The over-reaction of those sounding the warning sirens about him is without foundation in fact. It’s also emotional to the point of irrationality. PZ Myers has called him “a clown,” and written that “The man is a flaming idjit.”

This is confusing real concerns about Collins advocacy of religion and how this position will affect that/be affected by it, and the content of this advocacy. As for the former, there seems to be little emotion. As for the later, Collins is exasperating for scientists, as for example when he pushes the religious “fine-tuning argument” on physicists that know it to be false.

Though he’s not exactly an evolutionary biologist, he’s supported a lot of genetic research based on evolution, including as a part of projects done in his own lab. In my experience he listens to informed scientists and is open to lots of possible explanations. I wouldn’t worry too too much about his ability to fine scale direct research dollars, since the vast majority of that is directed by the individual institutes. The big NIH wide initiatives may be a different story, but that shouldn’t have a major negative impact on any particular line of research.

Some quotes from Collins’ The Language of God:

After all, there are clearly parts of the Bible that are written as eyewitness accounts of historical events, including much of the New Testament. For a believer, the events recorded in these sections ought to be taken as the writer intended–as descriptions of observed fact. — p. 175

Collins is here contradicting basically all textual scholarship on the Bible for the last 200 years. The Gospels, for instance, are not in any way eyewitness accounts. They don’t even claim to be!

1. The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago.
2. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life.

…

6. But humans are also unique in ways that define evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law …and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.

–page 200

There’s so much wrong with the above that I don’t even know where to begin. For one thing, the universe is not “precisely tuned for life”. The vast, vast majority of the universe is completely inhospitable to life. Also, what “massive improbabilities” are we talking about here? Who measured these probabilities, and using what evidence?

And we don’t know if the universe “came from nothing”. That’s pure speculation.

Item 6 is straightforward creationism. “Natural selection cannot explain X, therefore X was created by God.” It’s just creationism applied to one aspect of the organism, rather than the whole thing. In that regard, how is it different from Behe’s false claim that certain parts of organisms, e.g. the bacterial flagellum, could not evolve and were therefore designed by God? It’s anti-scientific nonsense.

Collins claim about “the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history” would come as quite a surprise to the historians and scientists who actually study these cultures. It takes quite a bit of cultural chauvinism to think that all human cultures are seeking after the god that happens to be believed in the culture you happen to inhabit. The truth is, what a Westerner thinks of as “god” frequently has no analogue in many other cultures.

I could go on. The book is filled with outright nonsense which sounds very similar to creationism to my ears. Anyone who reads Collins’ own writings can see there are good reasons to suspect that he might deny scientific findings when they don’t fit his religious preconceptions.

Heard Josh Rosenau from NCSE last night at a Center for Inquiry – New York meeting. Afterwards, during dinner, he agreed with me that your New York Times letter was quite fair and accurate. Sometimes you have to call a spade, a spade, and am glad you didn’t mince words with your Times letter or your comments here at The Loom.

“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?” – Collins’s lecture slides from a UC Berkeley talk in 2008

I have no problem with a Christian as NIH director, but I – alongside many others, I imagine – will remain uncomfortable with the appointment until this conflict of interest is addressed. And I don’t think that is an unreasonable response by any means.

I think you are badly wrong or, worse, willingly misrepresenting PZ Myers’ position by saying that he opposes Collins in the name of scientific reason.
In the name of reason seems to be the right stance.

Irrationnal beliefs, those you share with Dr Collins and Dr Conway-Morris and you promote under the patronage of the Templeton Foundation, are just plain irrational, not scientifico-irrational.

You are the ones trying to make them look as if they were supported by science hoping for some credibility. Don’t project your attitude to others.