Last spring, I invited a local professor of chemistry to come speak to our high school youth group about science and faith. Our youth group was in the middle of a series about what the Bible has to say about our responsibility to care for creation, and a large part of our conversation wrestled with whether or not science and faith could be companions. Some students saw them as foes, and others were inspired by the way that faith and science could be integrated.
The professor shared how he had seen many earnest believers enter college with a desire to pursue the sciences, only to have their faith shattered in the match between science and religion. This isn’t just anecdotal; according to a 2011 Barna Group survey, 29% of millennials who left the church said that churches are out of step with the scientific world, and 25% said that Christianity is anti-science. A 2018 Barna survey of teenagers who still attended church found that 49% felt that the church rejects much of what science tells us about the world.
That could have been me, too. My teens and 20s were plagued with this perceived battle between science and faith. All conversations about the two subjects were never “science and faith;” they were always “science versus faith,” opponents that could not both win the day. I love studying the natural world, but I also love studying Scripture. For over a decade, I lived in the uncomfortable and undecided tension of the either/or world of faith vs. science, unwilling to pick sides.
Finally, in my late 20s, I heard someone speak who offered an alternative pathway, a both/and approach that set my soul and brain free.
The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
It’s been years since I first felt freed from the perceived war of science and religion, and in that time, I’ve found so many companions who celebrate the gifts science can give us in our understanding of the world and are also serious, practicing Christians who see no contradiction between their faith and their scientific practice.
I came to The Language of God as one who already believes the two massive areas of study are compatible, so I didn’t need a whole lot of convincing from Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institute of Health and leading scientist in the mapping of the human genome. What I found in these pages was yet another companion, someone else who was willing to share their journey of faith.
If you’re looking for heavily scientific “proof” of God’s existence or a heavily theological argument for the value of science, you won’t really find that here—which, for me, was refreshing. I went into The Language of God thinking that it was going to be a heavily scientific, textbook read, but instead, Collins offers up a memoiristic narrative of his journey from atheism to Christian faith alongside the winding road of his own career in the sciences. He is vulnerable and real about the questions he wrestled with early in his career and how he ultimately came to faith, urging others who have declared themselves agnostic or atheist to take these essential questions of the human experience—why are we here and where did we come from—as serious as the questions that drive the rest of our lives.
Once Collins grapples with his own exploration of faith and science, he shifts his attention to the many great questions of human existence, including the origins of the universe, life on Earth, and the lessons he learned from the study of the human genome. In the last section of Collins’ book he explores the options that have been given to us about faith in science and faith in God, reaching back to the earliest rupture between science and faith with Galileo and onward to Darwin. Collins looks at four different perspectives: when science trumps faith, when faith trumps science, when science needs divine help, and science and faith in harmony, which is ultimately where Collins lands.
To me, the war between science and faith is an unnecessary stumbling block for generations of young believers who love the Lord and also want to pursue serious scientific studies. In our fearful attempts to “save” Christianity from the forces of modern scientific study, we end up strangling the faith of many young believers. Would it not be better to release our death grip and let all truth (which is God’s truth) set us free?
We do not have to choose sides, church. We can have a deep, sophisticated faith and a serious, awe-struck embrace of what science reveals about God’s beautiful world, a world that is elegant in its mechanics, stunning in its interconnectedness, and masterful in its unfolding.
Perhaps God really did give us both the “little book” of the Bible and the “big book” of Creation to learn about and experience who God is.
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2024
Root and Vine