served from 2009 to 2021 as director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Collins is also an author, perhaps best known for his book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. Collins is also a prominent theistic evolutionist, and for a number of years served as president of the BioLogos Foundation, whose website proclaims "God is the creator and sustainer of all things, and evolution is the best scientific explanation for the relatedness of life on earth."
However, while Collins is undoubtedly one of the most prominent Christian scientists today advocating theistic evolution (or "evolutionary creation" as the BioLogos Foundation prefers to call it), he is but one of a number of religiously devout scientists who, over the years, have embraced Darwinism. In fact, it could be said that Collins has a 19th century predecessor--Asa Gray (1810-1888), known as "the Father of American botany."
Asa Gray was originally trained as a medical doctor, but he developed a passion for studying plants. He traveled and studied extensively throughout North America and Europe, meeting a number of famous naturalists of the time, and was appointed by the University of Michigan in 1838 as the first professor of botany at any U.S. institution of higher education. He was also, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, deeply respected by Charles Darwin, even being consulted by Darwin on "the botanical aspects of his theory." Moreover, as the Encyclopedia Britannica tells us:
Unlike the agnostic Thomas Henry Huxley and a number of more timorous Christians of his time, Gray did not believe that Darwin's theory disproved the existence of God or was incompatible with religious belief. Instead, he celebrated Darwin's ideas as having revealed a mechanism by which God shapes the natural world. (emphasis mine)
Gray even wrote "both scientific and religious defenses of the theory of evolution in a collection known as Darwiniana."
Nevertheless, despite his advocacy for Darwin's theory, Gray and Darwin did not see completely eye-to-eye. Recall that Gray believed that evolution was guided by God. Darwin rejected this idea. As Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles B. Thaxton tell us:
When...Asa Gray...tried to find a divine plan within the theory [of evolution], Darwin protested that this was not what he meant at all. If each variation is predetermined to lead to some desired end, he argued, then there is no need for natural selection. The whole point of natural selection is to demonstrate how the appearance of design might emerge from undesigned random changes. "If the right variations occurred, and no others," Darwin wrote, "natural selection would be superfluous." (The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy, p. 114)
In addition--according to Benjamin Wiker at evolutionnews.org,--Gray, along with some other scientists, "thought that natural selection alone was radically insufficient to account for man's moral and intellectual nature." In response to this "defection" by Gray and others, Darwin "wrote another book, The Descent of Man (1871), in which he made his case that our moral, intellectual, and 'spiritual' aspects are all derived from natural and sexual selection. Evolution did not need God, thank you."
In short, Darwin rejected the efforts of Asa Gray and other early theistic evolutionists to integrate his theory of evolution with Christian theism. Arguably, this is a challenge for modern theistic evolutionists like Francis Collins as well.
Image of Asa Gray from Wikimedia Commons