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Is the road between science and belief a linear path, requiring the traveler to approach one only by moving farther away from the other?

Or do they work in concert, only finding strength in the other's expansion?

The first opinion is conventional and uncontroversial. The second is neither, and to succeed personally and professionally while promoting it takes not just talent and perseverance, but also eloquence.

That, in a nutshell, is a description of President Barack Obama's superb choice for director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins. Collins, whom President George W. Bush honored in 2007 with the Medal of Freedom, was unanimously confirmed by the Senate Aug. 7.

Collins served as the head of the Human Genome Project, which in 2003 mapped a complete sequence of human DNA. As the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), Collins discovered the genes responsible for type 2 diabetes, a form of endocrine cancer, and other diseases.

Collins is also a man of faith, though he didn't start out that way. In his book, "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief," he describes his journey from atheism to belief. At age 26, he was "stunned" by the logic of C.S. Lewis' explanation that God could only exist outside the framework of what appears to be the natural order, because the creator cannot be part of the creation any more than a structure's architect could also be a wall or staircase therein.

Lewis himself, of course, made a similar journey from atheism to belief. One of his more brilliant passages comes in "The Problem of Pain," in which Lewis describes the common belief that early humans, surrounded by strange and dangerous things, invented a higher being by way of explanation. It is natural, Lewis states, for us to believe this, because we can imagine ourselves reacting in the same way.

"But," Lewis continues, "it is not in the least 'natural' in the sense that the idea of the uncanny or the Numinous is already contained in the idea of the dangerous, or that any perception of danger or any dislike of the wounds and death which it may entail could give the slightest conception of ghostly dread or numinous awe to an intelligence which did not already understand them."

These two nuggets of thought adhere to the scholarship of the great Jewish philosopher Rabbi Moshe Chayim Luzzatto (known as the RAMCHAL). Luzzatto wrote of God's status as "intrinsically imperative" -- it does not depend on anything else.

Luzzatto continued: "Our intellect and imagination are only capable of grasping things bound by the natural limitations created by God, since these are the only things that our senses can detect and convey to our minds.... No inference can be drawn to the Creator from what we see among created things.... This Being must furthermore be divorced from all addition, structure, relationship, comparison, or any other quality that exists in created things."

And what of that "intellect and imagination" in a world without that creator? The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus accurately characterizes this in "American Babylon," where he criticizes the atheist position that thinking is a only physical act of neurosynapses in the "pound of meat" we call the brain.

"But, by their own account, they are programmed to talk that way, and, apart from our sympathy for their self-chosen plight, we need pay no mind to what they insist on describing as their mindlessness," he wrote.

This echoes Yehudah Levi, author of "The Science in Torah". Levi writes that the world functions according to "natural laws," but there is no real scientific explanation for why those laws exist, only that they do.

"We can expect consistent behavior in nature, but we cannot see 'natural laws'," he writes. "Obviously, there is no basis to deny them; but the scientist who lacks faith also has no basis to believe in them."

Collins himself is a scholar in his own right, creating a theory of science and belief he calls BioLogos. It defends the harmony among God's omnipotence, scientific developments, and human free will.

"If God is outside of nature, then He is outside of space and time," Collins writes. "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, all of the chemistry, physics, geology, and biology that led to the formation of life on earth, and the evolution of humans, right to the moment of your reading this book -- and beyond. In that context, evolution could appear to us to be driven by chance, but from God's perspective the outcome would be entirely specified."

"The God of the Bible," Collins concludes, "is also the God of the genome."

There has been, recently in this country, at once a public resurgence in hostility to religion and a private resurgence in faith. That discord is bad medicine, and Collins at the helm of the NIH is just what the doctor ordered.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.