Francis Collins

Before

Francis Collins grew up on a farm in Virginia, home-schooled and intensely curious, and went on to earn both a PhD in physical chemistry and an MD. Somewhere in graduate school he reasoned his way into a confident atheism, deciding that no thinking scientist could take God seriously and that faith was, at best, sentimental wish-fulfillment. He was comfortable in that unbelief — until his medical training put him at the bedsides of dying patients. Again and again he watched men and women face death with a peace and even a hope he could not account for, anchored in a faith he had dismissed. One day an elderly woman with severe heart disease, after gently sharing what she believed, turned and asked him a simple question: 'Doctor, what do you believe?' He stammered that he wasn't sure — and realized, with a jolt of embarrassment, that as a scientist who prided himself on evidence, he had never once seriously investigated the most important question a human being can ask. He had rejected God without ever examining the case.

The Turning Point

Stung by his own intellectual laziness, Collins set out to demolish faith properly so he could dismiss it with a clear conscience. A pastor pointed him to C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, expecting it to help. Instead it dismantled him. Lewis's argument from the moral law — the universal human sense of right and wrong, an 'ought' that pure evolutionary survival struggled to explain — struck Collins as devastating, because he could not argue his way past it. The more he read, in theology and in the elegant, written-out language of DNA he studied by day, the more the evidence tilted, slowly and against his will, toward a Mind behind it all. For about a year he wrestled, resisting the conclusions his own reasoning kept reaching. The final barrier fell not in a library but on a hike in the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest. Rounding a bend in the trail on a clear autumn afternoon, Collins came upon a frozen waterfall, the sunlight catching it and splitting it into three sparkling streams of ice. The image — and the thought of the Trinity it suggested — broke the last of his resistance. The scientist who had demanded proof of everything knelt in the wet grass and gave his life to Jesus Christ.

After

Far from ending his science, Collins's faith ran alongside his greatest work. He went on to lead the Human Genome Project, the historic international effort that first read the three-billion-letter code of human DNA — an achievement he described as glimpsing, for the first time, 'our own instruction book, previously known only to God.' He later served as director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health under three presidents. Through his bestselling book The Language of God and the BioLogos organization he founded, he became one of the world's most prominent voices insisting that rigorous science and serious Christian faith are not enemies but allies — that the God of the Bible is also the God of the genome, and can be worshiped just as truly in the laboratory as in the cathedral.

In Their Words

“The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshiped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate, and beautiful.”— Francis Collins