Francis Collins, God, and Me

I’m a little late getting to the party, but I feel like I have to comment on both Francis Collins’ nomination as the director of the NIH and the comments made by… um… notable commenters.

Sam Harris’ recent article in the NY Times has created all the stir you’d expect.  Christians are mad because they think Sam is trying to exclude him from consideration because of his Christianity.  Some atheists are upset because they think Sam is pushing too hard.  After all, Collins admits to believing in evolution.  Obama could have done much worse, and it’s a nice gesture towards the Christians who make up the majority of our population.

I think PZ Myers has two very pointed observations to make:

…The fact that Collins is a Christian is not a problem at all — we are not interested in narrowing the search pool for science administration to the extent that we exclude the majority of people in this country.

What is disturbing is that Collins is a fervent evangelical believer who inserts his superstition where it doesn’t belong, in the execution of his job…

There should be no religious litmus test for the office, but that does not mean that there shouldn’t be constraints on how the office should be used — it should not be steered into becoming the National Institutes of Holiness.

LINK

There is a very fine line to be drawn here, and I think it is not only worth doing so — I think it’s critical.  In America, every person is granted the constitutional freedom to believe anything he wants to believe about God.  Furthermore, eligibility for public office is not to be determined by a person’s beliefs about God.

However, we need to talk about the difference between Francis Collins’ eligibility and his credibility.  The thing that has a lot of non-theists in a fit about Collins is that he has consistently expressed views that are nonscientific, and he’s being appointed to a scientific position.  The fact that he’s an evangelical Christian doesn’t make him ineligible for the position to which he’s been appointed.  It makes him unqualified.

Much has been said about the fact that despite his belief in God, Collins’ scientific work on the Human Genome Project was impecable.  They assert that this demonstrates his ability and commitment to keeping his religious beliefs separate from his scientific work.  I beg to differ.  Collins has explained publicly that his belief in God does not conflict with the theory of evolution.  Here are his words:

“Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time…  After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced ‘house’ (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the moral law), with free will, and with an immortal soul… We humans used our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.

Quite clearly, the reason Collins could work on the Human Genome Project without religious interference is that he does not see the human genome as a threat to his religious beliefs.  Unfortunately, his clearly stated beliefs regarding morality and the existence of morality do clash quite drastically with the scientific model.  The science of morality exists, and it attributes the moral instinct in humans not to a magic shot of pixie dust from God, but a gradual increase in the complexity of social interactions.

Collins has not demonstrated that he is comfortable with the implications of a purely scientific approach to the human animal.  In fact, he has directly and fervently spoken against it.  He does not believe it, and we should not be so naive as to believe that his personal convictions regarding morality won’t affect his job.

In fairness to Collins and Obama, America would probably not accept the nomination of an atheist to this position.  Collins is clearly far from the worst possible candidate for the job.  At least he’s a scientist.  The question I must ask, though, is this:  In the area of science, can we afford to play politics?  Shouldn’t science be a matter of who is the most qualified, not who will placate the most voters?  Collins is far from the worst candidate for this job, but he is also far from the best.  The best candidate would be someone who had impeccable scientific credentials AND believed firmly and stridently in the scientific method as the final arbiter on all matters scientific.

Collins has stated quite clearly that he believes in science only insofar as it agrees with his particular version of religious nuttery.  When science and religion cross, religion wins.  There can be no other reasonable interpretation of his words.  Once again, I must refer readers back to the problem of religious moderation.  In catering to the arbitrary religious whims of the majority of Americans who believe in some kind of relatively non-extreme magical deity, President Obama has saddled us with a man who has his own arbitrary standard of where faith trumps reason.  Time will tell if Collins is even presented with a situation in which his faith and his job conflict.  Perhaps we will all be lucky and he will not.  But if he is, and if any aspect — no matter how small — of science research in America is compromised in any way because of this man’s religious beliefs, then we have all been harmed by religion.  Again.