The Language of God

I am reading a book called "The Language of God" by Francis Collins, who was the head of the Human Genome Project, the team that produced a map of the entire genetic code of the human species. It was a monumental achievement, modern medicine's "landing on the moon" moment in terms of the scale of the accomplishment.

Collins makes the case that being a believer does not mean you have to disbelieve science, or even segment it off to a different part of your mind - he explicity disavows Stephen Jay Gould's suggestion that science and theology are non-overlapping disciplines. He then goes through the most common alternatives put before the modern believer - creationism, intelligent design, or atheism, and rejects them all. He makes the strong case that we can recognize God, even the traditional conception of Abraham's God and not just the clockwinder of the Deists, in the world as we know it.

Resorting to C.S. Lewis and Augustine, he makes the case for an involved God, but a God who nonetheless created the universe as a self-running system that does not require numerous acts of special creation or intervention in order to exist. He does not argue that this makes God uninvolved today; Collins is prepared to accept that miraculous intervention does exist, but for its own sake - and not as something God needs to do to prop up the universe. A good architect who puts up a house shouldn't need to constantly come back and put up supports and repair the foundation, just to keep the house standing.

I'm only halfway into it, but I think Collins is quite courageous. Many of his scientific contemporaries, such as Richard Dawkins, are violently hostile to religion, and Collins will surely pay a price as a scientist for writing an unabashedly pro-religious work. At the same time, Collins forcefully rejects creationism and the "irreducible complexity" of proponents such as Michael Behe. 

Personally, I think that religion that insists on rejecting science is doing great harm. I was kept mired in a painful agnostic existence for a decade because of Christians at my work who led me to believe that accepting modern science was incompatible with Christianity. I had spent enough time reading about paleo-anthropology and cosmology that I had no way of accepting the idea that the Earth was 6,000 years old, and that dinosaurs chased Adam around. And the people who insist on this being the case are quite literally keeping people like me from God.

"Woe to you, scholars of the law! You have taken away the key of knowledge. You yourselves did not enter and you stopped those trying to enter." (Luke 11:52)