Big Think

I think it would diminish the hostilities, which are bad for our culture if more scientists were, in fact, willing to stand up and say that faith and science need not be in conflict because right now that’s a minority view that doesn’t get heard very much and it’s apparent to some people that we are having more of a cultural war – a war that seems to imply that some worldview needs to win and some world view needs to lose.

I would not want to look forward to a culture where science lost and religious faith became the dominating force for truth. I would not want to live in a culture where faith lost and science, with all of its reductionism and its materialism became the sole source of truth.

I think we need both kinds of truth. I think we need both kinds of world views to the extent that scientists can help with that realization of dual ways of finding answers to the appropriate kinds of questions that each world view can ask, then I think that would be a good thing.

Francis Sellers Collins is an American physician-geneticist noted for his leadership of the Human Genome Project (HGP). He currently serves as Director of the National Institutes of Health. He has been elected to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. He has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science and has written a number of books on science, medicine, and spirituality, including the New York Times bestseller, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

In other words, this guy is the absolute defining antithesis of the term, “Idiot…”

But, the most interesting part of the write up is not so much his words — it’s the comments below.

I can just imagine Dr. Collins sitting there as he wrote the above thinking, “You know, what I need is the perfect foil to show how true my words are. I need someone who can ignore the validity of the ontological, epistemological, axiological, methodological and the rhetorical elements of science and knowledge. Someone who is so rabidly hostile to religion, loaded with contempt for even the social sciences and blindly sold out to the idea that science knows everything that he or she will spew venoms like the most crazed Imam or right-wing Evangelical fundamentalist. Someone who will never be able to grasp how well the spittle running down his or her chin is proving my point. Yep, I need an atheist Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory sitcom — too bad he is just a character…”

Or, not… 🙂

(Apparently, he has two handles, “Common Sense,” and, “Mike.”)