Science, religion debated as evangelical takes top NIH post

— -- Can we all get along? Maybe not when it comes to science and religion.

Just ask scientist Francis Collins, installed last month as head of the National Institutes of Health.

It wasn't just newspaper editorials — scientists such as Harvard's Steven Pinker, who called Collins an "advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs," criticized placing an outspoken evangelical Christian in the post.

On his first day on the job, Collins stepped down from the BioLogos foundation he founded to foster a rapprochement between the spiritual and the scientific worlds, after such complaints. "I want to reassure everyone I am here to lead the NIH as best I can, as a scientist," Collins said at an August briefing.

Amid the noise over books like Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion; the 2005 Kitzmiller court case that found "intelligent design" a form of creationism; and the Bush administration's 2001 announcement of a (since-overturned) religiously motivated policy limiting human stem cell research funding to a few cell families, it's easy to overlook what science says about religion itself. But it might explain why the religious-minded sometimes similarly view science with suspicion.

In the June Journal of Religion, Wendy Cadge of Brandeis University, for example, looks at the history of medical studies examining the "power of prayer" to heal the sick. Since 1965, about 18 studies have looked at the effect, to much controversy, with a 2006 re-analysis of past studies finding no health benefits to stranger's prayers.