-Aren't there scientists who are skeptical about your science because you're religious?

-It's the general presumption of a lot of people that you can't be both a rigorous scientist and a serious Christian.

These worldviews are simply not compatible.

I discovered that there were really important questions that science couldn't help me with.

Why is there something instead of nothing?

Where does morality come from?

What happens after you die?

Is there a God?

I was an atheist when I started medical school, and I was a Christian when I left.

-We're all seekers, searching for answers to life's biggest questions.

There are people who have made it their life's work to explore and uncover the wisdom we all seek.

In this episode, I speak with physician and scientist Dr. Francis Collins about the intersection of science, belief, and faith.

This is "Wisdom Keepers."

♪♪ Francis Collins, welcome to "Wisdom Keepers."

-Nice to be here for a conversation with you, Ray.

-You ended a long run as the head of one of the world's premier biomedical research institutions, the NIH.

It's been a little while.

What's your life been like since?

-[ Chuckles ] Well, it hasn't been boring, and I'm happy to say I seem to have been given a chance to continue to do interesting things that give life meaning.

I was pulled into the White House shortly after I stepped down as the NIH director to serve as the president's acting science advisor.

And that was another year and a half of a part of life chapter that I hadn't expected, but fascinating.

Learned a lot of new stuff.

Got to start a program that maybe could save tens of thousands of lives by eliminating a disease called hepatitis C, which I'm very invested in even now.

Then eventually migrated back to NIH, where I'm running a research lab, which I've done now for the last 30 years, since I came there, studying type 2 diabetes, as well as a really rare disorder of premature aging called progeria, kids who age about seven times the normal rate, where we're on a pathway towards something really bold that we might be able to cure that disease using CRISPR and gene editing.

So lots of excitement in the lab these days.

-But running a lab is not running the whole show.

And I'm wondering if, as you watched the country muddle through the later phases of the pandemic, whether you had a chance to get a little distance on the state of play, the fraying of social solidarity, the way science ended up being dragged into politics, the way public trust in institutions has continued to fall.

You've seen political battles at the CDC, at the FDA, people getting rich and famous sowing doubt about the medical profession itself.

-Yeah.

-Did you get some distance from all of that, even as it was a tough time in this world?

-It's hard to get much distance because it's all around me as a scientist, a physician, somebody who cares a lot about society, somebody who's a person of faith.

That's also somebody who I am.

-Was there an illusion that science could be a place removed from that?

-[ Chuckles ] -Yeah, let the politicians have their battles, their tugs-of-war over this and that.

At least in the lab, I don't have to deal with that stuff.

-You know, Ray, I used to think that.

I was sort of in the Descartes camp here of philosophy that if you provide rational conclusions based on science and present them to almost anybody, they will accept them.

We're really all rational actors, right?

I guess I learned that's not really gonna work.

We are riddled with cognitive biases.

Jonathan Haidt had it right with this metaphor that is worth thinking about, about the rider and the elephant -- that the elephant is your emotional self and the rider is your rational self.

Make no mistake, what is going to determine the direction of travel?

[ Chuckles ] That's the elephant.

Christian communities have been even more susceptible to political messages that have, in many instances, been the opposite of what the foundation of their faith would have suggested was the appropriate response.

I was not a Christian growing up.

I became a Christian at age 27.

I embraced that faith at that point and continue to now and don't see a conflict between what I know as a scientist about nature and what I can learn about God through my faith.

I even call myself an evangelical Christian.

That basically used to mean somebody who is so feeling excited about what they've learned about their faith, they want to share it.

That's what evangelical means.

Now it's become a political label and never should have been that way.

-We are also at a point where the lack of faith in institutions has advanced to a point where even once you've done the research -- you know, it's become such a trope now.

"I've done my own research."

Where do you get your information from?

There's so much doubt.

We're standing on islands, shouting at each other across the -- across the sea.

-It feels that way, and let's be clear, I don't think the science communication has been perfect either, and I've certainly been part of that.

And I think we could have done a better job in some instances about explaining how science works and what we're sure about and what we're still working on.

But it does feel like we have a crisis in terms of people's decisions about what information to trust and what sources to trust.

And we're very much influenced, again, by our polarized society that we trust people who happen to be saying something that resonates with where we already are.

I even think that we're at a point where the willingness to accept objective truth as a reality is under threat.

How often have you heard somebody say about what is essentially established fact, "Well, that might be true for you, but it's not true for me"?

That's not okay.

Society's future depends upon having what Jonathan Rauch calls the constitution of knowledge -- basically, things that we have over lots of investigation accepted as established facts.

And those are established facts.

And if somebody's gonna try to say, "No, that one's not true," they better have really compelling evidence, and society needs to re-engage with that and figure out if maybe that one needs to be pulled out of the pile.

But that's not what happens now.

It's just like, "I don't like that one."

Facts don't care how you feel.

-But does that inevitably make the next professionals to have your job at the NIH, make their job harder?

Even if they come at this with a certain, um... political will to do the job in a certain way, it just makes finding out about curing disease, disseminating the information that you found out in the lab -- doesn't all that simply become harder in a society where no one believes anybody anymore?

-Absolutely.

I mean, it used to be, I think, trust in information was something that we intrinsically had a certain set of criteria -- I think maybe three.

One is, is this -- does this source have integrity?

Is this -- Is this a source that has been honest in the past and I can trust to be honest?

They're not making stuff up?

Do they have competence?

Have they done the work?

Do they really know what they're talking about?

Or is this a post on Facebook for somebody who just came up with an idea?

And then third, humility.

When I'm looking for a source of information, I don't want somebody who says, "I have the answer to everything."

I want somebody who has done the work in a particular space and can say, "I think I can help you with that, but don't expect me to give you answers about other things that I'm not an expert in."

Put those three together -- integrity, competence, humility.

If you just stick to that, you're gonna do pretty well, I think, in filtering this barrage of incoming information, especially from social media.

But we're not doing so well with that.

And I think therefore people are taking on board, putting into their portfolio of truth, stuff that shouldn't be there, that got smuggled in.

-I wonder, as you just suggested, whether the ground has already been sown with salt, like Carthage, and it's -- it's too late even learning those lessons.

A lot of the public, they'll just either tune it out or be openly hostile, as I heard in the later stages of the pandemic, with people just speculating that nefarious forces already expected a certain number to die and wanted them to die, that they were using this as a means of social control.

"The way I'm gonna resist is by remaining a pure blood."

I don't know if you heard that phrase being used -- a pure blood, someone who wasn't vaccinated.

We've gone pretty far down that rabbit hole.

-And the sad part of this is that most of the people who got caught up in those kinds of responses are good, honorable, thoughtful people.

The people I hold accountable are the voices that spread those kinds of stories without shame, oftentimes knowing it wasn't true, but making a buck off it at the same time, or getting some votes for a political campaign.

There has to be some way of dealing with sources of information that are truly dangerous, life-threatening.

Right now it looks like we're going the other way.

We're in trouble if we can't figure out some way to begin to say that truth matters, even in that circumstance, and people should not be vulnerable in the way they are to the kinds of charlatans that are very good at spreading misinformation and then selling you something that's gonna make them rich.

It's too easy for those folks to get away with it.

That's not right.

-Along with people who are religious people who were a skeptic of your faith because you're a scientist, aren't there scientists who are skeptical about your science because you're religious?

-[ Chuckles ] Yeah, that certainly happened, too.

-How do you thread that needle?

-[ Laughs ] I guess the general presumption of a lot of people still is that these worldviews are simply not compatible, and you can't be both a rigorous scientist and a serious Christian, or a serious follower of some other faith.

I was an atheist when I started medical school, and I was a Christian when I left, because I discovered that there were really important questions that I wanted to wrestle with that science really couldn't help me with.

Why is there something instead of nothing?

Where does morality come from?

What happens after you die?

Is there a God?

Does God care about me?

Science didn't help me with those, so I figured I'd better learn more about those issues.

And over two years with a lot of struggling, I became a Christian.

And, yeah, I told my scientist friends about that and they all said, "Well, that's not gonna last.

We'll give it a few weeks, and then your head explodes and you'll either have to get out of science, or you'll have to say, that faith thing is not for me."

It never happened.

I think as long as one is careful about what kind of question are you asking -- is this a faith question or is this a science question?

-- you're gonna be okay, and you can even blend those in your experience in a given day, in which case science is also a way of worshiping 'cause you're getting a glimpse of God's mind when you discover something.

-The last time you and I spoke in an extended way was just as you had completed mapping the human genome, and you were a happy guy, an excited guy, but also, I think, fired up by the idea that in a way, in your view, if I'm stating it right, you had a glimpse at God's handbook.

-That was what I really wanted to convey is that this is, in many ways, the language of God.

We have uncovered something profound -- our own instruction book, crafted over billions of years by the forces of evolution, which I see as God's mechanism for making it possible for these large-brained creatures in God's image to arrive on the scene.

And now we have read that book.

Well, we've figured out the letters.

We don't know how to read it yet.

We have a lot of work to do to learn the language, but this is a moment.

This is crossing into new territory, and it also is a moment not just of scientific achievement, but of self-awareness and of worship, that we've been given this by the amazing process that God put in place all of those years ago at the time of the Big Bang, giving us a chance to have this kind of insight.

And how could you not be in awe of that?

And how could it not make you feel like your lab is also a cathedral and we just had a chance for a great service?

-Are there still ways -- must there be ways that these two ways of seeing the world have to talk to each other now that the codebook is in our hands, to make sure that it's not misused, that there are guardrails, that the scientists have their say... -Yeah.

-...but also the people who worry about the dignity and nature of creation have their say so that things that, quite frankly, both sides might see as wrong, but only one side would see as ungodly, don't happen in a lab?

-Absolutely.

This is where you have to kind of think about the nature of ethical decision-making and what's our basis for that?

I think we're really talking about wisdom here.

What is wisdom anyway?

It's more than knowledge.

Knowledge doesn't necessarily have much moral value.

The 3 billion letters of the human genome sequence, which we now have, is knowledge.

But what you do with it is where things really start to become ethically significant.

It's not there until you start thinking about the applications.

So wisdom takes knowledge.

It's got to be based on that, right?

You don't want to build your wisdom on stuff that's not true, although people are trying to do that.

But then you add to that some experience, some common sense, and very importantly, some kind of moral framework.

That's what I think was so clear as the human genome sequence was coming out.

What's the moral framework that we now need to rest upon in order to be sure this is used to benefit people and not to hurt them, and also used in a way that recognizes there's something profound here, even religious, that we are looking at the instruction book for the image of God that we all are?

And that ought to be respected in a way that you don't mess with it without really thinking about what the consequences would be.

-Are there places, though, where scientists see an avenue of inquiry, and now we have the tools?

Where the other side of the argument says, "Well, wait a minute.

If you really believe in Imago Dei, if you think humans are in the image of God, you won't mess around in here, because it's starting to get a little murky."

-Yeah.

-Cloning, um, doing things with in vitro, and editing out traits that are part of the human family.

You might say, "Well, yes, but they're part of the human family and people suffer from them."

And the other person may say, "Yeah, but I'm not sure we want to tinker to that degree."

Those arguments must happen.

-They do.

-And both sides acting in what we might call good faith.

-A cardinal example of this is whether there should be editing of the human genome in a human embryo that is then gonna go to term and become a person.

There are technologies now that make that possible.

The whole CRISPR revolution makes it entirely feasible to take an embryo and decide, I don't like that particular letter.

I'm going to take that "T" and make it a "C" and be pretty good at it.

But that really gets fundamentally into the essence of what it means to be human.

For me, as a person of faith, thinking about that Imago Dei, that's a line I don't think we should cross.

-But we do it with a cow.

-We do it with a cow.

-And we do it with a dog.

-But we're not cows.

[ Chuckles ] We're not dogs.

And certainly for Christians, especially, the Imago Dei is a special thing about humanity.

It's about changing the very script of human life and altering the future of generations that may be derived from what you just did, who aren't there to give their consent.

So I've been very strong in this perspective that I don't think we should cross that line.

-There are people in the scientist wing of the argument who are also atheists, who say, "You know, actually, I'm not bound to respect" -- fill in the blank -- "Francis Collins.

If part of the way he sees reality is based on supernatural propositions, how can I trust him on anything else?

So, that's just not science, and a man of science or a woman of science goes on what's provable, what can be seen and observed, what can be replicated.

And I'm sorry -- I haven't seen God yet, and I haven't been able to replicate my results."

-[ Laughs ] That particular perspective you just described is a particular kind of faith.

It's called scientism.

It starts out with a prior assumption that there is nothing outside of what you can measure experimentally in nature.

And it is a huge leap of faith to decide that's your belief system, because you've categorically excluded anything that's outside of that from the get-go.

A scientist isn't supposed to assert a universal negative.

That always means that you have lost your sense of humility.

Somebody once used this analogy on me.

Suppose you were asked -- I'll say to this scientist who just had the point of view you expressed -- can you draw a circle that represents all of the knowledge that has ever existed or ever will?

Okay, that's gonna be this enormous circle.

Okay.

Now, would you draw on the same scale a circle that represents what you know?

Even the most sure-of-himself scientists will go, ehhh.

So suppose the knowledge of God's existence is outside your circle.

How can you possibly say, as somebody who's a rational, only making decisions based on evidence, a person, that God doesn't exist?

Is that not the most full-of-hubris kind of statement you could make?

I don't know how to counter that.

So anybody who's got this most severe form of atheism, which basically says, "There is no God, I know there is no God, anybody who says there is a God is wrong" -- they're committing a pretty serious kind of flaw in their logic, and they're adhering to a faith called scientism, which can't be proven either.

-There is an aspect of that wing of the argument that says, "You know, it's a -- a useful but essentially sentimental idea that life has meaning 'cause, in fact, we're just the result of a million accidents, a view that the human species, in all its lovely and horrifying works We might want to invest that with meaning, but really we just happened to get bigger brains.

Not much in the way of meaning."

-Even in that circumstance -- that, again, would be another sort of scientism state -- are there any pointers in what you can observe about yourself, or about the universe that might make you wonder about whether there's actually something behind all this?

I didn't know much about those when I was an atheist, but as I began to explore the possibility of faith, I began to realize that some of the things that I had studied as a scientist were really hard to explain without some kind of concept of meaning behind it.

The universe had a beginning.

How do you explain something out of nothing?

The universe follows these elegant mathematical laws about how matter and energy behave.

Why should that be?

And more than that, why should the universe have, as part of those laws, constants that determine the actual behavior of matter and energy that you can't derive the value of by theory?

You just have to measure them.

And this is pretty breathtaking.

If you imagine a universe where any of those constants were off by just a little bit, in some cases just one part in a billion, the whole thing doesn't work anymore.

You don't end up with anything except some particles flying around.

There's nothing complex that could happen.

We are on this incredibly fine-tuned knife edge of improbability.

Now, either you got to say that, "Oh, there must be a zillion other universes with different values, and we happen to be in the one where everything worked, or we wouldn't be having the conversation," or you have to look at this and say, "Wow, there's mathematics and there are these constants.

There's a mind behind this."

For me, a lot of that is this argument coming back to morality.

Where does that come from?

Why do we have this belief that there's something called good and something called evil?

Even though cultures will put different categories of things in each of those boxes, but we all agree.

Nobody says, "I don't care about good and evil."

If you're looking for a signpost for a God who cares about humans and not just one who started the whole thing going and then went on to other things, that's a pretty interesting place to find it.

And then finally there's beauty.

The more I get older, the more I think about that.

Beauty -- it can be so riveting for us, and it doesn't necessarily make any scientific sense about why it matters.

Why is it when I listen to the second movement of Beethoven's Third Symphony, the "Eroica," and that's the -- that's the funeral march in C minor, and it just does something to me that lifts me out of myself in a way that I don't quite know how to put into words?

Makes -- Gives you the sense of a longing, which is almost painful because it's so sweet.

And then it's like, "This is what I'm made for, but I know it won't be here for long."

What is that about?

-As the result of experiences you've had as a scientist, as a physician, as someone who seeks to alleviate human suffering, are there things that you've learned along the way that make you not only smarter in the dark arts of getting things done, but also wiser?

-Well, one is to constantly remind yourself, which is always a struggle for all of us, including me, that you might be really wrong about something, even though you're quite sure of yourself.

Humility has got to be a big part of that.

I have so many times in all the years that I've had the chance to lead big, complicated scientific projects, been brought up short by somebody who points out a really serious flaw in some approach I was taking.

Maybe it was scientific, maybe it was policy.

And you just have to be ready for that and open to that and willing to hear it and respond to it accordingly.

So humility helps.

Optimism helps.

I am an optimist.

I believe in hope.

I think hope can find its way into places that otherwise seem pretty dark.

Was it Martin Luther King said, "Darkness can't drive out darkness.

Only light can do that"?

Well, hope is part of light, and I am an optimist enough to think that we humans, even though we're flawed in all kinds of ways, we do have that moral law.

We are people who are trying to do good things.

We want to make the world a better place.

We want to have meaning available for people to flourish.

So if we can somehow get past the pressures of the day and then re-anchor ourselves to those foundational aspects that we all kind of agree on -- that love matters, the truth matters, that beauty matters, that faith and freedom and family and justice -- those are all things that hardly anybody will say, "Well, I don't care about those."

They will disagree about how to apply them.

But down under there, we are still a society of people who have those principles.

That ought to help us, even in a really difficult time.

This book that I wrote called "The Road to Wisdom" is a bit of a diagnosis about what's happened to us.

It points out how we've lost, in many instances, our anchor to objective truth, which is really an important thing to hang on to, how that's affected our ability to trust science, how it's for people of faith been a circumstance where some of the perspectives that are being brought into faith communities don't belong there.

They're more political than they are built upon the tradition.

And how we've lost our ability sometimes to figure out who to trust, what information is good for us.

And the last chapter of the book proposes solutions.

Hope.

So it goes through what kind of personal commitment people might want to make.

There's even a pledge if people were interested in taking personal responsibility.

"It is crucial to see that what we're 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 to fight against divisiveness and ignorance, but to 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."

That's our challenge.

Do we have enough hope to take those actions?

I believe we do.

-Francis Collins, thanks for joining us.

Great to talk to you.

-Wonderful to be able to talk with you, Ray, about these really important topics.

It's been a joy.

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