Reconciling God and Science

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Reconciling his belief with his service to genetics proved easier for him than for many of his colleagues. Upon discovering the fibrosis flaw, he remembers feeling that "God had rained down his blessing." But in a profession only 8% of whose élite admit to believing in a God who answers prayer, he found that God talk could be something of a taboo. "Bring up faith and there's always a little sense of, Didn't you get the memo?" At least once a month he receives an e-mail from some lonely post-doc asking advice on being an evangelical scientist. As his renown grew, he moved from sharing his Christian conversion with groups of fellow believers to sitting on public panels where, he says, "I've found myself the sole person saying faith was relevant" to science. Thus, he adds, "I've kind of been writing this book for 25 years."

The story of Collins' journey to faith, a description of his evangelical belief and a wrenching examination of God and suffering through the story of his daughter's rape constitute a significant part of his book, resembling in some ways evangelical testimony more than previous scientific arguments for belief. But he also explains why, although he does not believe God is rationally provable, he thinks that natural phenomena--such as the development of conditions favoring life on earth in the face of incredible odds--point toward the divine.

And he provides a pocket description of his preferred synthesis of evolution with Christianity, which he calls BioLogos but which has a previous history under the name theistic evolution. Collins' version sees God as having preplanned the process of mutation and selection at time's beginning, knowing it would produce humanity. It differs from Deism, the "divine clockmaker" theology of Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Jefferson, in that many Deists think God signed off once the clock was wound. Collins, on the other hand, thinks the whole point was for God to create a being with whom he could develop an ongoing relationship through prayer, Scripture and what the scientist cheerfully acknowledges as a scientifically inexplicable "divine invasion of the natural world" in the saving person of Jesus Christ.

The Language of God is enlightening but not always convincing. Collins writes at a pace better suited to statements of position than to sustained argument, and he sometimes falls back on familiar polemics by pros like Lewis. His insights on the nature of a God-science overlap, while fresh, are celebratory rather than investigative, budgeting relatively little space to wrestle with instances when the conjunction of the two can induce the philosophical bends (such as faith's understanding of God's place outside human time).

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