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“The journey to my discovery of the Divine has thus far been a pilgrimage of reason,” Flew wrote.“I have followed the argument where it has led me. And it has led me to accept the existence of a self-existent, immutable, immaterial, omnipotent, and omniscient Being.”7

Recently I listened to Francis Collins deliver a lecture to a group of skeptical scientists about his own journey from atheism to Christianity. Collins is one of the country’s leading geneticists and the longtime head of the Human Genome Project at NIH, which created the genetic map of a human being.

Collins argued that belief in God, “while not provable, is more plausible than atheism.” He arrived at this conclusion by following scientific arguments, not ignoring them. He identified several “pointers to God” that nudged him toward the notion of a Mind that created the universe and, more remarkably, life. One pointer is the fact that there is something—a universe with people—rather than nothing at all. Another pointer is the Big Bang: Collins argued that if there was a beginning to the universe, this required “a Creator not bound by laws of space and time” who lit the fuse.

A third argument for God is “the unreasonable effectiveness of math,” he said, suggesting “there might be a Mind with a mathematical bent beyond anything we can imagine.” Collins cited the “Anthropic Principle,” which posits that the universe is “finely tuned” to produce and sustain life—or, as physicist Freeman Dyson put it,“the universe in some sense knew we were coming.”8

Scientists noticed that a handful of “constants” in the universe, like strong and weak nuclear forces, must have the exact numerical values they do for the planets to exist, not to mention intelligent life to develop to the point where you can read this sentence.

“If you tinker with any of the constants,” Collins told his audience, “the universe could not support the complexity needed for intelligent life.” If gravity were weaker, for example, matter would fly apart and planets could not form. If gravity were stronger, the Big Bang would have been followed by the Big Crunch, and life could not have developed.

Collins came to believe in “a God who loves math, wants a universe, wants complexity so that beings could evolve into intelligence and wonder if there is more.” From there he went on to explain why Christianity makes sense to him. (For our purposes, that is a different story, more in the realm of personal preference than scientific induction.)

“God” may not be, as the atheists have it, a delusion—but perhaps a conclusion driven by the math of the universe. The infinite intelligence that maintains the planets in their orbits and tailors the molecular composition of air to each breath we take—this intelligence is not the figment of a narrow fundamentalist mind but the property of the most rigorous scientific minds. This is a God who makes sense to me, a defensible God, and one who has a starring role in a new batch of scientific experiments.

God 1.0

Imagine stripping God of all His imagery. Gone is the throne, the beard, the Michelangelo painting of a majestic Being nearly touching Adam’s finger with the spark of life. Gone, too, are the stories of a God who intervened, who favored a certain people, who assumed the physique of a man. This stripped-down version would be the sum of his attributes, which would include infinite information, an omnipresence that fills all space and connects all atoms, a taste for mathematics that keeps the planets in their orbit, and the power to do so. This is a God who might appeal to the concrete thinking of a scientist. I came to think of this as “God 1.0”—God minus the love and the narrative history.

Larry Dossey calls this God “non-local mind.” Dossey, a doctor and author, coined the term in his 1989 book Recovering the Soul.9 It bears more than a smart scientific ring.“Non-locality” is a staple of quantum mechanics, and one of the spookier aspects of physics. For Dossey and others on the edge of science,