Re: [asa] The Criticism Begins

From: Dave Wallace <wmdavid.wallace@gmail.com>
Date: Sun Jul 12 2009 - 16:41:47 EDT

From:
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/holy-post/archive/2009/07/12/a-scientist-who-believes-in-god.aspx

Not all the published opinion in the secular press is against Collins.  The author also deplores the science-religion warfare model! 

(Note for Burgy this newspaper denies global warming so their opinion is probably worthless or else they are paid hacks as you suggested earlier.)

By John G. Stackhouse, Jr.

Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, has been named by President Obama to head the National Institutes of Health. What makes this news is the breathtaking idea that someone could be both a scientist and a believer in God.

Like Isaac Newton. Or Johannes Kepler. Or Galileo Galilei. Or most of the other leaders of the Scientific Revolution. And a large number of scientists today.

This isn't news. What is news instead is the continuing ignorance of people who think that science and belief in God are incompatible. They are not.

Science is simply our best description to date of how we think the world normally functions according to the causes we can account for in the natural world. Science says nothing about whether a Supreme Being, or lots of spirits, or aliens, or angels, or anything else might be involved in that normal function nor perhaps interfere with it from time to time. To be sure, science might make belief in a Supreme Being, or lots of spirits, et cetera, problematic: Why believe in them when you can just believe in matter and energy in motion? But if you find that some things are not well explained merely in scientific terms -- such as altruism, or beauty, or morality, or love -- then you might well resort to beliefs that go beyond science.

That's why scientists have also been religious believers since . . . there was science. That's why Galileo never renounced his Christian faith, despite his difficulties with papal politics. That's why Darwin's theories were accepted by prominent Christians, whether Sir William Dawson at McGill or Asa Gray at Harvard--and now Francis Collins at the NIH.

We shouldn't be shocked that a believer -- even an evangelical Christian such as Collins! -- could be a real scientist. We should be shocked that we have bought into the "science versus religion" myth so fully that we can't understand how a scientist could be a religious believer also -- despite hundreds of years of Christians, Jews, and other theists practicing science.

The empirical evidence shows that lots and lots of people practice science and believe in God. It is unscientific to think otherwise.

Stackhouse teaches at Regent College and he is an advising editor at Christianity Today.
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