During a lecture Collins gave at University of California, Berkeley in 2008, he presented a series of slides, presented in order:
Slide 1: Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.
Slide 2: God's plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.
Slide 3: After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced "house" (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the Moral Law), with free will, and with an immortal soul.
Slide 4: We humans use our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to our estrangement.
Slide 5: If the Moral Law is just a slide effecdt of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It's all an illusion. We've been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?
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But the pilgrim continues his progress: next, we learn that Collins' uncertainty about the identity of God could not survive a collision with C.S. Lewis. The following passage from Lewis proved decisive:
"I am trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him:
"I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That
is the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -
on a level with the man who says He is a poached egg - or else He would be the Devil of Hell.
You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or
something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit as Him and kill Him as a demon;
or you can fall at His feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing
nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left open to us. He did not intend
to."
Collins provides this pabulum for our contemplation and then describes how it irrevocably altered his view of the universe:
"Lewis was right. I had to make a choice. A full year had passed since I decided to believe in
some sort of God, and now I was being called to account. On a beautiful fall day, I was hiking
in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty
of God's creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and
unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next
morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ."
This is a self-deception at full gallop. It is simply astounding that this passage was written by a scientist with the intent of demonstrating the compatibility of faith and reason. And if we thought Collins's reasoning could grow no more labile, he has since divulged at the waterfall was frozen into three streams, which puts him in mind of the Holy Trinity.
It should go without saying that if a frozen waterfall can confirm the specific tenets of Christianity, anything can confirm anything. But this truth was not obvious to Collins as he "knelt in the dewy grass," and it is not obvious to him now. Nor was it obvious in the editors of Nature, which is the most important sceintific publication in any language. The journal praised Collins for engaging "with people of faith to explore how science - both in its mode of thought and its results - is consistent with their religious beliefs." According to Nature, Collins was engaged in the "moving" and "laudable" exercise of building "a bridge across the social and intellectual divide that exists between most of U.S. academia and the so-called heartlands." And here is Collin, hard at work on the bridge:
"As believers, you are right to hold fast to the concept of God as Creator, you are right to hold
fast to the truths of the Bible; you are right to hold fast to the conclusion that science offers no
answers to the most pressing questions of human existence; and you are right to hold fast to the
certainty that the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted.
God, who is not limitede to space and time, created the universe and established natural laws
that govern it. Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living creatures, God
chose the elegant mechanism of evolution to create microbes, plants, and animals of all sorts
. Most remarkably, God intentionally chose the same mechanism to give rise to special creatures
who would have intelligence, a knwoledge of right and wrong, free will, and a desire to seek
fellowship with Him. He also knew these creatures would ultimately choose to disobey the
Moral Law."
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There is an epidemic of scientific ignorance in the United States. This isn't surprising, as very few scientific truths are seldom-evident and many are deeply counterintuitive. It is by no means obvious that empty space has structure or that we share a common ancestor with both the housefly and the banana. It can be difficult to think like a scientist (even, we have begun to see, when one is a scientist). But it would seem that few things make thinking like a scientist more difficult than an attachment to religion.
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*The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, by Sam Harris, pp.160-176.
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