Obama Names an Evangelical to Lead the NIH
By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
One of the striking features of the Obama White House's faith outreach and messaging is that it keeps the effort going even in areas that have yielded few dividends.
Although Obama has often been criticized by U.S. Catholic bishops, for instance, his administration has continued to take outreach to those bishops seriously. Obama recently invited U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops president Francis George to the White House. When the Vatican announced that Timothy Dolan would be the next archbishop of New York, Obama quickly phoned to congratulate him.
A similar pattern has emerged regarding the ethics of Obama's science policy. After announcing he was expanding federally funded embryonic stem cell research, the president was pilloried by many Christian organizations, from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to a bevy of Christian right groups—even though he stressed that the new program would be governed by robust ethics guidelines.
The president followed through on his pledge. He imposed new restrictions on federally backed embryonic stem cell research that disappointed many in the scientific community. Rather than praise Obama's middle-of-the-road approach, however, the same coalition of religious groups blasted the president for allowing certain excess embryos from fertility clinics to be used for research.
Instead of giving up on heavily promoting science ethics, however, Obama this week picked a Bible-believing, loud, and proud evangelical Christian to head the National Institutes of Health.
Francis Collins, former director of the Human Genome Project, has spent recent months building a new organization aimed at persuading evangelical Christians to accept the theory of evolution, hoping to bolster both Christianity and science in the process.
Was this the administration's primary reason for picking Collins? No way. But Collins's religious side is much too central to his work nowadays for the White House not to have noticed.
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Tags: NIH | Barack Obama | religion | evangelicals
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Reader Comments
Hey!
I resent the stereotyping of Kentucky Christians there AgentX! I agree with what you're saying, but I resent the stereotyping.
Nothing wrong
As an atheist myself I don't see a big problem with this choice.
Mr. Collins believes in God but follows scientific principles and worked on an extremely difficult project called HGE.
You can be a good scientist and still believe in God. He's not one of the Kentucky/Alaska/Texas cult-LEFT BEHIND reading-fascists that voted for Bush/McBush. So his appointment will go thru without a hitch. Obama made a good pick.
No war, Andy...
It is sad that many feel that a person who has faith in God are illogical and stupid, especially when it comes to science. Yes, the Catholic church did believe the geocentric theory was correct when many others knew that such was not the case. However, this was a sad case of pride and not stupidity. Are atheists going to say that they never let such pride get in their way while making "scientific" discoveries?
Unlike many other past and maybe a few present religions, Christianity does not claim the sun is a personable being or a god riding a shining disc or a chariot (both of which modern science has disproved). Christians just say that God created the known universe and made it run according to certain rules we call the laws of nature (modern science can and has not disproved this).
Some might claim that the Bible promotes the geocentric theory because of stories where the sun either stands still or goes backward for a few moments and then returns to its original course. Of course, now we know that the geocentric theory is quite false. Yet, to a person living in the ancient world (Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Israelite, Babylonian, etc.) the sun did appear to move around the earth and they did not find any real convincing proofs at the time to believe otherwise. Other than this, the Bible (while not a sciencebook) does not discredit science in anyway. One just needs to remember the obvious limitations the ancient Hebrews had when it came to science.
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