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LET me start by declaring an interest: I am that Steve Fuller who gave evidence for the defence in the trial over whether intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution in schools in Dover, Pennsylvania, last year. And books like this persuade me that I did the right thing.

The Language of God is by Francis S. Collins, director of the Human Genome Project for the US National Institutes of Health. He became a born-again Christian after reading C. S. Lewis鈥檚 Mere Christianity as a biochemistry graduate student. Collins is now part of the American Scientific Affiliation, a group of 3000 Christians which aims to render science consistent with its beliefs.

Collins鈥檚 mission is to deny any real conflict between God and Darwin. He wants to square things for scientists who don鈥檛 want intelligent design on their doorstep but who also don鈥檛 want to examine their own beliefs too closely. Collins鈥檚 comprehensive but exclusive training in the hard sciences may explain his belief in a God who communicates plainly through natural sciences but who refuses to cooperate with social sciences, and such biologically inflected fields as sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. These latter fields, Collins asserts, would reduce 鈥渢he existence of the moral law and the universal longing for God鈥� to culturally specific or deeply genetic survival strategies.

In trying to accommodate too many camps, Collins ends up mired in confusion. Ironically, rather like Richard Dawkins, he treats religions equally, thereby homogenising them. Collins promotes 鈥渢heistic evolution鈥�, a philosophy sufficiently devoid of controversy, if not content, to be 鈥渆spoused by many Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Christians, including Pope John Paul II鈥�. It amounts to a treaty with God, whereby science does the 鈥渉ow鈥� and religion the 鈥渨hy鈥� of reality.

Dawkins and Collins clearly need a lesson in social science. The idea that, say, Hinduism and Islam can be lumped together is left over from 19th-century attempts to understand how complex social relations survived long stretches of time without the modern nation state. Repeating this idea uncritically in 2006 when we know better is bizarre.

鈥淩ather like Dawkins, Collins treats all religions equally鈥�

As is Collins鈥檚 refusal to deal with Christianity鈥檚 uniqueness in being both most inspirational and most resistant to science. On the one hand, Christians extended the Biblical entitlement of humanity to understand and exercise dominion over nature. On the other, they baulked at theories such as Darwinism that failed to put humans on top. The alleged war between science and religion has really been a fight over the soul of Christianity.

For all their faults, intelligent-design theorists grasp this much better than Collins. Immanuel Kant argued that moral law is no more and no less than our private imitation of God鈥檚 enforcement of physical law. Subsequently, as our understanding of nature changed, our relationship to each other changed too. So when intelligent-design theorists think of a Darwinist, they don鈥檛 imagine a Collins, who sees evolutionary theory as a boon to medicine. Rather, they see an animal-rights protester who wonders, on good Darwinian but anti-Christian grounds, why human comfort has priority over animal suffering.

Collins is most interesting when he deals with his fellow Christians head-on. He invokes St Augustine鈥檚 The Literal Meaning of Genesis, a treatise that still sets the standard for sophisticated exegesis. Collins interprets Augustine as saying that Genesis should not be read literally in matters that stray beyond its remit. However, devout Bible readers like Newton did not read either Genesis or Augustine that way. They simply inferred that 鈥渓iteral鈥� does not mean simple-minded. From nature to the Bible, God鈥檚 works can be understood only in the original, be that mathematics and DNA, or Hebrew and Aramaic.