The Reason Project has an article up describing the The Strange Case of Francis Collins. I have picked a few choice quotes, followed by my reply:
In fact, to read The Language of God is to witness nothing less than an intellectual suicide. It is, however, a suicide that has gone almost entirely unacknowledged: The body yielded to the rope; the neck snapped; the breath subsided; and the corpse dangles in ghastly discomposure even now—and yet, polite people everywhere continue to celebrate the great man’s health.
I hope you all will forgive me for quoting a bit liberally here, however I think it is all highly relevant to the point I wish to make:
Dr. Collins is regularly praised by his fellow 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, 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 to understand Collins’ religious beliefs as they relate to scientific inquiry.
Here is how Collins, as a scientist and educator, currently summarizes his understanding of the universe for the general public (what follows are a series of slides, presented in order, from a lecture that 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 use 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?
Is it really so difficult to perceive a conflict between Collins’ science and his religion? Just imagine how scientific it would seem if Collins, as a devout Hindu, informed his audience that Lord Brahma had created the universe and now sleeps; Lord Vishnu sustains it and tinkers with our DNA (in a way that respects the law of karma and rebirth); and Lord Shiva will eventually destroy it in a great conflagration.
Now many of you on this site have witnessed me say some very unkind things about certain religious people and their attitudes towards others, however in this case, I believe Dr. Collins's position is worthy of spirited defense.
I think the author of the piece conflates agnosticism with atheism. Collins is essentially write that God can neither be proven nor disproven.
I do generally think that the person who says there is absolutely no God is no more accurate than the person who says there absolutely is a God, because neither can be supported by evidence. The only true scientific position can be an assertion of a lack of knowledge. We simply don't know and probably never can.
Beliefs, however, are entirely separate from theories or facts, and a person can choose to believe there is or isn't a God regardless of the lack of evidence. Collins may have found some reason to believe, but I do not believe that in any way undoes his scientific accomplishments.
Indeed, even his description of how God could have created the universe is essential identical to an assertion I have made many times that young-earth creationists may in fact be underestimating the power of God by denying that evolution exists.
Imagine, if you will, that an all powerful God were playing around and decided to see what He could create with a single spark. The big bang having been that spark, He set forth the basic rules of physics and gave it a certain amount of energy and matter and then just let it go.
If He knew it would one day come to be all that we see, is that not a substantially more awesome act than simply putting it all together in it's current state? Who are creationists to say that evolution was not a deliberate part of His creation, perhaps even one of the primary mechanisms of His creation?
There, in essence, lies a strong religious motivation to support scientific endeavors. Many religious scientists have described their motivation as wishing to better understand God and what He created. Now, I should say I am not among them, but I do understand them. They are cut from a very different cloth than the sort who use religion as a weapon to deny science and to deny personal freedom.
I think that is worth remembering in all of this. Religion is no less a tool than science or a basic hammer. It's how you use it that determines whether the output will be constructive or destructive.