The science of genetics is about how DNA works to form proteins and what those proteins do and how that is different from other proteins that were constructed by different software -- yes, software. DNA is a binary code for making proteins, and the total genome is a computer program for making a whole organism. It's incredibly complicated, and we still do not know very much about how it all works, but people like Collins and mostly the people who worked under his supervision rather than Collins himself, they are learning more every day.
What they do not know is Who wrote the software. Collins and a few others say they do, but then they turn around and deny it.
Genetics is not an historical science. In fact, if it were about history, it wouldn't be science at all. Paleontology is in that category: it looks like science, and they use scientific-sounding long words, but on the bottom line it's myths and fairy tales invented by people who refuse to read the history Book, instead preferring to believe childrens stories about things like frogs turning into princes. They really believe that one. It's not science. Real frogs don't turn into people, not even in millions of years, and real science has never shown otherwise. For more on how I know that, see my essay on "Biological Evolution: Did It Happen?"
Francis Collins is mentioned in the appendix to my essay (with details here). I ask anybody and everybody who has done peer-reviewed research (Collins being among them), what in their own research supports the Darwinistic hypothesis. Like everybody else, Collins did not reply, but I found some of his work which comes close to answering it. The answer is the same for everybody who believes the myth: their own research does not support the story, they got it from somebody else, Collins included.
The "evidence" they are claiming in denial of the historicity of Adam consists mostly in finding similarities and differences in the DNA of humans and apes. Think of it as like deducing which book evolved from what other book by noticing similarities in their words and sentences. If we find the same whole paragraph in two different books, we start accusing one author of copying from the other. It happens all the time, and sometimes the later author gives credit to the source. But genetics is still studying the words; we haven't gotten to the whole paragraph stage yet. Every book in the English language has the same words in it, "the" and "a" and "is". There was no copying, that's just the language.
I'm reading a sci-fi novel this week, where some of the aliens and anti-religious humans quote lines from the Bible. It's like the novelist doesn't even know he copied. But the lines are different enough from the ordinary things people say, we know where it came from. Composers like Bach and Handel often copied from their own music. There was no evolution, they just copied a part they liked. Why can't God do that?
If they had science (meaning, they could perform experiments and get repeatable results) to prove the Bible is wrong, then I could not remain a Christian. After all, if I can't trust what it says that can be tested, why should I believe what cannot? The Bible itself points that out (see "my BS Detector"). Other people -- apparently Collins among them -- are like the movie Secondhand Lions, where (so they assume) "if it's worth believing, you should believe it, even if it isn't true." Honest people cannot do that. I can't. Even the movie director himself couldn't really do it.
People have been announcing the death of Christianity for hundreds of
years. The evidence they offer generally shrivels up and blows away, usually
within a decade or two, before the proponents have died off. That's right,
the doom-sayers are the ones who die, not Christianity. When we know more
about genetics, perhaps in 2020 or 2030, the arguments Francis Collins
and his atheist colleagues are bringing against Adam will be as embarrassing
as Piltdown Man is today. They will have a new set of bogus "scientific"
accusations to bring. It always happens that way.