Francis Collins entered medical school at the University of North Carolina as an atheist. He had a PhD in physical chemistry from Yale and considered religious belief a relic of pre-scientific thinking. He was training to be a physician, surrounded by data and evidence, and saw no room for God in any of it.
The Question He Could Not Dismiss
Then he started working with patients who were dying. He watched people facing terminal diagnoses with a peace and strength that made no rational sense to him. When one elderly woman with severe heart failure asked him what he believed, Collins realised he had never seriously examined the question. He had rejected faith without investigating it — the very thing he would never tolerate in his scientific work.
Following the Evidence
Collins began reading. He picked up C.S. Lewis's "Mere Christianity" and found the logical arguments for theism far more robust than he had assumed. He studied the moral law — the universal human sense of right and wrong — and could not explain it through materialism alone. The investigation took him two years.
Kneeling on a Mountain Trail
The final moment came on a hike in the Cascade Mountains. Standing before a frozen waterfall split into three streams, Collins fell to his knees and gave his life to God. He later described it as the most rational decision he had ever made. He went on to lead the Human Genome Project, mapping the entirety of human DNA, and later became director of the National Institutes of Health.
What This Means for You
Francis Collins did not find faith by turning off his brain. He found it by taking his own standards of evidence seriously and applying them to the biggest question of all. If you are in a science classroom wondering whether faith and rigour can coexist — they can. One of the greatest scientists alive proved it.
