Connected

Learning the Language of God 

The discovery that there might be a God who cared about me was a profound revelation but I also began to sense a growing foreboding. I was beginning to discover God but the character of this holy God was almost infinitely far away from what I might be able to approach with all my failings. That distress was blessedly answered as I began to understand the person of Jesus Christ. I had thought that Christ was as much myth as history but realised after reading more about him that he was a historical figure. There is a great deal of evidence for Jesus' existence and his teachings, and even strong support for his literally rising from the dead. This, while it seemed incredible at first, began to make the most perfect sense. I realised that I would be cut off for all time from God if I didn't have a bridge of some sort to make me right, given my imperfections and God's holiness. The perfect bridge, I realised, was Jesus himself.

That was a joyous revelation but also a scary one. As it all began to fall into place, I realised I'd come so far down this road that it was going to be very hard to turn back.In a muddle about all of this, on a beautiful afternoon (one of those rare moments as a medical resident where I had a little time off) I went hiking in the Cascade Mountains in the northwest of the United States. It was a sunny day, the sky was perfectly blue, and I had that experience that we are occasionally given of being cleared of all of the distractions that otherwise get in the way of thinking about what really matters. I just left the car and walked up a hiking trail. I had no idea where I was, and it's a wonder I didn't get lost. As I walked up that trail I turned a corner and there was a sheer cliff face in front of me, at the top of which there must have been a small trickle of moisture. As that trickle came down the cliff it froze, and glinting in the sun was this frozen waterfall that came down in three cascades. I'd never seen anything like this before.

It would take anybody's breath away, spiritual or not, to see this beauty of nature. But it caught me at a moment where I realised that this was an opportunity to ask the question that we all have to ask at some point. Do I believe in God? Am I ready to say yes to that question? And I found that all of my resistance fell away. Not in a way that I could tell you precisely, in terms of 'Yes, I went through this logical argument and that theorem.' No, it just was a sense of 'I am ready to give myself to the love that God represents and that has reached out to me. I am ready to put aside my resistance and become the believer that I think God wants me to be.' I fell on my knees and said, 'This is something I want. Christ, come and be my Saviour, and change my life. I can't do it by myself, and maybe tomorrow I'm going to think I was nuts but today this is real. This is the most real thing that's ever happened.'

I was not quiet about my new faith. I was a young Christian full of excitement, wanting to share it with everybody. My colleagues were generally supportive, although a bit puzzled. A few of them, knowing that I was already on a pathway towards spending my professional career in the field of genetics, suggested that I was on a collision course and that my brain was in danger of exploding if I allowed my faith in Jesus and an exploration of genetics and evolution to come together. Those views would clearly be found incompatible and I would end up in some sort of misery and crisis.But shortly after I became a Christian I realised there was no real conflict between belief in a Creator God and using science to understand how God had done that creating. It is well documented by a recent survey that 40% of scientists in the USA believe in a personal God. I can't imagine that science, which allows us to peer dimly into God's creation, would in some way threaten God. Here is an opportunity to understand God better and increase our awe for what God has created.

I have been more open in terms of talking about science and faith than many scientists have been. There wasn't much written about how to put these worldviews together, so I decided to speak and write more openly about it. This has, for the most part, been a really exhilarating experience, and has resulted in my having the chance to talk to thousands of people about a topic which often isn't discussed, and in a small way to encourage people to think these issues through and not just put them to the side. It's not necessarily an easy thing, though, for a scientist to talk about this. There's a bit of a taboo in academic circles about discussing matters of faith, and that topic will empty the seminar room about as quickly as any I know of. There's a sense that this is not what science is about, and you should leave those conversations for your home or your church. I understand the reasons for that discomfort but I think it's unfortunate that this view has led many people to believe that science and faith are incompatible.You can read the book of the Bible or you can read the book of nature, and you can find truth in both ways. You need to be careful, of course, about what kind of question you're asking, and which tools are appropriate for that question. It seems to me that to put either of those kinds of investigations off to the side and say 'That's either inappropriate or dangerous' is to impoverish your opportunity to address the most important questions in life. We are only given a brief time to live here on this amazing planet, so why should we limit ourselves? We need to search in all kinds of directions for the truth.

 

Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. is the former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). On 17 August 2009 he was sworn in as director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Used with permission from Authentic Media. You can buy the book Test of Faith and check out other resources for churches from the Faraday Institute at www.testoffaith.com.