VIBs get special treatment

There are some scientists who somehow are able to do great science but then manage to subscribe to beliefs for which no good evidence exists. Somehow their minds are able to cordon off these Very Important Beliefs and grant them epistemological immunity. Francis Collins, the leader of the team that cracked the human genome, is one of them. He sees God's handiwork here, there, and everywhere.

When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion-letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can’t survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can’t help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God’s mind.

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I see God’s hand at work through the mechanism of evolution. If God chose to create human beings in his image and decided that the mechanism of evolution was an elegant way to accomplish that goal, who are we to say that is not the way.

C.S. Lewis--that atheist who mutated into another of Yahweh's sheep--is one bloke who convinced Collins about God's existence. But what finally drove Collins to dive into the black hole was something else.

His epiphany came when he went hiking through the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. He said: "It was a beautiful afternoon and suddenly the remarkable beauty of creation around me was so overwhelming, I felt, 'I cannot resist this another moment'."

Resistance was futile, eh?

Collins finally surrendered and became a theist because he experienced a high. How rational. Hey, I'm sucker for beauty too. I can't get enough of beautiful places, beautiful works, particularly beautiful moving music, beautiful women even. But in those rare moments that I'm in the midst of something really awesome I don't suddenly fall on my knees and accept Jesus and his dad as my delusion. It's also rather stupid to reason that just because we perceive and interpret various things (in nature) as beautiful means that a deity exists. Or maybe Collins wasn't even reasoning. As Pascal would say, his heart had reasons of its own.

Collins tells us that, "If one is willing to accept the existence of God or some supernatural force outside nature then it is not a logical problem to admit that, occasionally, a supernatural force might stage an invasion."

If you believe that the Incompetent Designer exists and if you believe that he waves his magic wand (or his fingers) from time to time, then sure you can believe that miracles pop up from time to time. The thing is, it's also logically valid to believe that Superman regularly foils bank robberies as long you believe in the "right" premises. There's nothing in Collins' statement but speculations. Is there any event at all that's been confirmed to be a miracle? Are we going to get showered with more arguments from awe and ignorance?