Francis Collins | Truth, Science, Faith, Trust

Collins:

Science is one of the sort of amazing gifts that God has given us, the chance to learn about God’s own creation. And in the process, we can be worshipping and not just doing lab experiments. But it has to be done thoughtfully and carefully. But it packs a lot of stuff into that zone of established facts. And once they get in there, if you’re not going to agree with them, you need to have a good reason.

Stump: 

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump and our guest today is the esteemed Dr Francis Collins. This podcast shares a name with Francis’s 2006 book, the Language of God. That book, and the responses to it, led to the creation of BioLogos. But Francis has a new book out, hot off the press: The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust. You’ll hear those familiar words in the subtitle: science and faith. Of course we talk about that a lot at BioLogos and on this podcast. But “science and faith” is surrounded by a couple other words, truth and trust, that maybe don’t get as airtime as they should. So that’s where we focus much of this conversation.

Francis Collins is our most frequent guest over the years of this podcast and his credentials are known to many, but a few of them at least, are worth repeating. He led the human genome project which mapped our human DNA, led the National Institutes of Health for 12 years and served as Science Advisor to the president of the United States. That science work, done in the hopes of providing for the common good, has not always been met with trust, especially in the last few years. This caused Francis to start wondering about what it is to have trust in something—a fact, an idea, an institution—and the nature of truth itself. That wondering led to this new book and will hopefully give us all some guidance in finding the path toward wisdom. 

Let’s get to the conversation. 

Stump:

Well, Francis, so good to have you back on this podcast that bears the name of your first book. It’s really a pleasure to be talking to you again.

Collins:

I’m delighted to be back with the Language of God and with you, Jim. And all the podcasts you guys have been doing are just phenomenal. So yeah, it’s nice to be part of that.

Stump:

Thanks. The last one we recorded with you was at the BioLogos Conference in Raleigh back in April and had such a fun and inspiring conversation with you and Kizzmekia Corbett about her development of mRNA vaccines for COVID. But at that time you are also going through a fairly significant health scare and it just announced publicly that you’d be having surgery for prostate cancer. I wondered if you could give any updates on that and how you’re doing to share with our audience?

Collins:

Sure, I’m glad to. I think it’s good for me to be public about this, maybe encourages a few other men to take this kind of thing seriously because there is a really good way to protect yourself by screening and early detection. And I’m a good poster boy for that. So yeah, I did get followed for five years to see if there was something not quite right there with something that didn’t look all that threatening for the first four of those years and then took a turn. And it was pretty clear this cancer was becoming one that could potentially escape from its original location and that’s what you don’t want. So ultimately after a lot of careful imaging and scans and biopsies, I went through what’s called a robot-assisted radical prostatectomy. And yes, it was all done by a robot, but guided by a very experienced surgeon at the National Institutes of Health. And I would say it went really well. The path results came back. Yes, it was an aggressive cancer, but the margins were clean and the lymph nodes were negative.

And even more recently, one of the things you can do after two or three months is to see is there any evidence from a biomarker, a blood test that there might still be some cancer cells left behind. And you just measure that thing called the PSA. And I’ve never been happier than to be undetectable. Because that was the answer. So chances are really good that I’ve achieved or my surgeons have achieved a cure by catching this at the right moment and taking care of it. I’ll need to be followed carefully over the coming years to be sure that’s right. But right now it looks really good.

Stump:

Well, very good. We’re glad to hear that.

Well, the main topic of our conversation here today is a new book, and I just introduced that by saying BioLogos got its start because of the book you wrote, The Language of God, back in 2006. And it struck a chord with a lot of people and started a lot of conversations about a better way of understanding faith and science. And now you have this new one, released September 17, The Path to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith and Trust. So you’re a pretty busy guy and we’re not yet delegating the writing of our books to robots or ChatGPT the way your surgery was done.

Collins:

No, no, didn’t do that.

Stump:

Why did you think this was an important way for you to use your time at this point in your career to write a book called The Path to Wisdom?

Collins:

Yeah, that sounds a little presumptuous, doesn’t it? For this scientist to decide to write a book that has the word wisdom in the title? Let me be clear. Yes, it’s the road to wisdom, but I’m on it too. And I am not going to try to argue that I have got this all figured out. But I think all of us are especially at a time where there’s a lot of tensions and contentiousness looking around saying, “is there a better way for us as individuals and as a society to get along and to figure out how to work together, and how to focus on things that really matter?” And some of those are matters of truth and some of them are matters of faith and trust and science. And that’s all woven into this piece. 

So to be a little more specific, what drove me to do this? I’m a scientist, had that incredible privilege of leading the Human Genome Project, serving as the NIH director for 12 years. I really believe that science and medicine are providing incredible opportunities for ways we can alleviate suffering and save lives. And then COVID came along. And the science that happened during COVID, Jim, was just absolutely phenomenal. And it was a result of hundreds of people dropping everything and working around the clock and figuring out how to avoid any of those slow moments where things don’t go so fast. And what happened? We had, in 11 months, vaccines that are 95% effective with very limited side effects that had never ever come close to happening before. So here we have the triumph of science, probably more than has ever been achieved in the course of humanity for this kind of a threat to people’s lives. And yet—

Stump:

And everybody loved it, right?

Collins:

Well, that’s the problem. A lot of us did. 3 million of us are alive as a result of those vaccines being available. That’s the estimate. But 50 million people basically said, “I don’t think I trust this. It’s not been explained to me in a way that I can believe this is going to be good for me.” And I’m seeing a lot of other messages on social media or from the traditional media or from politicians basically saying, “Watch out. They’re up to something here.” This for people of faith might even go into a space like, “This could be the mark of the beast, and we don’t want to take part in that.” And those kinds of messages were certainly there. And as a result of that, the estimates are really tragic. Something like 234,000 people died unnecessarily because of resistance to the trust in the vaccine. That just shook me down to my toes.

How could we, in a circumstance where the data was really compelling, the truth of the analysis seemed unquestionable, and yet it wasn’t carrying the day for a lot of people. And if I have any kind of ability still to influence anybody about this, I sort of wanted to raise my hand and say, “Wait a minute, is this who we are? Are we already at the point now where truth is just a matter of how you feel?” And science? “Well, you can’t trust those scientists because they’re all on the take.” You heard those stories.

And what about faith communities? They ought to be the foundation upon which we can mount an effort to focus on truth and loving your neighbor. And yet many of them have been pretty torn up by all of this, oftentimes influenced by politics. And people can’t even figure out who to trust anymore. So this book is about those things: truth, science, faith and trust. What are they anyway? What happens when they’re working well? What goes wrong when they don’t work well? And is there a way that each of us can grab onto the current circumstances and try to put ourselves back on this road to wisdom, which is going to get us to a better place?

Stump:

Okay. So of course, the philosopher is going to want to talk about truth. This is such a fundamental aspect of rational discourse, even a prerequisite for rational discourse. But now is something that we have to argue for, which sounds like we have to persuade people of the truth about truth, which very quickly gets into absurd territory when we don’t acknowledge truth. But these are strange days we’re living in. Why did you feel the need to start here with truth as the first of these issues to help us get out of this mess we’re in?

Collins:

Well, how many times have you recently heard, “That might be true for you, but it’s not true for me?” And that’s fine if we’re talking about a particular movie that you liked or didn’t like. But if we’re talking about the formula for water and whether it’s really H2O then there’s a problem. And it does seem as if this attitude, that truth basically has to be something that you approve of, that you like in order for it to be accepted. That’s really a dangerous place for us as individuals or a society to try to go. So yeah, I had to start there. And Jim, I will out you by saying you gave me some help here in terms of writing about this. I want to be really clear. I have never in my life taken a course in philosophy. And so it was really good to have a card carrying member of that particular discipline look over a draft of this and say, “Well, you’re about to step into some pretty deep holes here. You might want to think about how you choose terminology and how you phrase this issue about truth.”

I hope it’s now much more acceptable. I’m sure it is. Whether it’s perfect, that’ll be my fault. One of the things I want to get across to people, because I think it gets all blurry, is there are all these levels of truth. And it is okay to say, “That might not be true for me,” if it’s an opinion, but if it’s an established fact, you should really think hard about whether that’s a valid position to take. So in the book there are these four circles that start in the center with the things that are absolutely necessary facts. It would be true in any universe. A lot of that’s mathematics. Two plus two is four. I don’t care where you are. That can’t be just something that’s your opinion.

But then the next level outside that is a really important one, which is established facts that have been over the course of time considered by thoughtful people looking at the evidence to basically be settled science. So for instance, the earth goes around the sun, not the other way around. The earth is not flat, I’m sorry, flat-earthers. The earth is warming at a worrisome rate since about 1950. That’s not some sort of a hoax. The thermometer is not a political instrument, it’s true. Things in that space need to be taken seriously by all of us and not considered, “Well, I don’t like that one.”

Stump:

So yeah, I think this is really important to talk about here. So from your first category of necessary truths, we can’t imagine even a world where two plus two equals 17 instead of two plus… We can’t imagine what that would be like. Firmly established facts didn’t have to be true, but are things we discovered to be about the world really, about the way that the world really is. I wanted to ask about those though. Are we ever wrong though? Do we ever make mistakes about those? And is that part of the problem where people can still say, “Yeah, you did this vaccine thing, but science is always changing, isn’t it?” I mean, how do you respond to people that even in this category of firmly established facts, but that we also admit we’re not perfect in every once in a while we make some mistakes about that? How are we supposed to have the sort of confidence in this category that you’re pushing for us to have?

Collins:

No, it’s a great question. Basically, I think if one is going to cast doubt on something that’s in that firmly established facts, you ought to really be able to then to look at the evidence. What’s the reason to be doubtful here? Again, if it’s the earth going around the sun, it’s going to be pretty hard to make a case that that might turn out to be wrong. If it’s that the COVID vaccines as tested in the phase three trials that happened in 2020 actually did prevent hospitalization and death, you can’t go back and change that data, that’s just rock solid. You could say, well, maybe it’s not that good now because the virus has evolved and maybe our immune systems turned out not to hang on to this benefit as long as we had hoped. So yeah, there’s some effort there to try to deal with the nuance. But again, if you’re going to attack something in that space, you need to have more than just an argument that “I don’t like that one.”

Stump:

Right. Yeah. Okay. So keep moving then. I’m not sure if there’s an absolutely clear dividing line between that firmly established facts and then you get into what you call the zone of uncertainty. But there’s clearly a difference in the end between our understanding of the formula of water versus what dark energy is or what are things that we’re still trying to sort out. So talk a little bit about the distinction between these two camps or these two zones, even if there is a kind of gradation in terms of how much evidence we have for them?

Collins:

Yeah, you’ve said it right. It’s not like there’s a sharp line there, it’s a little porous, isn’t it? So some of the things that we say are established could turn out to need to be reconsidered again and they slip back into that other zone. And certainly, the point of having information in this zone of uncertainty is to try. That’s what science does, to try to figure out, can we make them certain after all. You could put in that category that there’s life on other planets. I don’t know if there is. There’s certainly some reasons to think that could happen. We don’t have data to show that. So right now it’s in that zone of uncertainty. But I can imagine maybe sometime in the next few centuries that we learn that that is true and then it moves into that inner circle. And at that point, nobody should be entitled to say, “Well, I don’t like the answer. It upsets my faith.”

Stump:

Is part of the problem here too, maybe particularly in the realm of science, again, that the blurry sort of distinction between a fact versus the bigger theory or the narrative that I’m telling. And here at BioLogos we deal a lot with the theory of evolution. And there’s a difference between being able to say, “Here’s this one fact that we’ve tested, we’ve done experiments, the dating of a fossil or something like that.” Is there a difference between that specific fact versus the story that we tell about or the bigger picture, the narrative that it fits into that might be a little looser in some sense than the specific facts? How does a scientist think about that difference between the individual results that I get from a fully controlled tested kind of experiment versus the theory that I talk about that it fits into? That’s a philosophy of science question, but I’m really curious to hear how you process that and where that fits into what we can accept is true.

Collins:

Yeah, no, it’s a great question. When I’m thinking of these circles, I’m thinking more of facts. But then we as humans want to try to organize those facts into some kind of principle. We believe that the universe is ordered. For Christians, we think that that’s one of the best evidences of God’s existence, that the universe is ordered. There’s a whole logic and a physics behind it. So when you see something like the apple falling from the tree in front of Isaac Newton, he could measure exactly what happened there and that would be an established fact. But he wants to organize it into something called the theory of gravity, a theory which at this point, at least outside of relativistic concerns is pretty darn well established. But I would still put the theory in a slightly different category, maybe on a different dimension than the collection of facts that support it.

Theories though, also are going to have levels of certainty. I mean, we talked about dark energy, that’s kind of a theory. Whereas you could say, well, the theory of evolution, although we still call it a theory, it is about as well established as gravity at this point in terms of the evidence that backs it up, especially from DNA. But it’s fair to say it’s probably on a different platform, a different level in this argument about truth than the facts themselves.

Stump:

Okay. So we’ve gone from necessary truths, to firmly established facts, to zone of uncertainty. And finally, the last one, what are your opinions?

Collins:

Well, it’s good that people have different opinions. It makes life interesting, and I don’t want to shoot that down or say, “Oh, we all have to have the same idea.” Everything in all of these circles has to be agreed to. Be very boring that way. At my house, we have regular disagreements about fashion, for instance, especially fashion that applies to me, because I am considered to be the worst example of anybody who is able to pay attention to those kinds of norms. And I just sort of don’t see it. So we have opinions, but we laugh about it and that’s okay. It is not in the zone of established facts that I should wear a particular kind of shoe.

Stump:

Okay. So these opinions, and this, I think this is a pretty crucial point for the overall book and the problem you’re addressing, that these are statements that aren’t even intending to correspond to some existing reality external, but to the way I feel, so it can be true for me, but not true for you about what I take to be the best flavor of ice cream or the best baseball team. But that’s a very different thing when I intend to say something about the state of reality as opposed to the state of me. And we need to make sure we’re keeping those clear, right?

Collins:

Right. And sometimes we’re not as clear with each other about which kind of reality we’re talking about.

Stump:

Okay, so let me poke in that pesky philosopher way a little bit.

Collins:

Oh, here we go.

Stump:

About some of those areas that might also cause some confusion and acknowledging that there might be some confusion, might help some people understand this because it makes me wonder whether this scheme of truth here is getting all the important things or we’re missing anything. And I’ll just acknowledge that words themselves get tricky, because words only have meaning based on what a community takes them to mean, but not everyone in that community always uses them in the same way. So I’m interested about uses of truth that don’t necessarily conform to this schema and get your reaction to them. So you just hinted a little bit, even at theories that might exist on a little different scale of some sort. I’m curious about something that doesn’t maybe even correspond to a written statement that we would take to be true or false.

So for example, in presentations about science and faith, you often put up a slide that compares a stained glass window from a cathedral in the UK somewhere with a view of the strand of DNA looking down the long axis. And you note this profound resonance. And in other works of art, some people might come away thinking, “That spoke truth to me.” Should we use a different word or is that just opinion or is there something stronger there that art might point to that doesn’t so easily fit into this, they’re not necessary truths, are they firmly established facts that something is beautiful or that I have this profound sort of experience or resonance with something? Or how would you describe that in relationship to truth?

Collins:

Yeah, another great question. And a lot of these are questions about things like beauty, things like morality, things like faith. And they’re really important and they do get brought up a little bit later in the book when I get to the chapter on faith. I guess, the way I had contemplated this first part about truth was much more in the zone of things you can measure about nature and that you can basically say, I think I understand how that works. But when it comes to these kinds of consequences of our own human experience, they don’t necessarily fit. What can you say is an established fact about your experience of beauty? Is it in fact the case that that is shared and proven that a sunset is going to be a source of joy? Well, it probably isn’t for everybody. So yeah, you’re right to say that category of experience is not very well covered by the truth circles in that chapter and has to be sort of pushed over into something about faith and emotional experience.

Stump:

So what about this? Here’s a more concrete example then that could be construed as true or false in some sense. So your friend Renee Fleming is a world famous singer. What if we put this statement “Renee Fleming is a better singer than Jim Stump.” Is that true? And is it true in the well-established… Or is this only in the eye of the beholder? Is this just a matter of opinion or is there something in between where… Because I’m not sure how we’d measure that.

Collins:

We could actually get a snippet of you singing and her singing and then carry out a worldwide poll and see how that turned out. And I suspect there would be agreement in there.

Stump:

Is that the measure though, if everybody agrees?

Collins:

Or is that just people’s opinions? I think that probably does blur a bit between that zone of opinion and the zones of established fact. There are scientific measures we could apply to say, “Was Renee actually right on the note and was Jim a little off?” And then we can say it’s an established fact that Jim’s effort to find the right pitch at the right moment is not as well-defined as Renee’s, and then we could put it in an established fact category.

Stump:

Yeah, we could probably establish that. [laughter]

[musical interlude]

Stump:

One other sort of dimension to this that I think might be helpful for people to hear just a little bit about is the issue of reasonableness and its relationship to truth. I don’t want to take us too far up into philosophy land here where the—

Collins:

Oh, good. I don’t know how to go there.

Stump:

—the air gets really thin very quickly, I’m afraid. But there’s a really important point for your book here. There are some truth claims, some statements about reality that really are correct or incorrect descriptions of the way things are. There are some of those that we don’t all agree about. And so I thought I’d get into this by having you tell the stories of your relationship with two men as they were dying. So Tim Keller, to whom you dedicate this book and call your spiritual mentor. And Christopher Hitchens, whose relationship with you started off pretty rocky, but then you became good friends with him too.

And I think it’s fair to say that they came down in very different places about the reasonableness of Christian faith. And I wonder what you make of that fact—the fact that what can seem so reasonable, even obvious to one person can seem unreasonable, even ludicrous to another person. And whether this sheds any light on our contemporary situation that you’re trying to address with this book, the polarization though, where some people just can’t get themselves to take a COVID vaccine that was approved by the CDC. What do you make of this? Tell us a little bit about your relationship with Tim and with Hitch and how you understand their sort of appreciation of the Christian faith, which is very different, right? And how do we understand that?

Collins:

Well, those were two remarkable relationships and I miss both of them. Tim was my most important spiritual mentor. I was privileged to be able to spend a fair amount of time with him in his last couple of years on this earth, because he was suffering from pancreatic cancer and was being treated at the National Institutes of Health and a very bold experimental immunotherapy protocol, which I think bought him an extra year, but ultimately the cancer came back. And all those afternoons sitting in his room as he was going through all of this, he didn’t want to talk about cancer, he wanted to talk about Jesus, and he wanted to talk about the current state of our society and the church and how are we going to try to find our way back into a better place?

And I learned so much from him, and he’s one of the people who just told me, “You have to write this book, Francis.” Many times I thought, “I’m not a writer, I don’t know how to do this.” But he would not hear of it. So for Tim, and frankly for me, the reasonableness of belief in God is really compelling. That book I wrote, the Language of God, the subtitle is, A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. Evidence, not proof, but evidence. Evidence making this seem like a more rational option than being an atheist, which is what I had been before. So I think it does have some of the kinds of features that we were talking about in those circles of truth, but obviously putting it in established facts, that’s true for me, but it is certainly not true for Christopher Hitchens.

Hitch was one of the most famous atheists who wrote a famous book called God is Not Great. And was very good at dissembling anybody’s effort to try to defend belief in anything outside of what you can measure in nature and was actually pretty good at trashing religion as not just being stupid but being harmful. And yet we got to be good friends. Again, as he was dying his last year and a half from esophageal cancer, spent a lot of time talking about all kinds of things including this.

So how could these two incredibly bright, capable men arrive at a reasonableness conclusion that was the diametric opposite. I think this is where I got to bring up the web of belief, Jim, and once again, I will thank you for being the one who pointed me to that metaphor from the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. We all have these webs of belief that are preexisting based on our life experience. Imagine that if you’re listening to this podcast, what does your web look like? It’s like a spider web, and it has a lot of threads in sort of a circular pattern, but near the middle, which is often where the spider hangs out, are some really important connections between the threads, nodes that one might call them.

Now, if that’s your web of belief, those nodes near the middle are things that you’re really absolutely determined are true for you, and you’re going to be very unlikely to accept somebody’s evidence trying to knock those down unless it’s absolutely overwhelming. My web of belief has belief in God and belief in the literal resurrection of Jesus Christ at one of those central nodes. I got there at age 27 after starting down this road to understand atheism and ultimately became convinced of the truth of who Jesus was and his death and resurrection. And so does Tim. Tim Spent a lot of his last few months going back through that argument from Tom Wright about the resurrection of the son of God and how that is historically so compelling.

Hitchens on the other hand, never had a web that had anything in the middle except “faith is a total waste of time, it’s misguided, it’s irrational, it maybe is evil.” And for him to accept the alternative when he defined almost his whole personage around being an atheist was just not somewhere he could go. And though we had those conversations and he would poke at me with—he knew the Bible better than a lot of Christians did, and he could always find some Old Testament scene and say, “So do you think that sounds like the kind of God that I should worship?” It’s like, “Hang on, we need to talk.”

Stump:

So yeah, I think that’s really helpful to use that metaphor and it points out a couple of things that again, I’d like to hear your comments to. One is that it feels like those beliefs at the very center of my web are fairly isolated from revision, at least in a quick and easy sense. And yet it’s not totally immune to revision. You yourself gave the example that yours changed pretty dramatically in your 20s.

Collins:

Drastically.

Stump:

So it can happen. Is it too existential of a question to ask? Well, why doesn’t it happen more often then? Or why is it so hard? And so this second part of this that I wanted you to respond to I guess, is so what it means for something to be reasonable to me seems like it’s more of a function of how well it fits with the other things that I’m already committed to, these other things that are already on my web. So maybe in that regard, talk a little bit more about your experience with Braver Angels and Wilk Wilkinson that you talk about in the book quite a bit of your differing webs of belief? And is it helpful at all to say what seems reasonable to you does not seem reasonable to him? And then how do we go about trying to sort out those differences or at least what’s been some of your experience with the Braver Angels group and the work you’ve done there to try to do that?

Collins:

Yeah. No, I’m glad you’re bringing it up. This is also something I want to try to exhort other people to perhaps look into and get engaged in. Braver Angels was founded in 2016 by David Blankenhorn who saw that the world seemed to be getting increasingly polarized and divided and people were going off to their separate corners and kind of engaging in a bit of a bubble environment where you listen to the people who agree with you and you avoid everybody else. And we can certainly see how that’s gotten even worse since 2016. But the idea then was to try to bring people together in a controlled environment where there was a moderator and really expect people to listen to each other.

And it was about reasonableness really. You go into that session, maybe it’s about public health or it’s about gun control or it’s about abortion, and you have in your mind what is the reasonable position that a reasonable person should take. And then you hear somebody who does not agree with that at all, and your first reaction is to get your back up and you start thinking about your snappy response about how you’re going to point out the error of their ways. That’s not what you do. You got to listen so well that you can actually speak back to that other person what you heard them say and why they’re saying it. So that means sorting out, where does this come from? What is this person’s experience that leads them to that?

And then you start to see, okay, so reasonableness brings me to a place based on my experience, brings this person to a different place, but it’s not unreasonable for them to be there considering their experiences. So take for instance, Wilk, who runs a trucking company in Minnesota, was just deeply offended by all of the public health measures that were brought down upon him in his small town where he didn’t see that much was happening that required closures of businesses or schools. Maybe that was fine for the big cities, but “Really? Has anybody come out here to look at what our life is like?”

And I could kind of see why he found this to be an unfortunate overreach on the part of the government. Whereas for me, in the situation room at the White House looking at tens of thousands of people dying every week, it’s like “We got to do everything we can to try to stop the terrible tragedy. And even if it’s inconvenient.” Well that was not as balanced as it could have been. So my reasonableness had to get modified, my web of belief had to have a few of its threads broken and reassigned to a slightly different part of that web. None of the ones in the middle, those are really hard, I still did not lose my faith, but I might’ve lost a little bit of my faith in public health measures that we did at the time that could have been done better.

Stump:

Yeah. So would it be helpful in situations like that, so when you’re talking with somebody that is diametrically opposed to some of the things that you hold to, and if it comes out that where truth is being questioned—”That might be true for you, but it’s not true for me”—is it fair in your mind to change that, to say, “wait, wait, wait. Maybe let’s say it’s reasonable for you but it’s not reasonable for me”? And through further conversation maybe we can get closer to the truth of what this is, but to at least acknowledge that something that I find deeply reasonable, you find deeply unreasonable and just that acknowledgement might help to start talking a little bit more.

Collins:

It helps hugely. That’s the first step to really recognize and respect that person as having a view that is worth considering. And the other thing that changes the dynamic, and I’ve seen this happen in Braver Angels is a lot is after you start to get to that point of understanding each other’s view of reasonableness, to begin to admit that maybe yours wasn’t quite as well thought through as when you walked in the door, that there are some weak spots here.

Stump:

Not airtight.

Collins:

And then pretty soon everybody gets more comfortable admitting that about their reasonableness. And at the end of an hour or so it’s like, “Wow, we’re not that far apart.”

Stump:

Yeah, and you mentioned in the book when you’re talking about these kinds of things, a line that we heard first from Monica Guzman who’s part of Braver Angels that she says, in talking with such people, one of the most effective questions to ask is, “Oh, you believe this. How did you come to believe this? Tell me a story about…” And is that part of what helps to put things in a context that lets you see how somebody could come to believe this thing that’s so different from what you do?

Collins:

Absolutely. And it also gives them a signal that you actually want to know more about who they are and where they came from, as opposed to planning how you’re going to try to shoot down their argument, which usually just results in people doubling up on their position and nothing good happens.

Stump:

Okay. The next two sections of the book are science and faith. And we’re not going to spend as much time on them. We’ve talked to you quite a few times about science and faith and we don’t want to give away the whole book here, so people still need to go out and buy it and read those sections for themselves. But say just a little bit about science here, this enterprise that you devoted so much of your life to. How can science be a part of the solution for these societal problems that you’re trying to address in the book as a whole, of the polarization and us not understanding each other? Is science part of the solution to that?

Collins:

I think it can be, but it’s not the only solution. I try to convey my own experience as a scientist. What an amazing adventure it is, the excitement of the exploration of things that you don’t know answers and then you discover them, and how that helps the human condition. Talk about the cystic fibrosis story that I was part of way back in the 1980s, finding the gene, and now it took a while, but now people with cystic fibrosis are almost able to plan a normal lifespan, which is just breathtaking. And that’s something that science was able to achieve, and sickle cell disease is now getting cured. Cancers are not nearly as awful as they once were. I’m again, an example of somebody who, without the advances in medical science, would probably be ignorant right now of the fact that I had a cancer that was going to do something really bad to me in a few more years. And now that’s not going to happen.

So all of that excitement, and also that this is a way of discerning truth. I kind of go through the importance though. If you’re accepting a scientific conclusion, be really sure it is a scientific conclusion and not an anecdote. Because there’s a lot of trouble out there from things that somebody says, “Well, I took this pill and this thing got better.” So many things that we need to be careful about. I go through randomized controlled trials and how important they are.

And if you have somebody recommending a medical intervention that they’re sure is going to be right for you, ask for the data. Show me where that actually was applied in a double-blind way, so people didn’t actually know whether they were getting the treatment or not, and did they get better than the people who didn’t get the treatment? That’s the only way you really know. So got to be a little rigorous about that. But I also say science does get it wrong. I told a couple of examples about that, some of them pretty painful and then that has to get corrected. But it is self-corrected. Any conclusion that really matters is going to get checked by other people and if it doesn’t hold up, you’re going to find that out.

So science is our friend. Science is one of the sort of amazing gifts that God has given us the chance to learn about God’s own creation and in the process we can be worshiping and not just doing lab experiments. But it has to be done thoughtfully and carefully. But it packs a lot of stuff into that zone of established facts that we were talking about. And once they get in there, if you’re not going to agree with them, you need to have a good reason.

Stump:

Okay. And then the next section is faith. Isn’t that one of the topics we’re supposed to avoid talking with people about over Thanksgiving dinner or…? Politics and religion. So if faith seems like it’s sometimes a way of driving people apart rather than bringing us together, how do you see faith as a positive force for addressing this polarization in society?

Collins:

Well, I look at it as a Christian, and I read the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, 6, 7. And I think about how we doing in following those exhortations from Jesus about how we should be living our lives and how would it change things, if not just the Beatitudes, but the rest of it about not just loving your neighbors but loving your enemies were actually to be something that we all signed up to faithfully follow. I’m deeply troubled, Jim, that in this current area of polarization and divisiveness, where the church ought to be empowered to be part of the solution, to follow all of those remarkable ways in which Jesus modeled for us and taught us about the responses to those kinds of tensions, we’re not doing so well. And churches oftentimes seem to be also riven by all kinds of tensions and disagreements. Many of them driven by politics. And that’s heartbreaking to see that. 

And the pastors will tell you that sometimes their topics they can’t even bring up on a Sunday morning without running a risk that half the congregation will get up and walk out because it doesn’t fit their politics. People of faith have been, I think, seduced many times into a mindset which is convincing them that this is like the end times, we’re under attack, everything is falling apart. It’s not a great time, but it was a whole lot worse in the first century AD, when Jesus made those recommendations about how to live our lives. So basically, get back to the basics, love and grace and solving the problems instead of contributing to them. Then faith can be our anchor. It always has been for faithful Christians. We need to re-grab it again, I think, in some instances where it’s gotten a little frayed.

Stump:

Yeah. Finally, we have the section on trust. So you’ve noted that truth has come on hard times, but that to me just seems mostly like a misunderstanding that can be corrected by careful conceptual analysis and definitions, which is the one big tool that philosophers think can fix about anything. But there’s also a crisis of trust that you talk about and document even some in our culture. I’m afraid that one can’t be fixed by philosophers and more careful definitions. What’s the problem with trust and how might we at least take some steps toward fixing that?

Collins:

Well, how do we decide whether or not to assign trust to an individual or an institution? I’m not sure I had thought deeply about that until I tried to think this through and write something about it. Seemed to me there are four things that fold into that decision. And three of them make sense, and one of them is actually a bit of a problem and a risk. So the three that make sense. Integrity, you want to trust an institution or person that has a track record of being honorable and honest. Second, competence. They need to know what they’re talking about, have some expertise and not somebody who’s just made something up. And third, humility. Willingness to say, “I’ve got limits too. I know something about topic A, but if you’re going to ask me about topic B, I’m not such an expert there. Go ask somebody else.” I want to see that in an expert. 

The fourth one though—and this is where I think we’ve lost our way a bit in many instances—is “Do they have the same values that I do?” Think about it. That’s a big deal. When you decide whether some information that’s coming at you is something you’re going to take on board and trust it to be good for you. And if it’s coming from your tribe, you’re much more likely to say, “Oh yeah, oh yeah.” Whereas, if it’s coming from those other people over there that disagree with you about a bunch of stuff, maybe about their politics, you’re going to be like, “No, no, that’s just one of those crazies.” Even though they might’ve just told you something really important that would be good for you to trust.

So that one is—and it gets back again, I think into where we were about webs of belief. Your aligned values reflects a bit that web and to not be aware of that gets you in trouble. So you may actually feel comfortable accepting as trustworthy some claim that just popped up on Facebook, because it was from somebody who had the same aligned values as you and discounting something from somebody who spent 20 years studying a topic and knows everything about it, but sounds a little bit like an elitist that’s not part of your tribe.

Stump:

Okay, so interestingly though, this does come back around to your web metaphor and your sort of recognition of your conversations with Wilk at the Braver Angels that yes, we disagree about a lot of these things and would find ourselves in competing camps in many ways, but if we drill down deep enough, we find the same values, at least when they’re stated broadly enough of the things that we’re committed to. So talk a little bit more about that and those values that you think we do ultimately share and just need to figure out a way to articulate that to see that there’s much more commonality here than too often is admitted.

Collins:

Absolutely. I’m glad you want to go there. Because I think that is in many ways the best solution to our current animosities. That web of belief that we have, mine might be very different than somebody else’s. I know it is different than Wilk’s because he and I both mapped it out. But they don’t float free in space, they’re attached to something. And I’d like to think of them as attached to these values that we share, that most people share. Things like freedom and family and love and goodness and beauty and justice, those kinds of principles that are hard to disagree with, and we’ll have a slightly different way of defining them, but I don’t know too many people who go, “Well, I don’t care about love.” Or “I don’t care about goodness.”

If we can take the animosity and the vitriol and sort of strip it aside and say, “Wait a minute, let’s drill down here. If you don’t agree with me about the concerns about our planet, about the need for creation care, that’s okay because you have different source of information, but could we agree that our families of the future ought to be able to live happily in a planet that is flourishing?” And then everybody goes, “Yeah, sure. I agree with that.” Okay, let’s start there and see if we can find common ground.

Stump:

Good. Okay, so you end your book with some very practical steps and even some action that might be taken as a way of helping to heal some of this. And you suggest perhaps a pledge that we might all be committed to. Would you like to read the pledge that you’re proposing and how people might sign on and use this?

Collins:

I’d be glad to. I do feel that if there’s a solution to the current divisiveness, it’s going to come from each of us. I don’t see it really on a top down way from politicians or government or media just sort of getting fixed. It’s got to be because of us. And I do believe that there’s this exhausted middle in our country that is waiting for the chance not to be exhausted, but to actually start to be solving the solution. So this is an effort to exhort anybody who gets that far in the book to figure out what can you do? Instead of saying, “Things shouldn’t be like this.” Let’s say, “I shouldn’t be like this. What can I do?” And so the pledge, which I think most people would probably say is pretty reasonable, we’ll find out because I’m asking people to sign it, and the pledge will be up on the Braver Angels website, so you can document that you did.

So here it is. “I pledge that from this day forward, I will seek to be part of the solution to our society’s widespread divisiveness, which is hurting individuals, families, communities, our nation, and our world. I will actively seek out opportunities to engage in dialogue with those who have different views from mine. By respectful listening, I will strive to understand their perspectives better, to identify our shared deeper values, and to build a bridge across the gap that has divided us. When sifting information, I will seek to be a wise consumer. Taking into account my own biases, I will carefully assess the plausibility of the claim, as well as the integrity, competence, and humility of the source in order to decide whether the information is likely to be trustworthy. I will resist the temptation to speak about, write about or share on social media information that claims to be true, but is of uncertain validity. Finally, I will bring a generous spirit to all my interpersonal interactions, refusing to ascribe evil intentions to others simply because of different political or societal beliefs. I will be slow to take offense. Loving my neighbor will be my goal. Please sign here.”

Stump:

Well, may it be so. Available now to sign at the Braver Angels website. Well, thanks for the book, Francis, The Road to Wisdom. There’s lots more in there that we didn’t get talking about here yet today, but I encourage everybody to get a copy and read it and heed its advice. 

I feel like we should end our conversation here with addressing the big news from BioLogos that has just recently come out.

Collins:

Oh, wow. Yeah, let’s do that.

Stump:

The announcement that Deb Haarsma will stepping down as President at the end of the year. So you didn’t hire Deb, but because you founded this organization, BioLogos, and have a pretty significant stake in keeping track of how we’re doing, I wonder if you might take this occasion to reflect a little bit on maybe what you had intended or even hoped for in founding BioLogos, and what we’ve become and maybe even some of your interactions with Deb over these 12 years of her presidency, not as her boss, but as a co-laborer with her in this work that you’ve started?

Collins:

Yeah, wow. When I started BioLogos now some 15 years ago, the hope was to provide a civil discourse-laden happy meeting place for people who wanted to talk more about the science-faith interactions and whether there was harmony there instead of the conflict that many people assume. And BioLogos has just flourished in that regard, now with a couple million people who pop in to see what’s there. With all of the other things like this podcast, like various meetings, regional, national, a high school curriculum for homeschoolers and Christian high schools is just amazing.

And now a focus going beyond the original focus on origins, also towards creation care. Another thing where science and faith really need to get together. When Deb came on as the president almost 12 years ago, BioLogos was still a pretty small, and might I even say struggling organization. And she had such a vision of how to take this forward and such an ability to make that vision come true by inspiring other people to see it, and then many of them to come on board and work with the organization, people like you. And over those 12 years, this has become a much more significant enterprise in terms of its impact and nowhere near done yet. Deb also personally has this amazing background as an MIT trained astrophysicist. When she gives a talk about the heavens declaring the glory of God and shows some of the most recent views about that from things like the James Webb Telescope. You just, you’re slack jawed in amazement and in worship, and that’s how she feels. So it’s not like she’s putting on a show. She’s talking from her heart.

I love being able to do sessions with her, both because I’m the biologist, she’s the cosmologist, we kind of got the big and the little both covered here. But we also get to be musicians together, because she is a really good pianist, and I confess, I kind of like playing the guitar. And so we often have found ourselves as the worship leaders after a session of BioLogos. I’ve just felt she has done so much for this organization. But 12 years is a long time. I stuck it out for 12 years as the NIH director, so I can hardly complain that she might feel the 12 years at BioLogos is similarly about enough and maybe time for somebody else to step in. But I can’t say enough about how much she has contributed to this amazing organization and that legacy is going to go on and on and on. And I hope we have a big party to thank her before she officially steps down on December 31st.

Stump:

Well, thanks so much for those words, and thank you for your work in science and faith for founding this organization that does so much work, and yes, keeps me employed. And thank you so much for your new book. May it sell a million copies and thank you for talking to us here again. I look forward to another one not too long into the future, I hope.

Collins:

I love the conversation. You asked some great philosophical questions, and I tried to do the best I could figure out where to go with them. But it was a really nice interview. Thanks, Jim.

Stump:

Good, thank you.

Hoogerwerf:

Language for God is produced by BioLogos. BioLogos is supported by individual donors and listeners like you. If you’d like to help keep this conversation going on the podcast and elsewhere, you can find ways to contribute at biologos.org. You’ll find lots of other great resources on science and faith there as well. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River Watershed. Thanks for listening.