Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust, with Francis Collins

Conversing with Mark Labberton

“Wisdom is not just about knowledge. Wisdom adds to knowledge with discernment, with understanding, with a moral sense of what’s right and wrong.”

We live in a time of overflowing and interweaving crises. A global pandemic exacerbates a mental health crisis caused social media technology. The upheaval of American electoral politics caused by an erosion (or breakdown?) of social and relational trust. The rise of nationalism, the proliferation of war, and longing for justice in the realms of gender and race.

Underneath it all appears to be a crisis of knowledge and its convergence around skepticism of science, a culture of suspicion, and confusion about basic factual information, let alone right and wrong.

We need wisdom. Badly. But in times of crisis and chaos, where are we to turn for wisdom?

In this episode Mark Labberton is joined by longtime friend Francis Collins, physician, researcher, and former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Known for his leadership in mapping the human genome, his public service at the NIH spanned three presidencies and culminated with overseeing the national response to Covid-19 pandemic.

The author of many books, including his bestselling The Language of God, Collins’s new book is *The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust,* a reflection on the crisis of truth, science, faith, and trust, and how the exhausted middle might chart a path toward a better future.

About Francis Collins

Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, is the former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As the longest serving director of NIH—spanning twelve years and three presidencies—he oversaw the work of the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world, from basic to clinical research.

Collins is a physician-geneticist noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the international Human Genome Project, which culminated in April 2003 with the completion of a finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book. He served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH from 1993 to 2008.

Collins's research laboratory has discovered a number of important genes, including those responsible for cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, Huntington's disease, a familial endocrine cancer syndrome, and most recently, genes for type 2 diabetes, and the gene that causes Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a rare condition that causes premature aging.

Collins received a BS in chemistry from the University of Virginia, a PhD in physical chemistry from Yale University, and an MD with honours from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to coming to the NIH in 1993, he spent nine years on the faculty of the University of Michigan, where he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. He is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. Collins was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2007 and the National Medal of Science in 2009.

Show Notes

• Get your copy of The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust
• “The crisis behind the crisis. It’s the crisis of culture. It’s the crisis of mind and heart. It’s the crisis of society. It’s the crisis of faith.”
• Collins occupying various roles through this book: professor, advocate, mentor, philosopher, coach, scientist, pathologist, and perhaps most saliently, cultural diagnostician.
• Being on the road to wisdom
• Helping those in the exhausted middle, to offer ways to do something to address cultural crises
• Collins summarizes the arc of the book
• TRUTH: “There is such a thing as objective truth. But it is not necessarily very popular in many circumstances.”
• “Facts—*established facts—*are now sometimes called into question because somebody doesn’t like the fact.”
• Jonathan Rauch on the “Constitution of Knowledge”
• “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free. He doesn’t say the counter that lies will imprison you, but you might have to think about that.”
• Science as a pathway to the truth
• Anecdotes vs. empirical science
• “We have to bring faith into this conversation if we’re trying to shape a future that it gives you a chance to tap into all the wisdom that's there.”
• TRUST: “I found in my own experience, some of the information that turned out to be most life-changing came from a source that I never would have considered as part of my reliable circle of buddies, but I needed to hear it.”
• “Wisdom is not just about knowledge. Wisdom adds to knowledge with discernment, with understanding, with a moral sense of what’s right and wrong.”
• “Our society is in trouble.”
• Where will the solution come from? No politicians, not media, but only us.
• Empowering people to be part of the solution
• “Love is your calling. Anger and fear are not your calling.”
• “Listen to understand.”
• Don’t distribute information unless you’re sure it’s true.
• Build bridges with neighbours and within communities.
• Braver Angels Website
• “If you put information in front of people that’s well established, they’ll make rational decisions. And I assume that’s what science is all about.”
• Collins’s experience leading the charge to develop Covid-19 vaccines, and then managing the resistance to vaccines
• “People of faith in many instances were the most likely to fall into the category of not trusting what science had to say.”
• The cultural crisis beneath the medical crisis of Covid vaccine skepticism
• Collins reflects on public health responses to Covid-19 (school closures, mask mandates, etc.)
• Systemic breakdown caused by fear, anxiety, distrust, and suspicion
• Collins comments on Anthony Fauci’s public service throughout Covid-19
• Discrediting and redefining science, subverting faith
• Postmodernism and the erasure of objectivity and reason in science
• “Nothing is true except our perspective.”
• Francis Collins’s perspectives on the Christian church
• Christians’ ungrounded fear that this is a war
• Tim Alberta’s book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory
• “Seeing through a glass darkly.” (1 Cor 13)
• A book of hope and whole human experience
• “There are profound reasons for each of us to engage. This is an argument about not standing aside. It’s 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 down 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 take up this challenge is therefore not an act one of exhaustion or desperation. But one arising from the hopeful pursuit of the promise of greater flourishing of our entire humandom.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.