Unsurprisingly, the July 27th opinion piece by Sam Harris on the nomination of Francis Collins to the NIH has generated many letters to the New York Times, a handful of which they published here. A few are good, others not so much. Let’s take a look:

Sam Harris’s article attacking Dr. Francis S. Collins, President Obama’s nominee to be the director of the National Institutes of Health, demonstrates nothing so much as Mr. Harris’s own deeply held prejudices against religion.

Dr. Collins’s sin, despite credentials Mr. Harris calls “impeccable,” is that he is a Christian. Mr. Harris is not alone in holding this view. A leading science blogger, also attacking Dr. Collins, demonstrated his own commitment to reasoned dialogue by calling the scientist a “clown” and a “flaming idjit.” When reason has such defenders, Heaven help us.

The disconnect from reality in such attacks is striking. Dr. Collins’s visionary work on cystic fibrosis set the stage for the Human Genome Project, which he then led to a magnificent conclusion — not just ahead of time and under budget, but as a model for cutting-edge collaborative research.

The suspicion that Dr. Collins’s faith would lead him to suppress research is sharply contradicted by his administration of the genome project and the profound scientific curiosity that has marked his entire career.

Francis Collins is a remarkable scientist and a visionary administrator.

He is exactly the right person to head the N.I.H.

Kenneth Miller
Providence, R.I., July 28, 2009

The writer is a professor of biology at Brown University.

Miller is a Catholic who has championed evolution in his books Finding Darwin’s God and Only a Theory. Like Collins he is both a defender of faith and science – albeit without the evangelist flare. But as PZ Myers has already noted this morning, Miller is wrong to reduce Harris’ critque of Collins to the simple observation that Collins is a Christian. To quote Myers, “The fact that Collins is a Christian is not a problem at all — we are not interested in narrowing the search pool for science administration to the extent that we exclude the majority of people in this country. What is disturbing is that Collins is a fervent evangelical believer who inserts his superstition where it doesn’t belong, in the execution of his job.”

To reduce Harris’ arguments to mere prejudice against religion is simply ridiculous. Harris has cogently pointed out the problems with Collins’ beliefs and their relation to science, but Ken Miller doesn’t want to listen to that. Next.

To the Editor:

Sam Harris is right to be concerned about the effect of religious faith upon science if Dr. Francis S. Collins becomes N.I.H. director. From a scientific perspective, it is essential that research into unsolved problems not be short-circuited by conclusions already reached through unscientific methods.

Science finds it intrinsically hard to justify the position that “at some moment in the development of our species God inserted crucial components — including an immortal soul.”

Religion must continue to ask, “Why is there something and not nothing?” The mythic answers it supplies may lack scientific weight, but are not thereby meaningless.

Science reaches beyond itself to undervalue mythic insight, and religion is wrong to impose it as a substitute for what can become clearer if we let the scientific method function.

(Rev.) Joseph D. Herring
Alpharetta, Ga., July 27, 2009

The Reverend Herring, unlike Mr. Miller, has precisely understood the substance of Harris’ critique. Collins has frequently made statements to suggest that certain areas of scientific research are essentially closed because of his particular religious beliefs. Although the mythic answers that religion supplies may be meaningful in a limited sense, however, they are hardly useful.

To the Editor:

Francis S. Collins’s appointment bodes well for science as well as for the National Institutes of Health. Advocates of science, whether people of faith or not, can welcome as N.I.H. director an esteemed scientist who is also helping his fellow evangelicals to accept evolution, support embryonic stem cell research and embrace scientific insights.

David Myers
Holland, Mich., July 27, 2009

The writer is a professor of psychology and the author of “A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists: Musings on Why God Is Good and Faith Isn’t Evil.”

This letter just misses the point. It may be true and indeed good that Collins does attempt to help evangelicals to accept more scientific findings, but at what price?

To the Editor:

Sam Harris’s article is very cogently illustrative of the Obama administration’s search for, not the best, but for compromise, in its major appointments.

Just as the selection of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for an opening on the Supreme Court bypassed at least 100 candidates better suited to take on the Scalia-Roberts cabal, so the selection of Francis S. Collins as the next director of the National Institutes of Health is disappointing to those of us who expected real change from the evangelical Christian bias of the Bush administration choices.

Certainly, the Obama promise of change is not fulfilled in such choices.

Jack Schaps
La Jolla, Calif., July 27, 2009

I don’t know Mr. Shaps, but I am proud to call him a neighbor!

To the Editor:

Does Sam Harris really want to make atheism a requirement for the position of director of the National Institutes of Health? Or is it Francis S. Collins’s faith in particular that disturbs him because he elucidates it so rationally and well?

The objection Mr. Harris raises against Dr. Collins seems most concerned with what he would have us believe was a contradiction: belief in God and open-mindedness. He’s clearly uncomfortable with the idea of someone believing in something that he cannot see — an ability without which science would not have gotten very far.

Suzanne Hoffman Levin
New York, July 28, 2009

No, Suzanne, it is because Collins does not elucidate it so rationally or well that disturbs Harris. We have every right to be uncomfortable with the idea of someone believing in somthing that cannot be seen, detected, or otherwise known – by most definition that just might qualify as mental illness. While science has become particuarly adept at uncovering that which is hidden, religion has simply remained hidden.

To the Editor:

The unreasonable attack by Sam Harris on the nomination of Francis S. Collins as director of the National Institutes of Health is disturbing on several counts. First, it raises a constitutional issue in advocating a religious test for holding public office. Second, given that the majority of people in the United States are theists, it risks driving a wedge between science and the sensibilities of the common person. This is not a tactic that will increase financing for the biological and health sciences. Many scientists applaud Dr. Collins for providing a theologically sensitive rationale for Christians and other theists to accept evolution.

Third, the attack is manifestly unfair to Dr. Collins, whom the vast majority of working scientists regard as a brilliant researcher and an evenhanded administrator.

Kenneth Lange
Los Angeles, July 27, 2009

The writer is chairman of the department of human genetics at the Geffen School of Medicine at U.C.L.A.

First, Harris is not suggesting a religious test for holding public office. He is critiquing some of Collins’ less brilliant ideas and questioning to what extent this would affect his work (if any). Second, while many theists can applaud Dr. Collins for providing a theologically sensititve rationale for Christians and other theists to accept evolution, that doesn’t make his rationale any more plausible or worthy of belief. Third, your attack has been manifestly unfair to Mr. Harris. Dr. Collins’ brillance as a researcher or administrator does not excuse him from holding wacky beliefs.

To the Editor:

Sam Harris declares that few things make thinking like a scientist more difficult than religion. Accordingly, he suggests that Francis S. Collins, a devout Christian, is unsuited to the work of science and to leading the National Institutes of Health. Too bad Mr. Harris wasn’t around to teach Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Maxwell, Dobzhansky and countless other scientific luminaries that their theological understanding was an obstacle to their science.

These explorers, of course, all realized that sacred texts and theology are not a source of scientific information, and hence that there can be no real conflict between science and faith.

Galileo’s marvelous Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, for example, emphasizes that Scripture responds to a completely different kind of question from those of science. The God who gave us our intellects, he said, would never require that we look to inspired texts or theology for answers we can find by the natural use of our own faculties.

Dr. Collins is familiar with this instruction. Mr. Harris apparently is not.

John F. Haught
Lake George, N.Y., July 28, 2009

The writer is a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University, and the author of “God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens.”

Once againk, this takes Harris critique further than how it was expressed. Nobody is suggesting that being a Christian makes one unsuitable for doing science – past or present. However, the argument was that certain forms of religious thinking have a tendency to suppress or ignore scientific research where such science is inconsistent with certain religiously held beliefs. As far as I can tell, Mr. Haught nor any of these letters have offered a rebuttal to that point.