QUESTIONS ABOUT THE LANGUAGE OF GOD

摘要

Although many scientists say geneticist Francis Collins will make a superb director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), not everyone is celebrating. A discussion about whether Collins's very public religious views will influence his leadership of NIH played out on blogsrnearly this spring and again in the past week. There seems to be little evidence for such worries, but they persist.rnCollins has written that his beliefs played a role in the 2000 White House press conference to announce the draft sequence of the human genome, when President Bill Clinton called the human DNA sequence "the language in which God created life." In 2006, Collins wrote a book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, that describes his religious conversion at the age of 27 and how he reconciles this with the science of evolution. Richard Dawkins, the biologist and prominent anti-religionist, feuded with Collins for mixing science and faith.