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At age 65, Dr. Timothy Johnson decided to take another look at his faith and rethink everything, as if for the first time. As a seminary graduate, who decided to be a doctor, and ended up on television, Johnson talks about this personal journey in Finding God in the Questions. Johnson is best known as medical editor for ABC News where he's reported on health care issues for Good Morning America since 1976. He holds joint positions in medicine at Harvard University and Mass General Hospital in Boston. He is also the assisting minister at the Community Covenant Church in Massachusetts.

Your book starts with the most rigorous questions about the intellectual sensibility of faith in a scientific age. How do you deal with the question about whether the universe is an accident or not?

There's an even more basic question that I eventually get to which is, Why is there something rather than nothing? When you think about it, there's nothing that says that it has to be. If you start with that question, then I think the very next question becomes, Is this kind of world more likely to have happened by accident or by design? I point out that it's amazing that we wouldn't for a minute look at objects of everyday life, the television in our room or a vase on the table and say, how did that come about? We know it came about because of some kind of intelligence and some kind of design by a person or a committee of persons. But when it comes to this unbelievable universe, we can be talked into thinking that it could have happened by chance.

The creation of the universe is absolutely amazing, from my point of view, and that's a bias probably because I'm a physician. I find that the human body is even in some ways more amazing. And when you get down to the structure of DNA and the brain, in particular, it turns out to be the most amazing structure that we could ever possibly imagine.

To give you one little example—the compacting ability of DNA. All the information needed to run each of us weighs less than a few trillionths of a gram. And here's another little factoid that just blows my mind. If we were to collect all of the information in DNA for all the organisms that have ever existed on this planet, it could fit into the size of a grain of salt.

How do you want to help people work through the role of the Bible and its usefulness for contemporary human inquiry about God?

It's obvious that modern secular people will not simply take the "authority of the Bible" as a given. So I spend some time talking about why I think the Biblical records, in general, and most importantly to me, the New Testament gospels, are reliable as historical documents. I go through some of the evidence and talk about the debate that clearly is going on and give reasons why I think ultimately it is reliable. I'm not saying it's a videotape record like we have in the evening news. The gospels are clearly documents that were written with a point of view and a purpose. But imbedded in the gospels we find the life and teachings of Jesus described there, and information that is very useful and that is a reflection of who Jesus was and what he did and said.

The most basic starting point for a secular mind, or even a person of faith today, would be to actually read the gospels. What are some of the things that you think surprise the secular mind about who Jesus is?

Jesus taught a lot about how we are to relate to the material world. Second only in terms of the amount of space devoted to the kingdom of God are his teachings about possessions and wealth and money. There's no way you can avoid that. The other thing that I think comes across so clearly is the way in which Jesus reached out to people who were in trouble. This was a constant theme in his ministry. He wasn't concerned about religious propriety, he wasn't concerned about institutional matters, he was concerned to find and deal with people in trouble.

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May (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48