The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

by Francis S. Collins

Here we see not only an argument about the rarity of miracles, but an argument that they should have some purpose, rather than representing the supernatural acts of a capricious magician, simply designed to amaze. If God is the ultimate embodiment of omnipotence and goodness, He would not play such a trickster role.

John Polkinghorne argues this point cogently: “Miracles are not to be interpreted as divine acts against the laws of nature (for those laws are themselves expressions of God’s will) but as more profound revelations of the character of the divine relationship to creation. To be credible, miracles mu...

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.”

Faced with a set of data that includes a puzzling and unexplained phenomenon, scientists construct hypotheses of the mechanism that might be involved, and then conduct experiments to test those hypotheses. Many experiments on the cutting edge of science fail, and most hypotheses turn out to be wrong. Science is progressive and self-correcting: no significantly erroneous conclusions or false hypotheses can be sustained for long, as newer observations will ultimately knock down incorrect constructs. But over a long period of time, a consistent set of observations sometimes emerges that leads to a new framework of understanding.

One of the most cherished hopes of a scientist is to make an observation that shakes up a field of research. Scientists have a streak of closeted anarchism, hoping that someday they will turn up some unexpected fact that will force a disruption of the framework of the day. That’s what Nobel Prizes are given for. In that regard, any assumption that a conspiracy could exist among scientists to keep a widely current theory alive when it actually contains serious flaws is completely antithetical to the restless mind-set of the profession.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo (all strong believers in God) built an increasingly compelling case that the movement of the planets could be properly understood only if the earth revolved around the sun, rather than the other way around. The details of their conclusions were not all quite correct (Galileo made a famous blooper in his explanation of the tides), and many in the scientific community were initially unconvinced, but ultimately the data and the consistency of the theory’s predictions convinced even the most skeptical scientists. The Catholic Church remained strongly opposed, however, claiming that this view was incompatible with holy scripture. In retrospect it is clear that the scriptural basis for those claims was remarkably thin; nonetheless, this confrontation raged for decades and ultimately did considerable harm, both to science and to the church.

The physicist Ernest Rutherford commented one hundred years ago that “a theory that you can’t explain to a bartender is probably no damn good.”

Among the many strange concepts now well documented experimentally are such things as the fact that neutrons and protons (which we used to think were the fundamental particles of the atomic nucleus) are actually made up of six flavors of quarks (named “up,” “down,” “strange,” “charmed,” “bottom,” and “top”). The six flavors become even stranger when they are described as each having three colors (red, green, and blue). The quirky names given to these particles at least prove that scientists have a sense of humor.

But in one very important sense, Rutherford and Occam are still honored: as puzzling as the verbal descriptions of these newly discovered phenomena are, their mathematical representation invariably turns out to be elegant, unexpectedly simple, and even beautiful.

This raises the first of several philosophical questions about the nature of the physical universe. Why should matter behave in such a way? In Eugene Wigner’s phrase, what could be the explanation for the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics”?1

If one is willing to accept the possibility of the supernatural, is it also an insight into the mind of God? 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 Are these mathematical descriptions of reality signposts to some greater intelligence? Is mathematics, along with DNA, another language of God?

At the beginning of the twentieth century, most scientists assumed a universe with no beginning and no end. This created certain physical paradoxes, such as how the universe managed to remain stable without collapsing upon itself because of the force of gravity, but other alternatives did not seem very attractive. When Einstein developed the theory of general relativity in 1916, he introduced a “fudge factor” to block gravitational implosion and retain the idea of a steady-state universe. He later reportedly called this “the greatest mistake of my life.”

After ruling out all other possible causes (including certain pigeons, who were initially suspected as the culprits), Penzias and Wilson ultimately realized that this background noise was coming from the universe itself, and that it represented precisely the kind of afterglow that one would expect to find as a consequence of the Big Bang, arising from the annihilation of matter and antimatter in the early moments of the exploding universe.

At least so far, scientists have been unable to interpret the very earliest events in the explosion, occupying the first 10-43 seconds (one tenth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second!). After that, it is possible to make predictions about the events that would need to have occurred to result in today’s observable universe, including the annihilation of matter and antimatter, the formation of stable atomic nuclei, and ultimately the formation of atoms, primarily hydrogen, deuterium, and helium.

The sense of awe created by these realizations has caused more than a few agnostic scientists to sound downright theological. 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.”3

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.

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. All of these steps in the formation of our solar system are now well described and unlikely to be revised on the basis of additional future information. Nearly all of the atoms in your body were once cooked in the nuclear furnace of an ancient supernova—you are truly made of stardust.

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.

Hawking writes: “Why did the universe start out with so nearly the critical rate of expansion that separates models that recollapse from those that go on expanding forever, that even now, 10 thousand million years later, it is still expanding at nearly the critical rate? If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in 100 thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size.”5

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

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.

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 almost infinitesimal. And yet those are exactly the parameters that we observe. In sum, our universe is wildly improbable.

Essentially, there are three possible responses to the Anthropic Principle:

This is called the “multiverse” hypothesis.

Hawking, quoted by Ian Barbour,7 writes, “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

Another distinguished physicist, Freeman Dyson, after reviewing this series of “numerical accidents,” concludes, “The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that t...

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 g...

In trying to judge between options 1 and 3, a particular parable by philosopher John Leslie comes to mind.11 In this parable, an individual faces a firing squad, and fifty expert marksmen aim their rifles to carry out the deed. The order is given, the shots ring out, and yet somehow all of the bullets miss and the condemned individual walks away unscathed. How could such a remarkable event be explained? Leslie suggests there are two possible alternatives, which correspond to our options 1 and 3. In the first place, there may have been thousands of executions being carried out in that same day, and even the best marksmen will occasionally miss. So the odds just happen to be in favor of this one individual, and all fifty of the marksmen fail to hit the target. The other option is that something more directed is going on, and the apparent poor aim of the fifty experts was actually intentional. Which seems more plausible?

(As Laplace famously said to Napoleon, when asked about God, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”)

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.” The theist might reply that the game would not appear to be dice to God, even if it does to us. As Hawking points out, “We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determines events completely for some supernatural being, who could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it.”12

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.

But the comfort level of the major theistic religions is somewhat variable. The idea of a finite beginning of the universe is not entirely resonant with Buddhism, where an oscillating universe would be more compatible. But the theistic branches of Hinduism encounter no major conflict with the Big Bang. Neither do most (but not all) interpreters of Islam. For the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the opening words of Genesis (“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”) are entirely compatible with the Big Bang. In one notable example, Pope Pius XII of the Roman Catholic Church was a strong supporter of Big Bang theory even before its scientific underpinnings were well established.

Unquestionably the language is poetic.

“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

As we shall see, science has now turned this upside down.

But here, as with the other two arguments, I would like to suggest that science should not be denied by the believer, it should be embraced.

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.

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

To examine the complexity of life and our own origins on this planet, 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 believer need not fear that this investigation will dethrone the divine; if God is truly Almighty, He will hardly be threatened by our puny efforts to understand the workings of His natural world. And as seekers, we may well discover from science many interesting answers to the question “How does life work?” What we cannot discover, through science alone, are the answers to the questions “Why is there life anyway?” and “Why am I here?”

We now know that the universe is approximately 14 billion years old. A century ago, we didn’t even know how long our own planet had been around. But the subsequent discovery of radioactivity and the natural decay of certain chemical isotopes provided an elegant and rather precise means of determining the age of various rocks on Earth. The scientific basis of this method is described in detail in Brent Dalrymple’s book The Age of the Earth, and depends upon the known and very long half-lives by which three radioactive chemical elements steadily decay and transform into different, stable elements: uranium slowly becomes lead, potassium slowly becomes argon, and the more exotic strontium becomes the rare element called rubidium. By measuring the amounts of any of these pairs of elements, we can estimate the age of any particular rock. All of these independent methods give results that are strikingly concordant, pointing to an age of Earth of 4.55 billion years, with an estimated error of only about 1 percent.

Not surprisingly, therefore, rocks dating back 4 billion years or more show absolutely no evidence of any life forms. Just 150 million years later, however, multiple different types of microbial life are found. Presumably, these single-celled organisms were capable of information storage, probably using DNA, and were self-replicating and capable of evolving into multiple different types.

This kind of “horizontal gene transfer” is well documented in the most ancient forms of bacteria that now exist on the planet (archaebacteria), and may have provided an opportunity for new properties to be rapidly spread.

No current hypothesis comes close to explaining how in the space of a mere 150 million years, the prebiotic environment that existed on planet Earth gave rise to life.

Fifty years ago, famous experiments by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey reconstructed a mixture of water and organic compounds that might have represented primeval circumstances on Earth. By applying an electrical discharge, these researchers were able to form small quantities of important biological building blocks, such as amino acids. The finding of small amounts of similar compounds within meteorites arriving from outer space has also been put forward as an argument that such complex organic molecules can arise from natural processes in the universe.

DNA, with its phosphate-sugar backbone and intricately arranged organic bases, stacked neatly on top of one another and paired together at each rung of the twisted double helix, seems an utterly improbable molecule to have “just happened”—especially since DNA seems to possess no intrinsic means of copying itself.

DNA is something like the hard drive on your computer: it is supposed to be a stable medium in which to store information (though, as with your computer, bugs and snafus are always possible). RNA, by contrast, is more like a Zip disk or a flash drive—it travels around with its programming, and is capable of making things happen on its own.