Do you ever notice how religious believers are always cited by the media as "devout" precisely when they are equivocating on basic Judeo-Christian moral and theological tenets? Dr. Francis Collins has some startling ideas on abortion. Startling, that is, from an Evangelical Christian who is Obama's choice to head up the National Institutes of Health. He's a favorite church speaker with Evangelical audiences, especially on how Darwinism poses no threat to their faith.
My colleague Bruce Chapman notes, "When the confirmation hearings take place I would not be surprised to hear some sharp questions about Dr. Collins's less known views on subjects that have not come out on his pulpit tours." The following was shared with me. So I'll share it with you.
From a 2006 interview here on Beliefnet:
Q: [S]ometimes when parents learn that their child has Down Syndrome, they terminate the pregnancy. What is your opinion of that sort of scenario?
A: I'm troubled that the applications of genetics that are currently possible are oftentimes in the prenatal arena. That is not the reason I went into this field.
The reason I went into this field was to figure out how to treat illnesses, rather than try to stop such individuals from even being born. But, of course, in our current society, people are in a circumstance of being able to take advantage of those technologies. And we have decided as a society that that choice needs to be defended.
From a 1993 New York Times profile of Collins:
"It is difficult to say you can't abort, but for overall cultural mores, you run into problems," Dr. Collins said. "It's the classic slippery slope. You have a gray scale going from diseases like Tay-Sachs disease that cause death in early childhood all the way to the other end of the spectrum with abortions for sex selection, which most people would say is a misuse of technology. In between is a gray zone. Where do you draw the line?"
In a 1998 book he co-authored, Principles of Medical Genetics, he considers a bioethical situation where a genetic counselor is discussing with a (married) mother, 8 weeks pregnant, whether to abort her child because there's a 7 to 8 percent chance the child will have a mild learning disability. Should the mother indicate an interest in aborting, Collins and his two co-authors commend to the counselor a stance of "respect for [patient] autonomy" and "nondirective counseling." In other words, the medical professional in this context should be morally neutral.
You'll find a link to the page in the book on Google Books here.
In an appendix to his bestselling The Language of God (2006), he questions "the insistence that the spiritual nature of a person is uniquely defined at the very moment of conception." He also defends "therapeutic" human cloning in these terms:
I would argue that the immediate product of a skin cell and an enucleated egg cell fall short of the moral status of the union of sperm and egg. The former is not part of God's plan to create a human individual. The latter is very much God's plan, carried out through the millennia by our own species and many others.
NPR has a wonderful photo of Dr. Collins "all smiles" at a White House ceremony where President Obama signed an Executive Order giving a green light to research performed on human embryonic stem cells.
You might want to take a look at my post from last week on Abortion & "Worldview-Induced Blindness."
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When God blessed Abraham and Sarah children,Sarah is old.They have even twins Isaac and Jacob.They have strong faith in what God had told them.It is always by faith that we are truly blessed.In this modern world,where science and all the knowledge and inventions research and technologies,there were many things now to consider for old woman to get pregnant,the old times since Sarah had proven that her age is not a hindrance for God's will,why not now in this present times?God is the same yesterday,today and for all times by faith we believe this truth about God.It is my faith that if it's God's will, nothing is impossible because when God creates,there is always a plan and purpose,if it's not,then be it.His ways are not our ways.
And in the second half of "Mein Kampf" Hitler wrote that he was creating a political philosophy based on race. So in his case, there was no difference between murdering people for political reasons, and mudering them for race based reasons.
Your Name, Hitler rejected that evolution could happen. If you had ever bothered to read Mein Kampf, you would know that Hitler says, in "Nation and Race", that organisms can never change their essential nature. Hitler explicity said on more than one occasion that Man was made in God's image, and that Man could have never evolved from animals.
On these very comment threads we provided abundant quotes from Hitler expressing his rejection of evolution.
It is tiresome to refute the same lies over and over again. David Klinghoffer already tried it here and got embarrassed.
Evolution by natural selection does say that killing the "unfit" is a moral good, because it is a scientific theory that attempts to describe the world as it is, it does not provide morals for us to live by.
You might as well say that Newton's Law of Gravitation says we should make airplanes illegal.
Perhaps. Or perhaps he is simply aware of the fact that the patient can get up and walk out of the room at any time, and therefore getting all judgemental and bossy is not likely going to do any good, and that the best approach is to talk is a respectful manner instead of telling them what to do or calling them murderers. There is not enough context to say whether or not this is the correct interpretation, but it seems plausible, especially since he finds the whole situation troubling.
Oh, and Your Name, "Darwinism" and Nazism have nothing to do with each other. Evolution is descriptive: it looks around and tells you what is, and has been, and likely will be, happening. Nazism is normative: it tells you what it thinks ought to be the case. When Darwin noted that indiginous people were likely to be wiped out, he was not saying that it was a good thing, or that it should be made to happen, he was merely prediction the most probable course of events. And guess what--he was right! When Darwin notes that nature tends to destroy the weak, he is merely relaying to you what has been observed and not approving of it, just as the observation that people tend to drown when submerged in water contains no moral support for the drowning of people.
Also, Nazism is not dependent on Evolution in any way. What it is dependent on is thousands of years of the selective breeding of animals--and loads of racism, of course. If Darwin had never set pen to paper, Nazism would not differ one iota from what it ended up being. All the basic ideas had been around forever. If you want bigger cows, only allow the largest to breed, and send the rest to the slaughterhouse. Hitler took these priciples, and applied them to human beings. For this he did not need, and did not have, the support of "Darwinsim".
Hitler on evolution in Mein Kampf:
The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc., and the difference can lie at most in the varying measure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance, etc., of the individual specimens. But you will never find a fox who in his inner attitude might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies toward geese, as similarly there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice.
Hitler here says explicitly that one species cannot evolve into another. Darwinists says pandas are vegetarians evolved from carnivores, and Hitler here denies that such a thing is possible.
Where do we acquire the right to believe that man has not always been what he is now? The study of nature teaches us that, in the animal kingdom just as much as in the vegetable kingdom, variations have occurred. They've occurred within the species, but none of these variations has an importance comparable with that which separates man from the monkey — assuming that this transformation really took place.--Hitler's Table Talk, p. 248.
[I]t was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys His work wages war against God's Creation and God's Will.--Mein Kampf
So don't bother with the Darwin-Hitler connection-there isn't one. It would be generous to say that Hitler's biological ideas were confused, and it is difficult to say what, if anything, he knew about biology.
Only someone ignorant of Darwinism and Hitler could say that Hitler was a Darwinist. His eugenic and racial ideas only sound like Darwinism to someone who has only heard of twisted caricatures of Darwinism spread by people like David Klinghoffer.
We've had the Hitler-Darwin argument thrashed out in these comment sections only a couple of weeks ago. It is a typically creationist tactic to revive a previously discredited argument, hoping to spread the lies one or two steps ahead of the truth.
I wonder if Dr Collins studied under Peter Singer at Yale?
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