My friend Paul Novotny read this book and passed it on to me.
The Language of God is a pretty quick read; less then 300 pages long. It is excellent.
The author is Francis S. Collins, a physician and geneticist who is the head of the Human Genome Project, which finished a draft of the entire mapping of the human genome (how our DNA is laid out on our chromosomes, identifying all of our genes) in June, 2000. The project is continuing; the sequencing of the last chromosome was published in May, 2006.
This is a colossal scientific achievement which will no doubt open the way for new forms of therapy in the future.
But the book is not primarily about Francis Collins the scientist; it is about Francis Collins the man of faith, and how he came to faith, and why he thinks it's reasonable and rational. There is plenty of science discussed, and Collins is excellent at making the advances in biology in the last several dacades comprehensible to people with only a sketchy understanding of the science. Collins presents the solid reasoning for accepting evolution as the best theory for uniting biological data and concepts. He refers to the Human Genome Project as figuring out "God's instruction booklet", and he gives a brief and interesting history of the Project.
Collins accepts evolution, but it is a theistic evolution. He opposes "intelligent design" theories as un-scientific and unnecessary to explain the data. He classifies himself as an Evangelical Christian.
Collins leans heavily on C.S. Lewis, and St. Augustine as he explains his faith and how he came to it. He heartily approves of St. Augustine's vision of faith and science not being in contradiction, and points out that John Paul II held the same position.
The Language of God is a good response to the militant atheism that geneticist Richard Dawkins has been spouting (and has been widely publicized) in the past few months. Collins gets off a number of solid zingers, pointing out that Marxist atheism has killed millions; on page 42 he points to the results of atheism: "atheism has the now-realized potential to free humans completely from any responsibility not to oppress one another."
In an excellent sub-section of chapter seven (a chapter entitled "Atheism and Agnosticism") he takes apart Dawkins, accusing him (P. 164) of being "a master of setting up a straw man" when Dawkins launches his vitriolic attacks on religion. And he extensively quotes the late Stephen Jay Gould, the widely published defender of evolution (Pages 165-166), where Gould says amongst other things: "Science simply cannot by its legitimate methods adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply cannot comment on it as scientists. If some of our crowd have made untoward statements claiming that Darwinism disproves God, then I will find Mrs. McInerney (Gould's 3rd grade teacher) and have their knuckles rapped for it..."
The last section of the book - a long appendix - is entitled "the Moral Practice of Science and Medicine: Bioethics". Collins especially examines cloning and stem cell research.
Collins dedicates The Language of God "To my parents, who taught me to love learning." Francis Collins is a true Renaissance Man. If you are interested in the confluence of contemporary science and religious faith, you can't do better then his book.
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