Religious Beliefs of Scientists

[_Brackite]

Collins: Why this scientist believes in God:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/03/collin ... index.html

[_EAllusion]

You're probably thinking of Forrest Mims.

First, there are plenty of open Christians who have written for and worked for Scientific American. Second, the situation was more complex than this. He was never hired in the first place. He was on the cusp of the job, but never got it. This was on the grounds of his being a creationist. How thoroughly this would affect his competence on the subject of amateur science is a matter for debate, but he was an advocate of a pseudoscience that touched many areas his editing job deals with. That's for sure. Then one has to consider the ethics of giving prestige, however small, to a leading advocate in a pseudoscientific movement. This obviously is important to SA, as spreading the adoption of sound scientific thinking to the general public is essentially its mission. If he was an editor doing his job just fine and was fired out of the blue because it was found out that he privately did not believe in evolution, I'd have a problem with it. But that's not at all what happened here.

For what it is worth, since then Mims has had incidents where he has been disingenuous in his writing. Not a shock for a creationist, but a bullet dodged there in any case. He's probably best known now outside of creationist circles for his role in the Eric Pianka mini-fiasco.

[_EAllusion]

Francis Collins is an odd creature in that he is well-known for attacking the ID movement while simultaneously explaining and at times evangelizing his belief in God on the basis of a design argument; only instead of eyeballs or flagellum, he goes with moral sense per C.S. Lewis.

[_bcspace]

Yes, such a person could do his job and leave the evolution articles to someone else while he simply edits them.

So then you're saying that having a biology editor that doesn't even believe in a very well established area of his own field of study is still some-how credible? That's as absurd as saying you wouldn't have a problem with them having a physics editor that doesn't believe in Newton's Three Laws of Motion.

Non sequitur. He wasn't hired to do research, he was hired to review articles for presentability in a magazine.

[_The Nehor]

When did being a scientist suddenly make you intelligent?

[_Imwashingmypirate]

I think you can mold anything to work with anything lol. Just claim that God created Science. Lol.

When did being a scientist suddenly make you intelligent?

When they discovered genetic engineering and how to make designer babies.

ETA, OOPs... I read wrong. I thought you(Nehor) said, "When did a scientist suddenly make you intellegent." Ohh well.