Francis S. Collins. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. 2006.

Biologos

Believers in God and nonbelievers are often uneasy with one another, if not hostile. Like conservatives and liberals, each side seems quick to accuse the other of intolerance. Scientists are popularly considered athiestic, although Einstein and even Galileo believed in a God, and Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey. What's bizarre to me is that for a century or more a primary battleground for these unnecessarily antagonistic worldviews has been the theory of evolution, from the Scopes Monkey Trial through Intelligent Design and those Darwin fishes with feet stuck to the back of people's cars. Why would religious conservatives choose, as a scientific theory to detest, one that makes complete sense, is easy to understand, dovetails with so many other comprehensible scientific discoveries (such as DNA), and has such compelling evidence? Why don't they rail against string theory? Why isn't the Christian Coalition up in arms about teaching muons in schools? This book, remarkably, warmly, smartly, shows that a scientific viewpoint is not necessarily athiestic, that theology is outside the bounds of science. Because polls show that one third of Americans would prefer to say that evolution never happened than to say that it did, with or without divine oversight, the author must waste a third of the book coming to terms with these people. HEY YOU PEOPLE: THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION IS AN AXIOM, NOT A HYPOTHESIS. EVOLUTION HAPPENS. That's all he needed to say about that. End of chapter. The author was the leading scientists on the human genome project, a good man, and an adequate lyricist (the texts of his songs included in the book did not live up to the prose--perhaps we need to hear the music--and I need to point that out to make myself feel better about how outclassed I am by him). Reading this book, I learned a little more about science and that God is unknowable. So book did not live up to the subtitle. There seems to be only one piece of evidence supporting the theory of God: that all cultures seem to have an idea of God and an idea of right and wrong--a moral law. There seems to be no evolutionary imperative for people to be kind, and yet most people are. It's an interesting case, presupposing that God is loving and not a vengeful despot. It's also an inversion of Freud's teachings, suggesting that people are born kind and taught by society to be savage, selfish, murderous beasts. I am less convinced by Collins's other points of evidence. The fact that nobody can guess what happened before the Big Bang doesn't, to me, point at a creator. Collins himself warns against the "God of the gaps"--using God to fill in areas of scientific ignorance. It's interesting that the universe we live in is highly improbable--that if the laws of physics or the nature of the Big Bang were very slightly different, the universe could never have formed this way. But that doesn't seem like much of an argument for a creator, because if the universe had come about differently (and maybe it did, or will, or is) we wouldn't be able to comment on it. I could say the same thing about the admittedly amazingly elegant, beautiful, and complex human being. I wanted a more detailed Unified Field Theology. But perhaps I am missing the point. Thanks for the book, Francis, and for identifying genetic misspellings behind breast cancer.