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.

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.

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).