Lead Human Genome scientist explains his Christian faith

And in the San Francisco Chronicle no less! Read the interview here.

An excerpt:

You were a staunch atheist for many years. What made you so sure that God didn't exist?
I grew up in a home where faith was not an important part of my experience. And when I got to college and people began discussing late at night in the dorm whether God exists, there were lots of challenges to that idea, and I decided I had no need for that. I was already moving in the direction of becoming a scientist, and it seemed to me that anything that really mattered could be measured by the tools of science.

I went on to become a graduate student in physical chemistry, and as I got more into this reductionist mode of thinking that characterizes a lot of the physical and biological sciences, it was even more attractive to just dismiss the concept of anything outside of the natural world. So I became a committed materialist and an obnoxious atheist, and it sounded very convenient to be so, because that meant I didn't have to be responsible to anybody other than myself.

What changed your mind? Did you have a sudden epiphany, or did religion sort of quietly sneak up on you?

It was a sneaking process. As a medical student I had the responsibility of taking care of patients who had terrible diseases. I watched some of these people really leaning on their faiths as a rock in the storm, and it didn't seem like some kind of psychological crutch. It seemed very real, and I was puzzled by that.


At one point, one of my patients challenged me, asking me what I believed, and I realized, as I stammered out something about "I don't believe any of this," that it all sounded rather thin in the face of this person's clearly very strong, dedicated belief in God. That forced me to recognize that I had done something that a scientist is not supposed to do: I had drawn a conclusion without looking at the data. I had decided to be an atheist without really understanding what the arguments were for and against the existence of God.

So where did you go from there?

With the full intention of shoring up my atheism, I decided I'd better investigate this thing called faith so that I could shoot it down more effectively and not have another one of those awkward moments. I read about the major world religions, and I found it all very confusing. It didn't occur to me to read the original texts -- I was in a hurry. But I did ultimately go and knock on the door of a Methodist minister who lived down the street and asked him if he could make any recommendations for somebody who, like me, was looking for some arguments for or against faith.

He took a book off his shelf -- "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis. Lewis had been an atheist [and] set out as I did to convince himself of the correctness of his position and accidentally converted himself. I took the book home, and in the first few pages realized that all of my arguments in favor of atheism were quickly reduced to rubble by the simple logic of this clear-thinking Oxford scholar. I realized, "I've got to start over again here. Everything that I had based my position upon is really flawed to the core."

I can understand how you might make the change from being an atheist to an agnostic, given your scientific worldview. But moving from an agnostic to a believer, now that seems like a tougher transition.

And I made it in stages, so for a while I abandoned atheism and landed in the agnostic bin, but I found that in a certain way a cop-out. It did not seem that that was necessarily a place where one could comfortably stay unless you could say, "I have now considered all of the evidence, and I've concluded that there is no reason to actually make a real decision." This business of saying "I don't know" can't just be an "I don't want to know." And the more I looked at the evidence, the more I concluded that I wasn't really in a position where that was a viable choice.