Professional Atheist Pitchforks New Christian Head of NIH

New atheist Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (2004) and Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), takes after Francis Collins, the former head of the federal government's Human Genome Project. President Barack Obama has just appointed Collins as the director the National Institutes of Health where he will oversee that agency's $30 billion annual research budget. Harris is really ticked that Collins professes to be able to reconcile Christianity with modern science.

A couple of weeks back, Harris wrote an op/ed in the New York Times expressing great unease about appointing the author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (2006) to head up the government's biggest biomedical R&D effort. Harris pointed out: 

Most scientists who study the human mind are convinced that minds are the products of brains, and brains are the products of evolution. Dr. Collins takes a different approach: he insists that at some moment in the development of our species God inserted crucial components — including an immortal soul, free will, the moral law, spiritual hunger, genuine altruism, etc.

As someone who believes that our understanding of human nature can be derived from neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science and behavioral economics, among others, I am troubled by Dr. Collins's line of thinking.

Harris concludes:

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?

The New York Times op/ed was evidently not enough. Harris has now typed out a much more fulsome condemnation of what he takes to be Collins' religious irrationality. A few choice tidbits appear below:

Collins's claim to have been an atheist seems especially suspect, given that he does not understand what the position of atheism actually entails. For instance:

If God is outside of nature, then science can neither prove nor disprove his existence. Atheism itself must therefore be considered a form of blind faith, in that it adopts a belief system that cannot be defended on the basis of pure reason. (Collins, 2006, p.165)

Elsewhere he says that of "all the possible worldviews, atheism is the least rational" (Ibid, p. 231). I suspect that this will not be the last time a member of our species will be obliged to make the following point (but one can always hope): disbelief in the God of Abraham does not require that one search the entire cosmos and find Him absent; it only requires that one consider the evidence put forward by believers to be insufficient. Presumably Francis Collins does not believe in Zeus. I trust he considers this skeptical attitude to be fully justified. Might this be because there are no good reasons to believe in Zeus? And what would he say to a person who claimed that disbelief is Zeus is a form of "blind faith" or that of all possible worldviews it is the "least rational"?

Harris continues to pile on:

Collins argues that science makes belief in God "intensely plausible"—the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of Nature's constants, the emergence of complex life, the effectiveness of mathematics, all suggest to him that a "loving, logical, and consistent" God exists; but when challenged with alternate (and far more plausible) accounts of these phenomena—or with evidence that suggests that God might be unloving, illogical, inconsistent, or, indeed, absent—Collins declares that God stands outside of Nature, and thus science cannot address the question of His existence at all. Similarly, Collins insists that our moral intuitions attest to God's existence, to His perfectly moral character, and to His desire to have fellowship with every member of our species; but when our moral intuitions recoil at the casual destruction of innocent children by, say, tidal wave or earthquake, Collins assures us that our time-bound notions of good and evil can't be trusted and that God's will is a mystery.

Harris ends with this wonderfully tendentious question:

Must we really entrust the future of biomedical research in the United States to a man who believes that understanding ourselves through science is impossible, while our resurrection from death is inevitable?

Read the whole rip roarin' anti-Collins tract here. 

In my Darwin Day 2006 column, I discussed Stephen Jay Gould's notion that religion and science constitute two non-overlapping magisteria. I concluded:

Scientific research into the sources of religious belief is just beginning, so any of the current findings could be rejected or revised as further evidence becomes available. Nevertheless, the magisterium of science is surrounding and shrinking the domain of the magisterium of religion. The Open Letter [on Religion and Science endorsed by thousands of clergy) asserts, "We believe that among God's good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator." It may well be that that same capacity for critical thought eventually leads us to stop believing in Him.

As I've disclosed before: I used to be an evangelical atheist, but I've since relaxed a lot. Or as I now put it–I am an atheist the same way that I am a-unicornist–show me a god and or a unicorn and I'll change my mind about their existence.