God, Under a Microscope

Surveys have indicated that 40 percent of scientists are religious, Collins said, but "if 40 percent of my own scientific colleagues are believers in a personal God, they're keeping pretty quiet about it."

"For a scientist, it's uncomfortable to admit there are questions that your scientific method isn't going to be able to address," he said. Besides, scientists are busy and focused -- they often don't take the time to explore "these more profound eternal questions."

In his talk, Collins said he was raised by nonreligious parents and became "an obnoxious atheist." But as a medical student, he wondered why patients who were suffering and dying retained faith in God.

He realized that as a scientist, "you're not supposed to decide something is true until you've looked at the data. And yet I had become an atheist without ever looking at the evidence whether God exists or not."

He began looking and early in the process read Lewis's "Mere Christianity."

"In the very first chapter," he said, "all my arguments about the irrationality of faith lay in ruins."

Yet he was besieged by doubts during two years of struggle and study. Finally, he went hiking in Oregon's Cascade Mountains. One morning, he said, "I fell on my knees and asked Christ to be my lord and savior. And he has been there ever since, the past 28 years, as the rock on which I stand."

Unimpressed by denominational differences, Collins has worshipped in a variety of Protestant churches while living the itinerant life of an academic. He became a Methodist at the University of North Carolina, an American Baptist at Yale and a Southern Baptist at the University of Michigan. He currently belongs to Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda.

Collins writes that "it is time to call a truce in the escalating war between science and spirit," in which the dominant voices have belonged to narrow, anti-God materialists and believers who spurn orthodox science.

He says both approaches are "profoundly dangerous. Both deny truth. Both will diminish the nobility of humankind. Both will be devastating to our future. And both are unnecessary."