The Faith of the Proposed Director of the NIH. (August 8, 2009)

Bob Park makes the comment in his most recent What's New blog: "Much has been made of Collins’ oft-stated belief in evolution. An op-ed in Monday's New York Times gives a very different picture. Sam Harris, best-selling author of  The End of Faith, quotes from a series of slides Collins used in a lecture on science and belief at UC Berkeley."

Mr Harris opens his opinion piece: "PRESIDENT OBAMA has nominated Francis Collins to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health. It would seem a brilliant choice. Dr. Collins’s credentials are impeccable: he is a physical chemist, a medical geneticist and the former head of the Human Genome Project. He is also, by his own account, living proof that there is no conflict between science and religion. In 2006, he published The Language of God, in which he claimed to demonstrate 'a consistent and profoundly satisfying harmony' between 21st-century science and evangelical Christianity."

Below is the text of five of the  PowerPoint slides which Dr Collins showed at a lecture on science and belief at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008:

presented in order:

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 marvellous 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?”