Reconciling God and Science

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The book seems liveliest when Collins turns his guns from atheists on the left to creationists and intelligent designers on the right, urging the abandonment of what he feels are overliteral misreadings of Scripture. "I don't think God intended Genesis to teach science," he says, arguing that "the evidence in favor of evolution is utterly compelling." He has little patience with those who say evolution is just a theory, noting that in his scientific world the word theory "is not intended to convey uncertainty; for that purpose a scientist would use the word hypothesis." The book is hard on intelligent design, heaping scientific doubt on its key notion of "irreducible complexity" in phenomena like blood clotting, and theological scorn on its ultimate implications ("I.D. portrays the Almighty as a clumsy Creator, having to intervene at regular intervals to fix the inadequacies of His own initial plan ... this is a very unsatisfactory image").

That is not the argument his publisher has chosen to emphasize, or his book's subtitle would be flipped to read A Believer Presents the Evidence for Science. But it may be the one with the best prospects. Students of the debate note that atheists are more dogmatically opposed to God than Evangelicals are to evolution, if only because aggressive creationism is neither a long-standing evangelical position nor a unanimous one. According to Edward Larson, a Pulitzer- prizewinning historian of the evolution debate at the University of Georgia, American support for it, now near 50%, hovered around 30% as recently as 1960. Today, Larson says, "it's a dynamic situation, with no unanimity." Evolution is taught at some Christian colleges.

Even before he wrote The Language of God, Collins was a player in this potentially consequential debate. He has an ongoing dialogue with Chuck Colson, the former Nixon aide who heads the successful Prison Fellowship and influences a significant conservative Christian audience through a daily radio show and a magazine column. Thus far Collins has failed to convince Colson, who says, "I think he's giving away more than he needs to, and he thinks I'm denying science." But Colson adds, "He's a guy I like, admire and appreciate. We're going to have dinner together and get some folks around a table and talk it through."

Evangelist Tony Campolo, whose position on the spectrum is somewhat closer to Collins', offers encouragement of his own. "It's one thing for a scientist to debunk creationism," he says. "It's another when a believer does it." A scientific believer with a serious book may stand the best chance of all.