What Do You Believe Doc?

In a quiet hospital room in North Carolina, an eager young doctor with a bright future evaluates his elderly patient with not much future left at all. She has a terminal heart condition, inoperable. All he can do is treat her symptoms and pain as the two of them wait for her time to run out. As the physician visits the dying woman during his daily rounds, they gradually get to know one another.

During one particularly poignant conversation, he learns that the woman is a deeply religious Christian. As a confident atheist, he assumes that as her condition deteriorates, her faith will do the same, as she realizes her God is not coming to the rescue. Yet with every passing day, his patient’s faith seems to grow stronger even as her body weakens.

Having been exposed years earlier to the writings of Heisenberg, Dirac, and Einstein, the doctor finds his patient’s religious beliefs antiquated but charming. But then, he is taken aback by her forthright inquiry: “Doctor, I have been telling you what I believe, but what do you believe?”

It’s not that he takes no joy in what his patient would call “creation.” Rather, he finds the universe deeply satisfying. He has long relished the idea that it can be understood and explained in discrete mathematical formulae—that it can present no dilemma that a robust theorem cannot answer. But in this case, he is shaken a bit when asked about belief.

He murmurs something about the beauty of the natural world and leaves the conversation with a degree of unease. He is one of the best trained scientists of his generation. By his own reckoning, there is no one who better understands the systems and laws that keep nature running. But he is deeply unsettled by the way the dying woman sleeps peacefully in her hospital bed while he lies awake each night haunted by her question.

…Over the next two years, the young physician reads voraciously about Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism, examining the data about their roots and their claims, seeking to find one that would help him satisfactorily answer the dying woman’s question.

Ultimately, while hiking in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, he comes to the conclusion that the claims of Christianity best explain what he sees around him. He begins to embrace the faith of his former patient, who had begun a kind of “cascade” within him with her one honest question. His radical internal shift doesn’t change much on the outside. He still loves his work as a scientist and doesn’t intend to redirect his efforts into religious service.

His sense of meaning and purpose, however, has refocused entirely. Indeed, this faith decision would become the fulcrum for a career that would eventually reach the apex of scientific renown and public service. This is the story of Francis Collins, one of our generation’s leading scientific authorities.

…His faith decision became a significant turning point, one that not only shaped his life but—by virtue of his leadership roles in the decades since—the lives of many others.