If there’s one thing I learned from Francis Collins’ _The Language of God_, it’s that being famous lets you get away with being lazy. The book is heavy on fluff, light on clear views, and downright embarrassing in some points with the lack of research and effort to understand what Collins’ opponents are saying. Nice for me, because it makes for a short review.

Collins declares himself a theistic evolutionist, which appears to mean that he rejects atheism and creationism, would like Intelligent Design to be right, but realizes it isn’t right either. He declares he opposes “God of the gaps” because it puts religion at risk if the gaps are filled. Instead, he seems to say, arguments for God should be based on problems science cannot, in principle, solve: “science is powerless to answer questions such as ‘why did the universe come into being?’ ‘what is the meaning of human existence?’ ‘what happens when we die?’” The trouble is, he never gives any reason to think his questions are really unanswerable, as opposed to just unanswered, and in many cases the questions themselves are confused. For example, does “universe” mean the observable universe? Then there could be some unobserved physical system that gave rise to it. Does it mean “everything that exists”? In that case, God is part of the universe and no explanation for its existence. I don’t have any idea what “meaning of existence” even means.

As for “what happens when we die,” shouldn’t the scientific way to answer that be to have scientists hang out in hospitals and make observations? This sounds tongue in cheek, but isn’t: “have scientists make observations” is, at a general level, how science answers all “what happens when…” questions, like “what happens when you put sodium in water,” “what happens when you run electricity through water,” “what happens when you dissolve salt in water,” etc. Collins just assumes that there is an afterlife which we have no evidence for, and then claims that this is a flaw in science because science hasn’t found evidence for his preconceived notions.

Collins two other big arguments are a version of the moral argument, and fine tuning. The version of the moral argument is less about the claim that there are objective moral facts, and more about the fact that humans behave morally, though there’s some confusion there: Collins lashes out at moral relativism because “If there is no absolute truth, can postmodernism itself be true?” But you can be a moral relativist without denying the existence of all truth, just as most physicists are relativists about space-time, even though they don’t deny the existence of all truth.

Most of the discussion of morality, though, isn’t concerned with moral relativism but rather evolutionary psychology and its alleged failure to account for altruism. While Collins does a good job with the rest of the biology in his book, here it’s painfully clear that Collins has no idea what he’s talking about. First, he pays very little attention to how altruistic human beings actually are, at one point appealing to a folk tale to illustrate altruism! Primates are cited to show how newly dominant males should kill the offspring of competitors, but it never occurs to Collins that conquering armies often do kill children, and step parents are often the worst child abusers. Similarly, he suggests if one evolutionary hypothesis were true, we would see people help their in-group but readily kill members of their out-group, which again is what we observe in real-life.

Also, he badly misunderstands what evolutionary psychology predicts about human behavior: while it does predict humans will be mostly selfish, it doesn’t predict super-Machiavellian gene spreaders. Perfect selfishness is prevented from evolving by high cost, constraints from evolutionary history, and the impossibility of predicting changes in the environment (birth control, anyone?). Most profoundly, certain kinds of irrationality (from an economists perspective) can be beneficial if they’re hard to fake: helping friends, even when it’s not in your interest to do so, makes you a more sought-after friend. Taking revenge on enemies, even when it’s not in your interest to do so, makes you a more feared enemy.

The fine-tuning argument is mostly boiler plate, though it is interesting how he divides the possible hypotheses up into “God,” “chance,” and “multiple universes.” Ignored are “it just is that way” and “some unknown physical cause.” These are easy to ignore, but important because they are in fact what the God hypothesis involves: God is supposed to just exist, without explanation, and because there’s so little evidence for him and the fine-tuning argument doesn’t point to a specific God, he’s basically an unknown God.

Collins also considers scientific arguments against the existence of God, mainly in the form of scientific problems with Genesis. Here, he appeals to Augustine, though he lets something interesting slip: Augustine opted for more liberal interpretations of Genesis precisely because he got scarred that educated Greeks and Romans would find problems with it, even one and a half millennia ago. It must be remembered that Augustine lived long after the composition of Genesis, and had no privileged insights into what the author(s) of Genesis were thinking. No matter what he thought, the author probably believed the myth he was telling, just as most tellers of ancient myths probably believed the myths they were telling.

Finally, brief comments on what Collins says about faith. Collins strongly opts for evidence-based faith, but at one point he explains that the reason the evidence isn’t very good is because a world with too much evidence for God wouldn’t be very interesting. Collins, though, apparently thinks that the correct response to weak evidence is making a leap of faith, rather than withholding belief and doing more research, which is the real scientific attitude for such cases.