i'm trying my hardest to resist to the trap.

What does this have to do with a literal interpretation of the book of Revelation?

Generic reading on the topic.

David Bebbington's definition is probably the most widely used:

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My main point is that if all you do is caricature the opposing side, then your argument is weak. The particulars in this discussion are with regard to a specific person, not about generic terms. Asserting things about Francis Collins' specific beliefs about the book of Revelation from a position of ignorance is intellectually disingenuous.

The jesus storyline includes the second coming and last judgment stuff. I am astonished that you're arguing it's a caricature when this is what most christians, let alone evangelicals, actually believe and is one the core tenets of their theology. You're the one who's semi-insulting them by making this claim.

As long as he takes his name of that website, I'm content to wait and see how he does. His grasp of science as a whole is somewhat less than I'd hope for someone nominated for this position, but as long as he leaves his religion at home and appropriates grants in a non-biased fashion I have no serious problem with him. I do think it's ridiculous that his particular belief is the single superstitious belief someone in his position could hold to with such zeal and still be considered acceptable for this job.

A "second coming of Christ" is not the same as a the book of Revelation being a "future prophecy intended to be interpreted as a literal seqeuence of events."

Study your theology first, then we'll talk.

The second coming isn't connected to the end of days?

It is, but it's not necessarily connected as a literal interpretation of the book of the Revelation.

Uh, you don't understand Collins' position on the Human Genome Project. Very few would consider him a top scientific genius, and he certainly didn't "put science in the driver's seat." He has a strong record, that's true, and his ability to manage projects seems to be excellent. But as PZ Myers indicated, this is not just a bureaucratic position and no matter how good he is as a bureaucrat, I don't like him there.

I wouldn't want Dawkins there either, incidentally, even if he were a US citizen.

Heh, I read your nitting. Okay, you're right, "literal" was a poor choice of words. I guess "inerrant" is more accurate, I certainly don't think he believes a literal beast is going to literally rise from the sea or anything. I think it is safe to assume that he believes this world is going to end, there is going to be a Rapture, and so on. In other words, he believes the future of mankind ends in a brick wall, so he can hardly be trusted to put the future of mankind on a solid trajectory for the next hundred, thousand, million years.

It's much more dangerous when someone decides based on arbitrary personal prejudices that an action capable of healing many while harming none is "wrong" and has to be stopped at any cost.

But this is all irrelevant. One job of the head of the NIH is to promote scientific progress in medicine. That you happen to think scientific progress is evil is beside the point. It is a dirty tactic to head an organization dedicated to that progress if you think such progress is evil - Collins can lobby against medical research if he's opposed to innovation. He should not be trying to head the NIH.

You didn't answer my question.

Have you read The Language of God?

It is a cruel state of affairs. If God chose this state of affairs, then God's choices are cruel. If this state of affairs exists as a direct result of God's nature, then God's nature (or at least part of God's nature) is cruel. I consider the latter to be even more terrible than the former. The cruelty doesn't go away just because you make it "part of God," on the contrary.

Remember, I consider your conception of free will to be nonsensical. That should make it clear why it being "God's fault" is most intuitive to me. But there are indications that God anticipated the fall. And again, putting a couple of people in a garden with a big tree and saying "don't eat the fruit from that tree" has kind of predictable results in general. Especially if you also let a talking snake into the garden, y'know?

So when the Bible talks of God putting the righteous on his right hand and the sinners on his left? Separating the sheep from the goats?

Okay, so a person's choices make them impossible to save, and it comes back to the free will thing again.

Well, you think that some people have made choices such that it is impossible for them to get in. You may not want to name specific people, but I think that is largely a cop-out. I mean, some of these hopeless people will probably be people you have met. We might as well assume I'm one of them. So why isn't God, at the least, merciful enough to give me the choice to end things now? Why do I have to keep pushing through, under the false belief that there is no God?

Nope.

Here's one of the way Collins helped advance science.

He was looking for the CF gene (cystic fibrosis gene). At the time trying to locate it was as he states like "looking for a single burned out light bulb in the basement of a house somewhere in the United States."

He explains later that he and his team invented a method called "chromosome jumping" which allowed them to move across a 2 million base pair target in pogo stick leaps rather than crawling along in the traditional way. That helped by enabling the house to house searches to be initiated in multiple locations at once. But a lot of people in the scientific community still thought his pogo approach wouldn't work. In 1989 Collins finally received the data from lab work confirming that they could actually find the burned out light bulb by progressively narrowing the chromosomal position. (It took 10 years, more than 2 dozen teams and more than 50 million dollars to locate this one gene and its one of the easier ones to locate.)

But we are now talking about two different things. You are mixing in the state of the world while I was talking purely about the state of natural consequences. Two very different subjects. I never said the world the way that it is has to be this way.

And once again our conversation cannot go much further because of our worldview gap here. I do not agree though that putting a choice in front of Adam and Eve is predicting that they will choose wrong.

There are things that can be said about these passages. But honestly I am not sure yet if my view can be supported in the bible. I currently believe that it is, but I have not studied it enough to say that I am right or wrong on this subject.

I don't see how this is a cop-out, but ok. What do you mean by end things now? Also, keep in mind that God's goal is not to have you aware of his existence, but be in a loving relationship with you.

I would say the world is the way it is because of natural consequences, and the consequences you're describing (a necessity of miserable life followed by destruction?) are also cruel in themselves.

You put candy in front of a child, say "don't eat the candy," and then leave the kid unsupervised with the candy, 9 times out of 10 you're going to come back to no candy. Would you blame the child for that?

Fair enough.

Destroy me now. It is excessive to make me live out the rest of my life if I'm going to be destroyed anyhow.

So it bothers you that if people choose to do bad things, that bad things will happen to them? And that there is a cosmic accountability?

??? He's not being nominated for the position of future overlord of humanity.

Do you have anything besides baseless accusations?

Yes. And it bothers me that people do not even know which things are "bad things" in the first place, but are subjected to the consequences anyhow.

One of the things I don't understand is how you can claim to love and forgive your enemies while still wanting bad things to happen to them (this is assuming they have already done bad things). If you love and forgive your enemies, then doesn't it go without saying that you are unhappy when bad things happen to them? And if they have already done bad things, then doesn't the principle that "if people choose to do bad things, bad things will happen to them" imply that bad things will happen to them? And thus, doesn't it follow that you are unhappy (at least in this case) because of that principle? How can you follow the dictate to love and forgive your enemies if it doesn't bother you that bad choices lead to bad consequences? Maybe you could argue that the alternatives bother you even more, but I don't even claim to love my enemies and it bothers me for anyone to have horrible things happen to them.

One of the things that I think when I hear of a real tragedy is "no one deserves that." And boy, do I mean it. I only want to hurt people when they are a threat, I have no desire to see someone who is not a threat hurt. I might have that desire if someone seriously wrongs me, but that feeling is cold and tight like the delusional rages I once had. It feels decidedly wrong to me, and I do not trust it to tell me what is desirable and what isn't.

Anyhow. What bothers me at a metaphysical level about your beliefs is that people can choose to do bad things in the first place, and that this is a good thing. You say that to truly love someone, a person needs to have free will. I see no reason for that restriction - it may sound innocent enough in theory, but we can see the consequences. And it is a restriction - you are saying that a necessary condition for true love is the ability to do bad things - why make that a necessary condition for love? Why restrict love so much? Why give it gravity only when it is paired with grief? If God's nature were to allow love without grief, then there would be love without grief. But God's nature is not so gracious, apparently. Call it "inexplicable" if you like, it still turns my stomach. If I were standing in heaven, I can't imagine that I wouldn't be deeply disturbed at how many failed to make it. If even one person had been destroyed, I would brood over that one person, and a whole existence that was hate and decay and that ended in a blink.

It doesn't bother me nearly as much if people do bad things just because that's how it turned out. It's not great, but it's not like somebody actually made it this way. There's no architecture to it. And that means it can likely be overcome. Not especially hopeful, no. Not as appealing a reality as having a perfect protector. But there is some peace of mind in not having to hold two such contradictory ideas at once.

No, but he can play a big role in the future of humanity. We are living in a time of constant change and at the brink of the explosion of technology that will define our future for the rest of human existence. Medical technology is a major component of that, and the NIH is one of the primary sources of medical research on this planet.

Baseless? He's against creating human stem cells. That's a critical avenue of research that he has already stymied.

But Collins reconciles some of the research too.

Here's what an evangelical group is saying:


Evangelical Francis Collins Named to Head NIH
Tiffany Stanley
Religion News Service

July 10, 2009

WASHINGTON (RNS) -- Francis Collins, the researcher who mapped the human genome and navigated clashes between his Christian faith and science, has been chosen to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Calling Collins "one of the top scientists in the world," President Obama announced his nomination on Wednesday (July 8), one day after the NIH released new stem cell research guidelines that angered many conservative Christians.

Though Collins, a self-described evangelical, will head the nation's primary scientific research agency, the avid supporter of stem cell research seems unlikely to allay the fears fellow evangelicals have over embryonic stem cell research.

"Francis is a great person, a good scientist, but we disagree with his positions on human embryonic stem cell research and on cloning human embryos for experimentation," said David Prentice, senior fellow at the conservative Family Research Council.

Prentice's office, along with the National Association of Evangelicals, Concerned Women for America and other Christian advocacy groups, favor adult stem cell research, but oppose embryonic research because they believe the process destroys nascent forms of human life.

Collins reconciles the research through a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer, which creates an embryo artificially, but is also the first step in cloning.

"Now that is very different in my mind, morally, than the union of sperm and egg," he explained in an interview with Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly. "We do not, in nature, see somatic cell nuclear transfer occurring. This is a purely man-made event."
An atheist who converted to Christianity in his 20s, Collins regularly pushes Christians to reconcile their beliefs with scientific theories such as evolution. He recently launched the BioLogos Foundation, which "emphasizes the compatibility of Christian faith with scientific discoveries."

Collins sees his faith and research informing one another, evident in the speech he gave when former President Clinton announced the first draft of the human genetic blueprint.

"It is humbling for me and awe-inspiring to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God," Collins said at a White House press conference in 2000.

Collins, who publicly endorsed Obama during his campaign, worked at NIH when he directed the National Human Genome Research Institute from 1993 until 2008. In 2006, Collins authored the New York Times-bestselling "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief."


http://www.crosswalk.com/news/religiontoday/11605811/

Where, there you have it. I don't think the head of a major scientific organization should be "navigating" clashes between faith and science. I think the head of a major scientific organization should be stolidly on the side of science.

There are plenty of people who have no higher authority than the knowledge arrived at through scientific inquiry, and no greater passion than furthering that knowledge to the benefit of all. That Collins puts his religious faith about his respect for science is a problem.

Who was it that said "no one can serve two masters?" I'm having trouble remembering...

Except that you forgot a few things like: ethics, politics and public opinion.

He's possibly the only person at the axis of all three forces that will try to maintain objectivity.

Francis Collins is much closer to the Dalai Lama in his approach to science and religion than he is to an abortion clinic bomber. I don't know why you want to paint him with the tar brush.

He's probably pretty close to a Gallileo.

He may be the next step in the evolution bridging science and religion. Controversy doesn't do much except delay the steps.

This statement is laughable. The idealization of the scientist shows a misunderstanding of what goes on.

Scientific inquiry does not drive ethical standards. Ethics does not fall under scientific authority, so you have no basis on which to reject someone who is a qualified scientist but an unqualified person to be in a position of power and authority.

And regardless of who is in the driver's seat, he (or she) is going to come in with a certain set of ethics that will drive how he operates. This affects things much more than his view of "scientific authority."

If someone who is nominated would truly undermine the scientific endeavor, then the blame goes to the one who nominated him.

I would not agree that this ever happens. I think that people do know when they are doing wrong, and that there is not this level of ignorance that you claim. Maybe on a very small level, but even that I would say is debatable.

It has nothing to do with want. To understand and to desire are two different things. The world makes sense to me with a level of accountability. That does not mean that I want bad things to happen to people. I wish that everyone would just make the right choice in the first place.

I see no way around it.

Once again you insert this this arbitrary choice theory. It is not that God could choose to make love a different way, but that love only works one way, otherwise it would not be love. I think that it is nonsensical to say that God chose his attributes and that he could have chosen differently. As if God could have chosen not to be God, or to be a different God then he is.

Love can exist without grief. Unfortunately that is not the way things turned out. Free will does not cause grief. The agent creates grief.

Ethics is a separate question. Not an unimportant one, but a separate one. The scientific endeavor necessitates that a person accept the results of scientific inquiry and scientific experiment as accurate. Someone whose basis for determining accuracy is whether a hypothesis is consistent with the Bible cannot possibly behave as a responsible scientist if the scientific data contradict the Bible.