Video Transcript: Top Atheist Scientist Converts to Christianity (Dr. Francis Collins)

Video Transcript: Top Atheist Scientist Converts to Christianity - Dr. Francis Collins

Unknown  

Why you were not a believer early in your life, why? 

Francis Collins  

It was the way I was raised. I was raised in this remarkable environment by a drama professor, father in a playwright mother, surrounded by theatre and music, the arts, they were doing the 60s thing, except it wasn't quite the 60s yet. And I was exposed to all kinds of fascinating ways to learn about life in the world and ideas. But faith was not really on the list of things that were talked about. It wasn't that faith was put down or considered inappropriate for other people. It just didn't sort of enter the conversation in my childhood.

Unknown  

Did it exist in your mind as a question? 

Francis Collins  

Oh I had glimmers of something some longing outside of myself some sense that maybe there was a God up there that I might be able to reach out to. 

Unknown  

what brought you as an adult then, to faith? 

Francis Collins  

Well, first, as an adult, I walked very far away from faith, I went from being sort of vaguely interested but not really to becoming an atheist. As a scientist studying physical chemistry, quantum mechanics, I became convinced that everything about the universe could be described by equations. 

Unknown  

So what changed that for you? 

Francis Collins  

Well, I changed my life plan from physical science to medicine. And when I went to medical school, the ideas about death and dying, which had been rather hypothetical became very real. You can't be in that environment, sitting at the bedside of people who are facing the end of their lives without having it an affect on you

Unknown  

Did you set out to find God? Or to find that there was no God?

Francis Collins  

I set out to prove that my atheist position was correct. I set out to try to find out what really were the rigorous arguments that I assumed were there that would rule out any possibility of God for a thinking person. 

Unknown  

You must have found many of them? 

Francis Collins  

I found some, many of them were ones I'd cooked up in my own mind. But the harder I looked at them, the flimsier they were, all of us human beings have a sense that there's such a thing as a right. And there's such a thing as wrong. What a curious thing. Where does that come from? If you were looking for evidence of a God, who cares about human beings, not just a God, who started the universe in motion, and then wandered off somewhere else? Wouldn't this be an interesting place to find him, basically, as something written within our hearts universally in humankind, making us different from other species, and calling us to be good and holy, pointing us as a signpost, if you will, toward something outside ourselves that is much more good and much more holy than we can imagine. 

Unknown  

Did you have at some point, a born again experience? 

Francis Collins  

When people talk to me about born again, and I didn't know what they were really referring to when I was growing up. But yes, I did have a moment where I became a believer. I had struggled for two years with this debate within myself gradually coming to the conclusion that belief in God was the most plausible of the choices, but that it couldn't be proved. And after many months of struggling with whether to make that leap, on a beautiful fall day, hiking in the northwest, with my mind a little more clear than usual, because there were not the usual distractions. I felt I could no longer resist. And I became a believer that day in the sunshine in the shadow of the Cascade Mountains.