Over at The Big Think, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins has a 40-minute soliloquy on science, religion, and their interaction, but you can listen to bits of it by clicking on the separate segments (see screenshot at bottom). I’d recommend these two short segments:

“Why it’s so hard for scientists to believe in god” (4:36)

and

“How does religious belief affect scientific inquiry?” (4:20)

In the first segment, Collins decries the “war” between science and faith, and calls for scientists to admit that there are other ways of finding truth, for that would bring a truce in the “culture wars”.  He begins by decrying (shades of xkcd) the “shrill pronouncements from extreme views” (i.e., those of Biblical fundamentalists) that threaten scientists. But he also argues that some of his atheist colleagues use “science as a club over the head of believers.”  He observes that “the extremists have occupied the stage, but that “science is a reliable way to learn about nature, but it’s not the whole story. . . We need something besides science to pursue some of the things that humans are curious about.”

This is, of course NOMA-ism, and he makes that explicit, arguing that science answers the “how” questions and religion the “why” questions. What are those pesky “why questions”? Collins gives a couple: “Why is there something instead of nothing?”; “Why are we all here”, and, of course, “Is there a God?”

He fails to note that while science has answered many of its questions (unraveling the human genome was one of his), religion has never answered any of those “why” questions, including, as you’ll see below, “Is there a God?”  I was surprised, for I thought the frozen waterfall had given him a strong affirmative answer that that one.

It is palpably true to anyone who’s not blinkered that religion does not have a reliable way to answer its “Why” questions. If it did, then all religions would agree on the answers. In contrast, there’s only one science, and  Hindu, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scientists will agree that a water molecule has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, that the speed of light in a vacuum is 186,000 miles per second, and that the Universe is about 13.7 billion years old.  Oh, and that evolution happened, too. Science can answer its questions; religion cannot.  Why can’t religious people just admit that? They can “address” questions, but not answer them.

Reader Michael, who sent me the link to Collins’s video, had this to say about the “club over believers” wielded by scientists. I quote (Michael’s thoughts indented):

COLLINS:-“…some of my scientific colleagues, who are of atheist persuasion, are sometimes using science as a club over the head of believers basically, suggesting that anything that can’t be reduced to a scientific question isn’t important and it just represents superstition and should be gotten rid of…”

** He misrepresents scientists here. I don’t know any scientist who does this! Scientists, such as you, Jerry, rail against believers when they…
1] Use poor argumentation & rambling word salads to defend what can’t be defended
2] Demand that their faith deserves special treatment or exemptions
3] Interfere in the public square on moral issues because they believe morals came down from their god
4] Deny scientific inquiry because the conclusions of science clash with their holy book

Well, I would be glad to see religion go the way of the floppy disk, but I don’t think I’ve ever used science as a club over the head of believers. True, science does tend to dispel faith, and I see the two areas as incompatible methodologically, philosophically, and in what they take as “true,” But I don’t think I’ve ever said that science absolutely disproves God, or that nonscientific questions aren’t important.

Finally, Collins commits a faux pas here, for he brings up Natural Theology, in particular the fine-tuning argument—the idea that things “like gravitational constants” might have been adjusted by God.  He notes that this fine-tuning “does make you think that a Mind might have been involved in setting the stage.” Elsewhere he’s frequently argued that our “moral instincts”—the innate morality that people seem to have—could not have evolved, but must also represent evidence for a Mind (i.e., God and Jesus) that put those instincts in our soul. Here Collins does exactly what he decries in the next segment, “mixing the magisteria,” as Gould would have called it. Collins argues that one’s faith should not affect how one does science, but what else is he doing when he concludes from the data of physics and psychology that there is a God?  Here Collins is misusing his authority as NIH director in a dangerous way, implying that science gives evidence for God.

In the second segment, Collins, thank Ceiling Cat, admits that belief shouldn’t have anything to do with how scientists do their science—except, that is, for psychologists and cosmologists.  He also admits that both atheists and believers can be ethical people. Well, I’m glad he recognizes this obvious fact.

Nevertheless, Collins argues strongly that scientists should become accommodationists, for it would diminish society’s internecine “culture war” if “more scientists would stand up and state and religion need not to be conflict.”

Sorry, Dr. Collins, but I decline. The only way they can’t be in conflict is if religion stops making claims that God ever interceded in the universe.  I’ll shut up if every believer becomes a deist: a believer in a hands-off God.  But even Collins isn’t that kind of believer, for he thinks that God has not only fine-tuned the universe and given us The Moral Law, but gave him a personal message, in the form of that frozen waterfall and a timely evensong in England that told Collins he should accept the NIH directorship. He also believes in the Resurrection.

Collins gets in a few licks at science along the way, too:

“I would not want to live in a culture where faith lost, and where science, with all of its reductionism and its materialism became the sole source of truth. We need both kinds of truth; we need both kinds of worldviews. To the extent that scientists can help with that realization of a dual way of finding answer to the appropriate kind of questions that each kind of worldview can ask, then I think that would be a good thing.”

No it wouldn’t. How can we—since 60% of scientists at good universities are atheists, along with 93% of Collins’s colleagues in the National Academy of Science—pretend that religion can really answer its “big questions”? For one thing, that is a tacit admission that there is a God who could give us the answers.  We really don’t need to call a truce in this “culture war.” Rather, we need to fight harder to dispel superstition.  Collins conceives of it as a war between faith and science, but it’s really a war between reason and superstition.  We won’t achieve our goals by pretending that superstition has any credibility. That is condescending. Atheist scientists who practice accommodationism are, I think, hypocritical. They favor tactics over truth, comity over integrity. And accommodationism doesn’t work anyway.

Finally, Collins takes issue with the claim of anthropologists like Pascal Boyer that religion had a secular origin, piggybacking on evolved features of the human brain like our notion of agency. Addressing Boyer’s hypothesis, Collins says this:

“I think it’s too simple to basically say , well, ‘that does it.’ [the secular explanation for religion]. Either God is true or God is not true; either God is real or God is not real.  It’s not a matter of whether you can explain it away by a hypothesis. The question is ‘what’s the real answer?’  And I think far too few people have looked at the question from that perspective: what’s the evidence for the idea God exists or doesn’t exist? I think anyone who’s looked at that would conclude that the strong atheist position of saying ‘I know there is no God’ is not an easy one to sustain. It basically implies a certain degree of hubris and arrogance to say that I know so much that I can exclude any possibility of there being a is a God.  On the other hand,  the evidence will never draw people to the conclusion that  ‘I know confidently that there is a God’.  Maybe God didn’t intend it to be that easy. “

I love the last sentence, dripping with post facto rationalization for God’s hidden-ness.

Now not that many atheists say “I know there is no God.” I don’t. That’s not a scientific statement, for it presumes absolute knowledge. But I am 99.9% sure there is no God, just as I’m 99.9% sure that there’s no Loch Ness monster.  Is it a “strong a-Nessieist position” to say “I know there is no Nessie”? Is that hubris and arrogance, too? It is curious that for everything as unevidenced as God—except for God himself—people are willing to argue that it doesn’t exist.  God is the one exception, probably because belief in Nessie doesn’t come with an afterlife. I can’t say I’m 100% certain there’s no God, but I’d bet $10,000 there isn’t one—if somehow we could know for sure.  How many believers would bet their houses on their beliefs being true?

There are two kinds of “proof.” There is “proof beyond all doubt”—absolute proof.  I don’t have that kind of proof when it comes to my atheism. But there’s also “proof that you’d bet your money or house on”—that is, proof that comports completely with reason.  That’s the kind of “proof” I have when it comes to the proposition “there is no god.” It’s time people realized that there’s a difference between a logical or an absolute proof on one hand, and a “proof beyond reasonable doubt,” which is what we use to convict criminals. It’s the latter kind of proof that most atheists use when claiming there’s no God. If you say, “I know there are no fairies in my garden,” then you can say, with equal credibility, “I know there is no God.”

No, it’s not a repost from this site, so you haven’t read it already, and yes, Slate does pay contributors, so they’re not taking advantage of me.  At any rate, they’ve just published a short essay I wrote on why science isn’t based on faith.

The claim that science and religion are both grounded on faith is, of course, a staple of accommodationists and religionists. It’s a way to suggest a comity between science and religion that involves dragging scientific facts down to the level of religious “truths.”

Slate gave it a nice illustration, too:

I like my last line:

So the next time you hear someone described as a “person of faith,” remember that although it’s meant as praise, it’s really an insult.