God is in the DNA.

A BOOK many of us consider sacred provides one account of reality; evidence assembled by subsequent exertions of the human intellect provides another. There's only one truth; and therefore, our adversarial culture insists, one of these two accounts must be driven from the field in humiliation and defeat. The confrontation between science and religion has only become more vitriolic in recent years--so it's heartening to find that one of America's finest minds is trying to point our way out of the dark rancor. Francis S. Collins is both head of the Human Genome Project and a believing Christian, and his new book--The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press, 294 pp., $26)--is a valuable attempt to reconcile these two essential human endeavors.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In Collins's view, "there is no conflict in being a rigorous scientist and a person who believes in a God who takes a personal interest in each one of us." Man qua scientist explores nature; man qua religious believer worships God in the realm of spirit. Because there is but one reality, these two distinct spheres can and must be reconciled into a larger whole. "The Big Bang," writes Collins, "cries out for a divine explanation. It forces the conclusion that nature had a defined beginning. I cannot see how nature could have created itself. Only a supernatural force that is outside of space and time could have done that." It is not the province of science to prove the existence of God, but it certainly offers evidence pointing in His direction.

Nowhere is Collins's presentation more helpful than on the question of evolution. This Christian scientist is an unabashed Darwinist. "Darwin had no way of knowing what the mechanism of evolution by natural selection might be. We can now see that the variation he postulated is supported by naturally occurring mutations in DNA.... Darwin could hardly have imagined a more compelling digital demonstration of his theory than what we find by studying the DNA of multiple organisms." The author goes on to describe how these material mutations have diversified the number of kinds of living things--among them, man. But he continues:

  At this point, godless materialists might be cheering. If humans
  evolved strictly by mutation and natural selection, who needs God to
  explain us? To this, I reply: I do. The comparison of chimp and human
  sequences ... does not tell us what it means to be human.... DNA
  sequence alone ... will never explain certain special human
  attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal
  search for God. Freeing God from the burden of special acts of
  creation does not remove Him as the source of the things that make
  humanity special, and of the universe itself. It merely shows us
  something of how He operates.

Collins's thought on this is close to that of John Paul II, whom he praises for striking a careful balance--simultaneously acknowledging the fact of biological evolution and recognizing that (in John Paul's words, echoing a previous teaching of Pius XII) "if the origin of the human body comes through living matter which existed previously, the spiritual soul is created directly by God." Some prominent theologians disagree with the John Paul II/Pius XII position; but that disagreement can be explained as a disappointing yet understandable overreaction to the rhetoric of village atheists who--overstepping the bounds of science--claim that evolution strikes an intellectual death-blow to belief in God. It's hard not to retreat into an us-versus-them mentality when some of the loudest and most prominent voices on the other side are lapsing in the same way.

One problem many religious believers have with evolutionary science is its ostensible endorsement of randomness. Collins is helpful on this question as well.

  If evolution is random, how could [God] really be in charge?... The
  solution is actually readily at hand, once one ceases to apply human
  limitations to God. If God is outside of nature, then he is outside of
  space and time. In that context, God could in the moment of creation
  of the universe also know every detail of the future. That could
  include the formation of the stars, planets, and galaxies ... and the
  evolution of humans.... In that context, evolution could appear to us
  to be driven by chance, but from God's perspective the outcome would
  be entirely specified. Thus, God could be completely and intimately
  involved in the creation of all species, while from our perspective,
  limited as it is by the tyranny of linear time, this would appear a
  random and undirected process.

On reading this, many scientific reductionists will probably be thinking, This Collins may have been a man of science earlier on, but he must have sold out to the Christian Right--from which they will quite relievedly conclude that he can safely be ignored. But they should know that this exit isn't available to them, because Collins does not argue for any conservative agenda. He supports, for example, the controversial "therapeutic cloning" procedure strongly opposed by religious conservatives.

Further, he reserves some of his harshest criticism for the Intelligent Design movement, which he dismisses as a "God of the gaps" effort. "It now seems likely," he writes, "that many examples of irreducible complexity are not irreducible after all, and that the primary scientific argument for ID is thus in the process of crumbling.... Major cracks are beginning to appear, suggesting that ID proponents have made the mistake of confusing the unknown with the unknowable." (Notwithstanding Collins's strictures, it should be pointed out that the ID movement has played a positive role in intellectual life. Scientists committed to philosophical materialism are free to police the boundaries of their discipline, and declare that ID is not "science"--but those of us who are not committed a priori to this reductionist attitude should be equally free to consider the arguments and evidence adduced by the ID proponents. The important question for us is not Is it science, as materialists define science? but rather Is it true? ID may or may not have the right answers, but it is helping the culture ask the right questions.)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Collins is a principled proponent of theistic evolution--which is to say, intelligent design without the capital letters. In this great cultural clash between faith and science, I have semi-seriously desired the formation of a group called "Fundamentalists for Evolution"--people who hold the Bible sacred and also gratefully accept the evidence provided by science about the physical world. (Lest I be misunderstood, I should note that Collins is not a fundamentalist by any stretch.) This book reminds us of some very important truths: "The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshiped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate, and beautiful--and it cannot be at war with itself. Only we imperfect humans can start such battles. And only we can end them."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

* In The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West (Encounter, 311 pp., $25.95), Robert Royal has achieved a tour de force of intellectual history, a scintillating reinterpretation of the key cultural events of the past 25 centuries in the West. President of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C., Royal challenges the conventional account of history as a gradual emancipation of the human spirit from religion. His account integrates the Greeks, Romans, and medievals into a "usable past" for modern liberal democracy--pointing out, among other things, that the Greek philosophers had more in common with religious believers than with secularist debunkers; that Dante, certainly the greatest poet of the Middle Ages and probably the greatest religious poet of all time, envisioned some religious leaders (popes) in Hell and some secular leaders (emperors) in Heaven; and that the efforts of Catholic officials in Paris to quash the rigorist Jansenist sect merely ended up provoking anticlericalism among Catholics. Royal draws out the lessons of these and many other events in a non-polemical way, completely without the hectoring tone that is so common in such broad cultural arguments: He has written a work of Geistesgeschichte that is inspiring to read, and that deserves a place on the college syllabus.

* Irving Kristol, one of the founders of the neoconservative movement, wrote over two decades ago that "it is the self-imposed assignment of neoconservatism to explain to the American people why they are right, and to the intellectuals why they are wrong." Connoisseurs of irony can therefore wince at the fact that, today, populists of both Right and Left are united in viewing neoconservatism as the sinister ideology of a coterie of professors seeking to impose a utopian vision on a recalcitrant and innocent mass public. In Neoconservatism: Why We Need It (Encounter, 247 pp., $25.95), young author/journalist Douglas Murray seeks to rescue the neocons from the undeserved vilification. He makes a passionate case for neoconservatism as a road between, on one hand, the relativism of the Left and, on the other, the "nostalgia," "archaism," and "anachronism" of the harsher anti-neocon elements on the right: "Just as the counterculture spawned the unsavory sight of nihilism adopted as an attitude among the 'radicals' and the socialists, so, one should ask, has not the myth of decline become a free acquisition of conservatism? Has 'Owl of Minervaism'--the heady idea that we are living in the fading light--become the conservative nihilism?" He sees the neocon ideals expressed in President Bush's second inaugural address as the key to the eventual success of conservatism tout court. In the words of his book's last sentence: "With confidence in its power, knowledge of a just cause, and the myth of inevitable decline banished, the American people can reaffirm their instinctive ambition and hope, and the conservative revolution can truly begin." Murray's book is, finally, an act of hope--hope that the values that conservatives, neo- and otherwise, seek to conserve will not merely be preserved as artifacts in an imaginary museum of culture, but actually prevail on history's stage.

* Kudos to Roman Catholic Books of Fort Collins, Colo., for republishing a key work of liturgical history. In The Reform of the Roman Liturgy: Its Problems and Background (198 pp., $24.95), the late Msgr. Klaus Gamber laid out with great precision the traditionalist case against many of the post-Vatican II changes in Catholic worship. What makes the volume of particular interest today is the fact that an earlier edition carried a preface by none other than then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Wrote the cardinal: "What happened after the Council was [that] in the place of liturgy as the fruit of development came fabricated liturgy. We abandoned the organic, living process of growth and development over centuries, and replaced it--as in a manufacturing process--with a fabrication, a banal, on-the-spot product. Gamber, with the vigilance of a true prophet and the courage of a true witness, opposed this falsification, and, thanks to his incredibly rich knowledge, indefatigably taught us about the living fullness of a true liturgy."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

That's one heck of a blurb, coming as it does from a man who presumably has the authority to implement Monsignor Gamber's ideas. One does, in fact, hear rumblings from the Vatican about major reforms in the offing--but Gamber himself pointed out one reason the changes under the new pope may not be as drastic as some conservatives wish: "Since the liturgical rite has developed over time, further development continues to be possible. But such continuing development has to respect the timeless character of all rites; and its development has to be organic in nature."

In liturgy, man confronts and adores the holiness of God. Anything that makes a liturgy appear more oriented toward human experimentation than to the encounter with the numinous devalues it in the direction of secular therapy. There is a reason some Protestants are moving toward more frequent and reverent celebration of the Eucharistic liturgy; it's the same reason many Catholics wish for reforms in their own Church, along the lines proposed by Monsignor Gamber.

* "For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church" (Eph. 5:31-32). In this famous passage, St. Paul is using marriage as a metaphor to illustrate the unity of God with His people. In his new book, Divine Likeness: Toward a Trinitarian Anthropology of the Family (Eerdmans, 242 pp., $26), Marc Cardinal Ouellet, the archbishop of Quebec, reflects on a similar analogy between the relations within the Trinitarian God and the relations within Christian families: Just as God Himself is, in essence, a community of love, love is the essential bond that constitutes a human family.

Ouellet writes that "the common life of the couple in marriage and their conjugal love are ... pervaded by Trinitarian love itself, which effuses in them its unity and fruitfulness. The couple is constituted as the domestic Church.... The Holy Spirit makes the couple a new reality, Trinitarian, namely a 'third' in relation to their individual persons.... Therefore, the couple finds itself engaged in the Trinitarian drama of the total gift of self for the other and with the other in the unity of a common fecundity." He contends that there is not just a likeness

between the Trinity and the family, "but above all a mutual immanence of the two realities, a sort of circumincession which involves the family in the Trinitarian relations.... The Christian family is a witness to the fact that the Glory of Trinitarian communion, which shines on the face of Christ ..., already dwells within the simplest and most concrete realities of life." The family is thus the locus in which people learn "to see God in the other.... This way of seeing in love allows one to discover the infinite value of the other and of oneself as the image of God, from whence flows the mystery of 'giving and receiving' divine Love in human love."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In 1960, Karol Wojtyla--the future John Paul II--published Love and Responsibility, a book on human intimacy that would become highly influential. Like that earlier work, Ouellet's book is dense but rewarding: an important contribution to the understanding of how God remains involved in human life, and how man participates in the life of God.

* The War on Terror is not a fight we went looking for. It's good to remember at times like these that while it takes a lot to provoke the U.S.A., once we are provoked we put up a helluva fight--and almost always win. (As Bill Murray pointed out in Stripes, "We're 10-and-1!") For a rousing crash (or refresher) course on the U.S. military tradition, I recommend Don't Tread on Me: A400-Year History of America at War, from Indian Fighting to Terrorist Hunting (Crown Forum, 464 pp., $29.95), by H. W. Crocker III. Sadly, but understandably, roughly one-fifth of the book is devoted to the Civil War: that is to say, to a purely domestic conflict in which one group of Americans killed (and were killed by) another group of Americans, because the latter insisted on the right to enslave yet a third group of Americans. (Regarding these chapters, readers should be forewarned about Crocker's pro-Southern tilt: He refers to the war as a "Northern war of aggression" and says the South "might have been ... a liberty-loving [sic] agricultural Sparta.") Justice prevailed, albeit terribly; the same can be said of almost all the foreign wars Crocker so ably recounts.

* In Great Philanthropic Mistakes (Hudson Institute, 158 pp., $14.95), Martin Morse Wooster provides some cautionary case studies in the misuse of generosity. A central problem, Wooster writes, is "arrogance on the part of program officers and foundation presidents"--grant-makers who are surrounded by flatterers and tend, over time, to develop a dangerously high regard for their own instincts.