Francis Collins, now director of the National Institutes of Health (but head of the Human Genome Project when he did this interview), tells Colbert that God gave us “ability to do science” so that we can “see God’s creation in all its awesome glory.” He also affirms that “there are parts of the Bible that maybe weren’t intended to be absolutely literally interpreted” but that he nevertheless wants the part about God’s forgiveness to be true.
Also, “evolution is God’s plan for giving upgrades.”
What an embarrassment! Colbert, who’s a Catholic, does his usual great job.
Collins’s conversion to Christianity was sudden when he came upon three frozen waterfalls and after he suffered a personal tragedy. Today he accepts some miracles in the bible and rejects others. He represents a slow infection in Evangelical ranks an does more to draw radical Christians to science and reason than do hard core atheists. Radical Christians hate and misttrust him. From an atheist’s point of view he is wrong in his theology and is a blatent contradiction of both science and religion. But he has the ear of doubtful Christians and helps spread his hybrid science to the superstitious.
+1
I think Collins’ strategy is as useful in the long term as getting reluctant people to get vaccinated by convincing them it’s homeopathic. I’m not sure what you call “hybrid science” is a good idea.
But he has the ear of doubtful Christians and helps spread his hybrid science to the superstitious.
you know, I’ve heard that repeated often as a mantra, and yet have seen no actual evidence that Collins works to convert any fundamentalists over to the side of science in any greater numbers than just the science itself does.
do you have any data to support your contention, at all?
Moreover, what Sastra said. Hybrid science is, by definition NOT science.
it’s a lie.
sorry, but I don’t want to be in the business of telling lies to people, as a scientist.
Collins is a flat out liar.
I’ll offer support for my contention that Collins has done less than nothing to aid the cause of science with his approach, using the very organization he worked with to make his approach a “reality”:
Biologos.
if you know anything about Biologos, you know that instead of doing what it intended to do, help to push science into the realm of the extremeley religious, it instead has become the exact opposite: a clearinghouse for theological nonsense that poses as science.
hell, even uncle Carl couldn’t stand it any more, and that’s saying something.
no, don’t delude yourself, this approach is doomed not just to failure, but to subversion.
I totally agree with you. Collins is a disgrace to science. One cannot give up logic and reason and the scientific method just because of a tragedy and a frozen waterfall. Funny how close Templeton money was sitting there waiting for Collins.
He is the worst of all people, a liar for Jebus and Mammon. He talks about working with DNA and seeing god in it.
In actual fact he is researcher gone the way of administration. He does nothing of value any more if he ever did.
He does science such a disservice, I sincerely wish he was not given any air time whatsoever. Lock him in his office and throw away the key.
“Evolution is our friend”? Now that’s real Panglossianism.
You’re right Jerry. Watching him was very painful viewing. Totally deluded.
Interesting: Collins implied that “junk DNA” must still have a purpose because DNA is the “language of God.” Now, of course, given his loosey-goosey understanding of evidence the purpose could literally be said to be anything at all, including “junk DNA is there to show scientists how common descent works” — but still. It’s a creationist talking point.
Besides that, blather like this is sooo empty. If DNA or evolution had anything positive to say about God then God would be in the damn theories. As it is, all Collins is doing is looking at whatever happened and, after the fact, pidgeon-holing it into the category of “Things That God Did That Strengthens My Faith.” Come on — if there was no DNA would Collins have had his faith in God weakened? Obviously not.
Science and religion can be said to be “compatible” in the REAL sense when God can be approached like a hypothesis and hey, turns out people don’t need to make a big song and dance about having “faith” (which is another term for “motivated reasoning.”) Compatibility ought to mean consistency — meaning, you can derive the existence of God from the objective study of reality (science.)
Until then, they’re only “compatible” in the weakest sense, which is where an individual can themselves believe conflicting things by making special exceptions and categories in their own mind. Homeopathy is “compatible” with modern chemistry if Joe the chemist uses Oscillococcinum for his own colds but doesn’t do so or endorse it as a chemist but only as a person.
What rot.
I’ve never seen you (read you) so irritated before!
They do like to redefine words. “Cognitive malfunction” becomes “compatible”. The root problem seems to be selection. They select what they want to be true from both their religion & science, or make stuff up, and arrange those selections into a world view. Like picking out clothes and accessories for an important social event.
I’ve never seen you (read you) so irritated before!
you’re not irritated by the fact that someone with Collins OBVIOUS cognitive dissonance that completely infects his view of science was promoted to the controlling position of the nations largest funder of science?
you certainly should be.
bloody well irritates me, I can tell you.
Sure I am. Actually it disgusts me. In fact unlike many people, even many atheists, who think Collins is good at science administration, or something, I have not seen any good evidence to think Collins is anything but average at best. He seems to be a good example of the old proverb, “people tend to advance to a position for which they are inadequate.”
But, Sastra usually doesn’t express so much emotion. S’all I was saying.
righto.
darelle wrote
But I did say it was “rot” — instead of “bullshit” — thereby exercizing restraint.
This was embarrassing to watch.
Collins ought to be ashamed but he seems completely, and obliviously, sincere. This guy is a disgrace to human understanding. He’s friendly and all, an affable sort of buffoon, but he also happens to have way more political clout than is safe for him.
Coming off in this interview as a bumbling buffoon, one kind of wonders what Hitchens found in Collins to consider him a close friend.
Attraction of opposites?
Maybe they limited conversation to DNA sequencing and good wine.
I thought his points were silly, but Collins himself didn’t come off as a buffoon to me. He seemed more like a grandpa who is good-naturedly trying to take part in some teenage game, using humor and good will to show the kids that he’s still pretty hip.
Seemed that way to me, too.
But it also seemed as though he was unaware that Colbert’s arch-right-wing-xianity is a schtick.
I’m pretty sure I’ve read that Colbert informs all of his guests of his schtick beforehand, and they’re asked to play along. In every interview I’ve seen, the guest engages Colbert’s character with faux sincerity.
He looked to me like an idiot saying the stupidest things.
Colbert does such a good job lampooning everything we gnus would consider lampoon-worthy. And with panache.
That bit about how Collins can (allegedly) discern metaphor from literal truth in the Bible, and about how if you decide parts are metaphorical, really the whole thing has to go?
That’s something I’d read here.
Is there a source for this claim I always hear/see about Colbert being an observant Carholic?
err…Catholic.
That other one would be Jay Leno.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Colbert#Personal_life
104 Interview with Stephen Colbert on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. NBC (June 14, 2006).
105 Ambinder, Marc (March 3, 2006). “Colbert Seeks Rapport With GOPers”. The Hotline. Retrieved August 13, 2006.
106 Kaplan, James (October 23, 2007). “If you are laughing, you can’t be afraid”. Parade Magazine. Retrieved February 12, 2008.
If he’s really sincere in his Catholicism, all I can say is he must be carrying around more dissonance than Anton Webern.
Come on, Stephen! So close! Drop the other shoe!
well, if anyone can compartmentalize well, it would be an actor, no?
Colbert is a self-professed Catholic… as for ‘observant’ I don’t know what that means… no Catholic I know is completely observant… I suspect Colbert doesn’t take birth control pills, however… 😉
By “observant” I meant “at least partly sincere”. As opposed to something one just says, in well-I’ve-got-to-put-something-in-this-box-on-this-form fashion.
I suppose teaching Sunday school would indicate some level of sincerity.
Within the RCC there is a wide variation amongst ‘sincere’ Catholics. All one need do is read the scholarship of Crossan and Kung to sense the wide variety thereof. Insincere Catholics are excommunicated or, in the case of priests, silenced.
You don’t have to read much of Vatican II to sense the wide variety within sincere Catholicism… but then there are many within the RCC hierarchy that dismiss Vatican II as inappropriate doctrine.
There is more rigidity imposed from without than from within the RCC.
I like Colbert but have never caught his show on a regular basis. With that in mind, I’ve never seen him be so rough on a guest before. He pushed Collins to the edge of condescension a couple of times. Collins responses were not very sophisticated.
He pushed Collins to the edge of condescension a couple of times.
I think he smelled blood.
Had me laughing, and I was having a really bad day.
Collins sounds just like any other preacher – hardly surprising. He hasn’t curbed his activities at all since he joined the NIH – not surprising. He gives god speeches to groups and allows (or demands?) that he be introduced as the chief of the NIH.
I had Collins beliefs years ago and no longer do, but I just can’t get upset with Collins the way other posters (& Jerry Coyne) do here.
First of all, as long as Collins mainly bends his theology to fit known science rather than the other way around, I can’t really complain too much intellectually.
Second, in fighting against creationism at the !*high school*! level (Eugenie Scott’s main bailiwick) some form of accommodationism is extremely necessary and folks like Collins are helpful in that. He may not convert many individual fundamentalists, but his presence can certainly affect court decisions and textbook decisions, and that’s important.
Coyne has pointed out that the main problem with theology is that it has no data to back it up and as such theologians wind up distorting their understanding of the real world to make things fit. (I’m thinking of Coyne’s speech at the Freedom from Religion Foundation.) As the great fictional rationalist Sherlock Holmes said “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” (“A Scandal in Bohemia”) This Holmesism I think sums up much of Coyne’s case against theology.
However, this kind of religiosity is a very human thing and as such a technical theological piety may be very seductive for a very good reasoner. In this passage from “The Naval Treaty”, Sherlock Holmes is completely Francis Collins, although a good biologist could make a case against Holmes’ reasoning here.
” “There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion,” said he [Holmes], leaning with his back against the shutters. “It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.” “
as long as Collins mainly bends his theology to fit known science rather than the other way around, I can’t really complain too much intellectually.
uh, you DID watch this video, right?
you DID read his book, right?
because if you did, you certainly came away with an odd impression of what exactly happened there.
I agree that Collins postulates a teleological purpose in nature for which there is no evidence. But he isn’t trying to say modern science is delusional. He’s trying to work with the known facts as best he can.
Kind of like historical fiction that tries to be true to its period, I guess.
No he isn’t. He could recognize that the facts fail to point to Jesus. Since he can’t/won’t abandon make-believe, he ends up discrediting himself as a scientist.
OK, I see your point.
What folks like Collins do is in fact immunize certain areas of inquiry from deep scientific analysis, arguing that the scientific method is just inadequate to understand them. (I believe that Collins and others like him hold evolution cannot explain altruism and compassion, thus engaging in a “god of the gaps” argument more subtle than that of hard-core creationists.)
Collins isn’t a historian, but he accepts solid sound science in his understanding of the natural world, especially his field of biochemistry and genetics.
I’m just saying he doesn’t spew out reams of false facts about the natural world the way creationists do. He’s not in denial about modern science- he just wants to make a “theist’s bargain” with it.
Creationist William Dembski overtly rejects “methodological naturalism” as well as “philosophical naturalism”. Collins deserves some credit for accepting the former.
You kidding? He believes in virgin birth. He believes in Jesus coming back from the dead. He believes in miracles. He believes in a god that inserts souls into humans.
That’s not in denial about modern science?
Collins believes in supernatural miracles on the basis of intervention from beyond in the normal course of nature, and claims science can only go “so far”, which I regard as untestable confabulation.
Personally, I find the psychological and historical arguments against Christianity (specifically from psychology of religion and understanding the process by which religion formed) more telling than arguments from biology and physics. Books like Michael Shermer’s “The Believing Brain” or Bart Ehrman’s “Jesus Interupted” are more challenging than appeals to the normal course of nature.
As long as Collins doesn’t engage in the obvious pseudo-science of “Answers in Genesis” such as their answers to the distant starlight problem (starlight created in transit- thus the universe may be only 5000 years old- give me a break!!) or AiG’s obviously phony explanation of craters on the moon and other earth-bound geological stuff, I can’t fault him overmuch as a scientist, unless you want to argue a scientist must be committed to “philosophical naturalism” as well as “methodological naturalism” (the distinction Eugenie Scott is always making over at the the National Center for Science Education).
But Collins indeed has a “No Science Trespassing” sign on the fence around his religious beliefs. If he removed it, he would be in less danger of cognitive dissonance.
GB,
We’re obviously engaging in another chapter of the discussion of this podcast over at “Rationally Speaking”
http://www.rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs04-the-great-atheist-debate-over-the-limits-of-science.html
“The Great Atheist Debate Over the Limits of Science”
Sorry, but the limits of science don’t include allowance for miracles. If someone believes the fishes and loaves story, nonsense about walking on water, raising people from the dead and the rest of the Jesus myth, one is not “trying to work with the known facts as best he can”. These are patently delusional concepts on the face of it. And no amount of mental partitioning makes this kind of thinking in any way “factual”.
I think we can be more subtle about the critique of miracles and follow the advice of Joe Nickell (frequent writer for Skeptical Inquirer) and be a “skeptical investigator” rather than an “armchair debunker”.
99% of reports of miracles can be almost certainly explained as the product of either hysteria or theological vested interest or otherwise untrustworthy. We therefore can reasonably assume that unexplained alleged miracles have a naturalistic explanation, which is simply not YET explained. Furthermore, to forego seeking explanation and just say “It’s a miracle” is mentally lazy. We can also appeal to philosopher David Hume’s “principle of minimum astonishment”.
However, to just say “science doesn’t acknowledge miracles” is to make outsiders think science is arbitrarily close-minded. It’s an argument that will not convince a supernaturalist.
Furthermore, it is very deeply ingrained in human nature to seek transcendent explanations of religious experience, altruism, and consciousness, and as such it should be no surprise that there are some people genuinely talented at scientific investigation should practice “methodological naturalism” without embracing “philosophical naturalism”. As previously stated, IDer Demkski rejects both, while Collins accepts the first, but not the second.
So your argument is that we should cut Collins some slack because he doesn’t live in Downtown Crazytown? His home may be in Uptown, but the zip code is the same.
Look… I don’t give a hoot if “outsiders” (whoever they are) are confused by pointing out the incompatibility of science and religion. What I care about is that statements are honest, that assertions are true and if ideas are well reasoned or delusional.
I’m not sure why you think it necessary to defend Collins in this manner. It is a of little credit to the man to state that he’s not quite as bat-shit crazy as Bill Demski.
As long as Collins doesn’t engage in the obvious pseudo-science of “Answers in Genesis” such as their answers to the distant starlight problem (starlight created in transit- thus the universe may be only 5000 years old- give me a break!!) or AiG’s obviously phony explanation of craters on the moon and other earth-bound geological stuff, I can’t fault him overmuch as a scientist
then you don’t understand science yet.
Collins is a special creationist, meaning he thinks at least aspects of humans were created by a divine being.
sorry, but that ain’t science, and your simplistic thinking won’t make it so.
I haven’t really thought about all my reasons, but they are probably a combination of at least the following.
a) I frequently read the newsletter that comes out of the National Center of Science Education which thinks along very similar lines as I do. Indeed for years it has been my main #1 source of news for battles around creationism. My father passed on to me his issues, and he got a free subscription since he wrote for them.
b) I used to be in Collins camp, so I like to be diplomatic to those who still are.
c) I have just enough background in social sciences of the kind that seems to incline folks to have a qualified sympathy to some religion. (Seems to me that secularists in fields like cultural anthropology, sociology and psychology are often far more willing to cut religion some slack. I have mostly just anecdotal evidence for this, though.)
There are probably other reasons I am not immediately consciously aware of. It may be ultimately just a matter of temperament or instinct.
Yours is a classic accommodationist position. I don’t think it works because “cutting religion some slack” really means accepting make-believe as reasonable. It means pretending that things that are clearly false propositions are not false, just in order to be polite. It means being politely dishonest to oneself and others.
And, fwiw, my graduate training and degree is in Anthropology (US version). There is without a doubt, substantial woo-sympathy found in the discipline, particularly in the cultural sub-dicipline.
Good to know!! Thanks for the exchange.
“40% of working scientists…believe in a personal God”
What does it take to be considered a working scientist? Why is he so proud of a number that is so much lower than the population as a whole? Why isn’t he mentioning the scientists in the National Academy?
Coward!
“40% of working scientists…believe in a personal God”
that’s also not a well supported number.
the exact way he phrased it, IIRC it’s less than 10%
40% would be the numbers professing to label themselves “xian” of one strip or another, but that only translates into Collins’ numbers in his head.
Well, Stephen Colbert is a character, and he’s always in character (the only time you’ll see him out of character is a Q&A session he does with the audience before he tapes a show, I know because I went to a taping a few weeks ago), so the colbert character is a practicing catholic, but I’m not sure what the reality is. I’m shy so I didn’t ask a question in the session before the taping, but it would be interesting to know what his response would be.
Collins doesn’t even understand evolution very well if he thinks it’s “God’s plan for giving upgrades”. That implies it has a direction, purpose, etc. And there’s something nasty about a God who keeps upgrading the lion and the antelope as ever more efficient killing and fleeing machines respectively.
To be even able to say this, Collins must never have actually read (with attention) anything about evolution.
Or else he thought that Darwin’s remarks about the Ichneumonidae were metaphorical.
I cringed when he said, “You’re a fruit fly. It doesn’t work so well. You need to do more than that. You’re a mammal […]”
Fruit flies are doing great from evolutionary perspective and have no need to be “upgraded” to anything, let alone to mammals.
It seems like Collins is highly competent in genetics, but really should not be commenting on anything outside of that narrow field.
“There are parts of the Bible that maybe weren’t intended to be absolutely literally interpreted” Perhaps he’d like to divulge WHICH parts, and how he knows that.
Christians have never ever conclusively agreed on this question. In the 16th century, Luther and Calvin could not agree over whether or not the 1st chapter of Genesis was allegorical or literal. Many theologians in late Roman antiquity disbelieved Genesis 1 was literal because it contradicted Neo-Platonic philosophy which far fewer believe in today than back then.
Answers to this are shifting and mercurial.
shifting and mercurial is a cover for:
contradictory and vacuous.