What does wisdom mean for Christians in an age of polarization, cynicism, and distrust? In confronting the unique concerns of our time, what can help us become wise?

Dr. Francis S. Collins joined us to discuss his new book, The Road to Wisdom, illuminating how truth, science, faith, and trust work together to help us discern the best path forward in life.

Thank you to our sponsors, Mark and Jennifer Tidd, Nancy Ziegler, and Bob Fryling; and to our co-host, Little, Brown and Company, for their support of this event!

Discussion Questions

• What is wisdom? How does Collins define/describe it? How do you define and seek wisdom?
• An essential part of finding truth is searching for it. But there is plenty of evidence that we often prefer to search for what confirms our point of view (also called confirmation bias) rather than what is true. Why would we rather have our biases confirmed rather than better understand what is true?
• What role does trust play in seeking wisdom? How do you decide whom and what to trust?
• How do the pillars of Wisdom Collins named – truth, faith, science, and trust – relate to each other in the pursuit of wisdom?
• What steps can you take, either individually, communally, or institutionally, to advance on the road to wisdom?

Online Conversation | Francis Collins | September 13, 2024

Cherie Harder: Thanks so much, Campbell, and welcome to all of you joining us for today’s Online Conversation with Francis Collins on “Truth and Trust.” We’re delighted that so many of you are joining today. I think we’re close to 1,500 registrants at this point. And I want to just say welcome. If this is your first time—we know there’s over 100 of you that have registered for the very first time—so if you’re one of those, we’re so glad you’re here and also want to give a special shout-out to those of you who are joining us from different countries. I think there’s at least 20 different countries represented, including Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, and many others. So welcome from across the miles and across the time zones. And if you haven’t already done so, let us know where you’re joining us from in the chat feature. It is always fun for others to see the worldwide community of Trinity Forum viewers.

If you are one of those people who are joining us for the very first time, or are otherwise new to the work of the Trinity Forum, we seek to provide a space for leaders to engage the big questions of life in the context of faith, and to offer programs like today’s Online Conversation to do so, and to come to better know the Author of the answers. And we hope today’s conversation will be a small taste of that for you today.

The Bible has a great deal to say about both truth and wisdom. Jesus tells us the truth will set us free. Proverbs has verse after verse about wisdom. It tells us that it’s more precious than rubies, that it pays higher dividends and is more profitable than gold, that it offers long life and honor, and that nothing one desires can be compared to it. And yet, it’s safe to say that we do not live in an age characterized by the widespread pursuit of wisdom. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who we had not that long ago as a guest on our Online Conversations, in a recent article for The Atlantic, which was the headliner, characterized the last ten years of American life as “uniquely stupid.” As extreme partisanship has divided us, misinformation has confused us, conspiracy thinking has addled us, and loneliness disoriented us, we report becoming increasingly convinced that those we disagree with are either brainwashed or hateful. It’s become harder for us to distinguish between fact and fiction, and easier for us to believe the worst in others, rather than to seek out what is true and trustworthy.

So how might we seek wisdom in such disorienting times? In a new and soon-to-be-released book, our guest today argues for a renewed focus on what he calls the “pillars of understanding and wisdom,” including truth, science, faith, and trust. He shows how these pillars can be mutually reinforcing and invites his readers to renew their curiosity, trust, and faith in facing the challenges of our time and pursuing that long road to wisdom.

Francis Collins is one of the world’s leading scientists and geneticists, and was the longest-serving director of the National Institute of Health, serving under three different presidents. Before leading the NIH, he spearheaded the International Human Genome Project, which mapped the entire human genome, including all 3 billion letters of our DNA, and, through it, revolutionized our understanding of our genetic makeup. Dr. Collins has been elected to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, appointed by Pope Benedict to the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences, and is the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, and the Templeton Prize for advancing scientific understanding of the deep questions of the universe. He is also the author of the New York Times best-selling work, The Language of God, and his brand-new, still-forthcoming, which will be out on Tuesday, new work, The Road to Wisdom, which we’ve invited him here today to discuss.

Francis, welcome.

Francis Collins: Well, gosh, Cherie, that’s a lovely introduction and thank you for the opportunity to be here and engage in conversation with you. The leadership you have shown at Trinity Forum has been such an inspiration to all of us who had the chance to learn from sessions like this. And I will try not to ruin your record by whatever we talk about today, but I think it’s a pretty serious topic we’re engaged in, and I’m delighted to see how many people have linked up to take part in it.

Cherie Harder: Well, we’re just really delighted to have you here, Francis. And it’s a terrific book and I’m just really excited to get to have this conversation with you. And so starting out, I have to ask, all books have elements of the autobiographical, and you mention early in your work that you have been on what you called a nonlinear life journey in search of wisdom. So as we start out, I’d love to hear from you just what set you on the quest for wisdom? What have you found and why did you write this book?

Francis Collins: Well, what a great place to start. You know, I started out a pretty significant science nerd. My original training in science was in chemistry, quantum mechanics, to be exact. And then I went to medical school and things got more complicated in terms of both the science and the theological and ethical considerations. And I entered medical school as an atheist and left as a Christian, and began to have much more of an interest, therefore, in how do we know things? Epistemology. And what do we do with that information? And is knowledge sufficient, or do we need something more than that if we’re really going to take full advantage of our experiences, our gifts that God has given us?

And here’s where wisdom comes in. Maybe I’ll just say a word about that as we’re going to talk about that in this hour. Wisdom depends on knowledge, of course, but it’s more than that. It builds on knowledge, but adds to that a moral framework, the element of understanding, of insight, of some common sense, of experience. Wisdom makes it possible, as Solomon had to do, to figure out how to make judgments in a complicated situation where knowledge alone doesn’t give you a clear answer as to what the right thing to do is.

So all of those things kind of come together to get us on this road. And that’s the title of the book. And it is a road, and I’m on it too. And I occasionally find myself in the ditch when something has kind of run amok in my own understanding of what wisdom is. But I think we all want to be there. We want to try to figure out, with all of the resources we have been given from nature, from the Bible, from our own experience, how can we be wise? Again, Proverbs has a lot to say about that. And, of course, maybe one of the most famous verses is “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Fear I don’t know in this case is intended to be like you’re frightened. But the recognition of the seriousness of that relationship, that you are, in fact, lucky to be able to deal with the Almighty. But you need to take that with great respect and seriousness. And of course, the rest of that verse, which doesn’t usually get quoted, is “and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” So knowledge gets in there too, but very much anchoring us as believers in what the source of all this is. 

I’m also very fond of James’ version of this, and it’s actually very similar in terms of what the words are. But I have inscribed in my daughter’s wonderful calligraphy that verse from James chapter one, verse five, which is, “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask of God, who gives to everyone generously and without calling faults, and it will be given.” Now that sounds pretty direct. I claim that on occasions, because I often find myself at a loss to put together all of the things that I know or should know, and how do I come up with a wise decision?

So all of that’s been kind of playing out in the course of my career, from medicine through research to the Human Genome Project, to the privilege of serving as the director of NIH for 12 years, to landing unexpectedly in the White House as the president’s science advisor. Many of the things you deal with in those situations are not just strictly the facts, although you better have the facts right. We’ll come to that, maybe. But on top of that, you need other things. You need to understand what your faith can add to that and how you can figure out who to trust for advice. All of those things add together, on a good day, and one could say, “I think I’m on that road to wisdom in a successful fashion. And I didn’t just fall in a pothole.”

Cherie Harder: You know, your book is largely about what you call “four core sources” of wisdom, which you define as science, faith, trust, and truth. And dealing with both truth and wisdom and knowledge, there are many different ways that we acquire knowledge. And so one of the things I wanted to ask you about is why you chose those four, in that there’s probably many people thinking, “Well, I can think of other ways of knowledge acquisition” or even potentially wisdom acquisition, you know, whether it’s personal knowledge or beauty, story or imagination. So why did you choose these four core sources to focus on?

Francis Collins: I confess, I’ve been very influenced by my own experience as a public servant who’s been in the public eye for quite a number of years. And I got to tell you, Cherie, I’ve become increasingly concerned about what’s happening in our society in terms of the divisiveness, the polarization, all of which seems to also attach itself to a diminished trust in traditional sources of expertise and a willingness sometimes to accept information that’s coming from unreliable sources as if it was true. So our definition of truth and what it really means to say something that is an established fact has gotten kind of frayed. Science is, of course, a source of much of that truth about nature, and science distrust has also been growing. 

In the midst of that, as a person of faith, I have wanted to see faith as a solution to a lot of these difficulties our society is facing because my faith and yours, it’s all about truth and it’s about love and grace. And yet in many instances, it feels like our faith communities have also gotten caught up in a lot of the divisiveness and maybe the politics have become more prominent than they should in a circumstance where I think we’ve all kind of been warned about that in terms of our faith needing to stay separate from that.

By the way, I wanted to say, in case nobody has seen it, there is this recent document, “Our Confession of Evangelical Conviction,” that just got released a few days ago. If you haven’t seen this, look it up. More than 300 faith leaders have signed on to this. And it’s basically a reminder that as people of faith, that is where our focus should be. And an increasing tendency to link our faith up to political goals is both harmful for how people see faith and also harmful for us as practitioners. So that’s also a source of concern.

So, Cherie, I didn’t want to write this book. This book was like not something that was like, oh, I can’t wait to pick up my pen or sit at my computer and start to put this down. But I am deeply troubled about the circumstances that I see and that drew me in this direction.

Now you ask about why the four? It sort of seems to me that, of our current malaise, these are four areas that should be sources of strength—truth, science, faith, and trust—that were finding themselves in a less strong position and even at times getting us off that road to wisdom. I totally take your point and let nobody imagine that those four concepts are the only things that belong there. You mentioned a couple of others. What about beauty? I guess for me, I think of beauty as one of those inexplicable aspects of being human that points me in the faith direction. But I know that atheists also experience beauty and have other explanations for it, and it’s certainly part of how we achieve things like wisdom, and the same would apply to experience and understanding.

But it seemed to me these four pillars are particularly crucial for a successful society and are particularly under threat right now, and needed, therefore, to be called out a bit, taken apart, obviously from my own perspective, telling a lot of personal stories in this book, some of which admittedly make me look really stupid. But that’s important. We need to do more of that too. And then try to figure out how do we reconstruct something, not just expect somebody else to do it for us, but how can we, each one of us, try to figure out how to get back on this road?

Cherie Harder: Yeah. You know, presumably for any of those four pillars to stand and be strengthened, there needs to be a desire for them to be strong. And one of the things that has sort of struck me—I’ve asked other guests about it and wanted to ask you as well—which is something quite troubling. You know, one would hope that we would all really want to know the truth. Jesus promises the truth will set us free. You know, there’s all sorts of reasons why we should want this and pursue it, but there’s also a lot of sort of contradictory evidence that perhaps we don’t always want to know the truth all that much. In your book you trace just even the rise of post-modernism. It’s moved from the left to the right. It became kind of a convenient way for people confronted with truths they didn’t want to hear or facts they didn’t want to hear to say, “Oh, well, that is your truth. That’s not relevant to me or my situation.” And then I also just think about the fact that, you know, misinformation has spread so quickly, and it has spread so quickly, in part, because we seem to enjoy it. You know, there’s been an Atlantic piece showing that misinformation spreads six times as quickly on social media as something accurate. It penetrates more deeply. It’s much more likely to be reposted, retweeted, commented upon, and the like. There seems to be something in us that doesn’t necessarily want the truth, that actually sort of relishes the falsehood. What do we do with that?

Francis Collins: Well, start out by recognizing it. Part of my book also is to try to encourage each of us, me included, to kind of understand what kind of cognitive biases you bring to every interaction and to what extent, when truth comes at you, you’re ready to take it on board or you think it’s boring, or maybe you just don’t think it matches with what your expected answer was going to be, so you set it aside. That’s one thing about truth. Real truth doesn’t care how you feel. And if you find yourself reacting to a statement because it makes you feel angry or upset, then first ask yourself, “Wait a minute. But is it true?” And if it is, okay, maybe there’s a need to do a little revision here of your own web of belief. And I talk about the web of belief in the book a bit, as a framework that I’ve found pretty useful.

But you’re right, the stuff that’s going to make you angry or upset or fearful or just gossip spreads so much faster than a reliable, reassuring statement of truth. I think our favorite emotion as human beings is righteous indignation. I mean, think about it. When you have a chance to get indignant about something: “Look what happened there, and that wasn’t just! And I’m going to speak out about—” we kind of relish that. And a lot of what’s going on in terms of stuff that flies around on social media, taps into that. But that’s not really good for us.

So the book is really calling on us all to recognize that truth does matter, that we’re in a difficult state now where untruths have become so readily spread around and accepted. And if you’re part of what More in Common, a wonderful group that’s been studying our society, calls “the exhausted middle,” which is probably about two thirds of us—you’re not on the left extreme or the right extreme. You’re just somewhere in the middle there. You’re a little bit red or a little bit blue. You’re a believer. You’re a skeptic, and you’re just like, “What happened to us? How did we get in this place with all this vitriol and all this stuff that’s being yelled at each other that may or may not be true?” I think the time has come for many of us to say, “I think I need to be part of a solution here. I need to say it’s not enough to say things shouldn’t be like this. I’m ready to say I shouldn’t be like this. Let me try to get my house in order. Get my worldview reset to the truth, to faith if that’s who I am. And not let all of this other noise out there knock me off my road to wisdom in a way that’s bad for me and bad for my society.” 

Cherie Harder: Yeah. That actually reminds me of something I really was looking forward to asking you about, which is the posture or orientation that your pillars cultivate. And part of what I mean by that is, you know, the scientific method as you have described it is one that is all about discovery and curiosity, but it’s in some ways opposed to certainty. I remember reading at some point that 50 percent of what we think we know is actually wrong. We just don’t know which 50 percent. And so, you know, part of the task of science is to continually test, continually discover, to learn, but also to hold lightly and allow for future discovery, which may contradict. Faith encourages our proper posture before God, which is one of worship, and encourages awe and humility and really just a delight in the transcendent. And so many of the forms of falsehood that you talk about in the book, whether it’s propaganda or lying or BS, in a sense, there seems to be a very different kind of orientation or posture, which is much more about self-assertion or domination. And so I wanted to ask you about what is the posture of the pilgrim on the road to wisdom? How should we be seeking wisdom and truth?

Francis Collins: What a great way to ask the question. Well, I don’t think it’s by being sources of propaganda and lies, for starters. Because you’re right, the motivation for that is often to make oneself seem important or special, or actually to gain some kind of power advantage by being the source of a lie that gives you that advantage. I think pilgrims on the road—again, you’re not going to get very far with wisdom unless you really do have respect for knowledge and for truth. And you’re right. Maybe the right way to approach that is the way the scientist does, that you have a category of information that, over time, has been established as factual, as evidence based, and you’re unwilling to tear one of those facts down unless you have very strong evidence to do so. But if you do have that evidence, then, okay, time to reconstruct your worldview by recognizing that one turned out not to be true. Science has to do that all the time. But you do it with care. And it’s not just a willy-nilly destructive attitude towards a fact you don’t like.

So the pilgrims, I think, have that same view, and certainly pilgrims who are people of faith, as you have said, approach this with awe, with humility. As a scientist who gets to do science but with an attitude of faith, I find this works really well, that you have the chance in the laboratory to try to make a discovery, and you might be wrong, but at the same time, you feel this incredible gift, this privilege, to be engaged in trying to discover something about God’s creation. And God already knows the answer. And occasionally you get an answer that nobody saw before. And I suppose, and some might say the next step is to say how important you are. But if you’re a person of faith, no, it’s this sense of awe, this sense of having been wonderfully gifted by the privilege of being able to explore God’s creation. I think that’s what the pilgrim on the road, whether or not they’re a scientist—and most won’t be—benefits most from that. This is not just a burden to be trying to find your way into wisdom. This is an incredible opportunity that God has given each one of us, surrounded by lots of information, lots of resources to sift through it all, to work through it with love and with grace, and see how we can find ourselves into a place that is what we are called to, which is more about everybody else than about us. 

Cherie Harder: Let me ask you what happens when it seems like the road forks and our road splits. And here’s what I mean by that. We were talking about science just a minute ago, and how there’s a lot that we think we know that may be subject to future revision. You know, one needs to hold a lot lightly. The expectations or just the disciplines of science seem like they may be at odds, at least at times, with some of the duties or obligations of, say, trust. And part of what I’m thinking here is, you know, as the head of NIH and in many of your roles, you had a responsibility to both basically safeguard the public trust and public health. And part of that necessarily requires giving simple, clear instructions, because when you ladle on lots of caveats and carve outs and waivers, people tend to dismiss things. It’s too much complexity for a very busy person to entirely absorb. At the same time, settled scientific consensus can change over time.

Francis Collins: Oh, it always does.

Cherie Harder: And that change can understandably then cause a fall in trust. And I know you have experienced that basic phenomenon over the last few years. And so I wanted to ask you, what have you learned from that? And how has that affected your own thinking about science, faith, trust, and truth?

Francis Collins: That’s a great question. And it does bring me then to reflect a little bit on the experience of the last five years that we’ve all been through with Covid, and where the public health aspects of that became extremely critical for saving lives, but also extremely contentious in terms of whether what was put forward was seen by everybody as appropriate or whether there were serious missteps. I was right in the middle of that, although not as somebody with the lead role for public health decision making. That was CDC. But I certainly found myself many times walking out my front door, and getting into one of those vans where you sit and stare at a camera and somebody asks you questions about what’s the recommendation right now about how to keep people safe from this terrible virus. I will tell you, almost all the time you had 20 seconds, maybe 30—once in a while you get two minutes, but usually it was pretty brief. 

So it was actually, what was going on right there, Cherie, was really what could have been a wonderful public lesson about the nature of science. Because this virus emerges out of Wuhan, a virus we knew nothing about other than it was a coronavirus. And we’re trying to learn as best as we can. What’s the story? How does it get spread? Is it spread by people who are healthy or only people who are sick? Can we come up with some drug that might help people who are sick before we have a chance to invent a new drug? Are there any existing drugs that might actually help? And, oh my gosh, how can we make a vaccine as fast as we possibly can?

All of that is happening in the year of no sleep, which was 2020. And yet you still have to come up with ways to offer to the public some suggestions of what are the best methods that can be used to keep them safe, even as in March, April, May of 2020, 4,000 people are dying every day. So we had to do what you do in science except in an extremely emergent situation. You make a hypothesis, you do the next set of data collection to see if it’s right, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it isn’t.

And what I should have said every time I had a chance to speak about this publicly is to say, “I’m about to tell you the best recommendations that the experts can come up with for today. But it’s based upon incomplete data. We are vastly unclear about a whole variety of aspects of this pandemic. We’re working as fast as we can to get those answers, but don’t be surprised if, in fact, in a couple of weeks or a month or two, we come back and say, we’ve got to change that recommendation because we have new information. And what we said before no longer makes sense.” We didn’t put that caveat into the communication like we should have. And so when the recommendation did change, people began to wonder, did these guys know what they’re talking about? Are they just jerking us around? Maybe that guy that I just was listening to on cable news or that social media post I got, they seem very sure of themselves. Maybe they really know what’s going on. And we began to lose the credibility battle and the consequences, Cherie, were devastating.

I talk about this a bit in the book, particularly for vaccines, which turned out to be, in my view, one of the most amazing scientific achievements in all of history. Vaccines that were shown in rigorous testing to be safe and effective in 30,000 people in 11 months. And yet a lot of people, by the time we got to that distribution by the middle of ’21, were not convinced. Good, honorable people, misled by lots of other sources of information and passing this up. The Kaiser Family Foundation looked very carefully at the consequences. And this is stunning. They estimated 234,000 people died unnecessarily because of misinformation about the vaccine. That’s so hard to get your head around. That was a major reason I felt I had to do something like write this book. But it never should have been that way. And I’m fearful that in other instances where we need to come together as a society and really rally around what the evidence is for things that are true—let’s talk about climate change, for instance. We’re not in a good place to do that unless we can re-anchor ourselves in truth, science, faith, and trust.

Cherie Harder: You know, speaking of a decline in trust, one of the things that has been, well, certainly fascinating, but also really unsettling is while one can understand how people might lose faith in different institutions or different experts, whether it was through just an honest mistake being made or there certainly has been a fair amount of institutional malfeasance in various sectors over the last few decades. So you have very good reasons for it. But one of the things that’s sort of troubling is, when people lose faith in institutions and leaders and experts, it seems like in the aggregate it does not necessarily make them more discerning but rather, ironically, more gullible in the sense that trust is always placed somewhere and where faith tends to then be is not in the institutional leader or the expert but in, you know, to basically take a caricature, the rando on the internet. How do we or how can one think about how to more wisely give and, in a more discerning way, give and place trust? 

Francis Collins: It’s a critical question. And you’re right that some of the loss of trust in individuals and institutions has been earned, based on malfeasance of various sorts. But when you look across the board at Gallup’s survey of people’s trust in institutions, everything without exception, except for small businesses and the military, everything else has lost trust by the American public dramatically in the course of the last 10 or 20 years. That’s not all earned. It just sort of spills over there, and some of it’s manufactured by people who have an agenda to try to take down some institution so that they can gain themselves some advantage. So be wary of that, of course.

How do we protect ourselves against the [inaudible]? Again, I think it does come down to having your house in order in terms of the ability to distinguish facts from fakes and recognizing what are the marks of something that might make your alarm bells go off. I love the story of a fifth-grade teacher who basically was trying to teach his students how to be more wary of things that they were seeing and causing them to gain or lose trust in an institution. So he would give them media stories and he would ask them—and he knew which ones were fake and which ones were real—asked them to figure it out and figure out what criteria to use. Such things as, what’s the source of the information and what’s their level of expertise? Is this something that’s been validated by somebody else? How does it fit with the previous information about this topic? And they got really good at it. 

So if a fifth-grade class can do this, maybe we can all do a better job of this. My book gives some suggestions about how we might all try to do a more effective job of distinguishing the reliable, trustworthy information from the stuff that’s not good for us. But it comes back again to what you were saying earlier: the stuff that’s not good for us often gets more attention because it riles us up. It taps into our emotions. I used to think I was a rational actor, and my emotions could be readily dealt with and set to the side as long as the facts were in front of me. And I recognized that, actually, Descartes had it all wrong, and David Hume had it right. And Jonathan Haidt, who you mentioned earlier, has this wonderful metaphor of the rider and the elephant, where the elephant is your emotions and the rider is your reason, and you can quickly figure out where the whole thing goes and who’s actually driving the direction. We got to recognize that. But some personal insight is a good way to start. And then maybe some exercises, like the fifth-grade class, to avoid putting your trust in a place that doesn’t belong.

Cherie Harder: Well, there’s so much more I’d love to ask you, but before we turn to audience questions, I do want to ask you just about what some of those practices are. What gives you hope looking ahead and, yes, what are some of those practices, not only analytical in nature, like the questions that the fifth-grade teacher gave his class, but also formational in character? What should we as people, both personally but also as a people, be doing formationally to encourage a discernment and love for wisdom?

Francis Collins: Yeah, it sort of falls in three main categories. One is to get our own worldview in order, in terms of anchoring ourselves in what are established facts and what are opinions that don’t deserve to be called established, and really exercising your distinguishing capabilities between facts and fakes, and even looking at your current lists of what you consider to be true, and asking, are there any clunkers in there that have found their way into your knowledge base that actually don’t deserve to be considered at that level of certainty, and that are kind of getting in your way? So that would be a start.

You could also look in the book about the webs of belief and map out your own web of belief and see what you have at the center and whether those things really belong there, or whether a little rearrangement might be necessary. Although those are challenging tasks, I think they are good things for us all to do. So that’s one area.

A second area is to really see what we can each do to get outside of our bubbles, get outside of our tribal alliances with people who think and talk and act like we do. We’ve got a real problem here in terms of the way in which our society has become divided and polarized, and we are even at the point of being unwilling to try to talk to somebody who’s in what’s perceived to be a different tribe or has a different view about something that you feel strongly about. I’ve spent a lot of my time in the last two years working with a group called Braver Angels that aims to bring people together on opposite sides of a critical issue. Maybe it’s immigration or gun control or public health. And really working through, what does it take to see how we could bridge that gap? And a lot of it is learning how to listen again. Listen, really listen, to understand what that person is saying, not to plan your snappy response, but to really understand where they’re coming from. I’ve done a lot of that with people who started out on very different place than I am, many of whom I learned a lot from, and some of whom are now really good friends who previously I would have thought, I don’t want to spend time there. Those people are like so completely in a different place. We could do more of that. We could do a lot more of that.

And the third thing is basically then to do it with this approach of love and forgiveness and willingness to recognize our own shortcomings, willingness to admit the times we’ve made mistakes, and coming at all of these efforts at healing with the way that Christ calls us to. Go back to the sermon on the Mount, read Matthew 5, 6 and 7 every day for a while and really see what is it we were called to do. And, of course, we can all say, “love your neighbor,” but go further. It says love your enemies too. How are we doing on that? Maybe not so well. There’s another anchor we need to find our way back to.

If we have those three general areas, with the exhausted middle, which is two thirds of us, fighting to make this a priority, I think our society would be benefited hugely. Not overnight. This has taken us a while to get down in this difficult place and it’ll take a while to get back out, but I don’t see it happening unless we all decide it’s time.

Cherie Harder: Yeah. Agreed. Well, thanks, Francis. Well, the questions are piling up, so we’re going to turn to some questions from our viewers. And if you’re joining us for the first time, just want to let you know that you can not only ask a question, but you can also like a question. And that helps give us some idea of what some of the most popular lines of inquiry are. So our first question comes from Casey Shirley, and Casey asks, “How can we, as a country, address the seemingly prevalent view that science and orthodox Christian faith are inherently at odds? Wondering what can be done through government/state and otherwise?”

Francis Collins: Well, I’m not sure that government is in the best place to try to solve that sense that there’s a conflict between science and faith. Although since I am currently a federal employee, I’m happy to say I’m a Christian who’s a scientist and thinks these things are remarkably complementary. There are resources out there that I think have made a pretty significant impact on helping people understand that that conflict is largely man-made and is not required either by Scripture or by the rigorous science that teaches us about creation. Particularly point you to BioLogos, which is a wonderful meeting place for civil discourse for people who are really serious about their Christianity and really serious about rigorous science. Couple million of them are now engaged in all kinds of interesting conversations at BioLogos.org and their meetings that they run, and a podcast that covers a lot of this territory. So yes, resources are there. 

And the good news is, there are a lot of us who see science and faith not as conflict at all, but as different ways to understand what God has given us. The two books that Francis Bacon wrote about—the Book of God’s works, which is nature, and the Book of God’s Words, which is the Bible—they’re both God’s, so they probably shouldn’t be considered to be in conflict, should they?

Cherie Harder: So question from Nathan Swanson, who asked, “How did your faith guide you while serving in a public role during the pandemic and while facing some harsh criticism during that time and since?”

Francis Collins: I will say I prayed a lot during that year of 2020, especially about the efforts to come up with some kind of mitigations with all these people who were dying around us. I prayed about those vaccines. I’ll tell you a very quick story. That night, when the trials of the mRNA vaccines were unblinded— the data is all kept completely blinded from everybody until after two or three months of follow up. And then you take off the blinders to see what happened. And I had hoped and prayed that the vaccine would be of some use, but I didn’t expect it would be better than maybe 50 or 60 percent efficacy, because that’s usually pretty good for a vaccine. And I knew it might fail totally. And it was 95 percent effective. That was an answer to prayer. That was a moment where I couldn’t even speak. I was supposed to say something and I just shed tears. It was the only thing I could manage to do. So my faith was in there, as it always is, but particularly in that difficult time.

You can, if you’re looking at the visual part of this, there’s a whole bunch of pieces of paper taped up to my wall in my office. Those are all Scriptures that would get me through on a difficult day when everything seemed to be going wrong and I needed Psalm 46 to help me out: “God is my refuge and strength and ever-present help in trouble.” And yes, there was plenty of criticism, and I understood that. A lot of people were suffering. They were confused. They didn’t understand the recommendations that were being made. It felt like there should be a better solution than what we had come up with. I’m totally understanding of that. The hard ones were people who then sent me emails saying you must not really be a Christian or you wouldn’t be doing what you were doing. Sometimes we Christians can be really mean to each other. And I had some of those experiences as well, but I understood where that was coming from.

Cherie Harder: So Mark Holman asks, “Dr. Collins, you mentioned that you entered medical school as an atheist and left as a Christian. Have you written about your personal journey of that discovery and change, and what are some of the lessons from that experience that have guided your journey?”

Francis Collins: Well, thank you for that question. The book I wrote 18 years ago called The Language of God pretty much walked through my own experience of starting out as an atheist and then recognizing during a particular interaction in medical school that I didn’t really have much of a foundation for that particular worldview. I just became an atheist because it was the answer I wanted. And it took me a couple of years then, of trying to strengthen my atheism by learning more about it, to realize it was the least rational of all the choices, and ultimately brought me to a recognition that the existence of God made a heck of a lot more sense than to deny that. And also that that God seemed to care about me. And ultimately, in the person of Jesus Christ I found the answer I was looking for.

So I wrote about that in The Language of God. I also write about it in this current book, The Road to Wisdom, the chapter on faith. Going through that, including some stories I haven’t told before, about times where I was afflicted by doubt and really troubled about whether I had made an emotional decision instead of something that I could live with as a scientist. I’m glad to say every one of those occasions of doubt resulted in being an occasion of growing in my own understanding of what faith is all about and who God is. But yeah, there’s a fair amount in the book about that as well.

And I found it to be an incredible joy as a scientist who’s called upon, as I was for those 12 years, to lead the largest research organization in the world, the National Institutes of Health, to know that I’m also standing on a foundation of faith, and I don’t necessarily have to have every answer when a difficult situation comes up. I have prayer, I have guidance from other sources like God, that is going to make this journey a lot more feasible than it would be if I was back there in my atheist self.

Cherie Harder: So I’m actually going to bundle two related questions. One is from an anonymous attendee who asked, “In thinking about AI/machine learning, what kind of caveats or cautions of the methods and facts and consequent decisions can come from a scientific analysis using this technology?” And somewhat relatedly, Mark Buckingham asked, “Do you think AI will only exacerbate the problem you have outlined and addressed?” And he goes on to say, “As someone with a scientific background who could understand the value of AI and its role in medical and scientific research, is it worth the level of social and ethical disruption that is possible?”

Francis Collins: Very important and complicated question. I’m actually a fan of AI and machine learning for medical applications, because I’ve seen so many examples where this has made possible things that we just couldn’t do without that particular set of tools. Look at what we’ve learned about imaging, for instance, the ability to use AI to get much more information out of scans, out of mammograms, out of images of the back of your eye. Now you can do a much better job of diagnosing somebody’s hypertension or diabetes problems with AI applied to those pictures of the retina. And it looks as if AI is maybe before a whole lot longer going to replace a lot of what we do right now with human pathologists trying to decide whether a particular biopsy is something to worry about or not. So that all feels like really good things.

But I recognize that there’s other stuff that’s not so good. AI, certainly when it comes to medical care or medical health delivery, has the risk of being contaminated by the fact that we have health disparities already. And AI, if it uses the data that’s already out there, may basically result in propagating those instead of actually trying to solve them. And I certainly recognize when it comes to, as the anonymous questioner asked, when it comes to social media misinformation or whatever the misinformation is coming from, AI has got a lot of talent to be able to dress that up in a way that looks even more compelling with all kinds of fakes.

I was reassured—there’s a paper published in Science yesterday that actually tried to look and see, with a collection of misinformation and true information that the researchers put together, AI did a better job of telling which was which—this was ChatGPT, actually—than human people looking at the same information, trying to say which was fact and which was fake. So maybe there’s a little silver lining there, but we’re going to have to watch very carefully in terms of what this does to our ability to sort out what’s really true. 

Cherie Harder: So a question from Caleb Luke and Caleb asked, “What advice would you give to younger generations in the exhausted middle to pursuing the common good, not only in this election season, but also after it?”

Francis Collins: We need you. We’re counting on you. My generation is not doing quite as well as you might hope we are in terms of being leaders, to sort out the confusion and the claims that aren’t really truthful. I’m counting on the bright, capable, visionary next generation to step forward and to sort these things out. I mean, just take where we are with climate change—or I’d rather call it creation care, because as a believer, it sort of feels like that’s what we’re called to do. I think it’s going to be this younger generation, that cares deeply about this, that’s going to help us actually do what needs to be done at an individual and a governmental and a worldwide basis to address what is incontrovertibly true. Our planet is warming. That’s an established fact, and it is because of human activity. That’s an established fact. Let’s not waste time arguing about that. Let’s figure out what we can do.

So yeah, I’m counting on you. And by the way, if you want to run for office, that’s good too. We could use a lot more leader talent in that space if our politics is going to get back on track and we will have politicians who are more interested in governing than in performing in front of a camera.

Cherie Harder: So Craig Phillip asks, “Can you provide an example of where your conversation with others from the ‘other tribe’ has adjusted your beliefs?”

Francis Collins: I’d be glad to. So going back to Braver Angels, I spent a lot of time with a particular guy from Minnesota named Wilke Wilkinson. He runs a trucking company. And when I first met him, he was my alter ego. He said everything that I thought was right was wrong, and everything he said was right I thought was wrong. He was furious about the way in which the public health recommendations had done harm to his small business, in sort of a rural area in Minnesota. And after a while, after I got over being a little bit on the defensive, I realized he’s got a point, that the public health recommendations we made, admittedly in the midst of an emergency, were one-size-fits all, and they were largely based upon where the real crisis was happening in big cities like New York, where the trucks were parked outside the morgue to handle all the dead bodies. And what was happening in small-town Minnesota was very different. And yet the same recommendations about shutdowns of businesses and schools were being applied across the board.

Now, to be fair, if we had not decimated our public health system across the country a few years ago, we would have had people in those local environments that might have been able to do the fine tuning. But that did not happen. And I can see from Wilke’s perspective how that was the beginning of losing confidence in the government’s ability to manage this pandemic. They were making recommendations that just didn’t fit. I learned a lot from that.

Cherie Harder: So question from Anna Kathel, and Anna asks, “What role does living embedded in local faith communities play in living well and seeking wisdom in our current age?”

Francis Collins: What a lovely question. Well, it should play an absolutely critical role. You’re not supposed to forsake the gathering together, and we’re better to be jointly walking along that road to wisdom, all learning from each other, helping understand the pothole that somebody else spied and you hadn’t seen. That’s the way it should be. And that is the way it is in a lot of faith communities. But certainly in some faith communities that I’ve seen and even been part of that opportunity to walk together has been really damaged by the way in which those political messages have somehow found their way into the conversation in a way that has driven people apart instead of together. I talk about, in the faith chapter, a pastor who tried really hard to try to remedy this by calling people back to what their faith foundation would say about how they could address a current thing, like a pandemic, by love and grace. And it didn’t seem to be going very well. He found out after he tried this two or three times, because one couple came up to him and said, “You know, that was all really good stuff in Jesus’ time, but we’re at war now. Our very life is under threat.”

Folks, it’s not. Let’s be clear about that. Go back to the first century if you want to know what life under threat was. Look at that Roman rule and what was happening to the Jews. We are at a contentious time for sure, but our life as Christians, as Americans, is not in this circumstance where we ought to think about this as an existential crisis and our best response, if we want to actually have other people listen to us, is to speak with love and not with anger and animosity.

So, yeah, may our churches— and I think this is entirely feasible, and many of them are already there. And I was really glad, as I mentioned earlier, to talk about this “Confession of Evangelical Conviction,” because I’m an evangelical. We can find our way back to that. We can be part of the way in which our nation gets healed and people can start to flourish again.

Cherie Harder: Well, Francis, there are so many questions lined up. And just apologies to all of you joining us—while there’s no way we can get to all of your questions, we really appreciate them. But we will be giving Francis the last word in just a moment. 

Before that happens a few things just to share with you as we start to wrap up our Online Conversation. First, immediately after we conclude we will be sending around an online survey or feedback form. We’d love for you to fill this out. We always like to hear from you. We always read it. And we try to put your suggestions into practice. And as a small token of our appreciation for filling out that form, we will give you a code for a free Trinity Forum Reading download of your choice. There are a number of Trinity Forum Readings that pertain to some of the themes that we have talked to you about today that we think would help you kind of go more deeply into exploring these ideas, and a few of those include “Telling Truth to Kings,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” George Orwell’s “Politics and the English language,” Augustine’s “Confessions,” “Pascal’s Wager,” and “The Lost Tools of Learning” by Dorothy Sayers. So I hope that you will fill that out and hope that you will avail yourself of a free Trinity Forum Reading download.

In addition, for everyone who registered, tomorrow we’ll be sending around an email with a link to a lightly edited video of today’s Online Conversation. Be on the lookout for that. That email will also include a number of different readings and resources for those of you who want to go further into this topic, as well as discussion questions that you can use with friends or small groups, reading groups. If you want to watch together and then discuss today’s Online Conversation, all those resources will be coming tomorrow in the early afternoon.

In addition, we’d love to invite all of you who are watching to join the Trinity Forum Society, which is the community of people who work to advance Trinity Forum’s mission of cultivating, curating, and disseminating the best of Christian thought. In addition to being part of the community and helping those programs go out into the world, there’s a number of benefits involved with being a Trinity Forum society member, including a subscription to our quarterly readings, a subscription to our daily “What We’re Reading” list of curated reading recommendations, and as a special incentive for your joining as a member or with your gift of $100 or more, we will send you a signed copy of Francis Collins’s new book, The Road to Wisdom, so I hope you will avail yourself of that opportunity as well.

And if you would like to sponsor an Online Conversation in the future, we would love to hear from you. You can either email us at mail@TFF.org, or just let us know that in the online survey that you should all have. And speaking of sponsors, I just want to thank again our sponsors for this Online Conversation, Admiral Mark and Jennifer Tidd, Nancy Ziegler, and Bob and Alice Fryling. We so appreciate your sponsorship and support.

There’s a number of events I want to let everyone know about coming up soon. Next month for our Online Conversations, we will be hosting Elizabeth Newman and her new book, Kingdom of Rage, as well as Byron Johnson on October 18th, on “Faith and Flourishing.” And in November we’ll be hearing from Yuval Levin. In addition, if you are in the DC area, we would love to have you join us for an in-person gathering on September 30th, where we’ll be hearing from Senior Fellow James Davison Hunter about his new book, Democracy and Solidarity, along with David Brooks. So hope you will join us for all those events.

Finally, as promised, Frances, the last word is yours.

Francis Collins: Thank you Cherie, and I hope everybody listened carefully to all those opportunities through the Trinity Forum Society, because it’s a wonderful organization and those readings are something I look forward to every time one comes in the mail. So thank you for everything you’re doing.

I thought I would just read a little bit from the very last chapter that kind of sums up my hope and my optimism for what we might be able to do as people of faith, people who care about truth, to be able to bring our society into a better place.

We’re living in a dark time. But as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that.” Guided by a determination to recover the foundation of our human values of truth, love, beauty, goodness, family, faith, and freedom, we are people of light. It’s one thing to say, “Things don’t have to be like this.” It’s another to say, “I don’t have to be like this.” There are profound reasons for each of us to engage. It is crucial to see that what we are fighting for is great and glorious and worth every bit of the effort from each of us. Truth, science, faith, and trust are not just sources of relief from a painful period in our country’s life. They represent the grandest achievements and insights of human civilization. They literally hold out the promise of a better life for every person on this planet, in material terms, in spiritual terms, and in social and cultural terms. To give up on them would be to give up on humanity’s potential. To fight for them would be not just a fight against divisiveness and ignorance, but the fight for a brighter future for us all. To take up this challenge would therefore not be an act born of exhaustion or desperation, but one arising from the hopeful pursuit of the promise of greater flourishing of our entire human family.

Thank you.

Cherie Harder: Francis, thank you so much. It’s been great to talk with you.

Francis Collins: I’ve enjoyed it greatly. And thanks to everybody who listened in.

Cherie Harder: Thank you to all of you for joining us. Have a great weekend.