Every now and then, a book comes along that resonates so well with my views that I have one of those “ah ha!” moments. The Language of God by Francis S. Collins is just such a book.

It isn’t that Collins has given me anything new, but rather that he has assembled in one volume so much of what I think needs to be said to the evangelical community. As a layman in both theology and science, I certainly don’t have the knowledge and experience to be heard, but Collins’ reputation is unassailable. One of the country’s leading geneticists, he is the head of the Human Genome Project, this era’s “Manhattan Project” that has mapped the human genome. His research prior to that post led him and his collegues to discover the “genetic misspellings” that cause cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis and Huntington’s disease.

As can be expected, many of the folks in the science blogs such as Panda’s Thumb are aghast at his philosophical and theological musings that appear throughout the book. As is common in our “culture wars” society, a discussion of Collins’ book quickly devolves into a defense of the Bible, and then criticisms of faith. You can see the exchange Here. But the point to keep in mind is that this is not a book for scientists: they already know evolution is true. It is a book for the average Joe, and especially for the conservative or evangelical Christian.

Collins describes his own spiritual journey, which will bore the uninterested but is instructive to Christians: his experience is just like ours. Before his conversion he was agnostic, a physician, and struggling with what CS Lewis called the “Problem of Pain.” And in the paradoxical manner that most of us have come to faith, it was not a healthy person, “blessed by God” with great vim and vigor, but a terminally ill person … with every “right” to question God’s will … who gets through to him. His search includes a discussion with a friend who is a Methodist pastor, and he finds a copy of Lewis’ Mere Christianity in his hands by the time their visit is over. We all know what happens next.

The book would still be a nice “smart-guy-becomes-Christian” story if it ended there. But Collins uses his experience in bridging his “hard science” background to a new life of faith, with all the attendant internal conflicts that can bring, to build a foundation for what comes next: a discussion of the “culture wars” and the poisoned atmosphere between people of good will when the subject of evolution comes up.

He tackles Young Earth Creationism (YCE), the view with the most literal interpretation of Genesis, all the way to Intelligent Design (ID), which takes such a allegorical view of Genesis that its much like kissing your sister: why bother? In a very respectful way, he shows how the Christian church never had a requirement for a literal interpretation of Genesis, with quotes from St. Augustine (who thought the language lent itself to allegorical interpretation) to CS Lewis himself. Evangelicals will be surprised, as I was when I discovered this on my own a couple of decades ago. (Its because we’ve been lied to, but Collins isn’t that blunt, and much too respectful to make the mistakes I do when I lose patience with the lies).

But he doesn’t spare the ardent anti-faith folks in the anti-ID crowd either. He explains their theories and, as much as he can in lay language, provides reasons why he disagrees with their conclusions. Through it all he makes clear that it isn’t which “side” the truth is on that matters, as truth is truth, and God is the author of it all.

This is an excellent book for young Christians entering high school biology or college, as it provides the means to reason through competing concerns and filter out the bias from the truth.

Highly recommended: The Language of God.