By Keziah Mendez —
The moment that finally broke Francis Collins’ lifelong atheism was not in a church or during a crisis, but when the universe itself began to feel impossibly precise, balanced on what he called a “knife edge of improbability.”
“You can’t look at that data,” said Collins,“ and not marvel at it,”
It is describing how a tiny change in gravity would have erased stars, planets and human life before it ever began.
Collins, the renowned scientist who led the Human Genome Project, explains how years of studying nature, physics, and morality convinced him that belief in God was not irrational, but intellectually satisfying and spiritually unavoidable.
He did not begin his life searching for faith, but for answers that could be measured, calculated, and proven in laboratories and equations.
As a graduate student immersed in quantum mechanics in theoretical chemistry and mathematics, Collins was captivated by how the universe obeyed elegant laws that not only worked, but were beautiful.
That beauty began to trouble him when he realized there was no scientific reason that mathematics should describe reality so perfectly or that something should exist instead of nothing at all.
The discovery that the universe had a definite beginning in the Big Bang only intensified those questions, because science could trace everything back to a single moment, but could not explain what caused it.
“If nature is not able to create itself,” Collins asked, “how did the universe get here?” concluding that a supernatural Creator that is not bound by space or time would be the only explanation as to why the universe did not collapse in on itself.
The fine-tuning of the universe pushed him further, as physicists showed that altering any of fifteen fundamental constants by even a fraction would result in a lifeless, sterile cosmos.
Faced with the options of blind necessity, an unobservable multiverse, or intentional design, Collins applied Occam’s razor and found purposeful creation to be the simplest and most coherent explanation.
That realization led him only to a desert God, at first a cosmic mathematician, but not yet to a God who cared about human beings.
The final shift came when Collins encountered what philosopher C.S. Lewis called the moral law, a sense of right and wrong written into every human heart.
He observed that humans excuse themselves when they do wrong, which only makes sense if they believe a moral standard truly exists.
Evolutionary explanations could account for kindness toward family or group members, but they fail to explain radical altruism toward strangers.
Collins pointed to moments like Wesley Autry jumping onto subway tracks to save a stranger from an oncoming train, an act that defied every rule of evolutionary self-preservation.
“Evolution would say,” Collins said, “‘Wesley, what were you thinking?’” Collins said, calling such sacrificial love a scandal under purely natural explanations.
That moral pull convinced him that God was not only intelligent, but good, and that humans were accountable to something beyond survival instincts.
Yet this realization left Collins deeply unsettled, because if God was holy, then his own moral failures stood in the way of any relationship with Him.
He described trying to forgive himself repeatedly, only to find guilt and imperfection returning again and again.
That despair changed when he encountered the figure of Jesus Christ, whose death and resurrection offered what Collins called a bridge between human brokenness and God’s holiness.
“I had heard the phrase ‘Christ died for your sins’ and thought it was gibberish,” Collins admitted, “and suddenly it wasn’t gibberish at all.”
In Jesus, Collins said, he found the wounded healer, a God who entered human suffering to redeem it rather than condemn it.
The scientist who once believed atheism was the most rational position now calls it the least rational of the available options.
For Collins, the evidence did not force belief, but it awakened an awe of the starry heavens above and the moral law within.
