Washington (AFP)

The American geneticist Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), received the 50th Templeton Prize on Wednesday, endowed with 1.1 million British pounds and intended to reward personalities working for the rapprochement of science and religion.

In an interview with AFP before the announcement of the prize, the person who led the pioneering project of a human genome map in the 1990s and 2000 said that he had found faith in the early 1970s when he was a student in fiercely atheistic medicine. Everything changed, he said, in contact with the sick at the bedside.

"I realized that my atheism could not help me answer some deep questions," says Francis Collins, 70, from home via video conference, taking a break to talk about God in the midst of a Covid-19 pandemic occupying it "100 hours per week".

Altruism, beauty, love, death: science is running out of tools to examine them, he says. Using an ancestral argument used by the apostles of the reconciliation between faith and science, he describes atheism as "more radical of dogmas", the scientific method requiring, according to him, to leave a little room for doubt on the existence of God.

"The most indefensible perspective is strict atheism, it is even arrogant enough to say that we know enough to exclude God", continues Francis Collins.

Astrophysicists and cosmologists, reflecting on the great question of the origin of the universe, preceded him among the winners of the Templeton Prize. But it is in the infinitely small, in the letters that make up the DNA alphabet, that Francis Collins sees "the language of God", according to the title of the bestseller he published in 2006.

- Science in worship -

"Let me be clear: I am not one of those who thinks that God miraculously arranged the exact letters in a supernatural instant, a few thousand years ago, and created the human genome all at once", specifies the scientist.

"I see in it the long and elegant result of an evolutionary process started with the first organism capable of replicating on its own, of which we do not really know what started it".

Life originated from this original microbe, up to "creatures like you and me with big brains, capable of big thoughts, even of thinking beyond what we see, towards something more important ... more divine ".

"In the life sciences, I see this beauty, this elegance, I see the way in which God had wired all of creation from the beginning," says Francis Collins. "It seems even more fabulous to me than the galaxies."

The award, originally called the "Advancement of Religion Award," was created in 1972 by John Templeton, a Wall Street-based investor who later became British and settled in the Bahamas. He died in 2008.

First awarded to religious leaders, including Mother Teresa for the first edition, the price gradually widened to scientists, physicists sometimes also priests, but also theologians and philosophers, of all religions. Among the winners are Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Dalai Lama and a few Nobel Prize winners.

Only three women obtained it. The last was the English nurse Cicely Saunders, who led the palliative care movement in 1981.

The descendants of John Templeton, whose eponymous foundation funds research projects ranging from immortality to love and neuroscience, like to recall that their grandfather set the price just above that of the Nobel Prize, to show that religion deserved no less than science.

More than equals, the two marry, for Francis Collins. Science gives the seeker "the privilege of exploring the creation of God". The intellectual exercise, dares the boss of the largest biomedical research agency in the world, then almost turns into devotion.

© 2020 AFP