http://www.ctv.ca/...rimination-101217/


"An astronomer argues that his Christian faith and his peers' belief that he is an evolution skeptic kept him from getting a prestigious job as the director of a new student observatory at the University of Kentucky."

Personally, I can think of no better reason to discriminate against a scientist than the fact that he doesn't believe in science, but I have to admit that in this case, it seems that the hiring team is making decisions based on poor evidence. But the question does seem to be a fair one that ought to be asked - anything else would be special pleading.

One of the things that disturbs me in these type of debates is that christian pseudo-scientists often take any evidence - even contradictory evidence - that is uncovered and claim it supports the existence of god or ID or some other fantasy.

Knobs like Francis Collins, of the human genome project, scare the hell out of me.

During a debate with the biologist Richard Dawkins, Collins stated that God is the explanation of those features of the universe that science finds difficult to explain (such as the values of certain physical constants favoring life), and that God himself does not need an explanation since he is beyond the universe. Dawkins called this "the mother and father of all cop-outs" and "an incredible evasion of the responsibility to explain"

Here's what Francis Collins Believes, from one of his lectures:

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.

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.

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.

4
We humans use our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.

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? (for the record, I am. I fully believe that there is more to be known about right and wrong from science than from sources like the bible)


This is, of course, pure bullshit, and demonstrates that nothing makes it harder to think like a scientist than religion.

Collins suggests that all scientific discovery is proof of a logical and perfect god, but when confronted with suitable evidence and explanations for the mathematical and other phenomena he refers to, his response always falls back to "But god is outside nature". Booolsheeet.

He can't explain why chimps have no soul, and we do, yet we share a common ancestor. Everyday the specific concepts of religion become less and less plausible.

What is plausible, however, is the idea that religious scientist may at some point stop rational inquiry and the scientific method in order to try to fit the evidence to a foolishly held set of beliefs about the nature of the universe. The entire idea of science demands that we hold our scientists to a high level of evidentiary requirements and intellectual integrity.

It seems, at the very least, we should ask if our scientists have imaginary friends.

"disbelief in the God of Abraham does not require that one search the entire cosmos and find Him absent; it only requires that one consider the evidence put forward by believers to be insufficient." Sam Harris