An Open Letter to Dr. Francis Collins

Nov 9, 2026

Dear Dr. Collins,

Peace be upon you. I write as a fellow physician and as an admirer of long standing, with a request that I hope you will receive in the spirit in which it is offered: an invitation, not a challenge.

For two decades I have followed your work at the frontier where biology meets belief. You have done more than almost anyone alive to persuade thoughtful people that a scientist can worship God without checking his mind at the church door. I agree with nearly everything you have written on that subject. It is precisely because I agree so deeply that I want to ask you to take one step further along the road you have already walked so far and so honestly.

A life in two books

You have often said that you read two books: the book of nature and the book of Scripture. Your biography is the story of learning to read both.

Born in 1950 in Staunton, Virginia, and home-schooled on a farm without indoor plumbing, you took a PhD in physical chemistry at Yale before deciding that the living cell was a deeper mystery than the quantum one, and went on to medical school at the University of North Carolina. At Michigan you pioneered positional cloning and helped find the genes behind cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis and Huntington’s disease. From 1993 you led the Human Genome Project to the first complete reading of the human DNA sequence in 2003, and from 2009 to 2021 you directed the National Institutes of Health under three presidents, steering the nation’s biomedical enterprise through a pandemic. Earlier this year the National Academy of Sciences awarded you its Public Welfare Medal, its highest honor. Few scientists in history have been trusted with so much.

Your religious biography is, if anything, more remarkable. You were raised with no particular faith and became, by your own account, an obnoxious atheist in graduate school. Then, as a young physician, a dying patient asked what you believed, and you realized you had never seriously asked. C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity and the moral law written on the human heart led you, at twenty-seven, to belief in God, and shortly after to Christianity. You have told this story with disarming candor in The Language of God (2006) and The Road to Wisdom (2024). What strikes me most is that you did not arrive at faith by abandoning reason. You reasoned your way there.

BioLogos: where I stand with you

In 2007 you founded BioLogos to show that evolution is not God’s rival but God’s method. I applaud that project without reservation, and I agree with every plank of it.

You hold that the universe had a beginning some 13.8 billion years ago and that its physical constants are finely tuned for life. You hold that evolution by common descent, over nearly four billion years, is the true account of how living things came to be, and that the genome itself is the most eloquent witness to it: the shared ancient retroviral insertions, the broken vitamin C gene we carry alongside the other primates, the fused chromosome 2 that tells of our kinship with the apes. You hold that God is the author of this process and sustains it at every moment, and that none of it diminishes human dignity or the moral law. You hold that the DNA molecule is, in your lovely phrase, the language in which God wrote life.

As a Muslim I can sign my name under all of it. The Quran repeatedly commands us to travel the earth and observe how God originated creation (29:20), describes every living thing as made from water (21:30), and speaks of humanity as having been brought forth from the earth and grown from it like a plant (71:17). Al-Ghazali, nine centuries ago, insisted that the regularities we call natural laws are God’s habitual action, which is exactly the theistic reading of nature you defend. On the great question of our age, whether a serious scientist can be a serious theist, you and I are allies, not opponents.

The courage not to read Genesis literally

You have also shown a rarer kind of courage: the willingness to tell your own community that it is mistaken.

You have said plainly that young-earth creationism is not merely wrong about the age of rocks but harmful to faith, because it forces young believers to choose between the evidence of their eyes and the God of their parents. You have argued that Genesis 1 and 2 are not a laboratory notebook, that the two creation accounts differ in order and emphasis, that the Hebrew yom need not mean a solar day, and that Augustine warned against this very error sixteen centuries before Darwin. You have followed the genetic evidence to the conclusion that the human population never passed through a bottleneck of two individuals, and you have let that evidence reshape how you read the story of Adam and Eve.

This is exactly the right method: when a well-established fact about God’s world collides with a particular reading of God’s word, it is the reading that must give way, not the fact. I honor you for applying that principle even where it cost you friends.

The next leap of faith

Here is my invitation. I ask you to apply the same method one step further, to a doctrine rather than a chronology.

You know, better than I, that anatomically modern humans have walked the earth for roughly 200,000 to 300,000 years. The fossils from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, the genomes of living Africans, the ancient DNA from Neanderthals and Denisovans all say so with one voice. The Adam of the biblical genealogies, by contrast, lived some six thousand years ago. Whoever he was, and I believe with the Quran that he was a real prophet of God, he was not the first human being. Tens of thousands of generations of men and women had lived, loved, buried their dead and wondered at the stars before him.

You also know something subtler, which is a consequence of the very evolutionary biology BioLogos teaches. When one species gives rise to another, there is never a first member of the new species. No chimpanzee mother ever gave birth to a human child. Speciation is a gradual shift in the gene frequencies of a whole breeding population over thousands of generations, and every individual in that lineage was the same species as its parents. The question “who was the first human?” has no biological answer, not because we lack the data, but because the question assumes a sharp boundary that nature never drew.

Now follow the logic to its end, as you taught us to do with the age of the earth. The doctrine of Original Sin, as Augustine formulated it and as Paul’s letter to the Romans is usually read, requires a single first man whose single act of disobedience corrupted the nature of every descendant. If there was no first man, there was no first sin to inherit. If there was no inherited guilt, there was no debt that only the death of an innocent God-man could pay. The substitutionary atonement rests on a historical premise that your own science has quietly removed.

I know that thoughtful Christians, including many at BioLogos, have proposed repairs: Adam as a representative chosen from an existing population, or the Fall as a story about every human rather than about one. I have read them with respect. But I would gently ask whether these are not the theological equivalent of the day-age theory, an honorable attempt to hold a text and a fact together that ends up doing justice to neither. You once declined that compromise for Genesis 1. I am asking whether you might decline it for Romans 5.

An invitation to a simpler monotheism

What remains, once the scaffolding of inherited sin and vicarious sacrifice is removed, is not less faith but more. It is the faith of Abraham, which Judaism preserved and which Islam calls simply tawhid: that God is One, without partner or incarnation; that He creates through the patient processes you have spent your life uncovering; that every soul is born innocent and is answerable only for what it itself has done (Quran 53:38-39); that forgiveness flows directly from the Merciful to the penitent, with no intermediary and no blood required; and that Jesus, son of Mary, was a mighty prophet and messenger of that one God, honored in the Quran more often than in any book outside the Gospels.

I believe this is the faith you were reaching for when, at twenty-seven, the moral law pointed you toward a Lawgiver. The Lawgiver was real. The road to Him, I am suggesting, is shorter and straighter than the one you were handed.

I do not expect a letter to change the convictions of a lifetime, and I would think less of you if it did. I ask only that you hold this question with the same open hands you brought to the human genome, and that you let me know, whenever you are ready, where the argument seems to you to fail. I would be honored to continue the conversation in person, in print, or over a long dinner.

With great respect and warm regards,

Zia H. Shah, MD

Board-certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Disease and Sleep Medicine

Program Director, Lourdes Internal Medicine Residency Program, Binghamton, New York