I find the cover of the February issue of DISCOVER highly offensive. In fact, I was embarrassed to find it in my mailbox. While I know it may be someone’s art, it is my pornography. If I want a fat, naked man in my mailbox, I will order him.

Ruth P. Watkins
Ashland, Virginia

I haven’t stopped laughing yet. Here’s my new issue of DISCOVER with a very large naked man on the cover and what’s the first thing I read? “The Big Bang Machine.”

Sharry Courter
Batavia, New York

The cover kinda scared me when I first saw it. I was like, whoa, there’s a naked dude on the front. I showed it to my mom, and she said, “Is that your father?” The guy really does look like my father. The glare he is giving looks exactly like the one my father gives me when he is disappointed. Kudos for the man on the cover.

Elizabeth Neucere
Houston, Texas

Editor’s note: Our February cover model is sculptor Ron Mueck’s Big Man (2000) on display at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City.

The Discover Interview with Francis Collins was fascinating [February]. As an atheist, I have great respect for him. Collins’s great contribution to science is rivaled by his forthright criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his book The Language of God, he debunks the fundamentalist creation story almost as well as Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. Nevertheless, several of Collins’s statements were puzzling. His question “What has atheism done to help people?” deserves an answer. Atheism is simply a lack of belief in a deity and does not exclude nonbelieving scientists, such as Darwin, Einstein, Crick, Watson, and Sagan, from contributing to humankind. I also take issue with Collins for accusing nonreligious scientists of having dogmatic beliefs in atheism. The vast majority of nonreligious scientists readily admit they would believe in a deity if scientific proof were presented and verified by peer review. They are still waiting, as am I.

Craig Gosling
Indianapolis, Indiana

The fact is that there are many highly intelligent, articulate believers like Francis Collins who do not see any inherent conflict between science and faith, but they are usually drowned out by the din of the conflict between militant atheists and young-Earth creationists. It was refreshing to see his interview in your magazine, where this topic has been heavily dominated by Dawkins and his ilk.

Randy Pals
Chesterton, Indiana

Francis Collins’s distorted thinking belies his claims to moderation and balance. He denies credit to atheism for the good done by atheists but holds atheism responsible for the horrors of Stalin and Mao. He then reverses his logic and compounds his biases by crediting religion for “altruistic, gentle, and loving” principles while dismissing the inhumanity done by its followers as occurring only “when someone takes those principles and twists them to suit their own purposes.” Atheists do not kill in the name of faith. Nor do I do good in the name of faith; I do good because it’s the right thing to do. Give me Richard Dawkins’s clear and honest thinking over Collins’s muddled justification for his beliefs and his dismissal of nonbelievers.

Francis Collins asks, “Is there any dogma more unsupported by facts than from the scientist who stands up and says, ‘I know there is no God’?” Unfortunately, there is. It is the scientist who stands up and says, “I know there is a God.” This embracer of both science and faith is on a slippery slope indeed, a prime example of brain compartmentalization—logical geneticist and illogical religionist.

William R. Lamppa
Embarrass, Minnesota

I am a retired physician. Several years ago, my patient’s life was saved because I had read one of Anthony Dajer’s articles in Vital Signs. Dajer wrote about a patient with a dissecting aneurysm whose life was saved because of the same diagnosis on another patient. The evening after I read the article, surgeons at my hospital saved my patient by repairing her dissecting aneurysm. I am sure that reading Dajer’s article aided my diagnosis.

William Barr
Tilden, Nebraska