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Followers of the Book are known
as Kitabiyas. That makes Francis Collins, a Christian, a Kitabiya. As director
of the Human Genome Project, Dr Collins stood by Bill Clinton when the then
American President spoke about DNA as "the language in which God wrote
Creation". He sees no conflict between his roles as a believer and a scientist.
He claims to have found a wonderful harmony in the complementary truths of
science and faith. "The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome," he
adds. "God can be found in the cathedral or in the laboratory. By investigating
God's majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a means of
worship".
However, Dr. Collins confesses
that he did not always embrace such perspectives. As a graduate student in
physical chemistry in the 1970s, he was an atheist. Nor could he find any reason
to postulate the existence of any truths outside of mathematics, physics and
chemistry. But things changed dramatically when he went to medical college.
He encountered life and death
issues at the bedside of one of his patients who asked "What do you believe,
doctor ?" That's when his search for answers began and he quickly ran into
limitations of his beloved science: it seemed woefully inadequate against a
variety of fundamental questions such as "What is the meaning of life ?" "Why
are we here ?" "If the universe began with a Big Bang, what or who came before
it ?" "What happens after we die ?' And so on.
Having always assumed that faith
was based on purely emotional and irrational arguments, Dr. Collins was
astounded to discover - initially in the writings of the Oxford scholar C S
Lewis and later from more eclectic sources - that one could build a very strong
case for the plausibility of the existence of God on purely rational grounds.
"My earlier atheist's assertion that 'I know there is no God' emerged as the
least defensible," he told a news channel. "As the British writer G K Chesterton
famously remarked, 'Atheism is the most daring of all dogmas, for it is the
assertion of a universal negative.'"
He also argues for what he terms'
theistic evolution' and believes that reason alone cannot prove the existence of
God. Faith is reason plus revelation, he says, and the revelation part requires
one to think with the spirit as well as with the mind. You have to hear the
music, not just read the notes on the page. Ultimately, a leap of faith is
required. |
