Francis Collins: Obama's Biggest Mistake

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.