Scientist Francis Collins Presents Compelling Case for Faith

I’m sit­ting in the green room (the room a speak­er uses to pre­pare for a speech or per­for­mance) just after Fran­cis Collins fin­ished a phe­nom­e­nal pre­sen­ta­tion on the com­pat­i­bil­i­ty of faith and sci­ence.

He was astound­ing. If you haven’t read his book The Lan­guage of God then I rec­om­mend you pick it up. We’ll be putting a video of his pre­sen­ta­tion up soon at http://franciscollinstalk.stanford.edu

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. If you’re impa­tient you can see one of a sim­i­lar pre­sen­ta­tion at MIT last year.

Our venue, Memo­r­i­al Audi­to­ri­um, seats 1,700. Our over­flow room, Bish­op Audi­to­ri­um, seats 324. We had to open five addi­tion­al class­rooms. I’m con­fi­dent we had at least 2,000 peo­ple turn out, but a police offi­cer pro­vid­ing secu­ri­ty was bold enough to sug­gest that the real total was 2,300.

My favorite part of the event? Look­ing at the pro­gram and see­ing six lines.

Wel­come: Lisa Ooi
PhD stu­dent, Chem­i­cal & Sys­tems Biol­o­gy

Intro­duc­tion: Pro­fes­sor William New­some
Chair, Stan­ford Depart­ment of Neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy the last house on the left online

Lec­ture: Dr. Fran­cis Collins
Direc­tor, Nation­al Human Genome Research Insti­tute

Those six lines sum up the whole event bril­liant­ly — many very bright sci­en­tists see no nec­es­sary con­flict between sci­ence and Chris­tian­i­ty.

Oh — if you’ve been fol­low­ing my blog for a long time, you might remem­ber Lisa Ooi’s name. She’s a long­time Chi Alphan who actu­al­ly lived with Paula and I for a brief sea­son. She did a great job and we’re very proud of her.

My sec­ond-favorite part of the event? Him show­ing the clip of him­self being grilled by Stephen Col­bert. Fun­ny stuff.

Big thanks to Chi Alpha’s co-spon­sors Inter­Var­si­ty Grad­u­ate Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship blues broth­ers 2000 divx online (the real dri­ving force for this event), the Catholic Com­mu­ni­ty at Stan­ford, and the Ver­i­tas Forum divx push

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. We could nev­er have pulled off an event of this scale alone. A big spe­cial thanks to Amy Cham­bers and Kyle Heath who shoul­dered a ridicu­lous amount of the admin­is­tra­tive details, to Pete Som­mer for rais­ing a lot of mon­ey to make this hap­pen, to Kyle Pub­ols and Andrea Romero for run­ning micro­phones dur­ing the q & a so very well, to the many stu­dents who helped route peo­ple to over­flow rooms on an instan­t’s notice, and to Lena Ho, Xianne Leiong, Hilary Dyer, Isaac Pen­ny, and all those who sat through lengthy meet­ings to plan this whole thing. Oh, and Dr. Bill New­some did a tremen­dous job. And thanks to the Office for Reli­gious Life and Dean Scot­ty McLen­nan for giv­ing us per­mis­sion to go for it.

Final­ly, a spe­cial thanks to Clare Kasem­set who did a great job on the plan­ning side but fell ill at the last minute and was unable to make it to the event. Hope you enjoy the video, Clare. Get well soon.

I’ll try to get some pho­tos and more thoughts online lat­er. Right now I need to focus on get­ting ready to preach a ser­mon­ic per­spec­tive on the same themes tomor­row night. I’ve got some big shoes to fill.