4 lessons on faith and science Dr. Francis Collins learned during a long and storied career

By Andrea Kane, CNN

Editor’s note: The podcast Chasing Life With Dr. Sanjay Gupta explores the medical science behind some of life’s mysteries big and small. You can listen to episodes here.

(CNN) — Some people feel there is a fundamental tension between religion and science, but Dr. Francis Collins, a preeminent scientist, the former director of the National Institutes of Health and an evangelical Christian, is not among them.

“The idea that there’s an inherent, irreconcilable conflict between science and faith is not true, because I have lived both of those worldviews since I was 27, and I’ve never found an instance where I couldn’t put them together,” Collins told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta on his Chasing Life podcast recently. (Collins was Gupta’s genetics professor at the University of Michigan Medical School three decades ago.)

“I feel like, as a believer who’s also a scientist, science takes on a whole new wonderful kind of aspect because you’re exploring God’s creation,” Collins said. And he should know: While director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, he was instrumental in helping map the human genome — essentially laying out the DNA instruction book for human biology — for the Human Genome Project.

“When you discover something that no human knew before, God knew that. And you just got a little glimpse of God’s mind,” he said. “That makes science kind of a form of worship, and it makes the lab almost like a cathedral. I love that.”

You can listen to the full podcast episode (with a bonus song) here.

Collins was not born into a religious tradition, rather he came to it — first almost by accident and then after deliberate study.

He grew up in an intellectual family in which faith was simply not part of the conversation. “It wasn’t denigrated; it just wasn’t considered relevant,” he said. “By the time I was a college student and then a graduate student in chemistry, I was an atheist.”

He said he arrived at his atheism not “by a careful analysis of the pros and cons” but rather by default.

All that changed during medical school.

“I had a patient who was an elderly woman in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. That’s where I was training,” he recalled. “She shared her faith with me every time she had a terrible episode of chest pain from her cardiac disease. And one day she just turned and looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘What do you believe, doctor?’”

The question blew him away.

“I realized I hadn’t given it any thought at all. And she just asked me the most important question I’ve ever been asked in my life. And I’m a scientist, you know. I’m supposed to have reasons for making decisions about something that’s really important, and I hadn’t done any of that,” he said.

What followed was a two-year journey “trying to understand, how could somebody who really is rational and they’re thinking about science, could actually accept the idea of God, which science can’t measure, and even a God that cares about me?”

“That was an unexpected journey where I thought I would end up strengthening my atheism and instead, somewhat kicking and screaming, became a Christian,” he said.

Collins has gotten some pushback during his career for his beliefs, maybe most notably when President Barack Obama nominated him to be NIH director, but those initial concerns didn’t play out.

“Over the 12 years that I served in that role, those objections became less prominent as people assessed, ‘OK, how’s he doing his job? Is he sort of smuggling in his religious perspective?’ No,” he said. “When you’re doing a job as a scientist, science is the tool that you’re going to use. That’s how you’re going to rest your arguments.

“You’re not going to suddenly say, ‘Well, if you look in the Book of Matthew, Chapter 25, you’ll see what the answer here is.’ I’ll do that for myself in my prayer life, but I’m not going to do that in a scientific discussion.”

Collins’ faith in science has never wavered, but the same cannot be said for some Americans, especially during the pandemic. Evolving data, lockdown restrictions that didn’t make sense in some parts of the country, misinformation and other factors all led to a drop in confidence that scientists were acting in the public’s best interest.

“I was becoming increasingly concerned about ways in which truth, science, faith and trust — traditional anchors for all of us — seem to be getting a little dislodged, and no more so than during Covid when the most dramatic example, of course, being people’s distrust of the vaccines,” Collins said, explaining what he wants to accomplish with his latest book, “The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust.”

“What a wake-up call to say we’ve lost something really important here, in terms of our path towards this road of wisdom, and also to deciding what’s true and who to trust and what is science about, and where does faith play a role,” he said. “I don’t know that we’ve come to grips with how that happened and what we might do to keep it from happening again, because the distrust just seems to grow, not to shrink.”

Here are four lessons Collins learned about faith in science and public trust during the pandemic.

Developing a vaccine was great — but not enough

Misinformation and distrust chipped away at public buy-in of vaccines.

“I think the development of those Covid vaccines in 11 months stands as perhaps the most significant scientific achievement of humanity since we started recording these things,” Collins said, noting that by late 2022 the vaccines reportedly had saved at least 3 million lives in the United States and many more elsewhere.

“And yet (tens of millions of Americans) — good, honorable people barraged by all kinds of information and not trusting the sources from people like me said, ‘Nope, thanks; I don’t want this.’”

An analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 234,000 deaths could have been prevented between June 2021 and March 2022 when vaccines were widely available.

“I don’t in any way want to suggest that those (millions of Americans) were somehow culpable for this,” Collins said. “They were basically victims, in my view, of a lot of missteps and misinformation and frankly disinformation (by) people who are out to make a buck convincing them that, ‘No, you don’t need the vaccine because I’ll sell you this other thing.’”

Knowledge does not equal wisdom

Those concepts of knowledge and wisdom get “muddled up together,” Collins said.

“Knowledge is the facts, the evidence, the information, the best you can put together, but it’s often insufficient to help you make a decision,” he said. “For that you need experience, you need some sense about insights and, oh, maybe some common sense and a moral compass — what’s the right thing to do?”

When you add those components — insight, common sense and morality — to knowledge, you get wisdom.

But wisdom can be elusive. “Right now, it feels like that road is pretty hard to travel. We’re getting knocked into the ditch,” he said.

Four ingredients necessary for trust

Collins said writing “The Road to Wisdom” caused him to think about what goes into public trust.

“In the area of trust, it seems like the way in which we make decisions about trust depends on four things,” he said. “One of them is integrity: Is this a source that I believe is honest and forthcoming? Second: Do they have competence? Do they really know what they’re talking about? Have they done the work to look at the complexities of the issue? And third is humility: Is this a source that actually admits there are things they’re not sure about and doesn’t try to extend their expertise in one area into all areas?”

Most everyone would agree with the first three, he said.

“But the fourth one, which now has emerged very large, is — is this source part of my bubble, is this part of my tribe? And therefore, I’m going to let my guard down and accept what they say,” Collins said. “And that could be good or that could be bad. Because facts don’t care how you feel. And a fact that comes at you from somebody who’s not in your tribe, that happens to be true, is still something you need to take on board and not reject just because of its source.”

Collins said we’ve lost some of that ability to discern the facts from sources outside our bubble, which can lead us astray.

Restoring trust is essential

Our future depends on the restoration of trust, he said.

“Science is a critical part of how we make progress, and to the extent that people are less and less likely to trust it to help them flourish, then we’re going to have more trouble flourishing,” Collins said.

Reclaiming that confidence and faith in science will have to be a deliberate process.

“That involves some humility, some admission of things that didn’t go as well as they should, a willingness to really listen, to understand the other perspectives of people who have lost that trust and try to figure out what we could do to regain it,” he said.

Ultimately, Collins said he’s an optimist but also a realist who believes work still needs to be done.

“I think it also is a call to action for all of us to begin to reanchor ourselves in truth and science and faith and trust,” he said.

Listen to the full episode here and join us every Friday for a new episode of the Chasing Life podcast. Happy holidays until the next episode.

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CNN Audio’s Eryn Mathewson contributed to this report.