Science and Faith  

StaffSeptember 15, 2010 

For years, the relationship between science and faith has been discussed and debated in many different arenas.  Of particular recent note, is Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, and his discussion with Peter Boyer of The New Yorker.  

Here's an excerpt from a press release regarding an article that Boyer wrote regarding Collins:

In the September 6, 2010, issue of The New Yorker, in “The Covenant” (p. 60), Peter J. Boyer talks to Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, about the August 23rd ruling that halted federal spending on embryonic-stem-cell research, and explores the political future of the debate. Collins is “the public face of American science and the keeper of the world’s deepest biomedical research-funding purse,” Boyer writes. “There wasn’t much doubt about Collins’s ability to handle the formidable challenge of running the N.I.H.,” but the initial objection to him was his Christian faith, which puts him in the minority among his peers in the National Academy of Science. It was clear, Boyer writes, “that Collins’s handling of stem-cell policy would be the critical test of his vow to separate faith from secular duty.” Before Collins had a direct say in the Administration’s decision on stem cells, “he had been personally torn by the ethical questions posed by stem-cell research.” But a year after Obama’s appointment of Collins, he seemed “an inspired choice,” Boyer writes. “The President had found not only a man who reflected his own view of the harmony between science and faith but an evangelical Christian who hoped that the government’s expansion of embryonic-stem-cell research might bring the culture war over science to a quiet end.”

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