Dr. Francis Collins is apparently in the news again. He claims to be an evangelical Christian, and pushed Christians to wear cloth masks and get vaccinated. Should Christians trust Collins as a scientific authority? Or is he just a willing pawn of the secular left? Let’s take a look at an article from Megan Basham, and find out.

This article from February 2022 is originally from Daily Wire, but full text here. The title is “How The Federal Government Used Evangelical Leaders To Spread Covid Propaganda To Churches”.

Excerpt:

In September, Wheaton College dean Ed Stetzer interviewed National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins on his podcast, “Church Leadership” about why Christians who want to obey Christ’s command to love their neighbors should get the Covid vaccine and avoid indulging in misinformation.

[…]Their conversation also turned to the subject of masking children at school, with Collins noting that Christians, in particular, have been resistant to it. His view was firm—kids should be masked if they want to be in the classroom. To do anything else is to turn schools into super spreaders. Stetzer offered no pushback or follow-up questions based on views from other medical experts. He simply agreed.

[…]Collins participated in a livestream event, co-hosted by Christianity Today… During the panel interview, Collins continued to insist that the lab leak theory wasn’t just unlikely but qualified for the dreaded misinformation label. “If you were trying to design a more dangerous coronavirus,” he said, “you would never have designed this one … So I think one can say with great confidence that in this case the bioterrorist was nature … Humans did not make this one. Nature did.”

I blogged previously about how several federal government departments now think that this is the most plausible theory, and how the CIA bribed experts to change their testimony about the lab leak theory. So Collins was actually the one spreading misinformation.

Collins takes secular left positions on abortion and transgenderism:

He has not only defended experimentation on fetuses obtained by abortion, he has also directed record-level spending toward it. Among the priorities the NIH has funded under Collins — a University of Pittsburgh experiment that involved grafting infant scalps onto lab rats, as well as projects that relied on the harvested organs of aborted, full-term babies. Some doctors have even charged Collins with giving money to research that required extracting kidneys, ureters, and bladders from living infants.

He further has endorsed unrestricted funding of embryonic stem cell research, personally attending President Obama’s signing of an Executive Order to reverse a previous ban on such expenditures.

[…]When it comes to pushing an agenda of racial quotas and partiality based on skin color, Collins is a member of the Left in good standing, speaking fluently of “structural racism” and “equity” rather than equality. He’s put his money (or, rather, taxpayer money) where his mouth is, implementing new policies that require scientists seeking NIH grants to pass diversity, equity, and inclusion tests in order to qualify.

[…]Having declared himself an “ally” of the gay and trans movements, he went on to say he “[applauds] the courage and resilience it takes for [LGBTQ] individuals to live openly and authentically” and is “committed to listening, respecting, and supporting [them]” as an “advocate.”

[…]Under his watch, the NIH launched a new initiative to specifically direct funding to “sexual and gender minorities.” On the ground, this has translated to awarding millions in grants to experimental transgender research on minors, like giving opposite-sex hormones to children as young as eight and mastectomies to girls as young as 13. Another project, awarded $8 million in grants, included recruiting teen boys to track their homosexual activities like “condomless anal sex” on an app without their parents’ consent.

Megan’s got the names of the people who promoted him in her article: Tim Keller, Rick Warren, N. T. Wright, Ed Stetzer, Russell Moore, and David French:

Keller, Warren, Wright, and Stetzer all publicly lauded him as a godly brother.  When presenting Collins to Southern Baptists, Moore gushed over him as the smartest man in a book club he attends…

[I]nfluential evangelical pundit David French deemed Collins a “national treasure” and his service in the NIH “faithful.”

Dr. Collins is a Darwinian evolutionist, so you can guess how evidence-based his views are about the origin of life and the Cambrian explosion. I think Christians need to be skeptical of believers in naturalistic religion: Darwinism, man-made catastrophic global warming, abortion, transgenderism, etc. It’s pretty clear that these naturalistic views are not the result of study and debate. People who jump on the speculations of the secular left, and pronounce them as infallible, are not doing it to promote truth. They do it because they want the respect of powerful secular leftists. Dr. Collins is not an independent thinker. He is someone who adopts the views of secular leftist elites automatically and without thinking. He wants to get ahead in the world. That’s it.