Mark Labberton:
It couldn’t be a greater honor than to welcome Dr. Francis Collins as our guest on Conversing today. Dr. Collins is the former director of the National Institutes of Health. In fact, he’s the longest-serving director, having done so for 12 years over the course of three different presidencies and at the height of one of the greatest international emergencies, COVID-19. He’s a physician and geneticist noted for landmark discoveries of various disease genes, and certainly will always hold a place in the history of science for his leadership of the International Human Genome Project, which completed a full sequencing of the over 3 billion genes involved in our DNA code. What a gift it is to have him as our guest on Conversing today to discuss his most recent book, The Road to Wisdom. Welcome, Francis.
Francis Collins:
I’m really glad to join you and converse on Conversing with you, my good friend Mark. And thank you for all the good works you do through this and many other media.
Mark Labberton:
Well, thank you. It is quite a gift to have you, and I don’t take it for granted for a moment. Today we’re going to be focusing on this newest book that you have just released, which is entitled The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust. It’s a book of so many different parts. Just to recap for everyone, your role as the director of the National Institutes of Health has put you at the vortex of one of the most important institutions of our day and certainly one of the most important crises of our day in the COVID-19 crisis. And it exposed a third crisis, which is really what I would call the core of the book, which is 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. And the way you explore it in this book is really possible only really because you have occupied such a distinct perch in all of this.
So let me just tell you some of the ways that I’ve thought about you as I had the great gift of reading this book. I felt at times you were of course a professor, that you were an advocate, you were being a mentor, you were being a coach, you were being a philosopher, you were being certainly a scientist, a pathologist, and I would say a cultural diagnostician. And it’s really that diagnostician quality that in some ways I think summarizes some of the qualities of this book. You’re diagnostic about what you have learned around issues of truth, science, faith, and trust that have become apparent to you through this perch that you’ve had at the NIH and through the significance of the engagement that that has caused you to have across the spectrum, politically, socially, economically, racially. It’s just a remarkable thing. So before we jump into the details, Francis, how does it feel to have weathered us all at this point and up to this moment with the launch of this book? How would you summarize just the journey-
Francis Collins:
It has been…
Mark Labberton:
… on a human level?
Francis Collins:
Yeah, it has been a journey. And if this is a book about the road to wisdom, I’m very much on that road myself, trying to learn from these remarkable experiences that I’ve been privileged to have. And you’ve outlined a few of those about myself and about our culture and our society. And I’m deeply troubled about some of what I see. So yes, you’re right. I am sort of forced into this role of being a diagnostician of our current societal state. And it does not look like it’s a healthy one.
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Francis Collins:
And I suppose I could go back in the lab, but close the door because I’m still running a research lab at NIH. But I feel compelled, if I have a little credibility somewhere, to try to express both some encouragement and also to call out some of the things that are really doing us harm that need to be addressed. And hoping that out there somewhere, maybe in the so-called exhausted middle of the country, which is a lot of us, there may be some willingness to think about what to do about this. Not just to wring our hands, but to actually go from way… Maybe where many of us are, things shouldn’t have to be like this. Instead, I don’t have to be like this. What can I do to try to turn this around and deal with the divisiveness, the polarization, the hyper-partisanship. And forgetting about loving your neighbor, which for me as a person of faith was supposed to be pretty central, and yet it’s sometimes pretty hard to find right now.
Mark Labberton:
It’s become more and more common I think in recent decades to talk about medicine as a holistic enterprise, that it really involves every dimension of our human experience. And not just the biochemistry of our bodies, but really the holistic dimensions of what it means to be human. And in a way you have demonstrated that through this book because you’re treating in a sense the whole person, but you’re now here in this book in a way looking at the holistic dimensions of our society and culture.
And in that you offer the kind of care of exam and attentiveness that I think we really, really need. And you are an exemplar of the thing that you’re trying obviously to encourage the rest of us to engage in in our own particular way. So maybe for the sake of those who haven’t yet read the book, we could just take a moment to have you sort of summarize the arc of the book and why these four particular words of truth, science, faith, and trust, why those as the words that tag some of the problems and challenges that we’re facing.
Francis Collins:
It took me a while to come to that conclusion, that those four particular aspects of our thinking and our existence are all a bit out of joint with each other and within each of them. And if we are serious about trying to get beyond a diagnostic to a therapeutic, we need to understand that. So let me just take them quickly one at a time. First of all, truth. There is such a thing as objective truths, but it is not necessarily very popular in many circumstances. Mark, how many times have you heard somebody say, “Well, that might be true for you, but it’s not true for me”?
Mark Labberton:
Exactly.
Francis Collins:
And if they were talking about whether a particular movie was just really super or not, that’s fine. Opinions need to vary. That makes life interesting. But if they’re talking about whether the formula for water is H2O, then this isn’t going to work very well. And we have gradually, I think, in the course of quite a few years, and COVID maybe even made this a little worse, slipped into the zone where facts, established facts, are now sometimes called into question because somebody doesn’t like the fact.
Mark Labberton:
Yes. Right.
Francis Collins:
And that gives you permission to say, “Well, that’s just not true for me.” If we really begin to adopt that in a dangerous postmodernist way about things that are well-established by science or by other means, then we’re in real trouble. Our society has flourished because we’ve had agreement, what Jonathan Rauch calls The Constitution of Knowledge, about things that have been well-established by careful examination, tested over the course of years and proven to be reliable. And beginning to abandon those, which is a temptation it seems, especially now. There’s a really serious path that I don’t think we should be running down right now.
So truth is crucial, but it’s crucial also to make the distinction between what is an established fact, which one should respect, and things which are still debatable because you don’t have enough evidence, and then things that are just frankly opinion. And sure, we can disagree about those all we want. I think cats are better pets than dogs. You might have a different opinion, that sort of thing. So truth is central to all of this. And there is a real danger here in slipping away from that foundation. Jesus talks about this as well, “You’ll 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.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, yes.
Francis Collins:
Now, science is a pathway towards discerning the truth. A reliable one. One which I’ve had the privilege of taking part in for pretty much my whole professional career. Science is capable of learning things about the natural world by experimentation and giving us discernment, about galaxies but also about ourselves. And certainly for somebody who’s interested in health, science is a really important window into understanding reliably, not anecdotally, what are important factors in staying healthier. Treating you if you get sick. And yet there again, there’s a lot of sloppiness now that seems to be sliding into that.
Anecdotes oftentimes seem to be capable of convincing people when rigorous studies either haven’t been done or have been done and are being ignored. COVID had many examples of that. Science gets it wrong sometimes, let’s be clear about that. But it’s self-correcting. If the conclusion really matters, it’s going to get checked by somebody else. And if it was wrong, eventually that will become clear. Distrust in science though has grown rather dramatically in the US and across the world. And most paradoxically in the last four or five years since COVID came along, despite the fact that science by the development of vaccines in record time potentially achieved one of its greatest remarkable contributions to humanity at all time. And yet, at the same time, trust in science was going down. We can talk about all the reasons for that.
And then faith. I am a person of faith, as you are. I think truth comes from science about the natural world. But truth of a transcendental sort, answering questions like, “Why am I here and is there a God and does God care about me?” Science doesn’t help with those questions, and yet they’re really fundamentally important. And so we have to bring faith into this conversation if we’re trying to shape a future that gives you a chance to tap into all the wisdom that’s there. There’s a lot in faith traditions. And yet I’m deeply concerned that faith communities in modern times, the last few years, but going on a bit before that, have somehow maybe lost track of a lot of the strong foundation that they actually rest upon in terms of figuring out what is true and who to trust, and have been overtaken in some instances more by partisan attitudes and partisan messages, which is certainly not where I think faith is supposed to take us.
And then finally, there’s trust. You take all of those sources of information that are coming at you and you try to figure out which person and which institution should I actually trust and say, “That’s information I’m going to take on board and consider it to be reliable.” We have a real problem, I think, right now in society trying to figure that out. We have so much coming at us. And frankly, a lot of it is not particularly evidence-based. And I don’t want to harp too much on social media, but I think there is a serious issue there. And yet, if some anecdote or some claim appears on social media that happens to make you angry or fearful, it gets your attention.
Mark Labberton:
Yes. Right.
Francis Collins:
Even if there’s plenty of evidence elsewhere that that particular claim’s not true, it grabs us. It’s how our amygdala is wired for things of that source. And we then may be tempted to trust sources we shouldn’t because they resonate with our own previous worldview. And especially as many of us are now gathered in separate camps, surrounding ourselves by like-minded people and beginning to think of anybody who’s not in our camp as untrustworthy and maybe even dangerous or maybe even evil, then our ability to decide how to trust information gets very colored by whether it comes from somebody who shares our values. And sometimes that can be quite misleading. 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’ve considered as part of my reliable circle of buddies. But I needed to hear it. It was hard to hear, but that’s really important.
So how do we do trust? We ought to focus on integrity and competence and humility. But we got to be careful about not focusing too much on, “Is this somebody in my tribe?” Because that is not necessarily going to give you what you need. So you put all those things together. And I don’t think anybody would say that truth, science, faith, and trust are all in a good place right now. They kind of intersect with each other. Together, though, they ought to lead us to this word wisdom. And wisdom is not just about knowledge. Wisdom adds to knowledge with discernment, with understanding, with some moral sense of what’s right and wrong. Knowledge doesn’t necessarily carry that along. But if you don’t have that right foundations of truth, science, faith, and trust, it’s pretty hard to be sure you’re on that road and you haven’t slipped off somehow into the ditch. So the book aims to try to do the diagnosis and then to recommend to each of us what we might do to try and get our houses in order.
Mark Labberton:
Let’s actually move there quickly and then come back to these four. So there is a tell-off to the book. There’s really an arc that you have in mind from the beginning. And I think it might be helpful for readers to know where the book concludes, and then we’ll come back and spend some time on each of these four again. What is the outcome that the book concludes with?
Francis Collins:
Well, it may be relatively agreed upon right now that our society’s in trouble. You can go to lots of conferences and have those diagnoses put forward by virtually every speaker. David Brooks tells the story about going to many of those conferences. And then there’s usually this last session where they’re supposed to be, “Okay, what are the solutions?” And in his description, people get up and go, “Mumble, mumble, mumble. Well, it was great to see you all.” And that’s the end of the conference. And I’ve been to a few of those too. And I didn’t want this book to be, “Mumble, mumble,” and then the end. So I really tried it from my own limited perspective. And again, Mark, I am not a card-carrying sociologist or philosopher or theologian. I’m just a guy who has had the chance to observe a lot of what’s happened in my 74 years.
And if it came down to trying to decide what’s the solution to our current circumstance, I couldn’t see it coming from politicians. Because I think they’re actually creating some of the problem. I couldn’t see it coming from the media because it’s all, in one way or another, taking a particular perspective. I couldn’t necessarily see it coming from any of those top-down sources. The only way it’s going to get solved is to come from each of us. Again, back to this exhausted middle, which is probably two-thirds of the country and are kind of disgusted by all the divisiveness and the nasty messages coming from the left and the right. Maybe if those folks, you and me amongst them, could figure out, “Okay, how am I going to be part of this solution?” That’s what I want to empower people to do in the last part of this book.
And what does that mean? Well, first of all, it does mean getting your own worldview in order. We’ve all been, I think, in a certain way affected, maybe even contaminated, although it’s a strong word, by all of the vitriol that it kind of finds its way into our daily experience. Almost to the point where you think that’s normal and therefore it’s okay if you engage in that yourself sometimes. That is not going to us where we need to be. So for people in faith, certainly there’s lots of places to re-anchor yourself. Start with the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, 6, and 7. There is so much there. If we were living our lives the way Jesus told us to in that remarkable set of exhortations, none of us would be doing what we are doing in this current vitriolic circumstance, at least not like this. So try to re-anchor yourself. And that also means really that love is your calling. Anger and fear are not your calling.
There’s lots of biblical exhortations about this. And that means not just loving the people who agree with you. That means loving the people who really very much disagree with you, and trying to understand where they’re coming from. So that’s another part of this. Build those bridges. Mark, I’m part of Braver Angels, which is a national group that tries to bring together people who really don’t agree about issues like public health or gun control, and have them really listen to each other enough to get beyond the point of just demonizing that person because of their point of view, actually see where they’re coming from.
Over two years, I’ve learned a lot about why many people are very critical about what happened with COVID. And it’s taught me stuff I needed to know. Do that yourself. Find somebody who disagrees with you on a topic but who do you think underneath it all is probably a reasonable person. Go have a coffee or have a glass of wine and say, “I’m genuinely interested in understanding your perspective. Tell me how you feel about this issue, why we’ve arrived at that. I want to understand it.” And then really listen. Listen, not to basically have a snappy response and tell them why they’re wrong. Listen to understand. We don’t do that very well.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Francis Collins:
If you can do that one-on-one, then maybe begin to build that into a larger network. Churches would be a great place to do this, although right now they’re afraid of stirring things up if you take on a difficult topic. But we got to take it on somewhere. And of course, that also means having responsibility to our communities, to our nation, which somewhere in there has to translate into choosing leaders that have the same view of finding harmony, finding solutions, people of character, people of vision, people who are not all about themselves. All of that, with a groundswell of two thirds of the country, maybe bit by bit we could turn this around.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Well, I have to say when I got to that section of the book, which is a kind of pledge that a person might make to enter into these deliberate practices that you’re describing, I’ve had it actually quite inspirational and encouraging. Because it does concretize a book with rich, rich, rich reflections and so many examples, for instance, of your own storytelling, your own preparedness to admit your fault, or your lack of knowledge of certain things, or your decisions in certain ways. But you also, right alongside all that take responsibility, but also take responsibility for the stewardship of the truth and the science and the faith and the trust, that at least insofar as it depends upon you, you could actually advance. Which is what the book is really trying to do. And in the close, that’s certainly what you’re appealing to everyone to do in their own particular context and terms.
It makes it, I think, really quite a appropriate finish, but also a launching pad for where people might take a book like this and think about it in relationship to others. Either book groups that they might form around a discussion of the book, or gatherings that they could imagine hosting perhaps of people that aren’t regularly together but might be able to come together around a particular book or a chapter. I could imagine neighborhood groups being formed out of this. Certainly church groups, as you say. Friendship circles, work circles. I just think it’s a tremendous resource for all of these things.
Francis Collins:
Mark, I really appreciate you’re highlighting the pledge as well. So I thought long and hard about this. Is this something that’s asking too much of people? But why not? The pledge that’s in that last chapter is something that I would guess most reasonable people would look at and go, “Yeah, that feels like something I’m willing to do.” But it does call upon people to do things like not distributing information unless you’re sure it’s true, because otherwise the scary stuff goes viral and true stuff just sits there.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Francis Collins:
Also encouraging people to build these bridges with neighbors and within communities, which many of us are sort of like, “Somebody else has to do that.” Asking responsibility to be wrapped around. And this will get posted. And a people willing to sign this and publicly say that they have done so on a website that Braver Angels is going to be supporting. In fact, it’s up there already. As a means of sort of telling the world, “Yes, I want to be part of the solution.” And also, that signing will point you to other kinds of bridging organizations. So there are hundreds now around the country, but they’re not very well known.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Well, we will put it in the show notes so that people can see ways that they could sign-
Francis Collins:
Great.
Mark Labberton:
… should they want to do so. One of the things that is amazing is that in certain ways these four categories that you’ve chosen are certainly not newly destabilized. It’s been a process over time of having come to where we are philosophically. And undoubtedly, you would’ve seen that unfolding long before we hit the crisis of COVID. But I am curious if you could give us a little bit more of the narrative part of how it became clear to you that these four were in such a destabilized place. What was it that do you think happened that caused all that to come into such stark relief, as you vividly describe it?
Francis Collins:
I’m not somebody who’s ever joined a political party. I’m one of those folks who sees good on both sides, except when there isn’t. And I basically didn’t think of myself as particularly engaged in all of the arguments that come forward about are you on the left or on the right? And I also was one of those people, perhaps a bit of a disciple of Descartes who would say, “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. And that’s what my whole life has been about, trying to make discoveries, whether it was finding the cause of cystic fibrosis or reading out the entire 3 billion letters of the human DNA instruction book. This is going to be a good thing. This is information. This is reliable. People can build on this and suffering will be reduced and flourishing will increase.
Then COVID came along. And there we were with this emerging worst pandemic in more than a hundred years. And this was the biggest challenge that biomedical research had ever faced. How are you going to, as fast as humanly possible, come up with solutions, hopefully therapeutics and diagnostics, but especially a vaccine? And it was my job at NIH to coordinate much of that effort, working with industry, with academics, with the FDA, and particularly with the virologists who were just revved up and ready to go, but needed encouragement and resources.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Francis Collins:
And what happened was phenomenal. And I will not forget that night in late November 2020 when the results of the phase three trial for the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccines, the mRNA vaccines, were unblinded. Until then, we really didn’t know, “Are these vaccines any good? Are they actually going to turn out to be both useless and harmful?” And yet at that moment the unblinding happens, it was beyond anything that I could have hoped for or prayed for. And believe me, I prayed a lot.
Mark Labberton:
Amazing.
Francis Collins:
95% effective. Essentially, no serious safety risks. And 30,000 people for each of those trials. This was astonishing.
Mark Labberton:
It’s extraordinary.
Francis Collins:
And done in just 11 months, where no previous vaccine had never been developed in less than five years. So here was my Cartesian moment like, “Okay, it’s going to be good now. People will see that data, everybody will roll up their sleeves. The big problem now is just get the vaccines out there and then we’re going to be all right.” And there was a big push, of course, to get the vaccines out there. But then by the summer of ’21, it was pretty clear that what had been so many voices about skepticism had taken hold in the hearts and minds of 50 million Americans who to this day have said, “No, thank you. I don’t trust those vaccines. I hear various stories about how it was all rushed, that maybe there is something wrong there. Maybe there is a chip in the syringe. Maybe this is going to make me sterile or cause all kinds of strange consequences to my body.”
And I have to take responsibility as one of those who was trying to convey the medical information to the public. Because I was asked to do a lot of that. And it was not getting across in a way that won the argument with those 50 million people. Of course, it was deeply distressing as a scientist.
Mark Labberton:
Of course.
Francis Collins:
Like, “Okay, I have information here. Surely you’re going to see it this way I do, if I just explained it to you.” And it wasn’t working. But much worse than that, Mark, gosh, Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that between June of ’21, at the point where vaccines were free to everybody, and April of ’22, just about 10 months, there were 234,000 deaths from COVID unnecessarily because of resistance to the value of vaccines. That’s an astounding number. That’s four times the number of Americans who died in Vietnam. 234,000 in graveyards. I can’t even think about that now without just feeling slightly sick in my stomach about how could this have happened in the most technologically advanced country in the world. And that the misinformation and the intentional disinformation won the hearts of those 50 million people. Those good, honorable people were trying to do the right thing for themselves and their families.
And yet, with all of this incoming, were unable to see what would’ve potentially saved them. So truth took a very big hit at that point. Information that was in that category of established facts was considered to be a best opinion and maybe actually a lie. And certainly, science trusts began to fall. And people of faith, in many instances, were the most likely to fall into the category of not trusting what science had to say. And political party had a huge impact on this. That’s been well documented in a study done in Ohio and Florida showing that if you wanted to look at who resisted vaccination and who died in that particular interval, your party was one of the strongest predictors of the outcome. There’s something terribly wrong here.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right.
Francis Collins:
That was sort of a wake-up call to me. And after I stepped down as NIH director, I felt like if I got a little bit of credibility, maybe I need to spend it. And then your friend and mine, Tim Killer, started to work on me. And I discussed a little bit with him my sense that maybe I need to do something, and he was relentless in insisting that that had to happen. Even as he was dying from pancreatic cancer, I had a chance to spend a lot of time at his bedside at NIH. He never let up on this, “You’ve got to do this.”
Mark Labberton:
I’m Mark Labberton. Thanks for listening with me.
One of the things that’s so remarkable is that underneath this medical crisis was then this exposure of this still deeper cultural crisis around these four words that you’ve chosen to focus on. And the significance of what those words in crisis have actually come to mean and not mean to signify and not signify to certain people who one would’ve thought in a culture of the 21st century in the most technically advanced nation in the world, that somehow these words would’ve stood a solid test, but in fact had eroded in ways that were magnified in their exposure. Not I think in their reality, but in their exposure, that it was suddenly so clear that there was this underlying pathology in our culture around issues like these four words and all that they point to. Just on a personal level, were there particular single moments where that just was particularly horrifyingly clear to you in a way that it may not have been before?
Francis Collins:
Yeah. I guess, again, a lot of it did come down to the response to the public health measures. Admittedly, there was lots of room for discussion about the appropriateness of closing the schools and for how long, and the appropriateness of mandates for masking. All of those recommendations that were well-intentioned, but weren’t always and solidly based on evidence as one would like. We were in the middle of a pandemic that we were just trying to learn about. At the same time we had to make recommendations. But it was really the vaccine responses that I had the greatest sense of alarm and disappointment, sometimes put forward by really reasonable people. Mentioned Braver Angels and some of the discussions I’ve had in that setting. Really reasonable people whom were convinced about information that had been put forward on social media for which there was really no compelling evidence, but which carried the day in their mind over all of the other things.
There’s this database that the FDA runs called the Vaccine Adverse Event Repository. It’s sort of a canary in the coalmine to say if something’s happening as a result of the vaccine, let’s be sure we don’t miss it. So basically anybody who has some sort of unexpected event within a month or two after vaccine is encouraged, or their doc is, to post on this. With 200 billion people getting vaccinated, there was a lot of things happening in the month or so after that. People fell down the stairs or people were in a car wreck, and those all got submitted as well. Obviously, pretty hard to imagine that was cause and effect, but it’s all there.
And there are people who look at that database and say, “Well, there were 36,000 deaths in this database, and those are all clear evidence that they were caused by the vaccine.” I would guess somewhere maybe less than a dozen of those were probably true, and those were the cases of individuals who had a blood clotting problem from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. But all the rest are, well, okay, they happened in that same timetable, as you would see in any timetable of 200 million people over a month. But that was just too hard somehow to explain for people who were already in this suspicious mindset about, “They’re hiding stuff from us.”
Mark Labberton:
Right. It was so disturbing to walk through that time. And because we are in a small group together and because in that group we had regular opportunity to walk with you through this long period where you were at the vortex of this crisis, it was so profound to me just as an individual listening to you account the story of the various ways where institutional failure, leadership failure, technology failure, political failure, social turbulence and chaos and division just broke down all of the systems that you would think the discovery of this extraordinary vaccine could actually potentially bring about such release and relief from the danger.
Instead, magnified in this way, there was still another virus, a social virus, of fear and anxiety and distortion and gossip and lies that I think honestly were, as you say, frequently held by people of goodwill and good faith, but just did not see the picture of what was really going on. Hence, the crisis that really motivated the writing of this book. I just want to say that it was an honor to listen to you tell the story, but it was a profound thing to watch you, in particular, lead and suffer through that process when it was the actual counter wind to the very goodness, truth and beauty of what had actually been discovered and made available to people. What a story. It’s remarkable.
Francis Collins:
It is. I think history will look back on the development of those vaccines in 11 months as perhaps the most significant achievement of science up until this point. Certainly in terms of what it did to save lives. Estimates are 3.1 million Americans alive now because of that. I might be one of them. You might be also.
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Francis Collins:
We don’t know of course who was saved, but you can look and see what would’ve happened without that. And there are too many times where science has been called upon at this timetable with this magnitude of a seriousness and have come through in this way. And that’s just an incredible testimony to those who led that effort, many of whom are now demonized. My friend Tony Fauci, who recorded to me throughout the course of this, because as the NIH director, he was one of the institutes at NIH and I’m supposed to oversee all of them. And he and I spent countless hours, pretty much every day and often every night trying to go through the data and come up with strategies that might accelerate the process.
And now in the minds of a vast number of Americans, he’s somehow been turned into a villain. This remarkable public servant, probably the most highly regarded expert in infectious disease on the entire planet, being looked at as somehow having conducted himself in a mischievous way and making profits, which he made none of, and enjoyed the opportunity to push people around. It is so completely contrary to the facts. And it makes me very sick at heart to see how we human beings, threatened as we have been, fearful of we have been, would turn to this kind of behavior to demonize and find a scapegoat of somebody who was actually such a dedicated public servant.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Francis Collins:
And I’m sorry. Politicians have led that charge in some instance, and shame on them.
Mark Labberton:
Yes. When I was doing my PhD, it was at a time in the late eighties when critical theory was really at its peak fever pitch in so many ways. And where the discombobulation of critical theory, that is the discombobulation of critical theory fomented in so many academic circles. And the discrediting of reason, the discrediting of institutions, discrediting of history in many ways, and certainly the discrediting of truth claims, the discrediting of science in various ways or certainly the redefining of science. Absolutely this subversion of faith and then the break in trust. All of that was rabidly present. So because that was actually at the core of a lot of what I was studying as a PhD student, I walked through this period realizing that when I had studied it as a philosopher and a theologian, I was studying it for the sake of somewhat more abstract debates. Though it was really clear that it had profound social impact.
So when in fact that whole movement, which in so many ways has gone to seed and shows itself now in the practical social reality of how all that just gets shaken down and pragmatized in social media debates or cheap accusations and bumper sticker statements, it’s not really grappling with the issues of what postmodernism was trying to grapple with. But it also offers something it can’t offer, which is a sense of guidance in the midst of its chaos. And yet it gives justification for almost anyone to say and do whatever it is that they choose to say and do, and to accuse anyone else and everyone else of doing likewise. So watching this happen medically felt to me particularly agonizing because it felt like the philosophical substructure that was behind what you’re describing in this book and what we saw unfold at the peak of COVID was really the fruitfulness of this philosophical movement that had changed societies and cultures in ways that were now just so vividly and tragically clear.
Francis Collins:
Yeah. This is a really interesting kind of historical spread of a perspective over the course of a few decades, that I think one can see now in a rather paradoxical way started on the left and has now become a feature on the right. That original postmodernism denying that there was such a thing as objective truth, that it was all your opinion, that it was so contaminated by our cultural experience that we wouldn’t be able to see truth if it came right in front of us. And basically that argument trying to apply itself more and more to areas like science where it really doesn’t fit. I don’t know any postmodernist scientists. Science is about finding the truth.
But now it seems that this ability to decide it’s okay to discount some fact that you don’t like, it’s certainly true to some degree on the left, but it’s really true in lot of what’s happening on the right. The philosopher Daniel Bennett, who’s not exactly somebody who would be inclined to do a lot of criticism of his own field of philosophy and the left side of it, had this amazing statement, which I quote in the book about postmodernism. That it wasn’t just unfortunate, it was truly evil. It made it fashionable for reasonable people to deny the truth. And the harms that were done by that were hard to oversee.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Francis Collins:
Wow.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, really profound. I think that one of the things that is particularly seminal in the book… Because you write as a Christian and because you’re standing in all of these public highly multi-faith, highly secularized contexts where you don’t assume by any means that everyone has the same worldview or that everyone has the same understanding of God, if there is a God. And not everyone has the same understanding of many, many aspects of human experience. But in the context of that then is also this erasure of objectivity that is not an example of political overreaching, but actually of a discovery and acknowledgement of established fact, et cetera.
And when those two categories get mixed and you think one is as fluid as the other, then you really are in a bind. And that is what you’re describing so vividly. I think where the impact of the book will make some of its most important influence, I think will be in the context of people who are trying to still sort out those things for themselves and to understand, “How do I get a grip on what I think is trustworthy and knowable and true?” And at the same time, not become overreaching in a way that can be the great fear that postmodernism put in motion. But on the other hand, if that’s one of its fears, one of its mandates seems to be overreaching, that anybody can overreach at any given moment under any given circumstance. And that partly is what has fueled the rhetoric, both elements of that.
Francis Collins:
Yes. Yeah. Postmodernism’s saying that nothing is true except our perspective, and that’s true.
Mark Labberton:
Yes. Yes. And that’s absolutely true. Yes, totally. Francis, when you think about the church in particular and its own complicity in this, which it has had such a significant complicity in this, where the church community of God’s people in the United States and frankly in places all around the world have been participants in some of this subversion of truth and of science. You address that explicitly of course in the book, and it’s been part of your own journey to have to stand in Christian context in particular, where the rejection of science and the rejection of truth is fought against and politicized in the ways that it has. How has it affected your own understanding of this mystery of God’s thing called the church? I mean, where has it led you?
Francis Collins:
Well, I love the church and I love the people in the church. And they are good, honorable people trying to find the truth and trying to figure out what it means that God is love when they’re sometimes surrounded by other people who aren’t behaving that way. And how can we sort through all of that? The Christian faith is in itself this remarkable foundation that is associated with love and truth and goodness and beauty, and yet it’s poured into these rusty vessels called human beings. And then when it gets poured out again, it doesn’t look quite as clean and sparkly as it should. And that’s the nature of the human condition. That’s why we needed Jesus to be down here to help us figure out how to deal with all of our imperfections and to find forgiveness.
But at a time like this, where the church can certainly be embattled, it seems, by lots of perspectives that are not friendly and are probably being over-interpreted as a real threat to their existence, I think a lot of Christian churches have the view right now that this is a war, that this is different than anything has happened in the course of human history. That’s just not true. The Christian church is actually being treated quite fairly by our particular country’s government and regulations and laws, and it’s not in any great danger of somehow being threatened by the ability to continue to exist. The threats seem more to come from a line linked with political perspectives that are oftentimes the opposite of what the church should be standing up for.
That certainly alienates a lot of the people who are sitting in a pew on Sunday morning wondering, “How did we get here? Why is this what we’re talking about?” Instead of going back to the scriptures and finding out who we are and what we should be trying to accomplish. My heart is grieved by that, and I think that’s probably true of you and many other Christians as well. How do we find ourselves back onto this road to wisdom? I also am grieved for the pastors who are called upon to try to manage the current very divisive situation when they try… And there’s something in the book about a pastor who tried to bring things around and basically gets accused by parishioners as not being aware of what a serious war we’re in the middle of for our survival. Because that’s such a mindset that’s crept its way into many of these discussions.
So ultimately, the evidence is pretty clear of the trouble. Tim Alberta’s book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, if people haven’t read that, it’s very sobering.
Mark Labberton:
Yes. I had a chance to interview him. Very sobering. Very, very sobering.
Francis Collins:
Very, very deeply researched, indicating just how far away from the path of Jesus many people in the church have been led to go, oftentimes by leaders who had another agenda that I wouldn’t necessarily say was very scriptural. But first step, of course, is to realize that. Second step is for the grassroots. Again, coming back to the individual to say, “Well, that’s not who I am. And I want to be part of the solution here to bring us as people of faith back into the place where we have always called to be and which we seemed to have slipped away from.”
Mark Labberton:
Right. One of the books that we discussed in our book group was the Book of Job, and we did it in the thick of COVID. And I remember one of the things that stood out was just the sense that it brings us to the brink of our own human comprehension, where there are mysteries that are pointed to as part of the wisdom of God in the Book of Job, which exceed our comprehension. And I think one of the beautiful gifts of your book, Francis, is that you are not a modernist who claims reality is plainly readable and that it simply falls out along rational categories. There’s all kinds of-
Francis Collins:
I used to. I’ve given that one up.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right. Right. That’s not the story. But neither is it the story that there is only darkness and opaqueness and invisibility. It really is this seeing, but seeing through a glass starkly. Let’s claim to see everything that we can possibly see and continue to pursue to see, pursue seeing, while also acknowledging that yes, there are limits to human knowledge and understanding. Certainly some of them are yet historically bound and could still be broken, of course, as they will be through ongoing progress and knowledge and understanding in science in particular. But it will also be the case that we live still inside a universe that is held by the mystery that only God alone provides and holds. And to me, you’re creating a space for people to bring the whole of reality to it in which there is both visibility, invisibility, concrete, material reality, and spiritual reality. That is the comprehensive picture that you’re portraying.
And to me, that’s why it’s such a book of hope. Because it’s not as though it’s not fractured, it’s not segmented, it’s not denied in any of its parts. And it allows for the whole human experience, including the suffering that we are in now and societal suffering that we’re actually creating for ourselves to actually also find its place and its future and hope. So I just want to close by saying thank you again for… On behalf of all of us, I want to say thank you for your work at the NIH and this unbelievable achievement that you helped to lead through the worst of this horrific COVID and everything related to it.
And then the social leadership that you’ve provided in the years of your leadership at the NIH, and now through the writing of this book that’s trying to heal us in yet other ways that are not just the medical ways, but in the social, intellectual, emotional, interpersonal ways that are part of what a full human life will really require and need. Francis, you have been a gift to us and you continue to be. And this book is just another manifestation of that. Thank you so, so very much.
Francis Collins:
Oh my goodness, Mark, you’re incredibly generous and I value your friendship and your wise thoughts and opinion as somebody who saw a lot about all these issues as well. Can I just read you the last paragraph that I wanted to put forward-
Mark Labberton:
Please.
Francis Collins:
… coming from near the end, not quite at the end? “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 efforts 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 on 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 born of exhaustion or desperation, but one arising from the hopeful pursuit of the promise of greater flourishing of our entire humanity.”
Mark Labberton:
Amen. Francis, thank you.
Francis Collins:
Thank you, Mark.
