In my early teens I became a committed Christian. At twenty-two, after years of intensive university study, I became a practising scientist with a great deal still to learn. In the course of my university studies I had read Geology for a year and that confirmed my sneaking feeling that the first chapter of Genesis was, well, not quite right. So I came to the conclusion that it is a poetic account written for a people in God's kindergarten but that, if one neglects the time scale, it is actually not a bad synopsis of what now is generally thought to have been a logical progression. It was left to Wallace and Darwin to propose a rational explanation for biological development. This has never troubled me because the question I have long been asking those who have difficulties is, Does it matter if we find out how God works?

That question is partly answered in a book which a non-scientist friend showed me recently. I bought it next morning. Francis Collins, who wrote The Language of God, also is a committed Christian and a scientist, but, I hasten to add, a far more important scientist than I because he was the Director of the Human Genome Project, that splendid work that solved the intricate chemistry of human DNA, the mechanism of heredity and the clue to how biological evolution occurs and much else.

Collins ranges widely. From his own leap of faith from atheism to Christianity, he deals with some of the usual objections to faith such as miracles, and the problem of evil. He squarely faces doubt believing, as has been said, that doubt is part of faith, and then moves on to questions of the origins of the universe and of life on earth. The early twentieth century saw the beginning of the study of the infinitely small atomic particles with the development of the concomitant quantum theory, and this was followed later by the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. The former destroyed determinism and left us with uncertainty, probability and complementarity. The steady push of the latter towards acceptance of the origin of the universe, time as well as space, as an explosion of an infinitesimally small and infinitesimally dense particle in an in instant of time, has driven some scientists towards the acceptance of God. What caused the explosion? What was before it? It sounds very much like an act of creation. It is salutary to think that Einstein originally opted for the steady state and later called that his biggest mistake: he rejected the quantum theory outright and died before experimental evidence supported it.

After a thorough grounding in chemistry, Collins turned to the practise of medicine, and this led to the exciting new realm where chemistry and biology meet. It is called molecular biology and DNA is at the heart of it. The elegance of the DNA molecule has been known for half a century. The similarities between the DNA of different species, even genera, have astonished scientists and laymen alike and the dire effects of the tiniest deviations from the norm have both startled scientists and provided hope that more knowledge may lead to the conquest of hitherto incurable diseases. It was obvious, then, that knowledge of what the DNA map of normal people looks like would be of inestimable value. Collins makes clear the enormity of the task of finding out, and the completion of it is a triumph. It is another huge step towards an understanding of how God works. Small wonder that he gave his book the title he did.

However, Collins does not stop there. He goes on to discuss other aspects of the impact of science on belief and the whole book is a powerful argument for the resolution of the old antagonism between science and faith.

I am neither a biologist nor a physicist. I am a chemist who specialised in food, but, like every other scientist, I have lived with uncertainty and probability; uncertainty because every scientific theory is believed and acted upon only so long as no evidence emerges to stimulate second thoughts, and, therefore, probability because tested and tried theories are probably, but only probably, right. Every time I get in an aeroplane I am betting my life that, with a very high degree of probability, the theories, on which the engineers who made it based their designs, were right. So also with crossing bridges, but every now and then a bridge, or a roadway, as happened the other day, collapses. In my own field, everyone knows that both peanuts and eggs are good foods. They are quite safe to eat and do one good, but not absolutely, only with a high degree of probability, because to a few unfortunate individuals they are as poison. Allergic reaction and anaphylactic shock can be deadly but, fortunately, are now well recognised.

Two thousand years ago there was a man who made the most outrageous claim. He said he was the Son of God and invited people to see God in Him. Outrageous? Only if it were not true. Then He was killed and on the third day He rose from the dead. Impossible, they said. They answered the wrong question. The question was not, Could it happen? but, Did it happen? and there were those at the time who thought that, with a very high degree of probability, it did. Thus far there always have been.

Keith Farrer

October 2007