Francis Collins
What do you think about Francis Collins Picked To Head NIH? The NPR piece lays his credentials, faith, and embracing of the two out in the open. I wonder how many hits there will be to BioLogos (which the NPR article links to) over the course of the next several days? See BioLoguration for my earlier comments on the blog aspect of this amazing resource. And if you haven’t read Collins’ The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, it’s time to pick up a copy (or at least catch the NPR interview) so you can talk about it with your family, neighbors, and colleagues ;-)
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This is great, great news!
You should also read an interview with Collins in the latest issue of Books and Culture. I don’t know if they’ve made it available online yet, but it’s a great read.
Collins is a good Christian man, but it is unfortunate that he has picked a fight with the ID movement. His book is widely panned as having two halves that contradict each other. The first half uses various scientific evidences to argue for the existence of God (the lack of an explanation for the fine tuning of the universe, the lack of an adequate evolutionary psychology to explain guilt and morality) and then in the second half he says that using scientific evidences is wrong-headed. It seems that in fact, evidences in nature brought him to belief, but afterwards, he fell into theistic evolutionist camps that convinced him not to argue that way.
FYI:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/14/AR2009071402890.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns
I’ve been waiting for “the culture war” advanced by “the new atheism.” Sam Harris’ NY Times Op-Ed “Science Is in the Details” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/opinion/27harris.html, 7/26/2009) is a well written, must read piece in which he works to the conclusion:
“Francis Collins is an accomplished scientist and a man who is sincere in his beliefs. And that is precisely what makes me so uncomfortable about his nomination. Must we really entrust the future of biomedical research in the United States to a man who sincerely believes that a scientific understanding of human nature is impossible?”
Hmm. … How would you respond to him?
So, if I understand Harris, he thinks that a latent purpose of the government (i.e. the NIH) is “understanding human well-being at the level of the brain” and then acting on the brain in order to bring about human well-being.
Is Harris advocating for Brave New World?