Here is a discussion with my friend on Francis Collins - Head of NIH.
Collins was appointed in 2009 by Obama and many considers this appointment to
be Obama's biggest mistake.
The discussion was prompted by my friend's reading of
"The Language of God" by said Collins.
This
resulted in me sending him (my friend, no Collins) the following email:
Dear
Friend,
Please visit this site:
https://samharris.org/books/the-moral-landscape/
The
book, which I have here and that is yours to read when you want, is the one
with the quote about Obama appointing Collins as head of the NIH in 2009.
One page 164 (ff), he outlines lectures given by Collins, statements that
make him unsuitable to be called a scientist and much less the Director of
NIH.
Now, this book by Sam Harris, was written in 2010 and much may have
happened since then.
Here is the comment on "The Language of God":
" 'The Language of God' is a genuinely astonishing
book. To read it is to witness nothing less than intellectual
suicide. It is, however, a suicide that 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."
Verbatim quote.
Next follow my summary of the ensuing paragraphs:
Collins meets - and clears - two VERY low bars:
1. He is not a "young creationist" (meaning, he realizes that
the universe is more than 13 billion years old)
2. He is not a proponent of the "intelligent design" hocus
pocus.
BUT
he has a budget of $30 BILLION (back in 2010), and still says:
(This is from a slide presentation Collins did:)
And I quote (Collins):
SLIDE 1:
"God Almighty, who is not limited in time or space, 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 (and here it comes,
finally)
"We
humans use our free will to break the moral law, leading to estrangement from
God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that
estrangement"
END QUOTE
And this was just from less than one page! There is so much more!
If I
hadn't told you that a "scientist" wrote that, I am convinced
you would have asked:
"What Southern Baptist church is the speaker a pastor at?"
This
is NOT how a scientist speaks - much less the person trusted with $30 billion
supposedly earmarked for life saving research.
I have said my piece! I rest my case.