‘Evangelistic’ scientist tapped to lead National Institute of Health
Published: July 9, 2009
Updated 4 months ago
Believes New Testament consists of ‘first hand accounts’
The scientist chosen by President Barack Obama to lead the National Institute of Health has a controversial history of mixing politics with faith.
Dr. Francis Collins was a leading pioneer in human genome research and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in 2007. He led the government’s successful efforts to decode the human genome.
Obama nominated Collins to lead the NIH on Wednesday.
But his history of mixing God and science has left some on the left with a sour taste in their mouth.
The New York Times notes that many object to his “very public embrace of religion.”
“He wrote a book called ‘The Language of God,’ and he has given many talks and interviews in which he described his conversion to Christianity as a 27-year-old medical student,” the Times article continues. “Religion and genetic research have long had a fraught relationship, and some in the field complain about what they see as Dr. Collins’s evangelism.”
Profiled in Bill Maher’s acerbic anti-religion documentary, Religulous, Collins asserts that the same level of evidence needed to assert a proof in science isn’t necessary for Jesus and the resurrection, and defends his faith using the New Testament as a basis — referring to it as “first hand accounts.”
Collins criticized his depiction in the film: “I thought my interview with him was going to be about the so-called controversy between science and faith, and whether someone could both believe in God and evolution. I was willing to discourse on that. But in a rambling discussion, Maher migrated into other territory where I am hardly an expert (like the historicity of the Gospels). As you could see, that was the part he chose to include, though he presented a very limited excerpt.”
Collins is also the author of a book that posits that science can provide the foundation for religious belief. The book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, argues that “God is most certainly not threatened by science; He made it all possible.”
“In my view,” Collins later writes, “DNA sequence alone, even if accompanied by a vast trove of data on biological function, will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal search for God.”
Collins’ marriage of science and faith within the same individual has also drawn praise.
“This marvelous book combines a personal account of Collins’s faith and experiences as a genetics researcher with discussions of more general topics of science and spirituality, especially centering around evolution,” Publisher’s Weekly wrote. “Following the lead of C.S. Lewis, whose Mere Christianity was influential in Collins’s conversion from atheism, the book argues that belief in a transcendent, personal God—and even the possibility of an occasional miracle—can and should coexist with a scientific picture of the world that includes evolution.”
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Good grief…
Derange you can believe in.
The raw story liberals have spent a lot of time defending Barrack but now I think both liberals & conservatives really have to admit to quote the Sex Pistols “Our figurehead is not what s(he) seems!”
DNC & RNC have BOTH sold out the country in order to enrich themselves.
Gravel Kucinich Paul Nader
McKinney Ventura too
perotcharts.com
The Fed
AIPAC
9/11
Making a mountain out of a molehill. Collins has been a high level administrator in the public science arena for decades. Even though I’m a committed agnostic myself, and consider religion irrelevant to my own life, if Collins wants to believe in god as a separate system for thinking, and recognizes that it is both irrational and necessary to keep this belief separate from science, then more power to him.
It completely depends on to what degree he keeps his religious delusions out of his political and scientific decision making. There are NO people that are complete in this regard. I don’t care what a person may claim, their decisions are always affected by their view of reality and their moral belief system. Let’s just pray (sic) that this guy keeps his bullshit to himself.
Question: Do you believe this person might consider allowing the NIH to fund a research project which examines the psychiatric origins of religious belief and it’s similarity with psychosis and schizophrenia?
Even Captain Obvious is asking…So?
If your a Christian its natural to believe the NEW Testament to be mostly a ‘first hand’ account of Jesus’s life. This is basically a ‘traditional’ view. Its nothing radical and certainly not limited to the Evangelicals.
Get your wiki on before making silly sensational headlines….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel
but, anyone that studies the subject quickly learns that NONE of the New Testament is “first hand accounts”.. so when you believe something that isn’t factual, that makes you .. uh.. deluded? or foolish.
And you don’t really want someone like that working on the “science” of “health”.. god isn’t going to fill in the gaps that science leaves behind. If he was, we’d not have taken 10s of thousands of years to have cars. Science did that.. not god.
Should be fine. I know lots of thinking, religious people — it’s something they struggle with. When they get to that point “it’s a matter of faith,” they have pretty much compartmentalized all that doesn’t make sense about the beliefs they are stuck with, as “faith.” It’s a gimmick but it works. Then they just otherwise act like normal professionals.
I’d be interested in the quality of his past science work and statements. What’s that like? Any publications? How do people who have worked for him feel? This strikes me as a kind of lazy and uninformative journalism.
“DNA sequence alone, even if accompanied by a vast trove of data on biological function, will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal search for God.” - Says who? Religion evolved to further the propigations of our species, I don’t know what the hell this moron is blathering about, ‘moral law’, lol. Why don’t chipmunks engage in war and why do some chimpanzees? Is it because they have knowledge or the ‘Moral Law’? Lol, sounsd like this guy is just another long winded douchebag administrator who thinks far far to highly of himself. There is no ‘universal search for God’, I’m proof of that, I’m not searching for god and I know many others who are not either, so that argument is shit. Furthermore, most adherants of religion don’t claim to be searching, they claim to have first hand knowledge of dieties. In reality, his universal search is merely widespread belief in fairy tales and nothing more. For being a scientist, he seems kind of like a numbskull, because evolutionary process’s are not confined to DNA, the algorithm is everywhere, including language and thought. Anyway, screw this douche.
I’d rather view the guy as a benevolent fellow who probably has the ability to separate faith from science. If so, let him write all he wants about a “universal” quest for a diety. That, too, is an article of faith that you correctly observe to be factually false, but apparently presented by our scientist as a supergenetic fact. To some of us, this will always sound like buffoonery. But my guess is that we’ll never get the candidate for political appointments who will summarily meet my expectations as a clearly rational thinker in all of his/her private and public expressions of thought. Hell, sometimes I sound like a nutbag to my own kids. At least it doesn’t interfere with my role as a parent. And I’d expect that our happy scientist can do likewise and separate his job from his irrational eccentricities.
As long as Collins understands that his religion is NOT part of his JOB, I don’t give a shit what he believes.
Since when is being an atheist a prerequisite for public service?
Actually as a person of faith who believes in evolution and the scientific method this man could be a role model for other evangelists which is probably what the canny Obama had in mind.
True faith and the scientific method operate in two completely different realms.
Since when have Athiests or Agnostics ever been in public office? Very rarely. You have to at least pretend to believe to be a politician. You have to pretend to pretend to know. A black man would have a better chance at being president during slavery times than an atheist would these days.
What’s ‘true faith’ as opposed to regular faith? It’s all the same crap to me. Believing in dieties, faith, what it boils down to is pretending that you know somthing that you actually do not, that’s what believing is, pretending to know. To a scientist that believes in fairy tales, science and faith do not operate in separate realms, they operate specifically in one place, his brain.
First hand? I don’t think so. When you consider that the average life expectancy at that time was around 40, and each of those to whom the Gospels are attributed were already in their 20’s or 30’s when they met Jesus and the first Gospel was KNOWN to have been written down approximately 60 years after the fact, I have a bit of a problem with the premise. It’s exactly that level of disassociation with reality that I have issues with.
In the movie “Dogma”, there is a great line spoken by Chris Rock where he says that beliefs are dangerous because they can’t be changed. Ideas are a far better thing to have. People will die for beliefs, and kill for them, but an idea is far less volatile. The fact that this guy doesn’t bother to look into the voracity of his beliefs bothers me. I think that if you are going to call something a belief, then you had better understand it, otherwise you are just a fool. This guy doesn’t even know the reality of what he has declared as his beliefs. How good of a scientist could he possibly be with such sloppiness in his personal beliefs?
“the first Gospel was KNOWN to have been written down approximately 60 years after the fact”
I can’t really make much of an argument, here. You’re just factually in error. No one “KNOWS” precisely how old any of them are. There are many competing theories, even among critical scholars who supposedly have no stake in exaggerating their age one way or the other. A quick gander at wikipedia reveals proposed dates as early as the mid 50s CE to as late as the mid second century. There might be someone here who has a problem with disassociation with reality, but it isn’t Francis Collins.
“The fact that this guy doesn’t bother to look into the voracity of his beliefs bothers me.”
Maybe you could set a good example for him and start looking into the veracity of your own beliefs.
written history isn’t about theories.. religious people cling to that bastardization of reality just as ardently as they do their fairy tale god.
We have “corroborating works” of historians, and in many cases, assertions from the writers themselves, that the people that wrote about Jesus were not alive when Jesus was.. you can’t write about something “first hand” when it happened before you were born.
tell me, rwhat.. do you take the bible as “first hand accounts” when it comes to Jesus? because, if you do, you’re not exactly being an impartial observer, and you’re showing that you accept hyperbole as “fact”.
“written history isn’t about theories.. religious people cling to that bastardization of reality just as ardently as they do their fairy tale god.”
Quick. Alert the historians that they can stop disagreeing with one another about things. Someone on the internet has pointed out that their differences of opinion are a religious plot.
“We have “corroborating works” of historians, and in many cases, assertions from the writers themselves, that the people that wrote about Jesus were not alive when Jesus was.. you can’t write about something “first hand” when it happened before you were born.”
Please name a few examples.
“tell me, rwhat.. do you take the bible as “first hand accounts” when it comes to Jesus?”
In some cases yes, but not in general.
“because, if you do, you’re not exactly being an impartial observer”
The fact that you think so reveals a great deal more about your bias than mine.
So, rwhat,
When wjm50 stated the first gospel was known to be written APPROXIMATELY 60 years after the fact, did you think yourself clever to contradict him by stating wikipedia “reveals proposed dates as early as the mid 50s CE…?”
Gee, that is APPROXIMATELY the exact same damn thing.
Get it straight: there was/is NO JESUS. No “Yahweh”, no “Ba’al”, no “Buddah”, no “Allah”. No “Jupiter”, no” AePtah”. These are all manifestations of ancient minds attempting, as Joseph Campbell once stated: ” to explain that which can not be explained.”
Some of us have left that level of evolution. Take that any way you wish.
When “Jesus” raised “Lazarus” from the dead, it was a “Mystery School” CODE for the archetype of Osiris, the Egyptian Resurrected God, aka “Ausure”, or ” L’Ausure”: The Osiris. In other words, acknowledging a “resurrected God” tradition thousands and thousands of years older than the “Jesus” version.
Got it? But this “scientist” hasn’t had the time to do ANY research on the veracity of his beliefs?
WTF kind of scientist is that???
“Jesus” ain’t coming back, you ain’t going to heaven, or hell, and you and he can “believe” whatever foolish myth you wish.
Just don’t expect me to want either of you in a position of authority.
This is great. Evangelistic Republicans were the bane of liberals during the reign of “W.”
More dogmatic science & religion please, sir. I have not had my fill yet!
pinroot…You sound more like pinhead to me.
Since he is a follower of the Christ Cult he has to be delusional, imoral, and deranged. I wouldn’t be within rifle range of him if I were POTUS. I think that Obama is trying to make us one big happy family again. It will never work after the Christianists tried to overthrow the lawful government of the USA. Never forget…Never forgive. Treason is a capital crime!
Oh yeah, Get your f#cking Religious Superstition out of my government!
I hereby renew my concerns about the science police who already wreak some havoc among us.
I have to say that when I read the headline, I was concerned. However, I agree with the sentiments of some of the above comments. I expect my religious views (agnostic) to be my business. If this gentleman chooses to embrace a religious view, it’s really none of my business. He, however, does have the obligation to keep his personal beliefs out of the duties he is taking on as the Director of the NIH.
Peace,
John
WTF???
Have we been hoodwinked?
Was this article on an atheist slant? Hell, even atheists would take issue with the article. Why would spiritual beliefs have anything to with it?
that you have to ask that shows you’re not qualified to be in this discussion.
“such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal search for God.”
Moral Law is LEARNED, just like anything else we “know”. It comes from people THINKING and understanding, not from some invisible sky fairy. And, what one religious fanatic calls “the morally correct premise” doesn’t hold up to natural law in many cases, and many other people don’t necessarily hold the same understanding, hence that moral law is an opinion, not “law”.
That this guy can’t see that from a clinical standpoint proves he lets his religion guide his science; and that’s not science at all.’
the search for god comes from advanced consciousness. It comes from our big brain that came from evolution. And there’s nothing to suggest that superstitious behaviors (the root of the ’search for god’) are limited to humans.. If it’s instinctual impulses evolved for survival, it’s not god at all.
what was that again? something about change? anyone anyone?
Raw censored/deleted all of my previous comments in this thread (where I simply told the truth) as well as the comments of some other people) , so I won’t waste my time saying anything else.
how do you get ride of these christian wack jobs
You have to have sex with them.
Why would his beliefs matter in this case? Unless his beliefs actively prevent him from doing his job well, why should they matter? He is by all accounts a brilliant researcher. The majority of this country is religious and consider the beliefs of atheists and agnostics “wacky” (I’m an agnostic for the record), and atheists and agnostics always complain they aren’t treated well if their beliefs are known … So now people on this article turn around and do the exact same thing to Mr. Collins? That’s pretty hypocritical! If Obama is truly finding the best person for the job regardless of religious beliefs, then he should be commended for that! Remember the days when all Bush appointees were talentless hacks only hired because of their strict adherence to extreme right wing ideology?
All valid truth-seeking systems eventually converge. I’ve spent a lifetime studying the relationship between spirituality (which does not always include religion) and science. The problem with some here is that they don’t want freedom OF religion, but rather freedom FROM religion. THAT is NOT religious freedom.
The most elementary understanding of math and science includes an appreciation that unprovable axioms lie at the basis for systems of either math or theoretical models of physical reality such as Newtonian, relativistic, or quantum physics. This means that by definition, those principles that lie at the very root of any such systems transcend logic, and all the reasoning internal to such systems is based on such logically transcendent, axiomatic principles.
Too many forget that reason has no ultimate authority, but is merely an intellectual tool that must depart from and return successfully to experience in its results in order to have any value whatsoever. There are aspects of modern physics that are currently not testable, and even some are not testable in principle. Most theories are testable by virtue of what they predict, but some of their underlying assumptions (axioms) are sometimes untestable in principle. For example, we now know that the underlying assumptions of Newtonian physics are not true in any absolute, general sense. Yet they work when applied to local, limited domains.
This is because experience, including scientific experimentation, is transcendent to and underlies reason. Reason is secondary and experience is primary. Scientific method is simply a socially implemented noise reduction system that uses experimental design as a noise filter and replicability as redundancy in the communications channel between humankind and nature. Atheists need to explain why any of what we perceive as real is lawful and how lawfulness differs from intelligence. The kind of order implicit in lawfulness is not discriminated this way in communications theory.
Atheists also need to explain why consciousness is assumed to be confined to its local manifestation in small organisms, and assumed not to have been implicit in the function of the cosmic system that fostered their evolution. They need to explain why so many scientists offer the mystical non-explanation of “emergent properties” to justify their personal experience of consciousness.
The concepts of “emergent property” and synergy are essentially parallel and synonymous. They are illusions arising when the functioning of a larger system is ignored during the isolated consideration of its subsystems. When the subsystems are conceptually reinserted into the larger context without which all aspects of their functioning could never have been fully assessed, the new properties seem to emerge. This is neither magic nor mysticism, but simply ceasing to ignore what a more provincial perspective had been ignoring.
Why assume that the most global, abstract aspect of our experience, consciousness, did not exist globally before the evolution of organisms that reflect it in locally more obvious ways? We know that physical structure is hierarchical, so why assume that certain local aspects of its manifestation, consciousness and intelligence, are confined to small subsystems and magically appear locally in the total absence of any more global antecedents.
In my view, we do not have to believe in the supernatural to believe that there are truly spiritual aspects of reality. This is a semantic problem, not a real one. If we’re honest with ourselves, we know from math and science that certain aspects of reality must necessarily be axiomatic, and therefore must transcend reason. They belong to the primary realm of experience. Reason is only an intellectual tool that we ideally possess in order to deal more successfully with that primary reality, our experience, and has no ultimate authority. Reason must be compatible with experience to have any utility whatsoever.
If we then equate the transcendent nature of axioms and the answers to ultimate questions such as where this all comes from, there is no problem of ultimate questions, nor of whether there is or not an Ultimate Cosmic Intelligence we can call God if we’re so inclined. The Global Intelligence implicit in the laws of nature that structure our cosmos qualifies for God in my lexicon. Evolution from a singularity to stars and galaxies, black holes, supernovae, second generation stars, planetary systems, and finally plant, animal, and human level intelligence is clearly a recursive process.
Cosmic structure at any given moment determines the flow of energy within it, modifies its own structure accordingly, which then redirects the flow of energy, and so around in a cosmic, eternal, recursive loop. Let us suspend judgment and consider for a moment that the laws of nature are so structured at the cosmic level that they create pressure to evolve everywhere locally subsystems that increasingly reflect the nature of the whole, in holographic fashion, until organisms arise that embody analogs of the whole of natural law to such an extent that they reflect this cosmically recursive character in their own self-awareness and can intuitively perceive that they are in some way created in the image of this Wholeness and can speculate about their origins while experiencing a grand sense of intuitive wonder in considering this cosmic connection.
Let us also consider the possibility that those who lack such an experience are simply disconnected with the Wholeness of their Origin and perceive provincially no terms of consciousness, but only in the concrete, local, superficial reality falsely constructed from a sensory awareness that cannot even detect extended spectra, not to mention macro- and micro-physical reality.
[The Global Intelligence implicit in the laws of nature that structure our cosmos qualifies for God in my lexicon. ]
You’re trippin’. “….Global Intelligence implicit….” bwahahahahaha. Tell it to a Pakistani that just watched a drone wipe out his family about “Global Intelligence”, or is that Global Hawk”??
An ice cold beer, a juicy kielbasa hot dog, and a seat near first base was “heaven” to me. Willie McCovey blasting one over right field fence qualified him as God in my lexicon.
Both observations based on our personal desire to believe. Nothing factual or based in REALITY.
Atheists don’t need to “explain” anything to long-winded nincompoops using big words.
There is NO GOD, period.
The onus is on the ones making the claim to KNOW the New Testament is “first hand accounts” of HISTORY. Which it is not. So , it is up to you to PROVE your premise of “supernatural” beings.
In fact, the O.T. and N.T. are adaptations of ancient Sumerian, Egyptian and Indian myths. Some with the exact same names, some with the exact same story, over and over, down through the ages.
ALL of it. The faded remains of what once “explained” the world to ignorant masses.
Hey, Farang Harangue. Never said that I believe the New Testament is a first-hand account. That’s an extremely naive, fundamentalist view. Anybody who knows anything about real bible history and how it got written knows better than that.
And you should have gathered from my “big words”that I believe in evolution. You should have figured out all by your little lonesome that I don’t believe in anything like such a literal interpretation of ANYBODY’S scripture, whether it’s Hindu, Bhuddist, Taoist, Shinto, B’Hai, Mormon, Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. You also apparently failed to notice that I don’t think God is supernatural, but simply transcends the intellect, just like axioms in math or the fundamental premises underlying science.
The problem with you secular fundamentalists is that you’re stuck on the same pitifully local, provincial little level of reality as your religious fundamentalist counterparts. You’re all literal-minded dufi (Latin plural of dufus, ha-ha…how’s that for “big words”) who can’t see beyond the most superficial level of anything.
Religious fundamentalists interpret scripture literally, and not just their own, but everybody else’s, too, and so all they see is the differences and not the underlying reality. And just like them, YOU believe what you can see, touch, and feel is literally real; that this is just the way things are. So you think God isn’t real because I can’t find his address, take you there, and show Him to you. Phew!
Just like your little religious counterparts and their idea that they have the ultimate truth of things, you haven’t figure out yet that flies, bees, and frogs see completely different things from what you do and it’s all just as “real” as what you see. Different animals, all the way to humans, see, hear, taste, feel, and smell different things and also perceive the SAME things differently from each other.
So what do YOU think is actually real? Who’s right?…you or a dragonfly with its compound eyes? Neither you nor I nor these insects and amphibians can perceive reality through the senses, because reality is not accessible through ANYBODY’S senses. But then you’re just another kind of fundamentalist, the flip side of the same myopic little coin, so you don’t get that, do you?…just like you don’t seem to understand “big words”. (Good grief, what world of little words do you live in?! Religious fundamentalists are anti-intellectual, too, you know. You should ask them to welcome you to the club, but I sincerely doubt they will.)
Reason, again, is not primary, but an intellectual tool we should be able to use to deal successfully with the primary reality, our experience. It would be nice, though, if you could at least learn to use it for that purpose. But then, to qualify as a fundamentalist, whether religious or secular, you need to have an infinite capacity for self-deception and for simultaneously entertaining incompatible ideas without the slightest inkling of self-contradiction or inconsistency anywhere.
Try looking for reality somewhere besides inside what you already WANT to believe for no good reason other than your past conditioning. That could help. The biggest evil in the world today is fundamentalism, which boils down to a superficial assessment of reality, no matter what the belief system. Look what it’s doing in the middle east and elsewhere. It distorts science. It denies reality right and left. It sometimes even blows its adherents and innocent bystanders up in the name of God.
The key phrase here is “belief system”. There is a very basic problem both with religious institutions and with the meta-scientific philosophy behind the idea that evolution replaces intelligence as a fundamental characteristic of the cosmos. These scientists ignore that lawfulness in nature IS intelligent function, including the mathematical principles that construct orderly systems from locally apparent chaos.
The problem underlying both major brands of fundamentalism is precisely the blind adherence to belief systems, despite compelling evidence and their obvious implications that should be sufficient to dislodge them. Religions mostly consist of belief systems, and that has nothing to do with any kind of transcendent reality, experience, or true spirituality.
The atheistic meta-science that dominates much scientific thinking today is no different in principle. It pretends to eliminate intelligence from its rightful place in the cosmic theater and place it exclusively in the small little organic subsystems within it, the evolution of which the cosmos somehow ironically fostered, and then, within this vast cosmic hierarchy, arbitrarily confine consciousness to these minuscule organic subsystems with the non-explanation of “emergent properties”. This is pure belief in magic and a contradiction to the supposedly universally respected principle of conservation law. It is a very heavily stretched, inelegant, theoretically uneconomical BELIEF SYSTEM and represents a huge cognitive dissonance! It distorts science.
Creationism is, of course, a still much worse distorter of science, but the principle is the same. The false assumptions of atheistic meta-science simply eliminate consciousness as a fundamental, axiomatic property of existence itself and consequently limit the ability of science to progress full speed ahead toward more comprehensive, theoretically economical, and elegant appreciation of transcendent, axiomatic reality.
It is this transcendent reality that spawns ultimate questions that have no rational answers, since by definition ultimate questions are axiomatic and axioms transcend the intellectual nature of the questions. But they do not transcend experiential reality, since we are, in our essence, consciousness, and therefore nothing less than synonymous with the answers. It is not a matter of belief systems.
We are the answers! To merely believe this is useless. It is fundamentally an EXPERIENCE that is not accessible either to the senses or the intellect. Axioms are not, by definition, accessible to the intellect. Can you even hear, touch, see, taste, or smell your own consciousness? So neither is such an overarching, transcendent reality accessible to the senses.
Yet you experience it. It is the most global, abstract, general feature of our experience, while not accessible to any specific sense. So go get its address for me and take me to it so I can believe it actually exists? Phew! You already have here a “legal” precedent to show how bogus that is when you require it of theists.
Explanatory power flows from the global, abstract, and general to the local, concrete and specific as any simple algebraic equation clearly demonstrates. It should be logically trivial to anyone who understands either science or math at all that there must exist some aspect of reality that is axiomatic. You are it! Not your body; not your mind; but your consciousness.
The Zen Bhuddists called it “knowledge by being” and said seeking it was like a “fish looking for water”. King David in the Jewish scriptures quotes God as exhorting us to “be still and know that I am God.” According to Christian scripture, Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” Jewish scripture signaled the axiomatic nature of ultimate reality in citing God as saying, “I am that I am.” The End.
Let’s see, he labels himself “hardly an expert” when it comes to the historicity of the new testament, but believes them to be “first hand accounts”?
See, that is my problem: How does a scientist “believe” myth to be “first hand accounts” while admitting he is clueless as to their veracity?
I do not want this person to be sitting in a position of authority.
He admits he WANTS to be ignorant, so he “can believe.” While it takes, oh, five minutes on google to find out the historical truth about the composition of the “New Testament.”
In other words: a fanatic.
Regardless of his religious beliefs (I’ve read his book on science and religion and indeed, to this scientist, it is indeed annoying), Francis Collins is an OUTSTANDING scientist. He is responsible in large part for the development of positional cloning for identification of human disease genes and used these methods (with numerous collaborators, as such projects required at the time) to identify the predominant disease locus for cystic fibrosis (CFTR) and that for neurofibromatosis (NF1). After Jim Watson was unceremoniously (and unfortunately) removed as director of the Human Genome Initiative, Collins stepped in and the first draft of the human genome sequence project to a very successful conclusion (ahead of schedule and under budget).
I and other scientists like me think he is a great choice as the next NIH Director. He has experience in molecular biology, human genetics and a strong appreciation for cell biology. He is both a basic scientist and a physician. He has gained a great deal of experience in administation, in the inner workings of the NIH and in relations with Congress and the executive branch. He is also very smart and very well spoken. I predict he will be at least as well-regarded as Harold Varmus was when all is said and done, and that is saying a lot.
And, frankly, as a bit of a heart-on-his sleeve Christian, he may turn out to be an able communicator of the importance of the scientific world view to the ‘belief’ community which has been rather alarmingly turned against science in recent years (and I would be willing to be that that figured into Obama’s decision).
“He is also very smart and very well spoken.”
When he states he “believes” the New Testament to be “first hand accounts but is unfamiliar with the historicity”, why should I believe he is “very smart” when he can’t take five minutes to research his beliefs in “invisible god men”?
And who gives a rat’s ass about his “ability” to be an “able communicator” to the Flat Earth Christian fundies?
Why, because he is willing to remain IGNORANT of the history of the composition of the New Testament?
Enough of the bowing and scraping to the ignorant: look where it has led us the last eight = years.
In point of fact however, to me, it is Obama’s lack of finding a better candidate that appalls.
Francis Collins may have contributed quite a bit to genetics research, but I don’t see how anyone who says the Big Bang was started by the hand of God could be classified as an outstanding scientist. He may call his view “BioLogos”, but it’s still just creationism with a few more fancy words thrown in.
His views on atheism are simple bigotry, stemming from willful ignorance on his part toward any point of view that doesn’t support his Christianist ideology.
It’s funny you should mention James Watson. He’s another example of a brilliant scientist whose personal view should disqualify him from holding a policy position in government. In Watson’s case, it is his nutbar views on race and intelligence, but Collins is no less of a bigot for his characterization atheists as “irrational” practitioners of “blind faith”.
I am a witch doctor from Jamaica, I would like to apply for job,man. I am much better. Your “god” was the janitor at my “god’s” Honor School.
Oh come on, this is a story from The Onion, right?
Right?
Right?
“Universal search for God?” WTF??
Yo Collins, I just disproved your claim. I’m not searching for God.
Maybe now we will see more faith healing in our hospitals…its a much cheaper alternative than traditional medicine.
Edward, the medical profession used to scoff at the idea of a mind/body connection. It was supposed to be some kind of mushy “new age” bunk. But their investigations using placebos have inadvertently upset the applecart. Now they sometimes try to discount research that supports anything that doesn’t fit their perspective by attributing the results to the placebo effect…an ironically direct contradiction to their former denial of a mind/body connection. In some cases, the results they try to discount as placebo effects are strong enough to motivate us to want to look pretty hard for the dang placebo!
You can’t have it both ways. They seem to want their cake and eat it, too. Makes you wonder about the integrity of their motives, or maybe it doesn’t make you wonder either.