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as Hollywood films. When I was studying at Pepperdine University, I took an entire course on the writings of C. S. Lewis and can attest firsthand to the power of his writings (although his science-fiction space trilogy lags behind the Narnia series in quality and is unlikely to see the light of film). Collins recalled his initial reaction to the argument that Jesus was God incarnate who had to come to Earth as a man in order to pay our debt of sin so that we may all be born again (famously posterized at sporting events in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”): “Before I became a believer in God, this kind of logic seemed like utter nonsense. Now the crucifixion and resurrection emerged as the compelling solution to the gap that yawned between God and myself, a gap that could now be bridged by the person of Jesus Christ.” Again, as the principle of belief-dependent realism dictates, once the belief is formed, reasons can be found to support it.

Before Collins made the leap, however, his training in science and rationality kept religious belief at bay. “The scientist in me refused to go any further along this path toward Christian belief, no matter how appealing, if the biblical writings about Christ turned out to be a myth or, worse yet, a hoax.” As long as belief was secondary to explanation, skepticism reigned supreme. But once you open your mind to the possibility of belief, explanations fall naturally into place. As he told a Time magazine reporter in a print debate with the celebrated atheist Richard Dawkins—who challenged Collins’s claim that God is outside of the universe and called it “the mother and father of all cop outs”—Collins replied:

I do object to the assumption that anything that might be outside of nature is ruled out of the conversation. That’s an impoverished view of the kinds of questions we humans can ask, such as “Why am I here?” “What happens after we die?” If you refuse to acknowledge their appropriateness, you end up with a zero probability of God after examining the natural world because it doesn’t convince you on a proof basis. But if your mind is open about whether God might exist, you can point to aspects of the universe that are consistent with that conclusion.

The explanation-belief order was about to be reversed. Collins was poised on the precipice of the leap of faith that the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard claimed was necessary to circumvent the paradox of believing that a being could be both fully human and fully God. C. S. Lewis provided the catapult that Collins needed to hurl across that theological canyon. In Mere Christianity, Lewis famously presented what has come to be known as the “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord” argument:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with a man who says He is a poached egg—or else He would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.

The intellectual arguments pro and con for the divinity of Christ that had so bedeviled Collins during his spiritual quest collapsed in one afternoon while communing with nature:

Lewis was right. I had to make a choice. A full year had passed since I decided to believe in some sort of God, and now I was being called to account. On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ.

* * *

I wanted to know more about this experience and managed to catch