No direct evidence, other than his book and website. I think those are grounding enough for my suspicion.

I'm not qualified to judge Collins' science qualifications and someone ITT said Collins was no genius. I read somewhere that Collins IQ is exceptionally high so I think if he's not a genius he's certainly in the ballpark. Plus who'd put a science illiterate as Head of the Human Genome Project? People have been watching him and his science for a really long time and he did speed up the mapping of the human genome.

Sanctity of life is a much bigger topic than just "life begins at conception". That is primarily an abortion hot button issue. It will also be a focus of the stem cell but you also have other issues like personal identity, human identity, embryo ownership, cloning and all kinds of consent to usage issues and probably a lot more I haven't mentioned. Disposal issues, patenting, etc.



Collins on stem-cell:
http://blog.christianitytoday.com/wo...ent_obama.html

I wrote a long and fairly hurtfull post about how this appointment (and other such intrusions into scientific honesty such as teaching ID) is good, because it will diminish america's scientific importance (and stature) further and eventually end the brain drain. Then I deleted it.
I will now say only that if your democracy wants to stop researching stuff because of whatever, someone else will pick up the pace. Naming rights will pass to others.

edit: to be clear, my country's democracy has banned stem cell research to a significant degree aswell, so Im not going nanana, im just stating something I feel to be true.

Firefox has an app for this. I think its called lazarus, it automatically saves what you type into chat rooms or emails so you can retrieve it if you make a misclick or have a crash.


EDIT: Woops, misread. I thought you accidentally deleted it. Still a good app though

I don't really have a strong opinion on this. If I was an Obama adviser I would have lobbied for somebody else, as I doubt that this person is that uniquely qualified over other possible choices who have more reasonable positions on medical ethics issues. I am guessing he might have been purposely chosen for his religious views, as maybe this isn't that powerful of a position and it will appease bible thumpers.

Do you ever plan to move beyond suspicion and into informed judgment?

.

Of course. Which is why it's too important to be left to the whims of religion, and rightly belongs to ethics and philosophy, where rational discourse steers the discussion instead of "omg embryos have souls!"

I never called him illiterate, I said that the breadth of his scientific understanding is slightly less than I would hope for in a nominee for this position. There are a zillion Atheists I would say this about and it has nothing to do with religion. FWIW I would apply it to myself as well.

This is a sidetrack, but I'm glad you brought up abortion. Until the government stops funding abortion and makes it expressly illegal in all cases, there is no logical basis for not funding stem cell research.

Certainly but

These are simply "life starts at conception/fertilization" restated.

Legal issues are not an obstacle to funding research. They can be handled by the legal system, and until they are can be examined on a project-by-project basis.

Another restatement of "life starts at conception/fertilization." Outside of that context, there is no issue with disposal.

A trivial issue to be decided by the courts, having nothing to do with funding research, and certainly not unique to stem-cell research.

I don't think the U.S. Supreme Court will base the case law strictly on abortion. Every Supreme Court Justice will write a different opinion and reason to a different conclusion. Abortion will just be a part of some of the opinions.

There could be all kinds of new issues spinning off when you start utilizing embryos and cells. This might not be the single act of abortion with a single issue.

There won't be any case law. The issue isn't over whether stem cell research can be done legally (it already can be and is), it is whether it is worthwhile to direct NIH funds towards furthering it. This is a non-debate absent the religious belief that life begins at conception.

You have the privelege of thinking whatever you want.

But the future isn't fixed. A little time and new issues can and will arise they always do.

With regard to Collins? Nah, probably not.

Everyone makes decisions based on philosophical perspectives. That is not my problem with Collins. Letting his religious views influence his professional conduct is more than just making decisions based on a philosophical perspective. But I am more opposed to his specific philosophical perspective than anything.

Welcome to the ranks of the vocal ignorant. I'm done.

I highly doubt he's letting his religious views influence his professional conduct and where ethics and belief overlap is debatable in every person on the planet. We don't control this overlap. You could appoint an atheist to the postion and next week he could convert and be more evangelical than Collins will ever be.

You should have read The Language of God. Collins said Science Truth is Truth and Spiritual Truth is Truth and the 2 can't refute each other.

He seems to be in the non-overlapping magisteria camp:
Non-Overlapping Magisteria is the view advocated by Stephen Jay Gould that "science and religion do not glower at each other...[but] interdigitate in patterns of complex fingering, and at every fractal scale of self-similarity."[1] He suggests, with examples, that "NOMA enjoys strong and fully explicit support, even from the primary cultural stereotypes of hard-line traditionalism" and that it is "a sound position of general consensus, established by long struggle among people of goodwill in both magisteria."

I'm really surprised you don't see Collins as the balanced one in the middle.

Collins is really calling an end to the conflict between science and religion.

Its only the fanatics that try to silence the peacemakers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Overlapping_Magisteria

Being balanced and in the middle does not make one correct. Consider the following scenario. Person A approaches Person B on the street, and this is the first time the two have ever met.
That's fine if he's doing it in his capacity as a Christian or a philosopher, but if he's going to do it in his capacity as the steward of a huge chunk of the total scientific research funding it becomes a problem.

Not when the terms demanded by the peacemakers are unreasonable.

Well, not really. Non-overlapping magisteria implies that neither has anything to say about the other. This is the real problem here: Religion is very much in the N-O M. camp when it comes to scientists trying to apply science to religious beliefs. Then they turn around and want to impose those beliefs in the form of restrictions on science. You have no reason to expect anyone to allow a one-way street here. Do you want them to overlap or not?

This whole thread is pretty much irrelevant.

With the exception of me and possibly the OP not one person has demonstrated he is familiar with Collins' stance on anything.

The atheists just made him into a boogeyman instead of one of the pre-eminent scientists of the 20th and 21st century with the track record to prove it.

Surprise! You didn't seem to think so until you read some questions you can't think of an answer to. You were perfectly content to argue until you realized that there is no objective argument that science should answer to religion unless religion follows suit. Oops.

What? I would eat my hat if you could produce a more thorough and intelligible evaluation of Collins' contributions to science given 24 hours and free reign to plagiarize than I could in 2 hours with no references.

I also said he was qualified, that I have no problem with his appointment, and that if he leaves his religion at home/church when he is making scientific decisions at work he'll do fine.

Nope. I don't worry that much about asinine arguments.

I'm always more busy recoiling from the shock at the closed mindedness on here.

madnak hasn't read Collins. I think its safe to say from his perspective all theists should get out of science. That's a logical conclusion to draw about his position because according to his way of thinking theist scientists shouldn't be promoted to leadership positions and should have diminished careers. Even theists with outstandingly successful careers, abilities and credentials.

Newton, Mendel, Bacon, Pascal, Copernicus, Descartes, Kepler, Boyle, Kelvin, Planck, Polkinghorne, Gallileo etc. should have all stayed home and studied Latin.

do you realize that in several of the cases the religiosity of the above scientists inhibited their progress? several of them came to a wall of "god did it" and never got past it.

and no one said Collins shouldn't continue doing science, Claudius Galenius specifically said he is fine with him as a scientist as long as he separates his religion from his science.

The non-scientific conclusion that "God did whatever" is no less scientific than something like "memetics did whatever." All it says is that there's an overarching philosophical construct under which the scientific conclusions are understood and interpreted. These have no bearings on the actual data given by whatever investigation was being performed.

but memetics has predictive power. thinking about culture in terms of memetics is based on analysis of real events. there is a known mechanism for memetics, we see information passed on from generation to generation and we see it change over time. there is no well defined mechanism for "god did it". it is the difference between analytical philosophy and religious philosophy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_philosophy

I think the tide is changing. A new increasingly prominent area of science is the studies on spirituality, the gene and the brain. If people want to labor under grudges and boogeymen its not very helpful.

Newer fields are emerging now too though some are still so new they are pseudoscience much like I think evolution must have been in its early stages back in the late 1700s with Erasmus Darwin.

Epigenetics, morphic resonance, just to name a few of the new ideas being explored.

New and unusual ideas:
http://www.sheldrake.org/homepage.html

I may get around to watching this series:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closer_to_Truth

(It has links to videos on Cosmos, Consciousness, Science, Meaning and the Future). (I'm linking it just for ease of finding it later.)

You're going to have to elaborate further, because being "based on analysis of real events" has nothing to say about "predictive power."

How do you define a "mechanism"? I find it odd that you're calling this a "mechanism" when it seems that all you're really saying is that the "information is sometimes passed along, but sometimes it's not passed along."

There is no clear "God" mechanism under the viewpoint that you have. But to a theist, the "God mechanism" (if I can call it that) is the mechanism that causes all the other mechanisms.

Under a purely mechanistic understanding of the universe, there can be no observed "God." In fact, there can be no independent agent at all. The observation that "I did it" is reducible to static laws. Something that falls outside the realm of those static laws (if there were a God who interacts in the universe in a way that he is not subject to the physical laws), it is assumed that there is some other physical law that encompasses the observation.

Furthermore, if God does interact in some absolutely consistent way with the universe, such as gravity, then there will just be some label slapped on the type of interaction, and then the mechanistic understanding negates "God" as having any role simply because they put a different label on it.

So I don't really think that the mechanistic understanding of the universe is robust enough to even consider "God."