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Dr. Francis Collins on the Intersection of Faith and Science

Dr. Francis Collins on the Intersection of Faith and Science

Over the years, the division between science and faith has grown wider and wider. It’s not a new division, like many want to believe, but it has been accelerated following the global pandemic and widespread misinformation online. And while it seems like the chasm is only growing wider, there’s one leader who believes faith and science can not only coexist, but also work together.

Dr. Francis Collins is one of the most influential voices in both the scientific and faith communities. As the former director of the National Institutes of Health, he led groundbreaking efforts in the fight against COVID-19 and has had a decades-long career advancing medical research, including heading the Human Genome Project. But beyond his scientific expertise, Collins is also an outspoken Christian, offering a rare perspective that blends rigorous scientific inquiry with a deep personal faith.

In Collins’ new book, The Road to Wisdom, he explores the role of trust, humility and curiosity in decision-making—whether in science, faith or everyday life. With society becoming increasingly polarized and distrust in institutions rising, we were eager to sit down with Collins to discuss his thoughts on how we can navigate these challenges. In this conversation, we talk about how science and faith can (and do) coexist, and how we can better discern who and what to trust in a world flooded with conflicting information.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

RELEVANT: How has studying science increased your faith, and how has your faith impacted your career as a scientist?

It has, absolutely. I’m not one of those who thinks the faith worldview and the scientific worldview have to have a firewall between them or something bad will happen. They coexist within me on any given day, including right now. And by the way, I didn’t grow up in a faith tradition, and I’m kind of glad in retrospect because I think there’s so much about faith traditions now that’s added on to the foundation, various human attributes—some of them are sort of anti-science. I never experienced that.

I came to faith as a Christian at age 27, as a medical student, really trying to find answers to questions like, why is there suffering? Is there a God? What happens when you die? Why am I here anyway? And why is there something instead of nothing? All of those questions that science has no answers to, but I thought they were important questions, and I wanted to have a way to approach them. And faith gave me that.

So now, as a scientist, I’m just as rigorous as any scientist you’ll meet about any kind of experimental data that you’re going to tell me convinces you of something about nature because that’s how we have to do it. But I also think of what we’re doing as scientists as exploring creation that’s given as a gift to us by God. And so, when you discover something about creation that wasn’t known before, wow, that’s a little glimpse of God’s mind, and that makes it even more of an exciting moment than if it was just an intellectual adventure.

So I think, therefore, science can be thought of not as contrary to belief in God but actually in a very similar way, almost like worship. I think you can make that case. So for me, as long as you’re careful about what question you’re asking and which approach fits, then I’ve never encountered a conflict between science and faith.

Your new book explores how truth, science, faith and trust all work together to help us find answers to today’s problems. How did you come to this conclusion?

Francis Collins: I didn’t really want to. I didn’t really know that it was going to be important to try to write about this, but it grew on me over time, and ultimately, I found I couldn’t really walk away. I served as the director of the National Institutes of Health for 12 years. I’m a physician, a scientist, reporting to three presidents: Obama, Trump, and Biden. And particularly during COVID, where it became clear that we as a society had become awfully polarized, awfully divided, and at times unable to tell the difference between lies and truth, we were in a pretty difficult place as far as our future. There is such a thing as objective truth, but if people start to deny that or accept alternative facts as if they are facts, then all kinds of things start to run off the rails.

And if science is not something that people can trust because they don’t like its conclusions, that also puts us in a difficult place. Facts don’t care how you feel. They just are what they are. But if people are allowed to discount things that they don’t really appreciate, where is that going to take us? Communities of faith, I would think, ought to be in a very good place to stand against this kind of deterioration. Truth, love, and concern for each other’s well-being are crucial, but many communities of faith have been caught up in a lot of the same contentious arguments that are more political than they are based on faith. I’m a person of faith, so I grieve a bit about what’s happened to my own community in that regard. We’ve also really begun to have trouble figuring out what criteria to use to decide whether to trust information, a person, or an institution.

Trust, in general, has been deteriorating rather badly over the course of the last few years. These are not good signs for the most technologically advanced country in the world to be having this kind of confusion about things that are really necessary for us to make progress. Things that I think fit into this idea of a road to wisdom that we all want to be on. Wisdom is not just knowledge; it adds other things like judgment, experience, and a moral foundation. But it feels like our collective road to wisdom has had a lot of bumps. Sometimes I feel like we’re in the ditch. So, the book was aiming to try first to do the diagnostics of what we’ve lost anchor to that is really significant, and then what we can do about it.

How did we get here? When did these “bumps” start?

It starts quite a ways back. It’s tempting for people to think that it just happened in the last year or two, or it just happened because of COVID. No, it was there. Politically, you can go back to the ’60s and ’70s and see the early signs of this kind of divisiveness. It got a lot worse in the 1990s, with politics becoming much more of a blood sport instead of an effort to try to compromise. Then certainly, in the last 10 years or so, it’s been very much in that space. People have tended to align themselves with like-minded people and then go off into their own particular tribal alliance and stop talking to people who don’t agree with them. They even begin to say, “They’re not just misguided over there, those people are actually evil.” And that’s something that I don’t think had reached quite the same level that it is now in a very long time. So it’s been accelerated.

COVID should have been a reason for us all to come together. We had a common enemy, and that’s what’s supposed to deal with divisiveness, and the common enemy was the virus. But instead, it seemed to be used as a way to drive us further apart in terms of people’s acceptance of various facts about the pandemic and the various implementation of public health measures, which became very contentious, like masking, closures of businesses and schools, and whether or not the vaccines were really safe and effective. That, unfortunately, from my perspective, turned this societal divisiveness, which was already a problem, into something much more serious, something that took lives.

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that between June 2021 and March 2022, when vaccines were freely available to anyone who wanted one, more than 50 million Americans said no. Kaiser says, by their very careful analysis, 234,000 people died. So this culture war wasn’t just about rhetoric; it took lives.

When did science in particular become a politicized issue?

It was a little bit that way over the past few decades. I mean, you could say because of the perceived conflict between science and faith perspectives, that therefore communities of faith, if they tended to be more on the conservative side politically, might mean that science was less likely to be warmly embraced among conservatives. But it was a pretty limited influence. That has gotten much worse, and distrust in science among conservatives has gone up very steeply. This is really hard to understand on a rational basis. I mean, science is about determining objective truths about how nature works. Why should politics be part of that conversation? But it’s almost now as if the Democrats are seen as the party of science, and therefore Republicans, because they can’t agree with the Democrats, have to be the party who questions science.

And when you look at the consequences—again, coming back to COVID vaccines and unwillingness to accept what was a very compelling case of safety and efficacy—that was a much stronger reaction for people who identified as Republican than those who identified as Democrat, which is so weird because that vaccine was developed during Donald Trump’s presidency by a remarkable effort called Operation Warp Speed, which I was part of, which was mostly shaped by the Republican Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, a really remarkable guy who did something amazing.

So, the Republicans ought to be taking credit for this — “look what happened under our watch” — but politics seems to have all kinds of ways to take what should be a sensible conclusion and turn it into something else.

Now that we’ve identified the problem, what can we do about it, both on an individual level and a global level?

Well, that’s what I’ve been struggling with. I would love to think that leadership at the national level could bring us back together, but I don’t see that happening. Various surveys of attitudes would say our politics is more divided than the public at large. So, don’t count on the politicians to bring us back together. There’s such a force now in Congress, for instance, to move yourself to the more extreme positions because that’s how one gets attention, and if you’re always running for the next election, you need attention, which means a lot of politician attitudes and behaviors are not about governing, they’re about performance—some sort of scene in front of videos or cameras or microphones to basically grab attention.

And it’s quite troubling to see that. I mean, I’ve lived in this environment because I’m a federal employee and have been for 31 years and have had the chance to work with multiple members of Congress over all those years and have grown to greatly admire many of those heroic figures. But now it just seems like we’ve lost that view about what it means to try to be a governing body, and it’s more about how to cause more attention to happen for something you just said. So, we’re not going to get it that way. I think if there’s going to be a solution, it’s going to come from each of us. We are, after all, the grassroots. We are, as More in Common has called it—that’s a group that’s done careful surveys of society—most of us part of the exhausted middle. We’re not out there on the left fringe or the right fringe. We’re like, what happened to us? We might be tilted a little bit to the blue or red side of politics, but it’s not what drives us. It’s not our identity.

Some of us, like me, are believers. A lot of us are skeptics, but we all have in common this desire to get our country back. And I think we’re ready to move from saying things shouldn’t be like this to saying things shouldn’t be like this. I’m not going to tolerate this kind of circumstance if there’s something I can do. I’m going to try to see how I can help. And so in the book, in the last chapter, there’s a whole list of actions that I think individuals who are motivated could start to take. And that includes being willing to try to build bridges to people on the other side of an issue instead of staying away from them.

And that requires some investment of time and patience, because you have to learn once again how to listen. Hear somebody else’s view. Really hear it, to understand it, not plan your rebuttal while you’re hearing it. Because you’re trying to see how they got to that place, and maybe you can find common ground. That’s happening at local levels. There are communities that are actually trying to invest in this kind of bridge building. It can happen, and I think most of us actually want that to happen. There’s a whole other set of actions that are more about how we all make decisions about trust.

I think in this very noisy and very contentious environment of the Internet and social media, we have lost our anchor about how to make decisions about who’s trustworthy. This information overload, with the rise of artificial intelligence making it even easier to generate lies that look like the truth, means we’ve got to get smarter about how to deal with that. We’ve got to become more skeptical consumers of information and recognize that if we’re just getting our news from social media, especially if it’s a platform that is only giving us the things that match our own pre-existing views, we’re probably in trouble.

If you’re in that circumstance, you should get out of that bubble and find places where you’re more likely to see things that don’t fit your own preconceptions. We’ve all got to get a little smarter and work a little harder at that.

How can we still trust people and institutions out there, knowing that they might get things wrong sometimes?

Well, some of it requires our own humility to recognize we get stuff wrong; all of us do. And also to recognize—and I don’t think this came across the way it might have—in a pandemic like COVID, which comes out of nowhere all of a sudden, there’s no way you’re going to know everything you want to know about this virus and how it spreads between individuals on day one. And so this could have been a great moment to kind of model for the general public how science is done, where you have some sketchy information, you make a hypothesis about what you think it all means, you collect more data, and then sometimes you have to revise your hypothesis or blow it up altogether.

That’s what we were doing. I still think the information that was coming out of the public health experts like the CDC was the best information we had. It was certainly better than some random post on social media that somebody tried to put out there, but it wasn’t perfect.

What I wish I had done, because I was one of the people in front of a camera talking about this a lot in 2020, was to say every time there was a recommendation coming forward that this is the best we can do right now because we are working with a rapidly moving situation with inadequate data. So don’t be surprised if we need to change this in a month or so. But also, please don’t be suspicious that we’re doing this for some sort of personal reason. We are taking the information we’ve got, trying to save lives. Here’s what we’ve got today.

Again, we might be wrong about some of this, but it’s the best that we or anybody else could probably do with what’s known at the moment. I wish we’d said that more often, and then maybe there would have been less of this gradual sense of distrust when the recommendations changed.

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