Madrid, Spain, Aug 28, 2006 / 22:00 pm
The director of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, says he believes in miracles and rejects the use of science for refuting the existence of God.
According to the website Caminayven.com, Dr. Collins explains in his new book “The Language of God,” which will be published in September, that “one of the great tragedies of our time is this impression that has been created that science and religion have to be at war.” Collins also says that working on the human genome project has allowed him to, “glimpse God’s work.”
“When you take a great step forward it is a moment of scientific rejoicing because you have been searching and it seems you have found it,” he continued. “But it is also a moment in which, at least I, feel close to the Creator in the sense that I am seeing something no human being has known before, but that God has known from all eternity.”
“When you have before you, for the first time, these 3.1 billion words from the ‘instruction book’ which transmit all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery regarding humanity, you are incapable of contemplating page after page without feeling overwhelmed. I cannot help but admire these pages and I have a vague sense that that is giving me a vision of the mind of God,” Dr. Collins stated.
Dr. Collins was an atheist until he was 27 years old, when a young doctor called his attention to the strength of his weakest patients. “They had terrible illnesses which they had no chance of escaping from and yet, instead of complaining to God, they seemed to lean on their faith as a source of comfort. It was interesting, strange, and unsettling,” he said.
Later he read “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis, which helped inspire his conversion. Collins explains that Lewis’s argument that God is a rational possibility was something, “I was not prepared to hear. I was very happy with the idea that God did not exist and that he had no interest in me. And yet at the same time, I could not leave.”