Francis Collins is one of the world’s most prominent scientists to speak openly and in detail about his faith in Jesus Christ, and he has tried to show that rigorous science and committed Christian belief can coexist without contradiction.
Who Francis Collins Is
Francis Collins is a physician‑geneticist who led the Human Genome Project and later directed the U.S. National Institutes of Health, becoming one of the best‑known biomedical scientists of his generation. His scientific work includes pioneering “positional cloning” methods that helped identify genes for diseases such as cystic fibrosis and Huntington’s disease.
His Journey from Atheism to Faith
Collins grew up in a home where religion was not emphasized and described himself as a skeptical agnostic and then an atheist through his early adulthood. During medical training, encounters with seriously ill patients whose Christian faith gave them peace in suffering forced him to confront big questions—meaning, purpose, and what happens after death—that he felt he had avoided.
An elderly patient once asked him directly what he believed, and he realized he had never seriously investigated faith with the same rigor he brought to science. He began to explore the major religions and was especially influenced by C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, where Lewis’s “moral law” argument for God persuaded him that objective right and wrong pointed to a transcendent moral Lawgiver.
Why He Believes in Jesus
For Collins, belief in God became specifically Christian as he grappled with the person and claims of Jesus in the New Testament. He came to see Jesus’ life, sacrificial death, and bodily resurrection as the central, decisive revelation of God’s character and the answer to the human problem of sin and separation from God.
Collins has said that the resurrection of Jesus is the pivotal historical claim on which his faith ultimately rests: even if his arguments from physics or biology were overturned, his confidence would remain grounded in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ miracles and resurrection. In that sense, his faith is not just a vague theism but a commitment to Jesus Christ as God incarnate, Savior, and Lord.
How He Reconciles Faith and Science
Collins argues that modern science and Christian faith address different but complementary “books”: the natural world (“God’s works”) and Scripture (“God’s word”). He rejects both atheistic materialism, which says science disproves God, and young‑earth creationism that denies well‑established scientific findings.
He advocates “theistic evolution” (sometimes called evolutionary creation), the view that God used evolution as the elegant mechanism to bring about life, including humans, thereby allowing him to affirm both orthodox Christian doctrine and the full evidence for evolution, cosmology, and genetics. He reads the Genesis creation account primarily as theological rather than as scientific history, within a long Christian tradition that sees Scripture’s main purpose as revealing who God is rather than specifying scientific mechanisms.
How His Faith Shapes His Work
Collins has said that knowing God in Christ gives him a sense of awe and humility when “reading” the human genome, which he famously called “the language of God.” His faith has also motivated him to encourage more respectful dialogue between believers and non‑believers, including founding BioLogos to help Christians engage modern science without fear.
In public reflections, he emphasizes that following Jesus means not just holding certain beliefs, but also practicing love of neighbor, compassion, and integrity in leadership and research. For Collins, then, being both a world‑class scientist and a disciple of Jesus is not a tension to be barely managed but a unified vocation: to explore creation through science and to follow Christ in trust and obedience.
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