As a child I had no formal religious training. My parents were not opposed to faith, but they did not find it particularly relevant to daily life.
At age five, I was sent to a local Episcopal church to sing in the boys’ choir so that I could learn music. I learned to love the hymns, but the theology washed over me without leaving any discernible residue. I can still play most of those hymns by heart on the piano—yet for the most part, I have trouble remembering the words because they had little impact on me.
As a child and adolescent, I had occasional moments of a strange longing for something that might be called spiritual, oftentimes inspired by a musical experience. But I couldn’t put it into words. Much later I learned to recognize this as a potential glimpse of the eternal, something described by C. S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy. But at the time, I had no framework for interpreting such experiences.
Going on to college and graduate school in physical chemistry, I lost any glimmers of spiritual interest and essentially became an atheist. I was unwilling to accept anything as having meaning or consequence if it couldn’t be measured scientifically. That of course denied the very possibility of anything outside of nature.
My adopted worldview thus presupposed that materialism is all there is. That in turn rendered such questions as “Why is there something instead of nothing?” and “Is there a God?” irrelevant. In its exclusionary stance, this philosophical view was actually not science—this was “scientism,” although I did not recognize it at the time.
But then I underwent a transition in my professional plans, moving from a focus on basic questions in chemistry and physics to an interest in life science and enrolling in medical school. I found the study of the human body fascinating on scientific grounds, and it was harder to keep those deeper questions about the meaning of life at bay when I found myself dealing with life and death on a daily basis.
I could see that many of the patients I was assigned to were facing the end of their lives and that our medical interventions were unlikely to save them for long. Some of them were angry, some depressed, but some who had strong faith in God seemed oddly at peace.
One afternoon, an elderly woman with advanced heart disease shared her Christian faith with me, explaining in deeply personal ways how her faith in Jesus provided her with a sense of comfort as she prepared to die. I was silent, awkwardly not knowing what to say.
But then, in a moment when time seemed to stand still, she looked directly at me and asked, “Doctor, what do you believe?” With an intense and unexpected flush of discomfort, I realized I had just been asked the most important question of my whole life.
Struggling to provide an answer, I knew that down deep I had nothing to say. I stammered something like “I really don’t know,” saw her look of surprise, and ran from the room.
This interaction tormented me over the next few days. I still thought atheism was the only rational option for a thinking person, but then why did her question make me so uncomfortable?
I realized that I had arrived at atheism without considering whether there might be evidence for other alternatives—something that a scientist is not supposed to do. I knew a few friends and professors who were Christians. While I assumed they must all have been brainwashed about this as children, I still wondered whether there was some explanation for how such scientifically minded people could hold ideas about God in the same brains that were studying biochemical pathways or cardiac surgery.
So, I began a search of books and people to try to understand this mystery. Through the assistance of a pastor who lived down the road, that search brought me to a little book by C. S. Lewis called Mere Christianity.
As I turned the pages, I realized with considerable alarm that my atheist arguments were laughably superficial. One by one, they were demolished by Lewis, an Oxford don who had also once been an atheist. Lewis anticipated my objections at every turn.
He helped me understand how atheism suffers from the arrogance of asserting a universal negative (again, something that scientists aren’t supposed to do). His logic also helped me see that atheism presents a colder, more sterile, and more impoverished view of humanity. Lewis led me to consider, for the first time, the true significance of good and evil.
He described something I knew from experience but hadn’t really thought much about: the universal human experience of being called to be moral creatures, though we all know that we regularly fail. Purely naturalistic explanations for morality (for example, the argument that it somehow has improved our chances for successful reproduction over many millennia) seem to account for some of this, but they fail to explain examples of sacrificial actions that we humans consider truly noble—the ministry of Mother Teresa, the legions of people volunteering for the Peace Corps or Habitat for Humanity, or countless other individual acts of radical altruism. Was this a signpost to God?
Lewis also opened my eyes to considering experiences he called “joy” that I had dismissed—those rare moments, often inspired by the beauty of music or nature, when I had a glimpse of something profound, a sense of longing I could not name, a piercing ache that was somehow more satisfying than any earthly happiness but gone too soon. I recognized those in myself. Was this another signpost?
Additionally, I became aware that science itself provides pointers to a Creator. Examining the data from multiple different perspectives, physicists now tell us unequivocally that there was an initial start to our universe around 13.8 billion years ago, where out of nothingness came this unimaginable explosion of matter and energy. This so-called Big Bang cries out for answers to the questions “How did that happen? What came before that?” But I was stymied.
Nature has not been observed to create itself. If there is to be an answer, therefore, it would seem to require a force outside of nature—a “supernatural” force. However, to resolve the dilemma of the origin of the universe, this Creator would have to be unconstrained by space and time. Otherwise, the next question would be “Who created the Creator?”
The more I looked at how our universe has been put together, the more amazed I became at the evidence for an intelligent Creator. As a scientist, I had studied and admired the elegant physical laws that govern matter and energy. These were simple, even beautiful, mathematical representations of scientific truth. But why should the universe have such properties?
As I further explored these laws, I learned something even more stunning—that the universe is precisely tuned to allow something interesting to happen after the Big Bang. Go with me here for a minute. The mathematical laws that govern matter and energy all include constants whose actual value cannot be derived by theory; you just have to measure them. They are what they are.
Take gravity, for instance. Gravity has a very specific, measurable, universal force. (Don’t worry about the exact number, but here it is, just to show you how specific it is: 6.674 × 10−11 N⋅m2/kg2.) Gravity made it possible after the Big Bang for matter to coalesce into stars, galaxies, planets, and ultimately us.
But what would happen if the value of that gravitational constant were just a little different? Here’s the stunning answer: If it were just one part in 1014 (that’s 1 with 14 zeros) stronger or weaker, there would be no stars, galaxies, planets—and hence no possibility of life.
It’s not just gravity that has this knife-edge fine-tuning to allow for an interesting universe. All the other major constants—the speed of light, the strong and weak nuclear forces, the mass of an electron, and several others—that determine the physical properties of matter and energy have precisely the value they need for us (or any other complex life form) to be here.
This can’t just be good luck. Even the atheist Stephen Hawking allowed that “the remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.” Either these parameters were set by a Creator, or we are forced to consider the possible existence of an infinite number of alternative universes with different values of these constants.
Because we are here, we are in the one (or one of the very few?) where it all worked out. Scientists tell us that it is extremely unlikely that we will ever be able to observe the existence of these other hypothetical universes. Furthermore, their postulated but unproven existence does not solve the problem of how these universes all got started and why there is something instead of nothing. Given these options, I had to conclude that the Creator hypothesis was profoundly more compelling than the atheist alternative.
Ultimately, I seem to have lived out the predictions of a quote attributed to the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, the author of the famous uncertainty principle: “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” I had reached the bottom of the glass.
Francis Collins is a physician scientist. He founded the BioLogos Foundation, led the Human Genome Project, served as director of the US National Institutes of Health, and leads an initiative to eliminate hepatitis C in the United States. He is the author, most recently, of The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust.
Excerpted from the book THE ROAD TO WISDOM by Francis S. Collins. Copyright © 2024. Available from Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group Inc., New York, NY, USA. All rights reserved.
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