Sam Harris contributed an op-ed to the New York Times over the weekend, in which he expresses the concerns of the freethought community and science advocates over President Obama’s naming of Francis Collins as head of the National Institutes of Health.
It is a conundrum: Collins is clearly qualified for the job, but he continues to make wacky religious statements in public forums, and as Harris points out, “few things make thinking like a scientist more difficult than religion.” Here’s the article:
Science Is in the Details
By SAM HARRISPRESIDENT OBAMA has nominated Francis Collins to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health. It would seem a brilliant choice. Dr. Collins’s credentials are impeccable: he is a physical chemist, a medical geneticist and the former head of the Human Genome Project. He is also, by his own account, living proof that there is no conflict between science and religion. In 2006, he published “The Language of God,” in which he claimed to demonstrate “a consistent and profoundly satisfying harmony” between 21st-century science and evangelical Christianity.
Dr. Collins is regularly praised by secular scientists for what he is not: he is not a “young earth creationist,” nor is he a proponent of “intelligent design.” Given the state of the evidence for evolution, these are both very good things for a scientist not to be.
But as director of the institutes, Dr. Collins will have more responsibility for biomedical and health-related research than any person on earth, controlling an annual budget of more than $30 billion. He will also be one of the foremost representatives of science in the United States. For this reason, it is important that we understand Dr. Collins and his faith as they relate to scientific inquiry.
What follows are a series of slides, presented in order, from a lecture on science and belief that Dr. Collins gave at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008:
Slide 1: “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.”
Slide 2: “God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.”
Slide 3: “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.”
Slide 4: “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.”
Slide 5: “If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?”
Why should Dr. Collins’s beliefs be of concern?
There is an epidemic of scientific ignorance in the United States. This isn’t surprising, as very few scientific truths are self-evident, and many are counterintuitive. It is by no means obvious that empty space has structure or that we share a common ancestor with both the housefly and the banana. It can be difficult to think like a scientist. But few things make thinking like a scientist more difficult than religion.
Dr. Collins has written 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 the existence of a “loving, logical and consistent” God.
But when challenged with alternative accounts of these phenomena – or with evidence that suggests that God might be unloving, illogical, inconsistent or, indeed, absent – Dr. Collins will say that God stands outside of Nature, and thus science cannot address the question of his existence at all.
Similarly, Dr. 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 innocents by, say, a tidal wave or earthquake, Dr. Collins assures us that our time-bound notions of good and evil can’t be trusted and that God’s will is a mystery.
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. I also believe it would seriously undercut fields like neuroscience and our growing understanding of the human mind. If we must look to religion to explain our moral sense, what should we make of the deficits of moral reasoning associated with conditions like frontal lobe syndrome and psychopathy? Are these disorders best addressed by theology?
Dr. Collins has written that “science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence” and that “the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted.”
One can only hope that these convictions will not affect his judgment at the institutes of health. After all, understanding human well-being at the level of the brain might very well offer some “answers to the most pressing questions of human existence” – questions like, Why do we suffer? Or, indeed, is it possible to love one’s neighbor as oneself? And wouldn’t any effort to explain human nature without reference to a soul, and to explain morality without reference to God, necessarily constitute “atheistic materialism”?
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?
Sam Harris is the author of “The End of Faith” and co-founder of the Reason Project, which promotes scientific knowledge and secular values.
I like this quote from Slide 5: “If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked.”
So a guy who thinks that frozen waterfalls prove the existence of the Trinity feels he can claim that atheists are being “hoodwinked” by claiming human morality arose from natural processes?
He obviously thinks it’s much more reasonable to assume that our morality comes from a God who slaughtered all first-born Egyptian males because Pharaoh wouldn’t free the Israelites, after God himself prevented Pharaoh from doing so by hardening his heart. Or hundreds of other similar massacres in the book we allegedly get our morals from.
Somehow, I don’t think atheists are the ones being hoodwinked.
I think that Harris’ concerns about Dr. Collins are completely justified. At their base, Collins’ arguments are no different than those of Christian apologists like William Lane Craig. Listen to any of Craig’s debates, and you’ll see all of Collins’ points used in the exact same manner:
1. Use the “fine-tuning” cosmological argument as existence of a first cause for the universe; Cause = causer (i.e. God)
2. Tout evolution as God’s “mechanism” for the development of life on Earth
3. Subscribe to the firm belief in human free will and its objective moral necessity
4. Use points 1 – 3 as proof that Jesus Christ is the only way to truly “know” God
Granted, Dr. Collins’ Christian worldview is his own – and he has every right to hold it as personally true. The problem is that, as noted by Harris in Collins’ lecture, this worldview is intertwined with science. Religion and science are not totally separated by Dr. Collins – he clearly uses scientific knowledge to explain why he holds his religious beliefs to be true.
So, are we to assume that NONE of Collins’ religious beliefs will play a role in his decisions as head of the NIH? One would hope that Dr. Collins would be able to look at matters from a purely scientific viewpoint… without having to ask God what he thinks first. But, the fact that he says acceptance of evolutionary morality is akin to being “hoodwinked” makes me doubt that he will truly be able to keep science and religion apart.
To his credit, Dr. Collins’ is absolutely qualified for the position – and his contributions to science must be appreciated; however, I share Harris’ worry that Collins will be unable to keep God out of the scientific equation… And if that happens, Obama might as well have named another Dr. to fill the position as head of the NIH – Dr. William Lane Craig.
Other rationalists, atheists, and the like will immediately appreciate Sam Harris’ dismantling of Dr. Collins’ circular logic, as well as be sufficiently alarmed by the lack of a clear delineation between his faithful application of science and his faith.
What I find particularly interesting is his Slide 1 quote, talking about the precisely tuned parameters of the universe required to reach its current state. Either Dr. Collins is understandably far too busy in his area of specialization to keep up with current cosmology, or he is simply choosing to ignore it because of the inconvenience it presents.
The problem of the unbelievably precise conditions required at the moment of the Big Bang is something that had been troubling cosmologists and theoretical physicists for some time, especially as advances in these fields had started to show just how unlikely these conditions were. The solution that was arrived on was the modified “inflationary expansion” version of the Big Bang, and like all good theories, was testable- many predictions made by the theory were verified using the NASA satellites that explored the cosmic background microwave radiation, and mapped it to a level of precision never before obtained.
In short, inflationary expansion does not require precisely tuned values at the initial start of the big bang. It does not require all of the universe compressed into a singularity and then an outward explosion of space and time in just the required fashion. Negative-pressure vacuum energy in a tiny nugget of space-time (which according to physicist Brian Greene, some solutions allow to have a mass as small as dozens of kilograms) that was causally connected resulted in a super-rapid expansion. This explains the large-scale structure of the universe (flat and homogeneous) which is not what you would expect from the physics of the traditional big bang model.
Here’s why- normal quantum fluctuations in this microscopic infant universe, when rapidly expanded to large scales, magnified into irregular clumps of matter and energy- the seeds for galaxy formation. No need to explain how conditions should be so unbelievably specific as to expand from the biggest explosion of all time into the universe we see now, with everything landing in just the right place. We have an answer in quantum physics, an already thoroughly tested theory.
There’s much more detail to it of course, and more to be worked out. More microwave background observations are planned. But what’s troubling about this with respect to Dr. Collins is that he simplifies and glosses over current cosmology theory- current enough that I read about it in Brian Greene’s “The Fabric of the Cosmos”, a popularized science book, three years ago.
Sam Harris has a one word answer to all of the world’s ills: religion.
Thus, anyone who is religious is, a priori, part of the problem.
Moreover, as evidenced at the following link, Harris himself is becoming a scientist not in order to conduct unbiased research but in order to attempt to evidence atheism.
http://atheismisdead.blogspot.com/2009/05/atheism-new-emergent-atheists-part-2-of.html
Also, FYI: interesting info on Collins is found here:
http://atheismisdead.blogspot.com/2009/04/john-horgan-and-francis-collins.html
http://atheismisdead.blogspot.com/2009/05/new-atheists-on-francis-collins.html
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