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...Indeed, the question was almost predictable, since the room was filled with Harvey Fellows, high-performing young academics devoted to bringing a Christian presence to fields where Evangelicals are underrepresented. And Collins, that rarest of raritiesa superstar evangelical biologistand author of the new book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press; 304 pages), was perfectly qualified to answer. He did. That notion "gets you into a series of real problems," he replied. He sketched one out: the human genome contains nonfunctional elements in the precise spot where they can be found on the chromosomes...
...will conform to their beliefs. Then there are academic atheists who claim increasingly aggressively that science is in the process of proving religion a delusion. But few of the polemicists have the authority to preach beyond their own choirs. Most believers don't care to listen to an atheistic scientist calling the idea of God a mythology created to explain what humans don't understand, and academic atheists are just as uninterested in scientific lectures from Bible literalists...
...Collins has more in mind than being a role model. The last celebrity scientist to suggest a middle path in the creation wars was Stephen Jay Gould, who argued that science and faith could coexist because they are "nonoverlapping" domains with no common ground on which to clash. Yet Collins insists on overlaying and intertwining them. He starts from a very Gouldian premise - "Science is the only reliable way to understand the natural world [but] is powerless to answer questions such as 'what is the meaning of human existence'" - but he tracks it to a different conclusion. "We need...
...Collins' trailblazing work identifying genetic defects that predispose to cystic fibrosis and other diseases led to his succeeding double-helix discoverer James Watson as head of a 2,400-scientist, multination project to map all 3.1 billion biochemical letters that constitute the human blueprint. In 2000, Bill Clinton honored Collins and his private-sector competitor Craig Venter in the White House, crediting their complementary genome work with uncovering "the language in which God created life." (See pictures of America's pastor Billy Graham...
...found that God talk could be something of a taboo. "Bring up faith and there's always a little sense of, Didn't you get the memo?" At least once a month he receives an e-mail from some lonely post-doc asking advice on being an evangelical scientist. As his renown grew, he moved from sharing his Christian conversion with groups of fellow believers to sitting on public panels where, he says, "I've found myself the sole person saying faith was relevant" to science. Thus, he adds, "I've kind of been writing this book for 25 years...