Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

The God Gene
Saturday, February 3, 2007

The National Prayer Breakfast was this week in Washington and the guest speaker was Francis Collins, former head of the genome project and recent born-again Christian. His entire talk is posted here. An excerpt:

As I explored the evidence more deeply, all around me I began to see signposts to something outside of nature that could only be called God. I realized that the scientific method can really only answer questions about HOW things work. It can’t answer questions about WHY – and those are in fact the most important ones. Why is there something instead of nothing? Why does mathematics work so beautifully to describe nature? Why is the universe so precisely tuned to make life possible? Why do we humans have a universal sense of right and wrong, and an urge to do right – even though we disagree on how to interpret that calling?

Confronted with these revelations, I realized that my own assumption -- that faith was the opposite of reason -- was incorrect. I should have known better: Scripture defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Evidence! Simultaneously, I realized that atheism was in fact the least rational of all choices. As Chesterton wrote, “Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas … for it is the assertion of a universal negative.” How could I have had the arrogance to make such an assertion?

So I had to accept the plausibility of a powerful force, a creative Mind, that existed outside of Nature. But was God only to be found in the abstract, or did he also care about me? I felt an increasing hunger to answer that question.

After searching for two years more, I ultimately found my own answer -- in the loving person of Jesus Christ. Here was a man unlike any other. He was humble and kindhearted. He reached out to those considered lowest in society. He made astounding statements about loving your enemies. And he promised something that no ordinary man should be able to promise – to forgive sins. On top of all that, having assumed all my life that Jesus was just a myth, I was astounded to learn that the evidence for his historical existence was actually overwhelming.

Update. A reader writes: "Perhaps you could also link this article to the February 2007 National Geographic. Collins is interviewed by John Horgan in this issue." A good idea: Done.

Labels: Christianity

Posted by B Feiler at 12:30 PM
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