Last week, President Barack Obama announced his n omination of geneticist and physician Francis Collins as the new director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the government organisation that funds medical research in the US. The appointment has sparked a flurry of mixed reactions across the country, largely because Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, is an outspoken evangelical Christian.
Collins is a staunch supporter of evolution and a highly-respected scientist who is responsible for the discovery of genes responsible for several diseases, including cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, Huntington’s and adult onset diabetes. He is also the author of The Language of God: A scientist presents evidence for belief (Simon & Schuster, 2006) and recently the founder of the BioLogos foundation, which aims to reconcile science and religion by promoting “theistic evolution” – the idea that God chose to create life by way of evolution.
Some see Obama’s decision to appoint Collins as an attempt to negotiate peace between science and religion. “Was this the administration’s primary reason for picking Collins?” asks Dan Gilgoff in US News and World Report. “No way. But Collins’s religious side is much too central to his work nowadays for the White House not to have noticed.” Indeed, the White House press statement mentions that “Dr. Collins has a longstanding interest in the interface between science and faith.”
“Rare among world-class scientists, Collins is also a born-again Christian, which may help him build bridges with those who view some gene-based research as a potential threat to religious values,”.
Is Dr. Collins qualified for the job? Without question. He is an accomplished scientist who, when he is doing science, does damned good science. Am I happy that he’s an evangelical Christian? Absolutely not. Of course I would prefer to have an atheist in the position instead, but then I’d prefer to have an atheist in every government position. However, Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution is quite clear: “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” That means that there can be no law requiring an elected official to belong or not belong to a particular religion, or to profess belief or non-belief in a god. It protects evangelical Christians just as much as it protects atheists. I’ve definitely got my bones to pick with Dr. Collins’ Christian beliefs, but they alone should not disqualify him.
he must know what he’sdoing ?!? :-s as he wants to impress america doesn’t he?!
Just don’t let him near the Great Big Science Electronic Database with a magnet.
Hmm, not afraid of that…if one fails to be rational, he will get it served surely.
Just a logical next step in his career I guess. The fact that he is religious is not really a factor in all of this, that’s my opinion. But they will not discriminate them either on their religion.
Unless you have given reason not to be all about reason at your job and such .. due to your religious beliefs (which went max. overdrive, during working hours for a weird not so logic reason) … then people may discriminate a person I guess … as being not all suiteable for the job.
And hey, it’s not the director himself that is NIH .. he will have to work with many others there, as he probably already has done before.
I dont know the man so can’t say personally if I agree/disagree with Obama’s choice. Haven’t followed all things in that area in the past either, nor am I into recent things going on there. So nope, I’m not someone who could judge this appointment (in a serious way).
I think that if you’ve followed his writings lately, and have no external means of support (thanks Hitch), you have to be a little nervous, but the guy is certainly qualified. He’s a sharp guy and a good administrator. Hopefully, he’ll keep his wacky out of his work.
Just goes to show you can be rational, intellectual, among the worlds best and also believe in God. Amen!
Here are just a few names that also proved that fact:
Einstein
Isaac Newton
C.S Lewis (a former atheist)
The list is endless……………………………….
It drives me barmy when atheists think that anyone who has faith must be “illogical”, when in actual fact it can be quite the opposite.
@Diana Well of course you can be rational, intellectual and also believe in a god. We humans are very good at compartmentalising. But your examples most certainly do not “prove that fact”. First of all, you’re making an appeal to authority, which is a logical fallacy. Just because those people may have believed in a god (and I’ll get to that in a second) does not mean that therefore a god is true.
Einstein (I’m assuming you mean Albert, the physicist) believed in a god? I’m not sure where you’re getting your information, but he was quite emphatic about his disbelief. In a letter Einstein wrote in English, for example, dated 24 March 1954, he wrote:
“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
Isaac Newton did indeed believe in a god, but then he also believed alchemy was true. He was utterly brilliant — he did, after all, invent calculus in order to explain the movements of celestial bodies — but he wasn’t right about everything.
C. S. Lewis did indeed have a mid-life conversion to fundamentalist Christianity, but his own claim of being a former atheist seems a bit wonky when you look at his actual writings. In ‘Surprised by Joy’, Lewis characterised his and others’ atheism by saying: “I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Anti-theists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry at God for not existing. I was equally angry at Him for creating a world.” Being angry at God for creating the world? That sure makes it sound like he believed even during that period of his life that an existent god created the world; and if he believed that, then he wasn’t an atheist. This isn’t a “no true Scotsman” fallacy; not believing that a god exists (which is a separate issue from whether or not one believes that a god does not exist, but I digress) is what makes an atheist an atheist. If you don’t meet that qualification, you’re not an atheist. It’s like calling yourself a vegetarian even though you still eat meat; not eating meat is what makes a vegetarian a vegetarian.
But all of this is besides the point. Just because other people believed in a god — even smart people — does not mean that a god therefore exists. Just about everybody on the planet used to think that the the sun revolved around the Earth, including intellectuals like Aristotle and Ptolemy. Count the evidence, not the believers.