
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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
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God is an awesome mathematician and physicist.
Francis Collins
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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
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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
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In my own experience as a physician, I have not seen a miraculous healing, and I don't expect to see one.
Francis Collins
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[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
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I think there are people who's lives have been saved because of the study of the genome.
Francis Collins
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Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation.
Francis Collins
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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.
Francis Collins
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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
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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.
Francis Collins