Sam Harris‘ Op-Ed piece in the New York Times yesterday on Francis Collins‘ appointment by President Obama as the new NIH director has ignited a renewed storm of discussion around the internet. I don’t have much to add to that commentary but I would like to record my initial, gut reaction to the slides from a 2008 talk that Collins gave at Berkely and that Harris included in his piece:

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?”

Yes, slides 1-4 are nothing more than nonsensical religious assertions. On to Slide 5. Here is a newsflash for Collins: We are already living our lives quite comfortabley within that worldview! Did Collins ever bother to check on us and see how we are doing? Of course not. Because if he actually did make a legitimate effort to understand the unescapable fact that atheists generally leave pretty normal and moral lives then that would crush his favorite argument for the existence of the Christian God.

And God forbid that a scientists would actually want to do something like that.