I remember some twenty years ago hearing a visiting preacher at my church say that he believed he would live to see Christians persecuted for their faith in the USA. While I doubt that will happen (I imagine the preacher is in his mid-to-late sixties now), it is true that Christians are more and more being condemned and marginalized for their beliefs. You can already see this in the comments being raised regarding Obama’s nominee for director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins. Here’s Chris Wilson, writing for Slate.
When rumors of the appointment began to circulate in May, University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne blogged, “I’d be much more comfortable with someone whose only agenda was science,” saying he was worried “about how this will affect things like stem-cell research and its funding.” (In fact, Collins is clear on his support of stem-cell research.) Sam Harris was predictably unimpressed with Collins’ ideas. “Most reviewers of The Language of God seem quite overawed by its author’s scientific credentials,” Harris wrote shortly after it was published. “His book, however, reveals that a stellar career in science offers no guarantee of a scientific frame of mind.”
Harris does not make a genuine attempt to consider the book’s ideas, but he is correct that the philosophy espoused by Collins, which he calls “theistic evolution,” has so far managed to evade sustained and careful scrutiny. Now that he has been chosen as the most important scientific administrator in the country, overseeing $40 billion of grants and programs, the scientific community can be forgiven for a few jitters over exactly where Collins comes down on the inevitable, often glaring contradictions between science and Scripture.
Read more here.
UPDATE: Of course, stories like this don’t help!
UPDATE II: GetReligion offers some pertinent comments