The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

by Francis S. Collins

After twenty-eight years as a believer, the Moral Law still stands out for me as the strongest signpost to God. More than that, it points to a God who cares about human beings, and a God who is infinitely good and holy.

the fact that the universe had a beginning, that it obeys orderly laws that can be expressed precisely with mathematics, and the existence of a remarkable series of “coincidences” that allow the laws of nature to support life—do not tell us much about what kind of God must be behind it all, but they do point toward an intelligent mind that could lie behind such precise and elegant principles.

Science is the only legitimate way to investigate the natural world.

Nevertheless, science alone is not enough to answer all the important questions. Even Albert Einstein saw the poverty of a purely naturalistic worldview. Choosing his words carefully, he wrote, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”5 The meaning of human existence, the reality of God, the possibility of an afterlife, and many other spiritual questions lie outside of the reach of the scientific method.

The poverty of an objectivistic account is made only too clear when we consider the mystery of music. From a scientific point of view, it is nothing but vibrations in the air, impinging on the eardrums and stimulating neural currents in the brain. How does it come about that this banal sequence of temporal activity has the power to speak to our hearts of an eternal beauty? The whole range of subjective experience, from perceiving a patch of pink, to being enthralled by a performance of the Mass in B Minor, and on to the mystic’s encounter with the ineffable reality of the One, all these truly human experiences are at the center of our encounter with reality, and they are not to be dismissed as epiphenomenal froth on the surface of a universe whose true nature is impersonal and lifeless.

Science is not the only way of knowing. The spiritual worldview provides another way of finding truth. Scientists who deny this would be well advised to consider the limits of their own tools, as nicely represented in a parable told by the astronomer Arthur Eddington. He described a man who set about to study deep-sea life using a net that had a mesh size of three inches. After catching many wild and wonderful creatures from the depths, the man concluded that there are no deep-sea fish that are smaller than three inches in length! If we are using the scientific net to catch our particular version of truth, we should not be surprised that it does not catch the evidence of spirit.

God is the Creator of all the universe, if God had a specific plan for the arrival of humankind on the scene, and if He had a desire for personal fellowship with humans, into whom He had instilled the Moral Law as a signpost toward Himself, then He can hardly be threatened by the efforts of our puny minds to understand the grandeur of His creation.

To add to the problem, church leaders often seem to be out of step with new scientific findings, and run the risk of attacking scientific perspectives without fully understanding the facts. The consequence can bring ridicule on the church, driving sincere seekers away from God instead of into His arms.

Proverbs 19:2 warns against this kind of well-intentioned but misinformed religious fervor: “It is not good to have zeal without knowledge.”

Believers would do well to follow the exhortation of Copernicus, who found in the discovery that the earth revolves around the sun an opportunity to celebrate, rather than diminish, the grandeur of God: “To know the mighty works of God; to comprehend His wisdom and majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful working of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and ac...

Are you distressed by some specific philosophical problem with faith, such as why a loving God would allow suffering? Recognize that a great deal of suffering is brought upon us by our own actions or those of others, and that in a world where humans practice free will, it is inevitable. Understand, also, that if God is real, His purposes will often not be the same as ours. Hard though it is to accept, a complete absence of suffering may not be in the best interest of our spiritual growth.

Science is not threatened by God; it is enhanced. God is most certainly not threatened by science; He made it all possible.