The geneticist has had a distinguished career and for the last dozen years has served as director of the National Institutes of Health, a massive federal agency that does basic research as well as fund the research of scientists in the US. The fact that he has served during three different administrations both Republican and Democrat shows that he has managed to avoid much of the partisan attacks that now routinely target prominent scientists, such as tthose on Anthony Fauci, who is head of one of the agencies that are under the NIH umbrella. Collins has been steadfast in his support of Fauci.
Collins is also an evangelical Christian, a fact that caused many people in the non-religious community to oppose his nomination by George W. Bush to be head of the NIH. But he has won over the skeptics by the way he has handled his tenure, with no evidence that he was driven by his religious beliefs in making scientific decisions.
He also wrote a best-selling book The Language of God where he attempted to reconcile belief in a god with science. I dissected that book in a 11-part (!) series of blogs back in 2009 where I pointed out the many flaws in his argument. But I have always respected Collins as a scientist and I especially admired his steadfast commitment to make freely available to everyone the data that were generated during the sequencing of the human genome, where he was named leader of the federal effort.
Dhruv Khullar interviewed Collins and the latter lamented the loss of trust in science, especially during the pandemic.
During the pandemic, Collins has struggled with a painful paradox: science is more effective and necessary than ever, and also less trusted. Researchers revealed how a novel pathogen spreads, evolves, and kills; they used its genome to create lifesaving vaccines in less than a year. At the same time, politicians and media figures, especially on the right, have undermined pandemic recommendations, maligned public-health leaders, and sown doubt about vaccines. Tucker Carlson, the host of one of the most-watched cable-news shows in America, recently told his viewers that there had been a “complete failure of public-health leadership.” He went on, “These people don’t take it upon themselves to know the data and to say it truthfully, so instead they have inculcated this culture of severe fear.” Tens of millions of people, disproportionately in rural and conservative communities, have chosen not to get immunized against a virus that has killed almost a million Americans. In surveys, only around a third of respondents say that they have high levels of trust in the N.I.H. and the Food and Drug Administration; eight in ten say that Republicans and Democrats disagree on basic facts. “When the history is written of the worst pandemic in a century, the scientific response will be seen as a shining light in the midst of a dark time,” Collins told me. “But science is caught up in a much larger disillusionment with the traditional foundations of how we decide what’s true.”
…Today, evangelical Christians have among the lowest levels of trust in science in America, and the highest rates of vaccine hesitancy. As a scientist whose faith is important to him, Collins called the disconnect “heartbreaking.” “I feel responsible somehow that myself and the rest of the scientific community has failed to get the message across,” he told me.
Collins describes his efforts to get the message across by appearing on Fox News.
“I don’t know how much good it does,” Collins told me later. “I’m seen by that particular part of society as a sort of élitist scientist who is probably in cahoots with companies, or God knows what.” After each appearance on Fox News, he receives a barrage of e-mails from viewers. “Sometimes I think these are written by bots,” he said. “I can’t imagine a human being actually sitting at a keyboard and putting these words together—not just about me but about my family. Everything you could imagine, in the vilest kind of language.” … Still, Collins said, he is far more likely to accept an interview request from Fox News than CNN.
Collins’s attitude is practical—there’s no need to persuade people who already agree with you. But it also seems rooted in a Christian sensibility. “My heart goes out to them,” he said, in reference to pandemic skeptics. “They have been misled in a systematic way by voices who claim authority but basically distribute lies. That just says to me I should have more sympathy for people who are on the right. If there’s a group that needs help—and not more accusations and insults—it’s them.”
Khullar sums up his impressions of Collins.
Speaking to Collins, I felt that his openness was more than a strategy. It seemed sincere. I wondered whether his sincerity flowed from the fact that he is genuinely part of the two tribes that he hopes to connect. He speaks both languages, understands both cultures, and feels acutely the rift between them.
There are those who point to the fact that there are excellent scientists like Collins who are also religious as evidence that science and religion are compatible even though that is not a valid inference.
As I said in the first post of my series reviewing the book:
To the extent that one can infer the nature of an author from his writings, Collins comes across as a thoughtful, compassionate, tolerant, and genial man, someone with whom it would be enjoyable to spend some time with discussing deep issues. He seems like someone who is sincerely trying to reconcile his scientific and religious beliefs, and he does not shirk the hard questions though his responses to most of them (as I will discuss in later posts) are contradictory and superficial. But that is unavoidable. Once you have made the decision to try to reconcile science with belief in a personal god, you cannot avoid contradictions because the two worldviews are fundamentally incompatible.
I attended a talk given by Collins at my university just after the completion of the Human Genome Project. In person he matched the impression given in the book. I was impressed by his gentle yet forthright manner and the respectful and clear way he answered questions, including my own.
I don’t understand how Collins can be so naïve about ANY of this. I have no idea how he formed his religious beliefs (indoctrination, emotional need…), but how does he not see how commitment to religion can take you far, far away from science and reason? You will ignore evidence when it suits you, and you won’t have the mental tools to identify nonsense. You will be easily manipulated by tyrants and con artists alike. Wake up, Francis! The hate mail surprises you?
I guess this is a reference to viewing waterfalls.
Why not both? Sure, they need help. But they also deserve all of the accusation and insults they receive, and more.
The degree to which Evangelical Christianity overlaps with right-wing politics is remarkable. Given the degree to which the typical Evangelical is ignorant of their theology, and the degree to which their views differ from Jesus H. Christ, perhaps it is fair to consider Evangelical Christianity as a political phenomenon, rather than a religious one.
Reginald@4- there was a post over at Science Based Medicine about the number of religious exemption cases that have been filed to avoid vaccination. How many of these are political objections posing as religious ones?
At the same time, politicians and media figures, especially on the right, have undermined pandemic recommendations, maligned public-health leaders, and sown doubt about vaccines.
No, I think it’s pretty much entirely on the right. I can’t think of a single politician or media figure on the left who has sown the sort of lies and distrust that we see regularly emanating from the right. The closest I can come to that is RFK, jr, but he was anti-vax long before covid hit, isn’t a politician, and would have zero media exposure if not for his name.
“The closest I can come to that is RFK, jr, but he was anti-vax long before covid hit, isn’t a politician, and would have zero media exposure if not for his name.”
Yep. If I had a time machine, I would try to redirect Sirhan Sirhan’s bullet from RFK senior to RFK junior. It would be a double win for humankind.
… he has won over the skeptics by the way he has handled his tenure, with no evidence that he was driven by his religious beliefs in making scientific decisions.
I stopped worrying about Collins when he came out in support of embryonic stem cell research. Amazingly, even the anti-abortion screechers seem to have given up on that issue soon after Collins did that.
I despise the way religion skews even the thinking of those who try to have good intentions. Collins would rather believe that bots generate the abuse against him than that it’s the very people he feels for on the right that are spewing forth those accusations and insults. And he thinks the solution is to go easy on them? For fuck’s sake.
file thirteeen @9: You actually read “sometimes I think” as “would rather believe”? I think your viewpoint might be skewing your thinking.
There have been several trolls commenting on FtB who make me think, sometimes, that they are just bots. That doesn’t mean I would rather believe that.
A long time ago, in a proto-social-network site far, far away, I encountered a Christian. He was, bar none, the most obtuse, objectionable, singleminded, prejudiced and worst of all boring individual I think I’ve ever encountered. He abhorred churches, especially the “Satanic” Catholic church, and just banged on endlessly about how he was able to “spiritually discern” the truth of the Bible, which was that basically everyone, it seemed, was going to go to hell. Only after some fantastical pantomime of an angel going through the bureaucratic charade of looking up their name in some kind of ledger, post-mortem, not finding it there, and immediately throwing them into the lake of fire, or something. He was a creationist, obvs, but beyond that just the worst kind of homophobic, racist, misogynist shitbag imaginable.
Anyhoo, one weekend morning when the weather was no good for flying or kitesurfing, I was at a loose end and amused myself by setting up a new account at the site. From it, I explained that I was a programmer in the field of AI, and that I’d been toying with a primitive chatbot. Because it was primitive, I’d needed to come up with a justification for it not having the greatest conversational skills. Rather than present it as a Rogerian psychotherapist, I figured that a particularly dull-witted Christian would be a good cover story for why the program would frequently make little sense, descend into non-sequiturs, be extremely narrow and repetitive, and sometimes just stop interacting altogether when it reached a conversational dead end. I’d programmed it to seek out messageboards and the like, and set up scripts to allow it to sign up and create accounts automatically. I’d trained it on a bunch of interactions with real Christians, and let it loose. It had signed up at “this” place, and had offended some people. I was there to apologise, to those offended and to the people who ran the site, but to reassure them that there was no human consciousness at the other end of those comments. I pleaded an inability to control it since it was running on computers I didn’t own or directly control, and I didn’t know the password to its account because that bit of its records had been randomly encrypyted to give it “freedom”. Absolute bullshit, obvs, but…
What followed was entertaining. Obviously people with a passing knowledge of the state of AI research immediately called bullshit. However, really quite a lot of otherwise intelligent, well-informed people didn’t immediately discount the possibility that this moron might indeed be artificial. It provoked some conversation about Turing tests and how some humans would fail them. Hilariously, when challenged about the possibility he was a computer program pretending to be human, the worthless fuckwit beautifully responded exactly as a chatbot would be expected to -- denials, non-sequiturs, and then ignorage. It passed a rainy weekend with some amusement. Much later, I discovered he’d moved on to spouting his nasty bile on Youtube. I also read his “testimony” -- in which he describe an earlier part of his life as a policeman (terrifying thought…), and apparently an alcoholic wife-beater, all of which he was “saved” from by meeting Jesus. I wonder if I could convince people now that he’s a deepfake construct…
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. ”
I’m not convinced this thesis is valid, but if it is, then Francis Colins is a first-rate intellingence.
Rob #10
Maybe! I wasn’t inclined to take the most charitable interpretation of his statements, was I? So many times I have seen the pattern of people making comments, particularly religious comments, pretending “speculation” about a point to hide their real biases that it might well be skewing my viewpoint. So maybe I’m the pot calling the kettle black… but maybe not too. I’ve seen a lot of people write “sometimes I think” in circumstances where they’re clearly being disingenuous, but I do admit that I have no evidence to assert that here.
Heh -- The is science and religion compatible question is almost as infuriating as the “Does free will exist” question.
Human beings are generally speaking emotional -- And ascribe a lot of meaning to “love”,”trust”,”friendship”,”empathy” -- is this way of living compatible with Science? -- (Use “compatible” in the same way that people who have the position that religion is not compatible with science do). Is Science compatible with Philosophy (atleast the parts that are not science!) -- Lets say ethics with the latest destructive invention? is Science compatible with Politics ? How about is Science compatible with Fascism -- if it is , is science bad or fascism good ?
@File Thirteen
That is not my interpretation -- He seems to be saying that rather than preaching to the choir , he wants to go talk to the people who disagree (and who need to hear him the most). There was a recent study of how some people who regularly watch Fox News change their views after being paid to watch CNN. this is I guess Collins version of taking CNN to them.(not meant to be a recommendation of CNN)
Deepak:
The only compatibility is the ability to coexist, but certainly not of either beliefs or epistemology.
(“… and then a miracle occurs”)
So those religionists (among others) basically simulate compatibility by compartmentaling their belief system. As I recall, Francis himself reconciles his beliefs by supposing God acts indetectably to humans. Which is not exactly scientific thinking.
PS to me, a most amusing example of an effort at détente is Gould’s concept of “non-overlapping magisteria”.
I mean, one could be a torturer by day, and then go home and be a loving parent and partner to their family and kind to their dog and cat.
So being a torturer must be compatible with being nice and loving, right?
(OK, perhaps I should not labour the point so. But still, it’s so bleeding obvious!)
John #16
I think Dawkins nailed it when he wrote:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-there-almost-certainl_b_32164
Non-overlapping, my arse.
file thirteen @18: I’m no biologist, but wouldn’t Dawkins’ scenario of Jesus’ birth imply that Jesus was female? Not sure what the theologians would make of that.
‘compatible’ is one of those words with a rather plastic meaning.
Is being a tax-paying citizen of the US (or Russia, or many other countries) compatible with being a pacifist?
Is buying oil and gas from Russia compatible with supporting Ukraine?
Is a couple compatible only if they never disagree?
If a person’s particular set of beliefs can be neither dismissed nor demonstrated by science, how are they incompatible with science? The only way to hold incompatibility in this case is by dogmatic fiat.
@ 20 Rob Grigjanis
Well I think a disembodied miracle performing omniscient superintelligence is about as close to something that can be dismissed by science as one will ever get.
Just sayin’.
Silentbob @21: On claims like that, science is silent. Silence is not dismissal. And science isn’t anyone’s ideological sock-puppet to back up their own beliefs.
You don’t believe in the disembodied yadda yadda. Neither do I. Leave science out of it, unless there are testable claims made.
Just sayin’.
@16
NOMA is rejected by most scientists and philosophers.
Science and Religion: 5 Questions
by Gregg Caruso
@John Morales
But who uses compatible in that sense ? In engineering compatible usually refers to complementary systems . No one says Apple Laptops are incompatible with Windows laptops -- we talk of a device or a program or a protocol being compatible with Windows but not with Apple etc. Science is also “compatible” with all manner of negative things , so what -- what does that mean?
Some maybe . Most just do not think they cover the same thing -- they consider these things different topics. When Ken ham needs a leak in his ark fixed , he calls a plumber. When hes sick he may pretend to pray but he probably still visits a doctor, no ?
Thats a pretty poor analogy for the point you are trying to make -- because no it isnt. What your analogy is stating is that person can behave differently to different people (sometimes even the same).
Is Science compatible with torture ? or is it a case of non-overlapping magisteria ? How about Science and ethics ?
@File thirteen
Scientific Thinker Richard Dawkins , now includes in his set of abilities the ability to predict , in the future, how a large number of people would react to an earth shattering discovery! Very scientifically at that. Pity he focused on Islam and trans folk and theistic evolutionists rather than Russia.
Deepak #24
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem:
@file thirteen
I wasn’t aware that sarcasm is a form of ad hominem , hmm?
But where is the substance in Dawkins assertions to argue ? He wants to say NOMA supporters are hypocrites by setting up a hypothetical and then ascribing actions to them! Where is the evidence for this? Where is the proof ?
How about if I said If God came down to earth tomorrow and provided irrefutable evidence that they are God , Dawkins and his supporters would still reject that evidence thereby showing that they have no commitment to evidence or the scientific method ! -- Here you can recognize the fallacy in the statements. I made up an unbelievable scenario , then I also ascribe behavior to Dawkins and then I used it to conclude that he is a hypocrite.
Funnily enough -- if I say -- Suppose you have a belief , Suppose then you find evidence that contradicts that belief -- what should one do ? But evidently if you are a NOMA supporter and you find something that will cause you to re-evaluate that belief its a problem!
And if you actually read what NOMA supporters have to say -- you’d probably find that the date time of Jesus’ birth or his DNA are not what what they believe is covered by religion -- they would agree that “facts” are covered by the science- so Dawkins example doesnt even make sense.
@Matt G #1:
The answer is as simple as it is unsatisfying: People have a starting position. No one gets to begin life with a blank slate. By the time you’re able to make your own decisions an enormous amount of things that will affect how you make them have already happened.
That’s the reason the big organized religions want to induct children into their faith so early. I had catholic schooling growing up so… I know the catholic church wants children to have their first communion around 7 or 8 years old. This is presented as a really big step into the faith. They have confirmation at around 11 or 12 years old. This one is supposed to be your lifelong commitment to the church. As you might imagine, this is very heavily stressed upon the child targets and it’s presented as a choice but there’s no meaningful offramp. It’s impossible to miss, especially as a child, that everyone is just supposed to go through this without question. Also, both first communion and confirmation are among the short list of sacraments the catholic church teaches.