What place does religion have in modern society? If I were feeling especially snarky (and lazy), I could end this column at twenty-nine words with a simple answer: none. But my editors generally prefer a word count of six to eight hundred, and despite my personal inclination towards atheism, I think there is more to be said.

In fact, there is so much more to be said that I won’t feign to be well enough equipped to properly cover the topic. Like most things I write about, there are plenty of experts who are far more informed about the subject of religion than I am. What makes the question of faith in the landscape of modernity especially intriguing, however, is that even the experts cannot begin to agree.

One purported expert is geneticist Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project and a prominent spokesperson for the evangelical Christian faith, who will also be speaking here at Stanford next week. Unlike some of the more old-fashioned and abrasive proponents of religion, Collins’ (modestly) progressive worldview allows for a harmonious — and even complementary — coexistence of science and faith. This distinction is significant. Historically, and even today, the church has forced followers to renounce the findings of science that contradict the teachings of the Bible, thus alienating most of the more analytically minded population. The newer attitude promoted by Collins has a far more widespread, modern appeal.

In its generous ideological accommodation, it also makes for a brilliant marketing strategy. Rather than engaging in a losing battle against modernity, Collins and his supporters have repackaged their product to sell in modern times. There is much debate about whether faith can indeed be integrated so seamlessly with science, with dissent from both the faithful and scientific camps. I’ll leave this discussion for the likes of Richard Dawkins, Mike Huckabee and you, readers, mostly because I am neither a scientist nor a theologian and my contribution would therefore be amateur at best.

But frankly, beyond the issue of God/science compatibility, I am startled by something much more basic about the Collins approach to religion: modernization. Faith strikes me as so fundamentally antithetical to modernity that any attempt to reconcile the two seems surreally comical. While modern times are characterized by the demise of tradition and the celebration of clarity of thought, the religious worldview is defined by a continuity of ritual and an embrace of mysticism. While modernity embodies upheaval, religion encourages obedience. And while the modern condition nurtures the power of the individual, the religious domain promotes her subservience to a greater force.

My fellow New Jerseyan Kevin Smith appears to see the comic surrealism as well. In Smith’s facetious 1999 film “Dogma,” a misguided effort to modernize the Catholic Church’s image unfolds through a campaign entitled, “Catholicism Wow!” Complete with a revamped, “less depressing” and utterly absurd Jesus figure bearing the name “Buddy Christ,” the attempt at Catholic modernization is portrayed by Smith as both silly and hopeless.

The Collins version of modernized religion is admittedly less ridiculous. In his book “The Language of God,” he at least ostensibly acknowledges the possible conflict: “The potential synthesis of the scientific and spiritual worldviews is assumed by many in modern times to be an impossibility, rather like trying to force two poles of a magnet together in the same spot.” As with much pop science writing, however, that cutesy physics simile rubs me the wrong way — it’s gratuitous and gimmicky, and it seems to exploit the certainty of science to affect an unqualified tone of truth.

Actually, this kind of technique seems to make up much of Collins’ baseline argument, which goes along the lines of, “I am a famous, successful scientist, so you can trust that I am right. And I’m telling you, God is real!” This might be convincing to some, but it certainly is not to an egomaniacal Stanford graduate student who knows firsthand how crappy this reasoning is because she uses it herself all the time. (“Oooh, so I actually have a degree in this . . . “ is my preferred way to tell people that their taste in architecture sucks.)

This isn’t to say that Collins doesn’t have any subtle, substantive and ultimately persuasive ways to make his case. In fact, I would assume that he does — his book and other work highlighting his faith have garnered enough attention from respectable sources to preclude him from being a total quack. For me, this decently regarded reputation is impressive in itself. Regardless of whether he is right, Collins has somehow succeeded in giving mankind’s most anti-modern institution a convincing chance at a new life in the stark and sterile landscape of modernity.