The drumbeat of modernists is that science and religion are incompatible, that only science deals with reality and religion is relegated to the realm of the subjective with no basis in fact.
Well, enter Francis Collins, MD, PhD, former director of the US Human Genome Project. Collins has an amazing testimony of how science led him to Christ. He was raised in a non-Christian home and declared himself an atheist in college, having little tolerance for belief in God. He had developed a belief that science held all the answers regarding ultimate "truth".
It was only after Collins began his pursuit of a medical degree, because of his interest in DNA and RNA, that his worldview began to change. One day, an elderly patient with heart disease shared her deep faith in God with him and asked him "What do you believe"? From her innocent question, Collins realized that up to that point, he had rejected God because of intellectual dishonesty. After all, a scientist is supposed to consider the evidence before rejecting a conclusion and he had never investigated the possibility that Christianity might be true.
Expecting an investigation of the rational basis of faith to shore up his atheism, he began to study world religions. It was then that a pastor gave him a copy of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. Lewis, who had once been an atheist himself, presented powerful, logical arguments for the existence of God. A major premise that got to Collins was the idea that we all have an intuitive sense of right and wrong that spans all cultures. This idea could have no basis in evolution, a philosophy embracing survival of the fittest. This Moral Law was a signpost, potential evidence of a Law Giver.
Another signpost for Collins was the fact that the physical laws of the universe could be expressed in simple, beautiful mathematics. And what about the characteristics of our universe, with fifteen constants that determine the behavior of electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, the gravitational force perfectly calibrated to make complexity possible. Any minuscule change in these characteristics would be catastrophic. The implication of design was overpowering.
The more Collins investigated, the more he accepted God's existence and the more he despaired in being so far away from God's plan. His despair was resolved when he met the person of Jesus Christ and his promise of forgiveness. In his twenty seventh year, Collins yielded his life to Christ while hiking in the Pacific Northwest. He states that, in 30 years, he has found no conflicts between what he knows as a scientist and what he believes as a follower of Jesus Christ.
Collins work in DNA has only strengthened his belief in Christ. DNA is the instruction book for all living things. It is a marvelous code made up of a double helix, carrying information in a digital code consisting of chemical bases that scientists have labeled A,C, G, and T. It is arranged in base pairs, that, if read aloud without stopping, it take 31 years to read it. Scientist have now completed the sequence of all 3.1 billion letters of this human instruction book and Collins believes that anything this complex could have never risen purely by chance. It points to an intelligence which he believes is the God revealed in Scripture.
So, far from being in conflict with Christianity, Collins believes that science confirms that our universe was made by an intelligent God of order who established fixed physical laws that are ours to discover.
The heavens surely declare the glory of God and life at the sub-cellular level clearly reveals His handwork.
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