Here’s the latest from the crossroads of faith, media & culture: 09/18/24

The road best taken. Known to most Americans for his work mapping of the human genome and later leading the National Institutes of Health during the era of Covid, Dr. Francis S. Collins in now setting his sights on a new mission – charting a course toward national civility unity built on balancing the tenets of faith and science on a foundation of wisdom.

In Part One of our conversation, the author of The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith and Trust discussed his own personal battle with prostate cancer and his time at NIH helping manage our national battle with a worldwide pandemic that exposed a deep cultural divide based on mistrust of the very institutions set up to protect us. As our discussion continues he reflects on the definition of wisdom, the balance between science and faith, the practical impact of the Human Genome project on healthcare, his friendship with the famed atheist author Christopher Hitchens and his own personal journey from atheism to faith.

JWK: You’re book is titled The Road to Wisdom. How do you define wisdom?

Dr. Francis S. Collins: That’s a good question. One needs to go and look at the Book of Proverbs which is all about wisdom. Wisdom is based upon knowledge, upon facts, upon reason – but it carries it beyond that. It adds to that a sense of moral understanding – that there’s a consequence of actions that relate to morality – and also implies the ability to take what you know and use that in a difficult situation to try to make a wise decision where the answer may not be (popular). It’s all of that folded together. It builds on knowledge but it’s more than just knowledge.

JWK: What’s the difference between science and faith?

FSC: Well, they’re clearly different but I believe they’re highly complementary. I wrote a book 18 years ago called The Language of God to try to make that case.

For me, as a scientist who believes that science is the way to understand how nature works, (it’s) also an opportunity to appreciate God’s creation which we have been given as a gift. Science is our chance to unwrap the gift.

Faith, on the hand, is a way of discerning other kinds of truths – transcendental truths, truths about questions like “Why am here?”, “Is there a God?”, “Who is Jesus Christ and did He die on the cross for me?”. Science doesn’t help so much with the faith questions. Faith needs to be careful not to try to answer science questions that it’s not well suited for either – but you put the two together and you have an incredibly rich opportunity to understand things about the world, about yourself and about God.

JWK: Do you believe in miracles?

FSC: I believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as a thing that literally happened. I certainly believe in that miracle.

JWK: Tell me about your journey from atheism to Christianity.

FSC: I did not grow up in any kind of faith tradition. By the time I was a graduate student studying chemistry, I was an atheist. Then I went to medical school. Sitting at the bedside of people who were facing the end of their lives, I realized I didn’t really know what I would do in that situation. I couldn’t help but notice that my patients who were believers seemed to be very much comforted by that. At one point, one of my patients actually turned to me and asked very bluntly “What do you believe, Doctor?” – and I realized I had no real answer to that. I had never really done the work to try to understand why people believe. I had no foundation upon which to rest. I figured I’d better do some work to strengthen my atheism. To my surprise, after beginning to investigate what the basis was, I had to come to the conclusion that atheism was the least rational.

JWK: What brought you to that conclusion?

FSC: Scientists aren’t supposed to assert a universal negative. You can never have enough evidence to say that God doesn’t exist because there might be something outside of what you know that says God does exist. So, just on a purely scientific basis, it’s a really bad idea to say God cannot be out there. Actually, I noticed – if you begin to look at science – there are pointers to God. The fact that the universe had a beginning, the Big Bang. How do you explain that? Nature can’t create itself.

JWK: How do you get something from nothing, right?

FSC: Yeah! How do you get something from nothing?! And how does the something – which is the universe – seem to be so fine-tuned (that it can) can make something interesting happen? Constants, like the gravitational constant, the speed of light or some of those forces that hold the nucleus of the atom together. If you change their value by the tiniest bit, the whole thing doesn’t work anymore. It’s not just you wouldn’t have life like we know it. You wouldn’t have any possibility of creating anything interesting. Some particles flying apart maybe and that would be about it. Somebody seems to have set the dial, some kind of intelligence that wanted this to give rise to complexity – to stars, to planets, to galaxies and, ultimately, to us. That’s hard to look at and say “Oh, it’s just a coincidence.”

Then there was this whole question of good and evil which forced me to think “Where is that coming from?”. How is it that all human cultures down through time – while they haven’t necessarily agreed what is in the good category and what’s in the evil category – agree that those categories exist and they matter. Where is that coming from? Evolution doesn’t quite get you there. That feels like a pointer to a God who’s not only a creator of the universe but also who is good, holy and wants to have a relationship with me.

Then the person of Jesus stepped in and I began to realize how I might have a relationship with that Holy God through Jesus who is both God and man. After two years of this intense effort where I was really trying to run away from the answer, I couldn’t run away anymore and I became a Christian.

JWK: I find your friendship with the atheist writer Christopher Hitchens to be interesting. You were good friends with him, right?

FSC: I was. It was a friendship that got off to a rocky start because there was a disagreement about faith. He, of course, was a famous atheist and remained so. I found that intriguing. He was clearly somebody who had done a lot of thinking about it. He knew the Bible better than a lot of Christians do. It seemed like a good opportunity for iron to sharpen iron. Engaging in conversations with somebody who has a totally different view than you do about something really important is often a way to figure out where your own arguments need some help. So, we became occasional sparring partners of an intellectual sort. I learned a lot from that. I learned to appreciate that although he could be incredibly devastatingly rude in a public debate, one-on-one, in a personal conversation he could be quite delightful. Then he got cancer.

JWK: And you remained friends with him during that time, as I recall.

FSC: I did – and tried what I could to bring some of the more recent tools of the Genome Project to see if they could help with his esophageal cancer…to see if there was something there that might suggest a treatment that wouldn’t otherwise have been thought of. For a while he was put on a drug that had never been used for esophageal cancer. It was a leukemia drug. I think it bought him some extra time – although we did, sadly, lose him a year and a half after his original diagnosis.

JWK: I didn’t agree with his conclusions about a lot of things but he did seem like an honest seeker of truth.

FSC: He was that. He would not tolerate fuzzy thinking in any way around him. He was, therefore, a really good person to spend some time with – as I did quite a lot to help my own thinking become sharper.

JWK: Talking about the Human Genome Project – which is what you’re probably most well-known for – what did it actually mean to map the human genome? How have we benefited from it?

FSC: I think when historians look back on the accomplishments of science in the last hundred years or so, they will certainly point to some major advances – maybe the splitting of the atom, maybe the discovery of DNA as the hereditary material, putting a man on the moon. But then, reading our own instruction book – those three-billion letters of the human DNA code for the first time – and having that available for all of us to to try to start to understand how it works, that’s pretty profound. We’ve crossed the bridge into new territory. We’re not going back to the previous level of ignorance. The consequences of that have been pretty dramatic…twenty years later. Maybe, particularly, in cancer because cancer is a disease of the genome.

Most people, like me, who have cancer will want to know “Hey! What has made my good cells go bad?!”. What mutations have happened in those cells that have caused them to lose their usual ability to stop growing? How can we use that information to do a better job of choosing the right drug for the right person? There are lots of other places where the study of the genome is in the mix of leading to significant changes in everybody’s care. A lot of that is still in process. Certainly though for rare diseases, to be able to come up with now not just a description but a precise diagnosis – and in some instances, like sickle cell disease – a cure, that’s just an amazing thing to contemplate.

JWK: So, there has been a treatment developed for sickle cell disease. Is that correct?

FSC: Yes. The FDA has approved two gene therapy treatments for sickle cell disease that appear, essentially, to be cures for these people who have suffered incredible amounts of pain for their whole lives. Now, they’re basically looking at a normal future.

JWK: And that’s a direct result of the Human Genome Project?

FSC: That had a huge impact on it. There are other things that kicked in their too but, yeah, I think the Genome Project was essential for us to get to this point.

JWK: Do you think we’ll ever eradicate cancer?

FSC: It’s going to be hard to eradicate. Cancer is not just a disease. It’s like hundreds of thousands of diseases. Maybe you could even say, now that we can look at exactly what is driving a cancer in each person, that almost every person’s cancer is unique to them. We’re gonna get a lot better at preventing it, diagnosing it early and developing treatments that either cure it or make basically a not-so-important chronic problem. Eradicate? That’s a hard one. I don’t want jump into total speculation there – but I would hope so. It’s not right around the corner for eradication. What is right around the corner, I think, is seeing a whole lot more opportunities for people who have what we currently consider to be terminal disease – Stage 4 disease – to have things like immunotherapy or genome-based therapy put them in a place that provides long survival, maybe even a cure.

JWK: That’s great. Finally, what do you hope people take from your book?

FSC: I’m glad we can go back to that. I hope people will take a chance to have a look at this. It is an effort to try help myself – because I’m on this road to wisdom too – and anybody else who looks at it to figure out how we can reanchor ourselves on some of the principles that have served us well over many decades or centuries. We need to establish when something is really true and, if it’s true, then it’s not okay to say it’s just true for me and not for you. Truth really does have to have that objective status.

Maybe (it’s) also a chance to have a better grasp of when we should look to science for answers and when faith is the place where the answers may come more effectively – but also to encourage faith communities not to see science as a threat but actually as a partner and not to be caught up in what, unfortunately right now, is a lot of other messages, including political messages, that I think are distracting from the powerful foundations of faith in terms of what it tells us to do (such as) loving our neighbor.

Then, how to do the best in terms of interpreting what sources should be trusted and what should be viewed with skepticism. The last chapter of the book is really about actions. It’s one thing to have a diagnosis of our divided and polarized society – which I think we’re all aware of. It’s another to say what are we gonna do about it? In that regard, I’m hoping that those who look at this will see themselves as part of the solution. If we can reanchor ourselves in what truth is all about, then we can be more skeptical about messages – particularly on social media – that are not based upon truth but may make us angry or fearful; to figure out how to sort that through and not be part of the problem by spreading those things around even further.

And then, learning how to talk to each other again – especially with people who don’t agree with you. You learn from them – just like I learned from Christopher Hitchens.

I think a groundswell is possible here to take us from where we are right now – a circumstance where everything seems political and everything seems polarized. I don’t think the politicians are gonna fix that. I don’t think the media is gonna fix that. I think that’s up to all of us.

At the end of Chapter 6, (there’s) an encouragement for people to consider taking a personal pledge that they’re gonna be part of the solution – a pledge not to distribute information that may not be true, to reach out to people they don’t agree with as opposed to just considering them wrong and evil and to build this community for the future that we long for where we do get along with our neighbors….I think it’s good, if we’re gonna have a chance to recover from this current polarized situation, for all of us to look at ourselves (and) not to just say “I wish it wasn’t like this” but to say “What can I do to change that?” The pledge is an opportunity that I hope people will look at and think about making a commitment.

I’m part of the Braver Angels group that’s very much about that idea – about how we get along with each other. Braver Angels is gonna post the people who sign the pledge so that we can all kind of make a commitment of that sort and then try to stick to it.

John W. Kennedy is a writer, producer and media development consultant specializing in television and movie projects that uphold positive timeless values, including trust in God.