The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief

Throughout the book Collins declares the necessity for thoughtful people to take a position on the questions that touch on “the meaning of life” (158) and thus affect all of us. Since we are endowed with the gift of reason that allows us to study and reach conclusions about the most important questions, it is inexcusable not to take a stand today, when so much more scientific data is available to us than in the past. Collins came to this realization, when a woman patient asked him about his beliefs and he did not know how to respond. The incident caused a spiritual and intellectual crisis for Collins, who professed to be a scientist—someone who studied data and drew conclusions from it—yet was avoiding an examination of what he decided is most important question, the existence of God.

Collins implies that the science-faith interaction options he lays out in Chapters 7–10 are the only ones to choose from, and he treats each in detail. Ultimately, for Collins, atheism and agnosticism are not really tenable positions based on what we know about the universe. Agnosticism is a copout and a “comfortable default pattern” (168): Many agnostics have failed to consider all the evidence and have simply thrown up their hands and declared the question of God’s existence unknowable. Collins points out that we would not accept this as a serious position in the scientific realm, where one must look at all the data before drawing a conclusion. Atheism is not tenable, because it “goes beyond the evidence” (165) of its own claims, becoming a kind of blind faith. Atheists claim to know certainly that there is no God from the evidence of science, even though science in itself cannot prove something that lies outside the physical universe. Collins believes evidence for God can be found in the universal consciousness of the Moral Law and altruism, which goes against the common evolutionary description of nature as a cruel, heartless environment defined by the survival of the fittest.

Collins’s interpretation leads him to theism as the inescapable choice. But he rejects versions of faith that reject science as well. Because science is a legitimate revealer of truth, we must also accept evolution as a fact, and we must find a way to combine this harmoniously with our belief in God. Collins believes that this is possible, because “truth cannot disprove truth” (198).