Revisiting Francis Collins

Last summer, Sam Harris, one of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism, released a broadside in the New York Times against Obama’s appointee to head the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins. Collins, in addition to heading the Human Genome Project, has been a vocal advocate for the reconciliation of science and faith — indeed, for the view that scientific evidence actually recommends faith. Harris argued that Collins has an unscientific worldview and that he would be less than open-minded in overseeing research into, say, the nature of the human brain, which he believes to be miraculously as well as evolutionarily constructed.
At the time, the most convincing response to Harris was that Collins, as both an evolutionist and a believer, might bridge divisions and, as one Times letter writer argued, “help[] his fellow evangelicals to accept evolution, support embryonic stem cell research and embrace scientific insights.”
As an atheist who thinks that the widespread rejection of science is far scarier than the widespread embrace of religion, I thought this rationale allowed me to come down in a nice, safe middle ground. Collins was okay.
But now, after reading Collins’s interview with the Harvard Ichthus (sorry, no link yet), I’m starting to think Collins’s defenders were wrong — Collins may be a brilliant scientist and administrator, but when he speaks publicly about faith and science, he does no favors for the scientific worldview.
Collins’s most basic view is that God set up the evolutionary process. This view is not based on evidence, but neither is it hostile to evidence. There’s just no evidence either way. I can live with that. So far, so good.
But then Collins is prompted for his views on the (always capitalized) Moral Law, which he, like C.S. Lewis before him, believes to be strong evidence of not just a watchmaker God, but a “holy, loving, and caring God” who intervenes in the world to shape his noble creations and guide their conception of right and wrong. This is where we run into problems. This is where, I believe, Collins demonstrates that his religious beliefs blind him to rather stark empirical evidence.
See, Collins admits that evolutionary processes can account for, and indeed have accounted for, altruism towards family members, exchange partners, and, in fact, “all members of your own group.” Okay, fine. Where’s the “but”?
Here it is, quoted in all its majesty: “But these evolutionary models all require hostility to outgroups within your species. Somehow we humans didn’t seem to get that memo.”
We didn’t get that memo?! Seriously?!
I’m sure Collins is a very nice guy, someone who doesn’t like to bother his head over human frailties and evils, but this is willfully blind and antagonistic towards history. Is politics anything but a cage match in which groups fight for resources and rights to the exclusion of others? Does anything describe human beings better than altruistic towards in-groups, exclusive and/or hostile towards outgroups?
I mean, I’m no fan of this state of affairs. As a liberal, I’m not sure there are good reasons to distribute resources to America’s poor, but not equally to the world’s poor. And, hey, I like the UN just fine. “Imagine no countries” sounds good to me. But is this a popular view? Is this a Law that has been written into our humanity by a benevolent God? Or is this just Francis Collins’s attempt to find evidence to support his religious beliefs, to pretend that observable facts support his faith? And is he not completely, laughably wrong on the facts?
But what is most galling, in my opinion, is that Collins doesn’t even care whether he’s wrong or right. He says, if evolution could account for this make-believe universal altruism, “that still [wouldn’t] rule out God’s hand in the process.” Why not? Because a “holy God who cares about good and evil” could still have designed evolution to produce universal altruism. Ah yes, but it’s atheists, according to Collins, who are guilty of creating “just so” stories.
Thus, in the space of a few paragraphs, Collins asserts the existence of a watchmaker God, presents fallacious evidence for a loving, holy, Christian God, and then declares that, if the “evidence” turns against him, well, he’ll maintain his belief in the second God anyway. I would have no problem with Collins if he had some mystical beliefs on top of his evidence-based ones. My problem with Collins is that he doesn’t seem to know the difference.
Again, let me reiterate: the problem with Collins is not that he’s religious. The problem is that he tries to enlist evidence into his religious cause: in fact, the subtitle of his manifesto is “A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.” Collins doesn’t just want to be a scientist who believes in God; he wants to give faith a scientific imprimatur. He says he wants to separate faith and science, to prove that belief in one need not entail disbelief in the other. But in fact he brings the two together, and conflates them.
Is this impairing his ability to run the NIH? Probably not, but it’s a fair question whether Collins can really be an impartial administrator when it comes, say, to investigations into the evolutionary origins of morality. And it no longer seems that he is an ideal spokesman for science. Much better to have someone who believes in science, believes in religion, and believes in the difference between the two.