Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [44]
More Than Molecules
Francis Collins and I sat in his spacious, sun-drenched office at NIH overlooking a canopy of trees. Collins headed the federal government’s Human Genome Project and wrote The Language of God.8 He was a towering man with a tame mop of gray hair and large features that fell automatically into a smile. On this blistering-hot day he wore black jeans and a blue T-shirt with an American flag spanning his chest. It was the Friday afternoon before the July Fourth weekend in 2006. The employees had the afternoon off; most of his colleagues had left, but Collins talked with me for more than an hour.
“There is no gene for spirituality,” he told me. “There may be a lot of genes that play some role in the development of a personality” inclined toward God, he said, but “there are so many other things at work.”
Dean Hamer’s book evidently vexed him. Collins ticked off the flaws. Hamer had declined to publish the findings in a peer-reviewed journal, opting instead to go straight to the public with a popular book. That meant his research did not endure rigorous scientific review and challenge. Collins continued: The findings have not been replicated, meaning that the “spiritual” properties of the VMAT2 could be a statistical fluke. The entire project rested on self-reported questionnaires, he noted. And finally, he said, the “God gene” seemed to account for a tiny difference in self-transcendence.
“Maybe the right title for the book should have been: The Identification of a Gene Variant Which,While Not Yet Subjected to a Replication Study, May Contribute About One Percent or Less of a Parameter Called Self-Transcendence on a Personality Test.” Collins reflected on that a moment. “That probably wouldn’t sell many books, though.”
But isn’t Hamer on the right path? I asked. Genes have already been identified with diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Why not a gene—or a cluster of genes—to explain spirituality?
“Spirituality is a very different phenomenon.We’re not talking about pathology here. We’re talking about a transcendent experience,” he argued. “You could no more identify a genetic glitch involved in spirituality than you could identify a genetic glitch in the experience of being alive. It is much too complicated and interwoven with every aspect of your personality, of your consciousness, of your sense of who you are, to be able to be pinned down in that very deterministic way.”
I knew that Collins was an evangelical Christian, a statistical fluke in the rarefied scientific atmosphere he traveled in, which must surely affect his approach to the research. I was unsure how to broach this intimate question. He did it for me.
“Take myself,” he said, out of the blue. “I have been a blatant materialist during a significant part of my life, an atheist with no use for God. I am now a very serious believer. My DNA did not change during that time interval. So I can certainly cite from personal experience that it’s nothing about my heredity that changed my view from one end of the spectrum to the other.”
For Collins, the path to God wound not through the shroud of mystery but the light of logic. When he was a twenty-seven-year-old medical student at the University of North Carolina, he said, a woman with terminal cancer asked him whether he believed in God and eternity. He evaded the answer, but the question haunted him.
“I came to the realization that my atheism had been chosen without considering the evidence for or against faith,” he said. “As a physician/ scientist, you’re not supposed to make decisions without looking at the data. So I decided I better learn more about this so I could defend my position—and accidentally converted myself.”
For a “tortured” year, Collins wrestled with God. He was mortified at the prospect of accepting God.Would he have to become a missionary? Would he turn into a dreary, humorless person? He eventually concluded, reluctantly, that God made logical sense to him: Where else would the moral laws that are “written in our hearts” come from?