May (Web-only) 2004

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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 ...