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Jesus Goes to BethesdaJust how religious is Obama's nominee for director of the NIH?

By Chris WilsonPosted Thursday, July 9, 2009, at 7:28 PM ET

Francis Collins. Francis S. Collins Whenever scientists get around to hunting for the Boy Scout gene, they should start with the genome of Francis Collins. President Obama's nominee for director of the National Institutes of Health has a folk résumé a mile long: He plays his acoustic guitar during commencement addresses and national prayer breakfasts, likes to talk about his motorcycle, and grew up on a 95-acre farm in Staunton, Va., where his parents ran a summer theater production among the oak trees. One summer, there were so many actors staying with the family that he and his brother Fletcher had to sleep in the farm's corn crib.

Collins is also a decorated scientist with a Yale Ph.D. in physical chemistry that he finished on weekends after he'd half-quit graduate school to get a medical degree instead. His composite public image—as a brilliant, eminently likable polymath—allows him to get away with talking openly in scientific circles about another quirk of his personality: Since age 27, he has been an evangelical Christian.

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Collins' efforts to defuse some of the tension between believers and scientists—that is, to insist that they are not mutually exclusive and that their values are compatible—has received a lot of buzz over the years. He is a firm believer in evolution, an opponent of "intelligent design," and dubious of the idea that life begins at the very moment of conception. He is also unequivocal in his belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ. His 2006 book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief was a best-seller, and he's a go-to guy for debates with Richard Dawkins, et al., over whether religion can coexist with a scientific ethos. Nearly every news story about the appointment mentioned his faith. (Many mentioned his guitar as well.) In many ways, his values are reminiscent of Obama's: He displays no queasiness about discussing his faith in public but advocates the unfettered pursuit of scientific inquiry.

His passionate defense of religion has earned some harsh criticism. When rumors of the appointment began to circulate in May, University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne blogged, "I'd be much more comfortable with someone whose only agenda was science," saying he was worried "about how this will affect things like stem-cell research and its funding." (In fact, Collins is clear on his support of stem-cell research.) Sam Harris was predictably unimpressed with Collins' ideas. "Most reviewers of The Language of God seem quite overawed by its author's scientific credentials," Harris wrote shortly after it was published. "His book, however, reveals that a stellar career in science offers no guarantee of a scientific frame of mind."

Harris does not make a genuine attempt to consider the book's ideas, but he is correct that the philosophy espoused by Collins, which he calls "theistic evolution," has so far managed to evade sustained and careful scrutiny. Now that he has been chosen as the most important scientific administrator in the country, overseeing $40 billion of grants and programs, the scientific community can be forgiven for a few jitters over exactly where Collins comes down on the inevitable, often glaring contradictions between science and Scripture.

Most of the time, Collins starts with the science and then reconciles the religion with it. He argues, for example, that the early chapters of Genesis ought to be read figuratively and in total agreement with the astronomical explanation of the universe. But there are some times when Collins' refereeing of the scientific issues makes me a little uneasy. I got to spend some time with him two years ago, in the course of researching a profile for the Washingtonian, and our interviews at several points returned to the difference between the "unsolved" and the "unsolvable," in his words. This is his criticism of intelligent design: By presenting gaps in evolutionary theory as evidence of its insufficiency, I.D. proponents are setting themselves up for defeat when those holes are inevitably filled by new discoveries.

This formula offers a convenient litmus test for where Collins falls on a variety of questions: If a given problem appears to be merely unsolved, then he'll leave it to the realm of science; if, on the other hand, Collins deems a question to be unsolvable, it's fair game for inclusion in a spiritual interpretation of the universe.

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Chris Wilson is an assistant editor at Slate in Washington, D.C. Follow him on Twitter.

Photograph of Francis S. Collins by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

COMMENTS

Wasn't the Genome project completed earlier because Craig Venter was threatening to beat them to the tape?

-- pramesh
(To reply, click here)

That was definitely a factor, but competition alone wasn't going to get the job done. I recommend Cracking the Genome by Kevin Davies if anyone is looking for a good, readable history of the HGP and the private counterpart.

-- Chris Wilson
(To reply, click here)

Collins is a very smart man, evidently a sincere Christian, and would undoubtedly be great for the job. But he fundamentally misunderstands Intelligent Design.

Why? Well, he dismissed it as misguided, and then in the very same article cites the arbitrary constants in the universe that are "just so" to make life possible as evidence of God - which is as fine an example of Intelligent Design as you can find.

Collins is an ID'er. He just prefers to use a different word for it.

-- the true conservative
(To reply, click here)

That's a great point. I do think, however, that the Goldilocks Enigma is a somewhat different case because none of the competing theories are currently any more testable than God is. The multiverse theory may be more scientifically compelling, but is boasts just as little evidence (as far as I know). I've also heard some wild quantum explanations about how the universe exists in a superposition that collapses into an observable state with the "just right" constants when we observe it, a la Schrodinger's Cat.

-- Chris Wilson
(To reply, click here)

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