State of the art thinking from the New York Review of Books. Rick Garnett comments on one section, calling it "particularly unfounded" and summarizes in this way:

In the end, I do not think it is a stretch to say that, in Wills’s view, any argument or position that is (a) held by the Bush Administration and some Christians (b) with which Wills disagrees is a "faith based" position.

I’ll pile on by considering this passage:

The religious position on health was foremost in the first major domestic issue George W. Bush faced as president. The great promise of using embryonic stem cell research had to be beaten back by the evangelicals, who think that embryos are human persons. Bush spent much of his time working out a way to cut off research without seeming to.

So exactly how many evangelicals are there on the Bioethics Council? Are Catholics now evangelicals? If the affirmation of the human personhood of the embryo is a faith-based position, what is the denial? Can science deny the humanity of the embryo? Does "science" have anything to say about "personhood," one way or another? Are all affirmations (and denials) of personhood dependent upon faith? Gee, I guess the country is, as the NYRB’s headline writer says, "ruled by faith."