Today on my plane, a plane ride a lot less intimidating than I remember just 4 years ago, when the crossing of an ocean seemed like Death, I picked back up a book that at first was a thrilling read. “The Language of God” an analysis of the idea of God, the belief in the supernatural and the coexistence of such a being in the midst of Science. The topic is thrilling, not simply because of debate, for if it was for pure argumentative reasons, I would run and hide in a dark corner…Science scares me, because I SUCK at it. My mind does not differentiate between a photon, a neutron, gravitons and gluons, even while I’m typing, part of me anticipates a small red ‘misspelling’ squiggle would appear beneath each word, but none do and so my MacBook schools me once again.
The topic is thrilling because of how God has intrigued the minds of the simplest theologians throughout the centuries along with the genius of the Albert Einsteins, Immanuel Kants’, Galileos’, and the stream of Nobel Peace Prize winners that in their day and their time, patented an ‘Ah-Ha’. One such mind so intrigued is Dr. Francis S. Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, one of the worlds leading scientists and the author of this book.
His life could fill the pages of a novel, a man born to supremely intelligent parents, graduates of Yale, yet revolutionaries – hippies before the sixties. The Collins headed a ‘New Deal’ type of community organization in a small mining town in West Virginia, led by Eleanor Roosevelt in an effort to make life a little richer and healthier for the miners and their families. Yet, the Great Depression proved to be too debilitating for this effort to persist and the Collins were released from their duties. A few years as an engineer for WWII military planes and Mr. Collins desired for his family to know the simple life and so packed up a gang of young boys and their mother to establish a family farm in a quiet valley of Virginia.
A slave to the sciences from childhood, Frances graduated high school at 16 and went on to a degree in Chemistry, then Medical School. It was here, for the first time that Francis contemplated the actual existence of God and what he found, was the beauty of compassion. Francis’ mind knows facts and figures, hypothesis and theorums, but what he was unable to understand was the joy of the Suffer, the peace of the one who is facing premature mortality, he learned that death can be replaced by LIFE.
The rest of the book and the majority of Francis’s investigation of God and faith is in the understanding of science and particles and origin and evolution. PICK IT UP, READ this sucker, cause what you’ll find is poetry in science… its beautiful stuff. My favorite quote of what I’ve plowed through thus far is from the final words of the astrophysicist, Robert Jastrow:
“ At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries”
So, I sit here in the Taipei airport anxious for dawn and my first day in Thailand to be greeted by some of the Greatest: Blake, Alissa and of course Oliver. My last bit of America sits in some airport baggage reservoir; a snickers bar for Blake, a stocking and Christmas decorations for Alissa and some anti-diarrhea pills for myself… hope they last meJ Until the New Year, I send you all a belated farewell… Good Night America, can’t wait to see how you’ll hold up.
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