President Obama's choice in 2009 to name [Francis] Collins, a born again Christian, as head of the NIH was derided by atheist bloggers. In a [2010] New Yorker feature, PZ Myers is quoted as calling Collins a "clown."  And Jerry Coyne tells staff writer Peter Boyer that he worries Collins' faith might lead him to restrict stem cell research.

Yet Myers and Coyne appear blind to several realities.  The first is that Collins is one of the best qualified scientists in the world for the position, with extraordinary talent and experience in public communication, government administration, and in working with a diversity of stakeholders. —Bigthink

Why Is It So Hard to Believe that Many Leading Scientists are Religious?

A small minority isn't "many", but Collins deserves credit for not letting his superstitions completely blind him to facts.

Given the number of religious people on the planet one would expect that scientists, being human beings who most likely grew up in religious cultures, would also have a minority who are religious.

The topical question poses a seeming non-problem.

To me the more interesting question is how could someone (clearly intelligent and well educated) like Dr. Nathaniel T. Jeanson actually believe the Young Earth Creationist nonsense of a 10,000 year Earth, worldwide flood, etc.?    ( Here is Dr. Jeanson illustrating nonsense ... letting the man speak for himself.  )

The appeal of religion can blind even the most intelligent individuals.    Dr. Collins views, by the way, harshly contradict Dr. Jeanson's.    It would be interesting to know what Dr. Collins honestly thinks of guys like Dr. Jeanson.    Hard to imagine Dr. Collins would find Dr. Jeanson's bibilical literalism to be anything short of nonsense.   

OMG.    One way or the other we'll make all that sciency stuff fit into this Bronze-age superstition.

Is that not amazing?   This guy graduated summa cum laude from the University of Wisconsin and holds a PhD from Harvard.   Obviously he has the intelligence to realize how profoundly his beliefs clash with well-established science.   Yet here he is speaking as if he learned biology from a Southern Baptist parochial high school.

This, to me, is an interesting example worthy of study.   It illustrates how effectively religious indoctrination can suppress critical thinking.   The YECs are a great example because many (probably most) Christians find their beliefs to be nonsensical.   So it is not a case of 'heathen atheists' looking down on religious people but rather fellow Christians wondering what on Earth is going on in their heads.

To wit ... the existence of scientists who are Christian is nothing special.  But those 'scientists' whose Christian views cause them to contradict well-founded science is special (and troubling).

This guy graduated summa cum laude from the University of Wisconsin

That's kind of personally embarrassing for me.

He is a smart guy.  He got his PhD from Harvard.  His problem is not a lack of intelligence.   It is not the fault of the university if someone goes off framing science through the Bible.

Why do you think this is hard for people to accept?   PEW estimated that about 1/3 of scientists have a belief in a God of some kind.   Given the vast majority of human beings on the planet believe in a God it is not at all surprising that a minority of even scientists hold such beliefs.

What would be surprising is if there were a large number of scientists who reject scientific findings because of a clash with their faith.   They certainly exist but best I can tell they are a tiny minority.   

Why do you think this is hard for people to accept?

there seems to be some kind of "battle" going on between "non-believers vs believers" in the minds of some of the posters on NT - thusly articles like this.

It's nowhere near surprising and easily accepted that some scientists have a belief in a God of some kind - i'm not sure why anyone would suggest otherwise since scientists are humans as well and subjected to the same indoctrination as everyone else.

there seems to be some kind of "battle" going on between "non-believers vs believers" in the minds of some of the posters on NT

With some believers often playing the victim or persecution card  when their beliefs or claims are challenged by non-believers.

Yeah, people seem to jump to the extremes.   For example insisting that atheists claim there is no God rather than comprehend that atheism is lack of belief, not certainty that no god exists.

How does the fact that some scientists believe in a god make a difference?    If they have evidence of a god that would be something, but mere belief means nothing.

For example insisting that atheists claim there is no God

Or that atheists believe there is no god.

How does the fact that some scientists believe in a god make a difference?

It doesn't and it shouldn't. At least, as you pointed out, not until they reject actual science in favor of their belief.

If they have evidence of a god that would be something, but mere belief means nothing.

Indeed.

This only proves that religious indoctrination is hard to let go of.

If asked to state their religion only a small percentage of People state, "None". Culturally, at least, nearly everyone self identifies with the "Faith of their fathers". Some do break from their cultural faith and certainly many change denominations among the thousands of different Christian sects. Then, of course, the Muslims are divided into Sunni and Shiite which are further divided into innumerable tribal and national groups. The Jews are divided into orthodox, reform and countless other schools of thought and degrees of adherence. My point is that just about everyone self identifies as at least a cultural member of some religious or spiritual group and that is only considering those faiths descended from Olde Father Abraham. Considering Buddhists and Hindus and Shintos and Zoroastrians and Scientologists and every other religious designation it should come as no surprise that lots of scientists names can be found among the rolls of some organized religion. BUTT, just how many scientists are fundamentalists? What percent of scientists believed the world is less than 10,000 years olde? How many reject evolution in favor of creationism? How many deny climate science? How many believe the frigging world is frigging flat? Not very damn many...

My father was a scientist, a biblical scholar and a man of great faith and yet he took great umbrage with fundamentalist know nothings who believed the bible, or any other ancient text including the King Jame Bible were writ by the inspired hand of God. He considered a "Literal Interpretation" of the Bible to be the least knowledgeable most ignorant least informed load of crap ever sold to a gullible public. Even the Catholic Church eventually reconciled itself to modern science. Small c christian evangelical fundamentalists are plainly trying to force their particularly and recently politically popular brand christianity into all of our laws and into our government. Everyone with a brain large enough to comprehend the wisdom of our founders giving us freedom of conscience, no matter what our faith identity, should universally oppose this with all of our hearts and all of our souls and all of our might. If you give on wit about this world do not buy what the fundies are selling. Reject fundamentalism of all stripes. Nothing good will ever come of it...

Well said.     

It could use another edit. No matter I always miss stuff. Still, passion counts...

A nation founded in The Enlightenment is being dragged backwards by fundies.

A nation founded in The Enlightenment is being dragged backwards by fundies.

This is true. They seem afraid of progress or change to the status quo.

Yet something on the order of 87% of inmates in jail identify as Christian, so what do we extrapolate from that.

Yet something on the order of 87% of inmates in jail identify as Christian, so what do we extrapolate from that.

But wait, aren't Christians supposed to be morally superior than the rest of us heathens? >sarc<

And only 6% of scientists identify as being Christian.

[Dr. Francis] Collins doesn’t recall ever seeing a Bible among the books in his parents’ house, and the only time they sent him to church it was for the choir music, and with the admonition “You should be respectful of what they’re doing, even if the stuff they’re talking about doesn’t make a lot of sense.” He was an agnostic when he went off to the University of Virginia, and by the time he was studying physical chemistry as a graduate student, at Yale, he’d become what he calls a “fundamentalist” atheist—the sort of non-believer who would share his dining table with a believer, just for the chance to expose the folly of faith. “I was fairly obnoxious about it,” he says.

Collins’s academic career was a sprint. He published his first research paper while still an undergraduate at Virginia. The summer after his junior year, he married Mary Lynn Harman, a struggling math student he’d tutored in high school, and they soon had two children. (They have since divorced, and Collins has remarried.) Collins was breezing through a doctoral program in theoretical chemical physics at Yale when he realized that a professor’s life in that field was not at all what he wanted. He decided instead to become a physician, and enrolled at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.

Collins loved medical school, but he worked impossible hours; on weekends he was finishing his physics dissertation. He and Mary Lynn moved to a small working-class town called Carrboro, at the edge of Chapel Hill, and she began to attend services at a little Methodist tabernacle. Eventually, her faith caught fire. She hoped that Francis would try the church, too, but he emphatically declined, telling her he didn’t wish to hear any more “about this Jesus junk.”

Collins had been feeling a nagging of a different sort. As a physician in training, he frequently found himself at the bedside of desperately ill patients, many of whom displayed a surprising equanimity and were only too happy to tell him why. He heard countless stories of faith, mostly of the Protestant Christian variety predominant in the South, and he noted the power of a psychological crutch, firmly held. One day, an elderly woman suffering from untreatable acute angina asked Collins what he believed.

He had nothing to say, which slightly embarrassed him; he was more bothered by the realization that he didn’t know why he didn’t believe. He decided that the question of whether God existed was an important one, and undertook to affirm his atheism. He spent two years reading C. S. Lewis and other explorations of reason and faith, and eventually called Mary Lynn’s pastor, the Reverend Sam McMillan.

McMillan recalls, “He said, ‘Please don’t be offended, but I’d have to get a lobotomy to go to your church.’ ” McMillan played golf, and Collins met him at the course for a round. Collins assailed the young pastor with questions.

“I’d be just about to putt a key putt, and he’d say, ‘You don’t believe in the Virgin Mary, do you?’ ” McMillan says. “By the eighteenth hole, I knew we were doing more than playing golf. And somehow I was prompted to seize the moment. It was the Holy Spirit inspiration. I grabbed the scorecard and wrote down, ‘When God knocks on my door, in a way that I—not my wife or pastor, but I—know that it’s God who’s knocking on my door, I will then accept Jesus Christ.’ I gave it to him. And he signed it.” (McMillan, who runs a Christian retreat in Boone, North Carolina, still uses that ploy with potential converts; he calls it the Francis Collins Covenant.) McMillan did not hear from Collins for several months. Then Collins called him while hiking in the Cascades, and showed up at church the next Sunday, saying he wanted to share his testimony. He told the congregation that during his trip he turned a corner and saw a frozen waterfall, perfectly formed into three separate parts. He took it as a revelation of Trinitarian truth, the sign that he’d contracted for on Sam McMillan’s golf card. The next morning, he vowed to devote his life to the Christian faith.

newyorker

Then Collins called him while hiking in the Cascades, and showed up at church the next Sunday, saying he wanted to share his testimony. He told the congregation that during his trip he turned a corner and saw a frozen waterfall, perfectly formed into three separate parts. He took it as a revelation of Trinitarian truth, the sign that he’d contracted for on Sam McMillan’s golf card. The next morning, he vowed to devote his life to the Christian faith.

I have a very hard time buying this.   A frozen waterfall flipped a switch and turned Dr. Collins from an atheist to a Christian??    There must be much more to this story.

How is this not against the CoC?

How is this not against the CoC?

i'm not stating it should be against the CoC - but it seems a little fuzzy when it comes to religion, and it's not something that can be braced without many of the religious minded (conservative and liberal) whining that they are being "attacked" etc and playing the "victim card" again. We already have at least one poster who plays the "victim card" almost daily with their seeds and corresponding comments - we don't need a ton more screaming "religious persecution". 

How is this not against the CoC?

Because Calbab properly puts his stuff in the "Religion & Ethics" category where it belongs.     The other member who constantly seeds superstitious nuttery deliberately does not do that.

* Last summer, 2009, some of the world’s preëminent scientists were in Cambridge, England, celebrating the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the publication of “On the Origin of Species,” when word arrived from Washington that Obama had chosen Collins to run the N.I.H. “A lot of those New Atheists were in attendance, and they were incredibly alarmed,” Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate, who was Bill Clinton’s director of the N.I.H., says. Varmus, who now runs the National Cancer Institute, is an old friend of Francis Collins’s, and was his boss during the Human Genome Project . “I tried to calm everybody down,” he says. “I said, Francis is a terrific scientist , and very well organized and a great spokesperson for the N.I.H., has terrific connections in Congress, and is a delightful person to work with.”

It was clear that Collins’s handling of stem-cell policy would be the critical test of his ability to separate faith from secular duty.

Accomplished scientist. Director of NIH 2017. Born again Christian .

* newyorker

Receiving 2018 Pontifical Scientific Award*

It was truly a humbling experience [for Dr. Francis Collins ] to receive the 2018 Pontifical Key Scientific Award. Presenting the award is His Eminence Gianfranco Cardinal Ravasi (right), president of the Pontifical Council for Culture. Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia (left) and Dr. Robin Smith (far right), president of the Cura Foundation, look on during the Unite to Cure conference on April 26 at the Vatican.
Credit: John Burklow, NIH

Outstanding.

* directorsblog.nih

2018 Pontifical Key Scientific Award

The 2018 Pontifical Key Scientific Award recipient is Dr. Francis S. Collins , an individual with exceptional persistence, commitment to excellence, and significant contributions to the field of medicine . A man of strong faith, Dr. Collins teaches us all that fully embracing science does not require casting off religion; one can enrich and inform the other. Dr. Collins’ research has changed the way we, as humans, view and understand ourselves. His discoveries have provided staggering insight into our own genetic basis, which informs much of our physiological function. Dr. Collins currently serves as the director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Appointed by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in July 2009 and held over in this same position by President Trump in 2017, Dr. Collins leads the NIH and its 27 Institutes and Centers. With its $37 billion annual budget, NIH is the largest single supporter of biomedical research in the world, funding thousands of scientists and research projects throughout the U.S. and around the globe. NIH supports work that spans the spectrum from basic to clinical research.

Dr. Collins is known for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the international Human Genome Project, which culminated in April 2003 with the completion of a finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book. He served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH from 1993 to 2008. Prior to leading the Human Genome Project and the National Human Genome Research Institute, Dr. Collins was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Michigan. There, Dr. Collins helped identify the genes for cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s Disease, and other conditions. He has played a pivotal role in biomedical research, in the United States and around the world. Among other contributions, Dr. Collins has opened up new avenues for research in many developing nations through the Human Heredity and Health in Africa initiative, which advances African research capacity and expertise in genomic science.

Dr. Collins has been a steadfast and forward-thinking leader in both academic settings and public service institutions. He received a B.S. from the University of Virginia, a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Yale University, an M.D. from the University of North Carolina, and completed a fellowship in human genetics at Yale University. He is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Collins has received numerous national and international awards for his achievements, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2007 and the National Medal of Science in 2009.

Furthermore, Dr. Collins has always thought deeply about life’s fundamental questions, drawing connections between his scientific work and his personal faith. He has written a number of books on the subjects, including the New York Times best-seller, “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief”. Dr. Collins writes, “The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral and in the laboratory.” For his monumental contributions to the field of biomedicine and his visionary ability to bridge the gaps between faith and science, we honor Dr. Francis Collins with the 2018 Pontifical Key Scientific Award.

Reference : vaticanconference2018

Very good discussion in these seven minutes! Great interview.

Interviewer:    Francis, as a famous research biologist, head of the human genome project, and a believer in God, do you find that dichotomy difficult? 

Dr. Collins:    I not only don't find it difficult, but i find it incredibly harmonious and for me being somebody who has both a scientific worldview and a spiritual worldview makes me feel like a more whole person than I could be if I was narrowly focused on one or the other. I know that upsets some people who imagine that these things are somehow at war with each other and your brain would explode if you allow both to appear at any given moment. But, I do not find that to be true at all for myself. . . science is the way to investigate the natural world I am a scientist I believe in those tools to find the truth about how the natural world works, but I also believe in spiritual tools to find the answers to questions that science can not help me with like, "Why am I here?" And, "Is there a God?" And, to have the opportunity to have both of those perspectives folded into my thinking on a given Thursday afternoon seems to be a wonderful gift; a wonderful privilege.

— Francis Collins, Can Science and Theology Find Deep Reality?

As Sociologist Elaine Ecklund concludes:

"We need real, radical dialogue -- not just friendly co-existence between religion and science, but the kind of discussion where each side genuinely tries to understand why the other thinks the way it does and where common ground is sought. This dialogue should reach the rank-and-file in religious communities with the message of how to maintain faith while fully pursuing science. And it needs to reach the rank-and-file in the scientific community as well, providing them with better ways to connect with religious people."

Well, it should be clear to anyone reading this thread: Dr. Francis Collins is a firm person of faith and science. Dr. Collins' faith does involve his mind, and not just his heart and soul. Where natural revelation stops informing him, the simple message of the Gospel, spiritual revelation, strongly continues to inform him.

I think that has been clear since the beginning.   What is also clear is that nobody seems to disagree that a well respected scientist can believe in a God.

You seem to be arguing a point that is not in dispute.   Like arguing politicians often say one thing and do another or stock prices are unpredictable.

My guess is that is why you seem to be talking to yourself.   Nobody has anything to offer other than:  'sure, okay, that seems correct'.

Good.

Why Is It So Hard to Believe that Many Leading Scientists are Religious?

It's not hard at all