The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

by Francis S. Collins

Agape, or selfless altruism, presents a major challenge for the evolutionist. It is quite frankly a scandal to reductionist reasoning. It cannot be accounted for by the drive of individual selfish genes to perpetuate themselves. Quite the contrary: it may lead humans to make sacrifices that lead to great personal suffering, injury, or death, without any evidence of benefit. And yet, if we carefully examine that inner voice we sometimes call conscience, the motivation to practice this kind of love exists within all of us, despite our frequent efforts to ignore it.

Doubt is an unavoidable part of belief. In the words of Paul Tillich, “Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.”1 If the case in favor of belief in God were utterly airtight, then the world would be full of confident practitioners of a single faith. But imagine such a world, where the opportunity to make a free choice about belief was taken away by the certainty of the evidence. How interesting would that be?

Anyone who claims the blooming of a flower is a miracle is treading upon a growing understanding of plant biology, which is well on the way to elucidating all the steps between seed germination and the blossoming of a beautiful and sweet-smelling rose, all directed by that plant’s DNA instruction book.

MORE THAN TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO, one of the most influential philosophers of all time, Immanuel Kant, wrote: “Two things fill me with constantly increasing admiration and awe, the longer and more earnestly I reflect on them: the starry heavens without and the Moral Law within.”

“a theory that you can’t explain to a bartender is probably no damn good.”

Were Einstein, Heisenberg, and others encountering the divine?

“Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.”2

mathematics, along with DNA, another language of God?

how did it all begin?

In God and the Astronomers, the astrophysicist Robert Jastrow wrote this final paragraph: “At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

Jastrow writes: “Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements and the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same; the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy.”4

The Big Bang cries out for a divine explanation. It forces the conclusion that nature had a defined beginning. I cannot see how nature could have created itself. Only a supernatural force that is outside of space and time could have done that.

Matter began to coalesce into galaxies under the force of gravity. It acquired rotational motion as it did so, ultimately resulting in the spiral shape of galaxies such as our own. Within those galaxies local collections of hydrogen and helium were drawn together, and their density and temperature rose. Ultimately nuclear fusion commenced.

This process, whereby four hydrogen nuclei fuse together to form both energy and a helium nucleus, provides the major source of fuel for stars. Larger stars burn faster. As they begin to burn out, they generate within their core even heavier elements such as carbon and oxygen. Early in the universe (within the first few hundred million years) such elements appeared only in the core of these collapsing stars, but some of these stars then went through massive explosions known as supernovae, flinging heavier elements back into the gas in the galaxy.

our sun is instead a second- or third-generation star, formed about 5 billion years ago by a local recoalescence. As that was occurring, a small proportion of heavier elements in the vicinity escaped incorporation into the new star, and instead collected into the planets that now rotate around our sun. This includes our own planet, which was far from hospitable in its early days. Initially very hot, and bombarded with continual massive collisions, Earth gradually cooled, developed an atmosphere, and became potentially hospitable to living things by about 4 billion years ago. A mere 150 million years later, the earth was teeming with life.

you are truly made of stardust.

If God exists, and seeks to have fellowship with sentient beings like ourselves, and can handle the challenge of interacting with 6 billion of us currently on this planet and countless others who have gone before, it is not clear why it would be beyond His abilities to interact with similar creatures on a few other planets or, for that matter, a few million other planets. It would, of course, be of great interest to discover whether such creatures in other parts of the universe also possess the Moral Law, given its importance in our own perception of the nature of God. Realistically, however, it is unlikely that any of us will have the opportunity to learn the answers to those questions during our lifetime.

It is that tiny fraction of the initial potentiality of the entire universe that makes up the mass of the universe as we now know it.

The way in which the universe expanded after the Big Bang depended critically on how much total mass and energy the universe had, and also on the strength of the gravitational constant.

The existence of a universe as we know it rests upon a knife edge of improbability.

3. The same remarkable circumstance applies to the formation of heavier elements. If the strong nuclear force that holds together protons and neutrons had been even slightly weaker, then only hydrogen could have formed in the universe. If, on the other hand, the strong nuclear force had been slightly stronger, all the hydrogen would have been converted to helium, instead of the 25 percent that occurred early in the Big Bang, and thus the fusion furnaces of stars and their ability to generate heavier elements would never have been born.

Adding to this remarkable observation, the nuclear force appears to be tuned just sufficiently for carbon to form, which is critical for life forms on Earth. Had that force been just slightly more attracti...

Altogether, there are fifteen physical constants whose values current theory is unable to predict. They are givens: they simply have the value that they have. This list includes the speed of light, the strength of the weak and strong nuclear forces, various parameters associated with electromagnetism, and the force of gravity. The chance that all of these constants would take on the values necessary to result in a stable universe capable of sustaining complex life forms is...

This general conclusion is referred to as the Anthropic Principle: the idea that our universe is uniquely tuned to give rise to humans. It has been a source of much wonder and speculation since it was fully appreciated a few decades ago.6

“multiverse” hypothesis.

We are just very, very, very lucky.

3. There is only one universe, and this is it. The precise tuning of all of the physical constants and physical laws to make intelligent life possible is not an accident, but reflects the action of the one who created the universe in the first place.

“The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications.”

Going even further, in A Brief History of Time, Hawking states: “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”8

And Arno Penzias, the Nobel Prize–winning scientist who codiscovered the cosmic microwave background radiation that provided strong support for the Big Bang in the first place, states, “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five Books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.”10 Perhaps Penzias was thinking of the words of David in Psalm 8: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him?”

could be argued, however, that the Big Bang itself seems to point strongly toward a Creator, since otherwise the question of what came before is left hanging in the air.

no scientific observation can reach the level of absolute proof of the existence of God. But for those willing to consider a theistic perspective, the Anthropic Principle certainly provides an interesting argument in favor of a Creator.

number of observations, Max

Max Planck and Albert Einstein demonstrated that light did not come in all possible energies, but that it was “quantized” in particles of precise energy, known as photons. At bottom, therefore, light is not infinitely indivisible, but comprises a flow of photons, just as the resolution of a digital camera cannot be any finer than a single pixel.

Bohr postulated a similar quantum argument, developing a theory that postulated that electrons could exist only in a certain number of finite states.

Einstein himself, though he played an important role in the early development of quantum mechanics, initially rejected the concept of uncertainty, famously remarking, “God does not play dice.”

there is nothing inherently in conflict between the idea of a creator God and what science has revealed. In fact, the God hypothesis solves some deeply troubling questions about what came before the Big Bang, and why the universe seems to be so exquisitely tuned for us to be here.

For the theist, who is led from the Moral Law argument (Chapter 1) to seek a God who not only set the universe in motion, but takes an interest in human beings, such a synthesis can be readily achieved. The argument would go something like this: If God exists, then He is supernatural. If He is supernatural, then He is not limited by natural laws. If He is not limited by natural laws, there is no reason He should be limited by time. If He is not limited by time, then He is in the past, the present, and the future. The consequence of those conclusions would include: He could exist before the Big Bang and He could exist after the universe fades away, if it ever does. He could know the precise outcome of the formation of the universe even before it started. He could have foreknowledge of a planet near the outer rim of an average spiral galaxy that would have just the right characteristics to allow life. He could have foreknowledge that that planet would lead to the development of sentient creatures, through the mechanism of evolution by natural selection. He could even know in advance the thoughts and actions of those creatures, even though they themselves have free will.

This is not just a modern-day question; throughout history debates have raged between literalists and nonliteralists. Saint Augustine, probably one of the greatest of all religious intellects, was particularly aware of the risks of turning biblical texts into precise scientific treatises, and wrote, with specific reference to Genesis: “In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.”13

The elegance behind life’s complexity is indeed reason for awe, and for belief in God—but not in the simple, straightforward way that many found so compelling before Darwin came along.

THE “ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN” dates back at least to Cicero. It was put forward with particular effectiveness by William Paley in 1802 in a highly influential book, Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearance of Nature. Paley, a moral philosopher and Anglican priest, posed the famous watchmaker analogy:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever. Nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer, which I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there…the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use…. Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.1

Darwin himself, before his voyage on the HMS Beagle, was an admirer of Paley’s writings, and professed to be convinced by this view.

Paley’s argument cannot be the whole story. To

we must dig deep into the fascinating revelations about the nature of living things wrought by the current revolution in paleontology, molecular biology, and genomics. A

“Why is there life anyway?” and “Why am I here?”

Stephen Jay Gould, the most passionate and lyrical writer on evolution of his generation, in his book Wonderful

Darwin’s Revolutionary Idea

The Origin of Species.

He held that variation within a species occurs randomly, and that the survival or extinction of each organism depends upon its ability to adapt to the environment. This he termed natural selection.