The Language of God

In the subject book, Francis Collins, the head of the government side of the Human Genome project attempts to "provide evidence for belief". While I enjoyed the book quite a bit, if you are looking for "evidence of God", Collins pretty much just defers to C S Lewis on the actual discussion of "The Moral Law" which is the cornerstone of his "evidence". I'm still in the "belief and unbelief are equal leaps of faith" camp, but the point is that there is logic for either case and nothing in science, philosophy, or religion are going to "rationally prove" the case in this universe. Either God or chaos decided that our existence wasn't going to give us that rational proof in this universe.

The question of the book is: "In this modern era of cosmology, evolution and the human genome, is there still the possibility of a richly satisfying harmony between the scientific and spiritual worldviews?" His answer is very much "yes", as is mine. "Whether we call it by name or not, all of us have arrived at a certain worldview. It helps us make sense of the world around us, provides us with an ethical framework, and guides our decisions about the future." Seems obvious.

He lists 3 responses to the Anthropic Principle: (that the universe is uniqely tuned to give rise to humans, or as really good atheists put it "we are here because we are here"):

1). There are essentially an infinite number of universes (the "multiverse theory"), so "we had to be here", all possibilities are. (a current atheist favorite that they had to come up with fairly quickly)

2). We are just ultimately and incredibly lucky ... a string of many known and likely many unknown 10 to the - many 10's and even at least low hundreds of decimal place improbabilites all worked out in our favor. We won the cosmic lottery. No way to prove that the winning lottery ticket for the next 300 million Powerball WON'T blow into your house window. In fact, it would be nearly a dead certainty stacked against the odds that you would be here at all.

3). God did it.

Actually, in the ebb and flow of human history, this hasn't really changed much. We just have a few more specific numbers for just how high the odds against our random existence really are.

After some time wading through angry atheist tracts, the thing I liked best about this book was the tone and humility of the author and a lot less "intellectual grandstanding" than Gould even though this guy is clearly extremely intelligent and accomplished. He seems to be far more interested in his reader understanding the issues and his points than in being impressed with the authors intelligence.

A lot of time is spent on the problems of Creationism and Intelligent Design. I generally agree with his assessment that they cause more trouble than they are worth. I find "fundamental literalists" to almost always be quite brittle and quickly become uncomfortable and judgmental or both when issues of origin and science are discussed. However, I think Collin's fails to understand what I would see as the "the appearance of age problem". God could create the universe as I write this using whatever methods he chooses--how that happens to "look to us" is interesting TO US, but doesn't have anything to do with his "somehow trying to fool us". From a divine perspective, it is all "just stuff"(matter, or the appearance of matter), not of any great importance. The hope we have is that he has chosen to provide us with a "soul in his image" ... no doubt with less fidelity than a low res cartoon, but promised to be eternal.

Sit back, try to focus on the NOW, being as opposed to doing, "say thanks"--there may be more "proof" available than logic would indicate. God wants to know you, shut off your monkey brain and LET HIM!