A number of people have suggested I
was unfair to Sam Harris in criticizing his attack on Frances Collins.  Below I reprint his column from the
NYT, inserting at key points comments showing I am very far from being unfair.  Towards the end we get into issues more interesting than that, issues growing out of Harris’s attack on Collins.

Harris writes:

PRESIDENT OBAMA has nominated
Francis Collins to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health.
It would seem a brilliant choice. Dr. Collins’s credentials are impeccable: he
is a physical chemist, a medical geneticist and the former head of the Human
Genome Project. He is also, by his own account, living proof that there is no
conflict between science and religion. In 2006, he published “The Language of
God,” in which he claimed to demonstrate “a consistent and profoundly
satisfying harmony” between 21st-century science and evangelical Christianity.

Dr. Collins is regularly praised by
secular scientists for what he is not: he is not a “young earth creationist,”
nor is he a proponent of “intelligent design.” Given the state of the evidence
for evolution, these are both very good things for a scientist not to be.

Harris uses a stealth debating
point here to undermine Collins. 
He grants Collins is not an idiot. 
But . . .

But as director of the institutes, Dr.
Collins will have more responsibility for biomedical and health-related
research than any person on earth, controlling an annual budget of more than
$30 billion. He will also be one of the foremost representatives of science in
the United States. For this reason, it is important that we understand Dr.
Collins and his faith as they relate to scientific inquiry.

What follows are a series of slides,
presented in order, from a lecture on science and belief that Dr. Collins gave
at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008:

I will assume Harris is being
accurate regarding the content of the slides.  He is not George Will or Bill Kristol.  In my view Harris’s sins are not those
of dishonesty and manipulation, but of overweening self-righteousness.

Slide 1: “Almighty God, who is not
limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its
parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long
periods of time.”

This may or may not be true, but
since it deals with the origin of things, is of little relevance to
investigating what happened afterwards, as Collins’ own work demonstrates.

Slide 2: “God’s plan included the
mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on
our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.”

Perhaps Harris has the
totalitarian notion that not only must we agree with the physical evidence –
evolution – but we must agree with interpretations of the evidence that
empirical findings have so far been unable to shed any light on
whatsoever.  If so this is a
disturbing comment on Harris, not Collins.  Christianity has strong totalitarian strains, though Collins appears free from them.  Atheism apparently does as well.

Slide 3: “After evolution had
prepared a sufficiently advanced ‘house’ (the human brain), God gifted humanity
with the knowledge of good and evil (the moral law), with free will, and with
an immortal soul.”

Free will and immortal soul are
things science has no way of studying.   It is unclear how even to describe a free will.  If it cannot be formulated in a testable
proposition, it is not amenable to scientific investigation.  SO LONG AS this is not used to suppress
scientific investigation it is difficult to see why it matters.  

Is there a moral law? Harris
would seem to think not.  I do –
but do not need a Christian God to find it.  Even Robert Axelrod’s study of the iterated prisoners
dilemma and computer strategies to win it can be used to argue for a moral
law.  See his The Evolution of
Cooperation.

 Again, a red herring.

Slide 4: “We humans used our free
will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For
Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.”

Hard to see how this bears on
research – unless Harris demands fealty to his views on things other than
science – which he pretty obviously does.

Slide 5: “If the moral law is just a
side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all
an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong
atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?

A rhetorical point on Collins’
part.  I do not see for a minute
how it is relevant to his work as a scientist – beyond perhaps making him a
more ethical scientist.  I like
that idea.

Why should Dr. Collins’s beliefs be
of concern?

There is an epidemic of scientific
ignorance in the United States. This isn’t surprising, as very few scientific
truths are self-evident, and many are counterintuitive. It is by no means
obvious that empty space has structure or that we share a common ancestor with
both the housefly and the banana. It can be difficult to think like a
scientist. But few things make thinking like a scientist more difficult than
religion.

Collins would apparently agree
with all these statements – so why is Harris making them except to suggest that
naming Collins to this position somehow leads to undermining these
propositions.  On could as easily argue that naming a believing Christian to this post,
one who agrees with these propositions, helps undermine the authority of those
who argue that these tenets of modern science must be rejected to preserve
one’s Christian faith.  The entire paragraph
is either irrelevant or misleading. 

Dr. Collins has written that science
makes belief in God “intensely plausible” — the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of
nature’s constants, the emergence of complex life, the effectiveness of
mathematics, all suggest the existence of a “loving, logical and consistent”
God.

But when challenged with alternative
accounts of these phenomena — or with evidence that suggests that God might be
unloving, illogical, inconsistent or, indeed, absent — Dr. Collins will say
that God stands outside of Nature, and thus science cannot address the question
of his existence at all.

These statements are NOT in
conflict or tension.  God is
“immensely plausible” but science can neither prove nor disprove the
issue.  So?

Similarly, Dr. Collins insists that
our moral intuitions attest to God’s existence, to his perfectly moral
character and to his desire to have fellowship with every member of our
species. But when our moral intuitions recoil at the casual destruction of
innocents by, say, a tidal wave or earthquake, Dr. Collins assures us that our
time-bound notions of good and evil can’t be trusted and that God’s will is a
mystery.

Even if he does believe this, the
two propositions are not contradictory. 
Judging from what Collins is described as saying, the universe had to
evolve to a certain point to be ready for human souls.  This involved the working out of
scientific laws and principles that were themselves NOT indicative of these
souls.  From a Pagan perspective
I’ve discussed this at length in Pagans and Christians 
as well as my book of dialogue with an evanglical Christian, Beyond the Burning Times. 
  To be very brief, if as
Collins says, God sets certain processes in motion that will in time generate
bodies able to hold souls, these processes will not be moral in the way a soul
can be.  Since the bodies that hold
souls will continue to depend on these processes to live, they will be subject
to these phenomena, sometimes to their regret.  Does God make it better in the end?  Science cannot say. 

Most scientists who study the human
mind are convinced that minds are the products of brains, and brains are the
products of evolution. Dr. Collins takes a different approach: he insists that
at some moment in the development of our species God inserted crucial
components — including an immortal soul, free will, the moral law, spiritual
hunger, genuine altruism, etc.

I disagree with Collins, but so
what?  I also disagree with
Harris.  In so far as we study
physical reality these beliefs of Collins, Harris, and myself are irrelevant beyond
the point at which they might suggest hypotheses that can be scientifically
investigated and our willingness to respect the results of those tests.  But while Harris
seems to under play the fact, science has always consisted of people who
disagree with one another but have a broad agreement as to the standards that a
scientific proposition should meet. 
Harris by contrast seem to think it’s nothing but a count pf heads
(“Most scientists…”)  Heads count-
but it’s a lot more complex than that.

What made science in the modern
sense possible was the development of standards for testing claims about the
physical world that people could agree with despite differing beliefs about
religious matters.  It has always
worked that way.

As someone who believes that our
understanding of human nature can be derived from neuroscience, psychology,
cognitive science and behavioral economics, among others, I am troubled by Dr.
Collins’s line of thinking. I also believe it would seriously undercut fields
like neuroscience and our growing understanding of the human mind. If we must
look to religion to explain our moral sense, what should we make of the
deficits of moral reasoning associated with conditions like frontal lobe
syndrome and psychopathy? Are these disorders best addressed by theology?

Actually Collins effectively
answered this point earlier in Harris’s attack, if Harris would only try to
understand him.  Collins said the brain
was necessary.  Defects in the
brain would obviously account for some problems.  It is not clear where to draw the line between physical problems with the brain and spiritual problems with the soul.  So long as they cannot then scientific investigation is appropriate from Collins’ perspective. 

I believe what really is going on here is that Harris is trying to
eliminate alternative approaches to a HYPOTHESIS he “believes” in that purely
physical explanations can account for understanding human nature.

His is a hypothesis with
difficulties because consciousness (awareness) is NOT physical, it is mental.  Our definition of what is physical includes it being able to be measured.  
Awareness can not be measured, but we can find physical phenomena that
correlate with awareness, and changes in physical conditions that correlate
with reported changes in awareness. 
(Think of the old high scjhool brain teaser of being asked to prove that others are conscious.) 

Awareness is subjective, but it manifests in the world. 
Several possibilities exist along with Collins and Harris’s.  Another is that matter/energy is itself
conscious in some sense, and that consciousness in the human sense is an
emergent quality implicit in matter because all matter has interiority. 

I will happily grant I have no
very firm idea what the truth may be and am annoyed with those who claim they know.

Dr. Collins has written that
“science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence”
and that “the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted.”

Seems sort of a mirror to Harris.  Substitute “religion” for “science” and “Christianity” for “atheistic materialism” and see what you find…

The issue of course is not
what Collins (or Harris for that matter) believes but does it cause him to falsify his data or suppress
inconvenient findings.  The
evidence is that in Collins’ case it has not. 
Harris is unable to mention even one example.  But then, by taking his religion seriously, Collins is
guilty by definition.

One can only hope that these
convictions will not affect his judgment at the institutes of health. After
all, understanding human well-being at the level of the brain might very well
offer some “answers to the most pressing questions of human existence” —
questions like, Why do we suffer? Or, indeed, is it possible to love one’s
neighbor as oneself? And wouldn’t any effort to explain human nature without
reference to a soul, and to explain morality without reference to God,
necessarily constitute “atheistic materialism”?

Let me go very slowly here.  Collins said: Once the brain (a physical
thing arrived at through evolution) was ready for it, a soul was inserted.  Souls can not be measured or otherwise
detected scientifically.  If they
exist, they operate through the brain, and at this point there can be no
contradiction between Harris – who would argue only brain structures matter,
and Collins, who would argue the soul operating through brain structures that
make human beings possible, matter. 
They are arguing about the existence of something to which science has
no way of studying because if it exists it is not measureable or predictable or
able to be experimented upon.

Given the logic of Harris’s
argument, there would only be a problem if Collins said that the soul altered
physical reality in some way by violating known laws of matter.  If it can operate through physical
reality only be obeying laws of matter, then there is no problem between them, because it can only be investigated that way.  I happen to think the issues are more
complex, but between Collins and Harris there really does not seem to be a
problem.

Francis Collins is an accomplished
scientist and a man who is sincere in his beliefs. And that is precisely what
makes me so uncomfortable about his nomination. Must we really entrust the
future of biomedical research in the United States to a man who sincerely
believes that a scientific understanding of human nature is impossible?