Dr. Francis Collins: From Atheism to Faith

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Excerpt from 2020 Templeton Prize winner Dr. Francis Collins' address:

"Beginning with the reason that I am here tonight, let me say something about the perceived disharmony between science and faith. Nearly six in ten adults in the US say science and religion frequently conflict. That was certainly my view as I was growing up in Virginia, without much of a spiritual perspective, but falling in love with the scientific method. Faith seemed to me to be the antithesis of the rational scientific approach that I wanted to pursue, and so I migrated, without much thought about it, into agnosticism and ultimately atheism.

"But then I moved from quantum mechanics to medical school, and the questions of the meaning of life, and the reality of mortality, were impossible to ignore. Science didn’t help me much here. But I was surrounded by patients, and some of my professors, for whom faith provided a way to wrestle with those profound questions. That was puzzling. Challenged by one of my patients to describe what I believed about God, I realized my atheism was dangerously thin. Seeking to prop this up, I began a journey to try to understand why intellectually sophisticated people could actually believe in God – and to my dismay, found that atheism turned out to be the least rational of all the choices. To quote Chesterton, “Atheism is the most daring of all dogmas, for it is the assertion of a universal negative”. Over a two year period, with much help from wise mentors and the writings of C.S. Lewis, I slowly and rather reluctantly came to the conclusion that belief in God, while not possible to prove, was the most rational choice available. Furthermore, I saw in the very science that I so loved something that I had missed — the evidence that seemed to cry out for a Creator: there is something instead of nothing, the universe had a beginning, it follows elegant mathematical laws, and those laws include a half dozen constants that have to have the exact value they do or there would be no possibility of anything interesting or complex in nature. God must be an amazing physicist and mathematician."