Book Review: ‘The language of God’ by Francis Collins

My monthly review of a wonderful book for those of us navigating the space between faith and doubt.

[amazon template=thumbnail right&asin=1847390927]My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The copywriter for the book jacket was definitely drinking caffeinated coffee: this book ‘may be the most important melding of reason and revelation since C S Lewis’s Mere Christianity … [Collins] has heard every argument against faith from scientists, and he can refute them.’

Actually, the sound of big guns blazing is happily missing from this book. Francis Collins, code-breaker of the human genome, is personal, gentle, generous, thoughtful, well-informed and honest. He describes his own conversion to Christian faith from an atheist background; the beautiful intricacies of creation; the problems with atheism, agnosticism, creationism and Intelligent Design; and ends up in a quietly stated but coherent place of theistic evolution.

Far from (that copywriter again) proposing ‘a new synthesis’, Dr Collins arrives at the beliefs of most of the people I know. He does so in an elegant style, wearing lightly a thoroughness of thought, and with a keen eye for the pithy quotation.

Far from slam-dunking his foes he ends the book with an appeal that the ‘battles between the scientific and spiritual worldviews [need] to be resolved–we desperately need both voices to be at the table, and not to be shouting at each other.’

This is one of the first books I would turn to for anyone wrestling with the issues of science and faith. (My own More than Bananas isn’t bad either …)

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.