Francis Collins
Physician-geneticist who led the Human Genome Project and directed the NIH — a former atheist, converted through C.S. Lewis, who founded BioLogos to show science and faith are allies.
Key Works
The Language of God(2006)
A bestselling account of his journey from atheism to Christian faith, arguing that the scientist and the believer can be the same person.
Belief: Readings on the Reason for Faith(2010)
An anthology of writings on faith and reason, gathering voices from Augustine and Pascal to Lewis and Bonhoeffer.
The Road to Wisdom(2024)
A reflection on truth, science, faith, and trust, written for a divided age out of decades in public scientific leadership.
Francis Collins is an American physician-geneticist who led the Human Genome Project to its completion in 2003 — the historic effort to read all three billion letters of human DNA — and later served as the longest-serving director of the National Institutes of Health. He is also one of the world's best-known Christian scientists, a former atheist who came to faith in his late twenties.
His Story
Collins grew up on a small farm in Virginia and trained as a chemist and then a physician. As a graduate student he considered himself an atheist. But as a young doctor, watching patients face death with unshakable faith, he realized he had rejected Christianity without ever seriously examining it. A pastor handed him C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, and over the following months Lewis's arguments dismantled his objections. At twenty-seven, he became a Christian.
His scientific career was remarkable: his lab helped identify the genes behind cystic fibrosis and other diseases, and from 1993 he led the Human Genome Project, announcing its completion in 2003. In The Language of God he described DNA as "the language in which God created life." He went on to found BioLogos, an organization dedicated to showing that mainstream science and Christian faith are allies, not enemies. From 2009 to 2021 he directed the NIH under three presidents.
His Legacy
Collins has given a generation of believers permission to love both the Bible and the laboratory:
- He led one of the landmark scientific achievements in history, the sequencing of the human genome
- The Language of God became a bestseller and a touchstone for scientists exploring faith
- BioLogos continues to help churches, students, and scientists move past the warfare model of science and religion
- His public testimony — at the highest levels of American science — has made "Christian" and "world-class scientist" visibly compatible
Why Read Collins Today?
Collins writes as a working scientist, not a philosopher in an armchair, and as a convert who remembers exactly what his atheism felt like. He takes evidence seriously in both directions — the evidence of the genome and the evidence that pointed him to God. For students who fear that a science career means leaving faith behind, or skeptics who assume no serious scientist believes, Collins is the living counterexample, and a generous, plain-spoken guide.