God, science and morality walk into a bar . . .
For National Institutes of Health director-nominate Francis Collins, it’s no joke
In a New York Times op-ed, Sam Harris, raises concerns about how Francis Collins, who formerly headed the Human Genome Project and has been nomimated by President Obama to direct the National Institutes of Health, attempts to reconcile his religious faith with his devotion to science.
Only a few years removed from intense national debates over “intelligent design” and teaching evolution in school, the tension between American evangelism and scientific evangelism shows no sign of abating. Now that an ardent Christian and accomplished scientist will take over our government’s leading medical research institution, it’s a good moment to revisit this tension.
Attempting to grasp Collins’s outlook, Harris worryingly points to a 2008 presentation Collins delivered at Berkeley:
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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?”
This sounds like sort of a mixed view of God, where he begins as a deist God — a sort of watchmaker, who simply sets the gears and winds the watch — and then intervenes at a crucial moment, before fading into the background again.
At first blush, it’s not the most internally consistent view, but that’s not what bothers Harris. As he writes later:
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?
These anxieties feel like a bridge too far. It’s true that explaining morality and human nature through God competes with whatever explanations neuroscience and cognitive psychology might offer up. Yet it seems unlikely that even Collins would suggest we abandon scientific inquiry into these issues. And it is downright implausible to imagine Collins would oppose psychiatric treatment of mental disorders.
Neuroscience and evolutionary psychology have eroded much of the mystique around our moral intuitions and judgments in recent years, but we have a long way go to before the almost spiritual weight of our moral convictions evaporates completely. There’s too much we still don’t understand about the brain and people show no sign of ignoring their moral compasses.
Harris is right to raise questions about Collins’s attempt to connect his scientific beliefs with his religious faith. But to worry this will unravel “the future of biomedical research in the United States” seems paranoid.
–Sam
Related posts:
- Sam Harris – Can science address morality?
- What morality “means”
- Science v. Religion Pt. 574
- Is political science relevant?
- Reason to believe?
ShareComments
Leave a Reply
