by Dr. Francis Collins, as told on the Story Partners Podcast
I’m supposed to be a scientist who answers all the questions and tries to figure out what evidence there is to support an answer one way or the other.
And I had done nothing to actually explore whether there could be evidence for the existence of God.
I thought that faith and reason were opposites.
I was so wrong.
A Renaissance Childhood
My name is Francis Collins. I’m an MD and a PhD, if that matters. I had a very unconventional upbringing on a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. My parents were ‘doing the 60s thing’ before it was the 60s; they were ahead of their time. My father had a PhD in Renaissance literature but was also deeply involved in traditional folk music and theater. My mother was a playwright.
I’m the youngest of four boys. My parents decided they were better teachers than the local schools, so we were all homeschooled. I made it to sixth grade before entering public school, which turned out to be a good thing. My parents were wonderfully creative teachers. I received a gift from them: the joy of learning new things. My mother, in particular, could travel from history to mathematics to languages and make them all seem like something you just wanted to know more about. There were no lesson plans; we just pursued what we wanted to talk about. I learned a hunger for learning from that experience—the joy of discovering something I didn’t know before. I’ve carried that with me for the last 70 years.
Among the many topics we studied, faith was not one of them. My parents didn’t denigrate faith, but they had no real interest in it. They did think church was a good place to learn music, however. My one exposure to church growing up was being sent to the local Episcopal Church at age five to learn to sing in an all-male choir. I was a boy soprano for years and learned a lot about music from a gifted, if disciplinarian, choirmaster.
I didn’t learn a thing about theology. My dad suggested I should ignore that part, and I followed instructions. By the time I was 15, I had no idea what Christianity was about. I assumed Jesus was a myth that some people found necessary to talk about. Other than the music, I didn’t see much point to organized religion. I was full of intellectual curiosity and completely devoid of spiritual interest.
Agnosticism
By the time I got to college, I had become interested in science, specifically chemistry, because of a gifted teacher in public school who lit a fire in my mind. In the late-night dorm conversations about belief, I wasn’t sure where I stood. There were Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and atheists. To me, the atheists seemed to have the better hand of it. The people of faith seemed to be talking about things they thought they ought to believe, but it wasn’t clear they actually did. Some presented a view of faith full of judgment and guilt, and I didn’t want to add that to my life. I decided this wasn’t a fruitful area for me. I guess at that point, you’d say I was an agnostic, and I stayed that way for about ten years.
I traveled a tortured pathway as a scientist. I initially went to graduate school for a PhD in quantum mechanics, but I realized it was too abstract. I wanted to be engaged in something with a direct benefit to humanity, and second-order differential equations weren’t doing it for me. I made a drastic change and decided to go to medical school. I had no interest in medicine until then, so answering admission questions about why I wanted to be a doctor was awkward, but I was admitted to the University of North Carolina. I was already married with a small child, taking a complete 180-degree turn. All along, I kept the idea of faith out of my experience. When Christian colleagues tried to bring it up, I felt intense discomfort. I didn’t think I wanted to know what they knew.
The Bedside Question
That changed in my third year of medical school. That’s the year you leave the classroom and start taking care of patients in clinics and hospitals. I sat at the bedsides of honorable people in real trouble from cancer or heart disease. It’s hard to watch and not be touched. You’re told as a student not to get emotionally involved, but I wasn’t good at that. I wanted them to get better, yet I could see our interventions weren’t going to change the ultimate outcome. I had to wonder: how would I handle that? It was coming for all of us, even me at age 25.
There was one particular patient—a kind, gentle elderly woman with severe heart disease. She had daily episodes of crushing chest pain. I would sit at her bedside and hold her hand while she went through these spells, and all the while, she would be praying. She was clearly a person of deep faith. One afternoon, she explained how Jesus made all the difference, that she could handle physical suffering because she knew He was right there with her. She said, ‘Doc, I appreciate your being here, but the presence I really counted on was Jesus, my savior.’
Then, she turned to me and in a moment burned into my brain. She said, ‘You know, Doctor, I’ve told you about my faith. You never say anything. What do you believe?’ I realized I had no answer. I had avoided that question intentionally. I was practicing ‘willful blindness,’ as C.S. Lewis would describe it. I stammered that I didn’t know, saw her surprised expression, and left the room.
The Search For Evidence
That moment bothered me for days. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that I had given no time to this most important question. I was supposed to be a scientist who answers questions based on evidence, yet I had done zero to explore whether there could be evidence for the existence of God. I just assumed faith and reason were opposites—that as soon as you get into reason, faith is gone. I was so wrong.
I figured I’d better do some homework. I wanted to see how thoughtful, reasonable people—including some of my mentors who were distinguished physicians—could be believers without their ‘brains exploding.’ I started by knocking on the door of a pastor on my street. I told him, ‘I’m curious to know how rational people could possibly believe what you are preaching, because I don’t get it.’ He was very tolerant. He admitted there were no easy answers to things like why God allows the innocent to suffer, but he was willing to talk. Finally, he reached for a book on his shelf and suggested I read it because it was written by someone who had traveled the same path. That book was Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.
C.S. Lewis and the Moral Law
I took the book home and, within the first few pages, realized my arguments against faith were those of a naive schoolboy. As a scientist, I was particularly interested in Lewis’s arguments about rationality and how reason fits into the idea of a God who cares about us. The first chapter, ‘Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe,’ focused on the Moral Law.
I had never given much thought to the Moral Law. Is our sense of good and evil completely explainable by natural selection? Lewis argued that it doesn’t quite hold up. We admire ‘radical altruism’, someone sacrificing their life for a stranger or a competing tribe. From a purely naturalistic or material frame of mind, that makes no sense. Yet, we feel that obligation. It is one of the things we find most inspiring; we think that is how humanity ought to behave. If you are looking for an argument for a God who is good and holy, and you find in yourself a motivation to be good even when it costs you, that is a signpost not to be neglected.
This began a two-year journey of weighing the pros and cons of belief. I finally picked up the Bible and read other faith traditions like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. I saw a central component of ‘loving your neighbor’ across them, but I was still confused. As a scientist, I also struggled with how to put Genesis together with what I knew about origins.
I was convinced that science, done properly, reveals truth. If God is the Creator, then science is discovering God’s truth. It shouldn’t be a threat to Him. If there seemed to be a conflict, I figured we needed a better ‘hermeneutic’, a better way of interpreting the Bible. I was glad to find out later that harmony really was possible. I also discovered that science was teaching me things that tipped the balance strongly in favor of there being a God.
The Fine-Tuning of the Universe
As I studied the origins of the universe, the evidence for a Creator became overwhelming. The Big Bang implies a beginning out of nothing, and nature is not known to create itself. Even Stephen Hawking struggled to explain why there is something rather than nothing. As a chemist and physicist, I saw that the mathematical laws governing matter and energy—like Maxwell’s equations or “E=mc^2”—are exquisitely simple and elegant. They suggest a Mind behind the math.
Even more amazing is the ‘fine-tuning’ of physical constants. Take gravity, for instance. If the gravitational constant “G” were off by just one part in a billion, the universe would have either collapsed long ago or expanded too quickly for stars and planets to form. There are about half a dozen such constants that must be exactly what they are for life to exist. To me, the simplest explanation is intention. I moved from agnosticism to deism, believing in a Creator who is the ultimate mathematician.
I returned to the ‘Moral Law’ and the concept of beauty. Why do we feel a rush of spiritual ecstasy—what C.S. Lewis called ‘Joy’—when we hear a certain piece of music or see a sunset? It doesn’t make evolutionary sense, yet it calls us toward something beyond ourselves.
But I had a problem: if God is the source of the Moral Law, He represents everything good and holy. Looking at myself, I realized I couldn’t bridge the gap between God’s holiness and my own shortcomings. I was a ‘fallen creature,’ though I didn’t have that vocabulary yet. Suddenly, the story of Jesus made sense. Jesus died on the cross to bridge that gap, allowing me to be loved by God despite my imperfections. I found no other solution to this dilemma in any other religion.
The Waterfall And The Leap Of Faith
The moment of decision came during my residency. I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains in Oregon. The scenery was breathtaking, perfect sun on autumn snow. I turned a corner and saw a massive frozen waterfall, split into three distinct streams. In that moment, I felt a clear signal from God that it was time to stop resisting.
The next morning, I went outside my motel, knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose, and gave my life to Jesus. I was 27 years old. That was 48 years ago, and it has been the rock and foundation of everything I’ve done since. My scientific friends thought it was a ‘honeymoon’ phase that would fail once I realized faith and science were incompatible. They were wrong. I saw that investigating DNA—the instruction book of life—was actually a way of investigating God’s creation. The laboratory became my cathedral.
BioLogos
In the 1980s at the University of Michigan, my lab spent five years searching for the cause of cystic fibrosis. We searched through the three billion letters of the human genome and found that just three missing letters were the cause. That discovery was an answer to prayer. Today, 30 years later, people with cystic fibrosis aren’t planning funerals; they are planning for retirement.
I began to see that medical research is often how God answers prayers for healing. I felt a dual calling: to be a rigorous scientist and a minister of God’s love. Eventually, I was asked to lead the Human Genome Project, which led to a series of lectures at Harvard and my book, The Language of God. The overwhelming response led to the founding of BioLogos, a community dedicated to showing how a rigorous scientific worldview and a Bible-believing Christian faith can fit together.
Leading The NIH And The Road To Wisdom
In 2009, I was appointed Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). I oversaw a staff of 46,000 and a $50 billion budget, witnessing miracles in the treatment of sickle cell disease and cancer. I served under three presidents—Obama, Trump, and Biden—navigating the immense challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. During those 100-hour work weeks in 2020, I kept Psalm 46 by my computer: ‘God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.’
I retired from the NIH recently, but I continue to advocate for truth and harmony. My latest book, The Road to Wisdom, addresses the divisiveness in our current society. We have become sloppy about the difference between truth and opinion. I believe people of faith should lead the way in loving our neighbors—and our enemies—and refusing to get snagged by harsh political rhetoric.
I am a scientist, a physician, a husband, a grandfather, and a cancer survivor. But most of all, I am a believer. God found me, and I have found that science and faith don’t just coexist; they enhance each other. There is no reason to feel the world is coming apart when we recognize that God is still in charge.
