If Francis Collins And Christopher Hitchens Can be Friends — So Can Monotheists of All Shades

Epigraph

God may still bring about affection between you and your present enemies – God is all powerful, God is most forgiving and merciful.

He does not forbid you to deal kindly and justly with anyone who has not fought you for your faith or driven you out of your homes: God loves the just.

But God forbids you to take as allies those who have fought against you for your faith, driven you out of your homes, and helped others to drive you out: any of you who take them as allies will truly be wrongdoers.  (Al Quran 60:7-9)

Francis Collins talks about Christopher Hitchens towards the end of his above Templeton Award speech.

Below a brief CV of both and let the 21 minute speech do the talking to overcome hatred among Monotheists of different shades among the Abrahamic faiths and the perpetual sectarian prejudice bordering on hatred among the Muslims of different sects.

Francis Sellers Collins (born April 14, 1950) is an American physician-scientist who discovered the genes associated with a number of diseases and led the Human Genome Project. He served as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, from 17 August 2009 to 19 December 2021, serving under three presidents.^[1][2]

Before being appointed director of the NIH, Collins led the Human Genome Project and other genomics research initiatives as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), one of the 27 institutes and centers at NIH. Before joining NHGRI, he earned a reputation as a gene hunter at the University of Michigan.^[3] He has been elected to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, and has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science.

Collins also has written books on science, medicine, and religion, including the New York Times bestseller, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. After leaving the directorship of NHGRI and before becoming director of the NIH, he founded and served as president of The BioLogos Foundation, which promotes discourse on the relationship between science and religion and advocates the perspective that belief in Christianity can be reconciled with acceptance of evolution and science, especially through the idea that the Creator brought about his plan through the processes of evolution.^[4] In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI appointed Collins to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.^[5]

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was a British author, journalist and educator.^[2][3] Author of 18 books on faith, culture, politics and literature, he was born and educated in Britain, graduating in the 1970s from Oxford with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. In the early 1980s, he emigrated to the United States and wrote for The Nation and Vanity Fair. Known as “one of the ‘four horsemen'” (along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett) of New Atheism, he gained prominence as a columnist and speaker. His epistemological razor, which states that “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence”, is still of mark in philosophy and law.^[4][5]