“Faithful to God, Science,” by Stephanie Simon is a great story in today’s Los Angeles Times about Francis Collins, the scientist who headed the Human Genome Project. He is also a devout Christian, believing in both the God of the Bible and evolution, for which he draws heat from all sides. I find I resonate greatly with Collins.

He urges his fellow scientists to give up the arrogant assumption that the only questions worth asking are those science can answer. He entreats his fellow believers to recognize it’s not blasphemous to learn about the world.

One day last summer, in the basement office of his suburban home here, Collins dictated this manifesto into a tape recorder: “Science is not threatened by God; it is enhanced. God is most certainly not threatened by science; He made it all possible.” It became the central thesis of his book — with this addendum: “Abandon the battlements.”

These statements are somewhat reminiscent of something Dieterich Bonhoeffer wrote (I read this in A Year With Dieterich Bonhoeffer, 214):

Weizsacker’s book The World View of Physics is still keeping me very busy. It has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God as a stopgap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that’s bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know; God wants us to realize the divine presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved. That is true of the relationship between God and scientific knowledge, but it is also true of the wider human problems of death, suffering, and guilt.