• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 566 0

Collins during a long drive to visit family, isolated in his car from the distractions that being head of the National Institutes of Health brings.2 He was refreshingly (and revealingly) open about his beliefs and how he arrived at them, starting with what led to the frozen waterfall epiphany. Collins was a medical resident working hundred-hour weeks. “I was overworked and underslept, trying also to be a good husband and father, and I really had little time for deep reflection. So if there was anything to that moment in the mountains it was being set aside from those distractions and allowing myself to contemplate these profound questions.” In this state of readiness, Collins explained, “I turned the corner of the trail and saw this frozen waterfall glistening in the sun. It wasn’t so much a miraculous sign from God as it was a feeling that I was being called to a decision. I even remember thinking that if a bald eagle flew overhead at that moment that would be really cool, but that didn’t happen. But I did experience a feeling of peace and of being ready and in the right place to make that decision. I just had a peaceful sense of ‘I’m here. I made it.’”

After a “honeymoon period of about a year” in which Collins “felt great joy and relief and talked to lots of people about my conversion,” doubts began to creep into his mind, making him wonder if “this had all been an illusion.” One Sunday of particularly intense doubt, Collins “went up to the altar, knelt for a while in great distress, crying out in some voiceless prayer for help.” Just then he felt a hand on his shoulder. “I turned and there was a man who had just joined the church that day. He asked me what I was going through. I told him, he took me to lunch, we talked, and we became good friends. It turns out that he was a physicist who had traveled a similar path to mine, and he helped me see that doubt is part of the faith journey.” Reassured by a fellow scientist, Collins “was able to go back and reconstruct how I came to faith in the first place, and I concluded that my religious belief was real and not counterfeit.”

Did it help that he was also a scientist?

It sure did! In talking to lots of people of faith I’ve discovered that I have intellectualized my belief far more than most people, so it was especially helpful to share my doubt with a fellow scientist.

Having doubts didn’t set you back in your faith?

No, doubt is an opportunity to continue growing.

How can you tell the difference between the position that God exists and doubt is the normal part of faith, and the position that God does not exist and doubt is reasonable and appropriate?

There is a spectrum of belief, between absolute confidence in God’s existence on one end and absolute confidence that there is no God on the other end. We are all living somewhere on this spectrum. I am over toward the belief end, but by no means all the way over there. And I know what it’s like to live on the other end of the spectrum since that’s where I was in my twenties. If you look at that spectrum from a purely rational perspective, neither extreme is defensible, although for all the reasons I describe in my book I conclude that the belief side is more rational than the disbelief side.

* * *

The Language of God is an honest and genuinely conciliatory effort at bridging the divide between science and religion. I quote it often in my debates with creationists because Collins—someone with considerable scientific status in his religious camp—nevertheless explains clearly why intelligent design creationism is bunk. And his chapter on the genetic evidence for human evolution is one of the most eloquent summaries ever penned on the subject. It is worth briefly summarizing here because it well captures Collins’s integrity before the facts and sets up a conundrum that he (and all of us) must navigate around when it comes to ultimate questions about nature.

Collins begins by describing “ancient repetitive elements” (AREs) in DNA. AREs arise from “jumping genes,” which are genes capable of copying and inserting themselves