hello Coventry I'm Francis Collins I had the privilege of leading the human
genome project I'm intensely interested in the topic of science and faith and
right now I'm the director of the National Institutes of Health in the
United States which keeps me unfortunately awfully busy and that's my
excuse for not being with you in person instead I'm speaking to you from my
kitchen and hoping that these words will be of some use in this remarkable set of
talks that are happening there at Coventry so Who am I it's probably good
to give you a little glimpse of my childhood how I ended up in the
circumstance you see now I grew up on a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of
Virginia my parents were doing the sixties thing
except it wasn't the 60s yet living on a farm with outdoor plumbing and no
animals to help with the farmwork so it was a lot of work and basically I grew
up interested in almost everything but then I ended up going to public school
and discovered science in the form of a chemistry class and decided that's what
I want to do I want to be a chemist I went to college majored in chemistry and
often got a PhD in quantum mechanics which was really exciting stuff and
along the way became pretty disinterested in anything that had to do
with spiritual perspectives from my view the only thing that really mattered was
science figuring out truth about nature but I also discovered along the way that
I'd kind of missed out on another branch of science and that was biology I'd
ignored it it seemed much too messy and it is kind of messy but incredibly
interesting and realizing that I had missed that opportunity to explore that
and discovering that really interesting things were happening with biology I
changed my direction and went to medical school I know this doesn't seem like a
linear pathway well it wasn't I would not recommend this to anybody as an
efficient way to get to your permanent career but I I did love medicine once I
got into this and it was science but it was about the human body it had the
promise that maybe something interesting would happen in terms of coming up with
answer to diseases that we didn't understand so
I felt like I could be a medical researcher that's what I'd really like
to do but what kind of research well in that first year of medical school I had
a professor who came and taught just six lectures but it was about genetics about
how this study of DNA and inheritance was beginning to shed light in terms of
the ways in which all of these revelations might actually help people
and he brought patients to class and I decided that's what I want to do I want
to be a medical geneticist whatever that is there weren't very many of them and
some people thought I was nuts but it was this passion that emerged that's
what I want to do so I proceeded down that path at this point I was an atheist
figuring that there was no reason outside of the scientific method to
worry about any other kinds of truth but then something happened I found myself
in the clinical part of medical school sitting at the bedside of good people
who were facing the potentially end of their life and I realized in that
situation I would be very hard-pressed to know how to deal with that and some
of these people who had remarkable faith really seemed very strong they weren't
shaking their fist at God they were at peace and one day a patient of mine
wonderful young woman whose was facing the end of her life told me about her
faith and then asked me so doctor what do you believe and in that moment I
realized I had no idea I had never given any really serious consideration to the
question is there a god and if so does that God care about me
and what happens after you die all those things were things I had avoided I was
practicing what you might call willful blindness I didn't want to look at those
issues but her question unsettled me deeply and I felt I have to go and learn
more about this there must be reasons why people believe I assumed it was all
superstition but as I began to talk to people who were believers
and a good pastor who lived down the street and listened to my blasphemous
questions pointed me to things that I might read one of them was
CS Lewis's book called mere christianity and i was blown away here was this
Oxford scholar who like me had been an atheist and then began to explore the
evidence for faith and realized that there was a lot there that was hard to
ignore and who also recognized that in many ways atheism is the most irrational
of all the choices what Chesterton calls the most daring of all dogmas the
assertion of a universal negative scientists aren't supposed to do that
and so I began to consider whether I might have been wrong about this still
imagining that ultimately this search for truth would lead me back to atheism
it didn't I found out there were things about nature that I had kind of ignored
that were pointers towards something much bigger than myself there was in
fact this question of why is there something at all why is there something
instead of nothing the ultimate philosophical question science doesn't
have any answer to that and then there is this wonderful universe but it had a
beginning which suggests that there must have been a creator that is not limited
in space and time otherwise you can't solve the question of how did this get
started well that sounds like a Creator God and then when you begin looking at
the universe my goodness all the time I had spent as a student of quantum
mechanics I loved those equations that describe matter and energy how could it
be that those actually worked it suggests that there's an intelligence
and a very impressive intelligence behind all this a mathematician a
physicist and then maybe the most compelling this sense that the way in
which the universe works the way that those constants that determine
everything from gravity to the mass of the electron have to have exactly the
the the exact size and shape and value that they do otherwise the whole thing
doesn't work it falls apart of all the possible universes that might have
happened we and to be and the only one where any of
this would be at all interesting otherwise it would be monotonous
formless senseless particles all through the rest of all time and yet that's not
the way it is so one has to begin to say somebody some incredible wise
intelligence has set the dials and that was a shock to me and it certainly made
it difficult to stick to my strict atheistic perspective but then there was
the question of okay that might get you to the point of recognizing a creator
that you might call a deist god a god who said everything together but then
maybe wandered off to do something else what about a guy who cares about me well
there again when I began to look at the evidence I realized something that I had
never given consideration to because it was just like breathing the air and that
was this sense that we all have as human beings about good and evil what is it
that could account for the fact that we have this thing called the moral law all
cultures have had it they disagree about how it applies but no culture has ever
said there's no such thing as good and evil they have their definitions about
what they're doing being good and somebody else is evil and I began to
realize there's no real reason for that to be there that I can come up with
scientifically and if you were looking for evidence of a God who wasn't just
interested in the universe as a bland featureless spiritless thing but
actually interested in having relationship with creatures maybe even
creatures in God's image and you found in yourself this sense of good and evil
would that be an interesting signpost to a god who cares about you and not just
any old signpost but a signpost it points to God's character which must be
good and holy more so than we ever can imagine that shook me up this existence
of the moral law again and I come back to Lewis that first chapter of mere
Christianity what's the title of it it's called right and wrong as a
to the meaning of the universe okay I got the clue but then I began to feel
this sense of concern about what that said because if there is a God and God
cares about me and God expects me to be good and holy and not to do the evil
thing I had to be honest and I wasn't very good at that and that just as I was
beginning to appreciate that there might be a god that God seemed to be getting
further away from who I was how was I going to solve that into that
gloom came the bright character of Jesus Christ God reaching out to me God
sending Jesus as the substitution for my failures Jesus who became man but also
was God and who by his sacrifice built a bridge so that I could in fact approach
this good and holy God and not feel completely hopeless that made perfect
sense all the things I had heard from believers when I was growing up which I
thought was just so much nonsense about Jesus died for your sins now it made
perfect sense okay well an atheist would say that's all fine but this stuff about
the moral law that's really just something that comes out of the fact
that being good has provided opportunities for all of us to live
longer and reproduce and pass along our DNA it's just all evolutionary pressure
that doesn't work for me because if that's true that basically says good and
evil are not real concepts at all and we've been hoodwinked and by some sort
of biological conspiracy to believe that they matter now even I think the
strictest atheists have a really hard time with that one morality has to have
a basis otherwise it doesn't fit together at all with what we all
experience and where could that basis come from I don't see how it comes from
culture I don't see how it comes from anything inside ourselves which requires
us then to look out side and there again I land squarely in
the presence of a God who cares about good and evil well as I became a
believer people around me suspected that my head was going to explode because
here I was as a physician a geneticist interested in DNA and all of a sudden I
thought God was involved in this that now has been 42 years since I made that
transition from atheist to Christian and I've never found a problem here and it
troubles me greatly that so many people see these as worldviews that are in
conflict I think the conflict is one that we
humans have managed to create quite nicely but I do not believe it's baked
at all into the fundamental truths of science and fundamental truths of faith
as long as you're careful about making sure what kind of question you're asking
you can find truth these are the two books that God gave us the book of God's
words the Bible and the book of God's works nature and those books can't very
well be in conflict and if they are or if we think they are we probably made
some kind of error in our interpretation or one of the other for me as a
scientist the coolest part of science is DNA so let me say a word about that I
have had the privilege of leading the Human Genome Project an international
effort which in the space of 13 years read out all the letters of the human
DNA instruction book written in this remarkable script this incredible way of
passing information from generation to generation and this DNA language which
is true of all living organisms is the way in which digitally all that is
encoded and it's an elegant language it has just four letters in its alphabet
and if you took that particular script for a human being it takes three billion
of those letters to read out the instruction book for human biology if
you stacked pages together where you had printed that out from one cell of the
body it would be about 600 feet tall and you have all that information inside
each cell of your body delivered to you by your parents
remarkable stuff elegant stuff it's hard not to be in awe of the beauty of the
way in which DNA controls this passive information but then it has to be put
into action so there's RNA and there's protein all these metabolites oh my gosh
there's the brain which has to be specified by that DNA language with 86
billion neurons between your ears that have to do all these amazing things you
cannot be involved in science and not be an AW every day and some people who are
believers say well isn't science kind of knocking back the aw by understanding
how this works from time to time and I would say no not at all it adds to my uh
science is also a way of uncovering the amazing majesty and beauty of God's
creation and so as a scientist I can also be a worshipper when I discover
something that wasn't known before now people will ask can you in fact look at
life and see that that might actually have happened from natural processes or
doesn't this require there to be a supernatural intervention especially in
getting the whole thing started and it's a great question and we don't know the
answer nobody quite knows how life first began on this planet there are theories
it might have been RNA instead of DNA we don't really know people are doing
experiments trying to replicate that environment to see if there might be
some pathway where you start out with a lot of inanimate chemicals and you end
up with something that can replicate itself I don't know it's possible God
had to step in and do it but it's also possible and maybe even more amazing
that God set all those parameters at the beginning of the universe in such a
precise way that the arrival of this kind of life on this blue planet was
inevitable by the way in which the whole plan had been put in in motion and that
seems like even more amazing because after all God designed the natural laws
maybe it's not in God's best interest to intervene with those natural laws too
often so if he could do it all by the original plan that is
just amazing so I don't know the answer but I would hope nobody would get hung
up on that one of the things that people like me who are scientists and believers
get worried about is when somebody says well here's a place that science hasn't
understood yet so that must be what God did and then science comes along and it
makes advances and now it starts to be clear that maybe there was a way we
could understand that that's a God of the gaps approach we should be careful
about but there are parts of our understanding of what we live within in
this universe that science really isn't going to help us with and we can hang on
to those why do I believe in God why am I as a scientist who's had this amazing
experience uncovering all these mysteries about life why am i also a
follower of Jesus it just doesn't make sense otherwise to put this all together
I would feel so impoverished if only the scientific perspective was how I put
answers to questions together because there'd be questions I simply would have
to say well they're off the table why am i here is that a scientific question
science doesn't help me so much there is there a god what happens after you die
what's the nature of beauty and why do we care about that what what about love
is there something about science that's gonna really help you understand the
most altruistic sacrificial kinds of love the love that causes somebody to
lay down their life for another person even somebody they don't know those
things scientifically remain mysteries and I think always will but from a faith
perspective when I go and see what Jesus said on the sermon of the mount it all
falls beautifully together so to have the chance then to live this sort of
fully realized life of bringing all those ways of understanding truth
together and not having to compartmentalize them over here or over
there that has been a joyful way for me to have the chance to live this life of
science and of faith and it's wonderful when I encounter other people who share
that same sense of joy unfortunately all too often and
culture we have not seen that potential for harmony there's been a lot of sense
that there's a conflict here and there's certainly loud voices coming from both
extremes here either saying that science is not to be trusted because it
disagrees with an interpretation of a particular scriptural verse or on the
other hand that faith is not to be trusted because science is the only
thing that matters and those faith people they're always coming up with
stuff that you can't prove I think most of us don't really see it that way I
think most people feel like there is something here from both perspectives
that we want to embrace we want to internalize we want to wrap our arms
around the good news is they're right there is such a harmony you can find it
I have found it I hope in this wonderful Coventry series there will be more and
more opportunities for people to understand just how these worldviews fit
together into something that is truly beautiful truly awesome truly inspiring
truly gratifying and truly gives us all joy thank you