dyslexic deism

Dr Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, has a book out: "The Language of God". It is about his conversion to evangelical christianity and he tries to lay out a case for religion in no conflict with science, while also tackling creationists and religions fundamentalists.
Haven't read the book, but am feeling less inclined to after Collins gives (yet another) interview in Salon.
Must say, it sounds like a good pitch for a Templeton Prize though. best of luck with that.

PZ has already dissected the interview, but since Collins is a physicist I feel an urge to comment also...

Collins tries to make a reasoned case, and to be fair, he rather thoroughly dismisses naive creationism and for the most part he argues some cross between Newton's "Prime Mover" and Spinoza's non-interventionist general deity.
His primary case seems to be essentially a reversal of his underlying "null hypothesis": he was an atheist, had some emotional experiences and flipped from "there is no evidence for God, so there is no God" to "there is no evidence against God, so therefore there must be a God".

Now, by construction, one can make a case for God, such that there is necessarily no evidence that can be counted as being against God - which Collins pretty much does, except when he disingenously sneaks in sophomoric arguments for God, really.
The question then becomes what the need for such a hypothesis is, and at some level it is a null issue - if people want to believe in an omnipotent christian God, or the Great Programmer in the Sky, or Flying Spaghetti Monsters, that is potentially innocuous, people can believe whatever dammfool thing they want; in practise, such beliefs become more relevant when they affect people's behaviour - whether from an impulse to be kind to orphans, because they think God would want them to; a desire to kill heathens and infidels; or, a need to spin interpretations of scientific observations and models.

Collins is out of touch with modern physics, an argument such as "And the very fact that the universe had a beginning implies that someone was able to begin it. And it seems to me that had to be outside of nature. And that sounds like God." is wrong - it is internally inconsistent and shows no understanding of cosmology; even if we ignore recent speculations on pre-Big Bang physics, or alternatives like continuous inflation and multiverses. Maybe Collins needs to read a good dose of Smolin or Susskind.

Collins also shows inconsistencies in initially suggesting a completely impersonal God who sets things in motion and then steps back, and then promptly insisting that there are "miracles" and that God can and does intervene directly, not just in the universe, but at the personal level of individuals on Earth.
This is a necessary contradiction in his argument, because as a scientist he can not accept interventionist deities - miracles would either have to be unrepeatable or unobservable, or they would be amenable to analysis by scientific methods and therefore positive proofs for God, which he has rejected as an option, because such proof is not there; but, he is not just a deist, he is christian and accepts a particular miracle having occured as literally described in a particular sect's edited transcript.
Inconvenient that.

Reading the interview (and I have not read the book), the real key issue seems to be Collins consideration of "Moral Law", which he takes as some absolute and unachievable by evolution: both arguments seem to me to be wrong. Following CS Lewis - it would seem hazardous to use Lewis's arguments on what can and can not happen through biological evolution, much has changes since Lewis's time...
The examples he uses are altruism, such as saving (unrelated) others, and caring for orphans.
Now, if you evolve while living in small related groups, both altruism (to an extent) and caring for orphans, specifically, are likely to be positive for fitness - given a maternal instinct, and surplus resources, related orphans can be cared for, and since they are related, this passes on "your" genes. It is a low risk strategy. Altruism follows from the maxim "I'd die to save two brothers or four cousins", and as with all adaptations the mechanism, once in place, is subject to both scatter (some people have less than optimal altruism, others have higher than optimal altruism - this is globally optimal, since locally having some spread permits rapid adaptation to environments where the optimal level of altruism varies - and, no, this is not teleological, it just requires that both extremes of behaviour have some finite fitness on average and therefore a typical population at any given time has some spread in individual altruism), and because there is runaway adaption (classic game theory, if no one is altruistic, then it pays to not be altruistic, if all are altruistic, it pays not to be altruistic, but if some fraction is altruistic, then it pays to be altruistic some of the time - genes can play that game).

But, Collins seems to neglect memetic evolution - if there is group selection for behaviour such as altruism, and if there is some random altruism present in society, then memetic selection can work to very rapidly spread the behaviour even if it fails completely on the individual selection level (which Collins seems to argue, incorrectly, but then memetic selection can operate in parallel with genetic selection as opposed to against it or orthogonal to it).
For example, in the care of orphans - one of the ways in which missionary christianity spread was through adoption and care of orphans who were abandoned, and who then became christians, mostly.
Which incidentally also suggest the Universal Moral Law fails, since this shows there were societies which did not look after orphans, whether from scarcity, memetic selection against orphan care or random variation. Further, this memetic selection also ran away, with famous instances of children being removed from non-christian parents and placed in christian orphanages in order to convert them en masse. That is when they didn't kill the heathen parents to make the orphans in the first place. Nor was this a uniquely christian adaptation, a number of other successful religions sent orphans to monasteries or equivalent where they were a ready source of labour and converts.

Social memetic selection is very strong and rapid, and once in play can override genetic selections in some instances, for a while at least. A cursory glance, suggests orphans were used for everything from slave labour to human sacrifices in other societies. Of course there are many reasons why societies consider care of orphans to be prudent. The point is that care of orphans was NOT universal in historical societies, and there is group adaptive advantage to the memetic concept of taking care of the orphans, if the resources are there. So an outside organization can infiltrate a group through altruistic behaviour, like orphanages, and then incidentally establish the meme that doing so is a positive good.

Collins also ducks the question on stem cells and when life begins. Honest but cowardly.

The interview did not particularly make me want to read the book, hope the book makes a more coherent case, but I doubt it. Maybe one day I'll plow through it.