Francis Collins. Little, Brown and Company, 2024. 288 pages.
Reviewed by William Galloway
Francis Collins became a well-known scientist as head of the Human Genome Project and then as longest-serving director of the National Institutes of Health. He also authored, almost twenty years ago, The Language of God, a best-selling book drawing on his personal religious beliefs and professional career in medical research to argue for the compatibility of fact-based science and Christian faith.
Collins’s new book is his attempt, as a scientist and devout Christian, to address the continued deterioration of both understanding and acceptance of scientific reality and the concurrent decline in active religious belief in our social and political culture. Because it is personal to him, he discusses in detail the emergence, especially among his fellow Evangelicals, of resistance to medical recommendations and then to the newly developed vaccine during the COVID-19 crisis. He cites the calculation by the Kaiser Family Foundation that an estimated 230,000 Americans likely died unnecessarily due to refusal to accept the highly effective mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, which was developed, tested, and produced in a near miraculous six months under NIH support. “We are in serious trouble when some believe that their faith requires them to distrust science, or when others believe that their political allegiances are a better source of wisdom than truth, faith, or science” (14). He reviews published data and expert critiques to describe how we remain mired in a crisis of truth and trust, compounded by the emergence of various social media as primary sources of information and by the political amplification of extremism and animosity.
Following the brief discussion of the problem – our society’s loss of wisdom as a guide to living and decision making – Collins identifies four “bedrock” sources of wisdom. “The premise of this book is that by reclaiming the solid ground of truth, science, faith, and trust we can find ourselves back on the road to wisdom ….” (32). The remaining four chapters discuss each bedrock in turn.
Collins proposes a simple understanding of truth, “… that there is a reality that exists independently of us and that statements or beliefs about that reality are true when they accurately describe it …” (33) and that truth matters in our personal and communal life. He pictures information as four concentric layers. At the core are necessary truths. Firmly established facts, uncertain information, and subjective opinions form the progressively outward layers. Much scientific knowledge lies in the firmly established layer. Collins points to the corrosive impact of postmodernism, which denies the reality of objective truths, thus removing any need to support alternative truths with confirmatory facts. Given the abundance of untruths, Collins proposes a six-fold categorization of it: ignorance, falsehood, lie, delusion, bull****, and propaganda. The English language provides a wealth of terms for different types of untruth, and this categorization works wonderfully well as I peruse the day’s news. The chapter ends with a more serious philosophical discussion of how, as humans, our judgement of truths is inherently biased by our personal experiences, beliefs, and culture. Collins pictures this matrix as a spider web of threads, some close to the center and forming our core beliefs, others on the distant edges. New inputs tug at multiple threads, some transmitting, some amplifying, and some dampening the final input to the center. The chapter ends with discussion of negative influences and positive approaches to discerning truth.
As one might expect in a book written by a career scientist, Chapter 3, Science, is the longest chapter. Early pages recount Collins’s journey from a PhD in chemistry, to medical school, to postdoctoral research in medical genetics, to manager of a global research initiative, and finally to director of the NIH. Along the way he participated in and then managed several lines of research that led to breakthrough diagnoses and treatments of cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease among others. Beyond medical applications, the Human Genome project also demonstrated that all races are members of a single family, derived from a common ancestor, a conclusion that counters a long history of racism. He notes, however, that medical science, like all human endeavors, is subject to error, misuse, and ethical issues, providing avenues that can be and have been used to challenge and deny medical realities. Collins summarizes in some detail how this played out during the evolving COVID-19 pandemic. He candidly discusses instances when NIH and the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) communicated contradictory or changing guidelines. That said, the politization of and church-based resistance to social distancing, masking, and, finally, use of the mRNA vaccine reflected our long history of growing rejection of scientific truths. To Collins, the more than two hundred thousand avoidable deaths, which probably were a consequence of that widespread denial, are tragic. Similar resistance to established science continues in the ongoing denial of global climate change and its origin in human use of fossil fuels. Collins offers no far-reaching solutions. Medical and global climate science exemplify critical areas where an abundance of “firmly established facts” are contested by the full array of untruths, ranging from ignorance to propaganda. Wisdom is lost.
Chapter 6 discusses the status of faith, particularly traditional Christian faith, in American culture and the consequent impact on our communal search for wisdom. Among recent trends he introduces are the increasing anger with the concomitant rise of Christian nationalism in many congregations, the ongoing conflict between religious conservatives and many facets of modern science, and the rise of Nones, Dones, and Ums (people who claim nothing in particular when polled about their faith or lack thereof). As in the science chapter, Collins traces his own journey of faith, which paralleled his journey as a scientist, from None to committed but questioning Evangelical. Initially his approach was that of a trained scientist: he did extensive research into various religions and faith traditions. An intellectual acceptance of Christianity evolved, with times of personal crisis and mystery at critical junctures along the way. The discussion then moves on to the interplay between scientific truths and Christianity, an interplay that has been and remains both contentious and synergistic. Notably, for Collins, scientific understanding has been an important foundation of his faith. He is frank in his concern about the disconnect between scientific truth and religious dogma, held by many American Christian communities, as well as the distortion of Christian belief by fear, anger, and politics. Yet he remains hopeful that a positive, Beatitudes-based Christianity, which respects and incorporates modern science, can reclaim many from the Nones and Ums camps and help to heal a divided culture.
The discussion of the final cornerstone, Trust, may be the weakest of the four chapters devoted to what he sees as the four bedrock sources of wisdom. This is understandable, as trust is a quality that is difficult to define, measure, and build (or rebuild) in our modern culture. Polls regularly document the sense of falling trust in all our institutions, public and private. Again, COVID-19 and its aftermath compounded an already declining sense of trust. In our information-clogged world, decisions about the reliability of individuals and sources must regularly be made. Collins presents and describes a simple matrix of four elements that may aid such decision making: integrity of the source, competence of the source, humility of the source (does the source note its limits, admit mistakes, and honestly address opposing facts and opinions), and our aligned values with the source. These are useful elements to differentiate. However, to apply them to important issues can take hard work and much time. The real difficulty comes with assessing aligned values. They can provide a basis for building trust but also serve as blinders to truths not supporting our own beliefs or not popular within our tribe, political party, religious affiliation, or profession. Collins provides two case histories to illustrate use of the criteria: (1) the proposal that cell phone use causes cancer and (2) the issue of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. I’ll leave Collins’s conclusions for readers to discover.
As I read through the book, I was struck by the echoes of Old Testament laments – the sense of loss and exile – in Collins’s writing about our crisis of truth and trust (and consequent loss of guiding wisdom). But, having acknowledged and discussed realities of our “wilderness,” Collins, like the biblical writers of ancient Isreal, ends with a message of hope, and with a prescription for recovery of wisdom. “Let’s begin with a fundamental principle. There is such a thing as truth and that really matters” (219). Facts that are necessarily true, such as mathematics, and concepts that are firmly supported by objective evidence, such as well-documented historical events, require our acceptance. Questions still under investigation that may change and evolve, and opinions that will likely always remain so, allow personal discernment. He continues: our culture must reconnect with shared human values. As individuals, we must make the effort to discern facts from fakes and personal opinion. Here Collins suggests “mental immunization” against the modern barrage of ignorance, falsehood, lie, delusion, bull****, and propaganda, and dependence on multiple, tested, and trusted sources. We need to engage with others. We must help the kids by reclaiming unstructured, play-based childhood and limiting immersion in digital media. As individuals and as groups we need to reengage with our larger communities. There are no surprises here if you have followed ongoing discussions, including several popular books noted by Collins, on the impacts of technology and lifestyle on mental and emotional wellbeing.
This is a thoughtful and useful book for general readers interested in understanding and navigating the state of our twenty-first century society. Collins, as always, writes clear, straightforward prose. His explanations of medical and scientific concepts, technologies, and methodologies are informative and readily comprehensible to the layman. The book covers a spectrum of topics that bridge the state of religious faith, the ongoing breakdown of trust, the proliferation of false information at the expense of factual knowledge, and the dearth of truth in Western democracies. Discussions of each topic are short and general; there are, after all, many topics to be covered in a book on wisdom. He provides simple illustrations and language that helped me better organize my own understanding and daily experiences. Collins intersperses case histories and personal stories to make generalities meaningful at the individual level, and to describe experiences and introduce the people, religious and scientific, who have molded his own thinking.
Appropriately, Collins ends with a benediction: “May we all be blessed by enough foolishness to do what others claim cannot be done: to travel down this road to wisdom with joy, and to help catalyze the reemergence of a loving, civil, compassionate, optimistic, and visionary democratic society. Come, my friends, and be part of that dream” (241).
