‘Evangelistic’ scientist tapped to lead National Institute of Health

from John Byrne at RawStory:

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.”