Aiming for the Moon

124. The Road to Wisdom - On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust: Dr. Francis S. Collins (Physician, Geneticist, Former Director of NIH)

• Season 5 • Episode 124

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A multifaceted understanding of wisdom is essential for a functioning society.  Only with this broad understanding can we humbly dialogue with those who disagree with us and piece by piece build a culture of conversation. In this episode, I sit down with geneticist and physician Dr. Francis Collins to discuss his latest book, The Road to Wisdom. Dr. Collins argues that we must return to the four core sources of judgment and clear thinking: truth, science, faith, and trust.

A Quick Note:

Aiming for the Moon has a diverse audience. I strongly believe that developing your perspective comes from speaking with people who you both agree with and disagree with. Iron sharpens iron. That’s why this podcast is a platform that hosts interesting and successful people from a variety of worldviews. Gen. Z has the opportunity to trailblaze a culture of conversation. So, let’s go.

Topic:

  • Four Anchors of Knowledge: Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust
  • Cynicism and Nihilism in Public Discourse 
  • The Importance of Humility in Dialogue
  • "How has being attacked by those 'on your side?' changed how you communicate?"
  • Harmonizing Faith and Science
  • Iron sharpens Iron: How going outside your bubble helps expand your perspective
  • Navigating Polarized Issues in a Multicultural Society
  • Practical Steps: So, how should we then live?
  • "What books have had an impact on you?"
  • "What advice do you have for teenagers?"


Bio:
Dr. Francis S. Collins is a physician and geneticist. His groundbreaking work has led to the discovery of the cause of cystic fibrosis, among other diseases.  In 1993 he was appointed director of the international Human Genome Project, which successfully sequenced all 3 billion letters of our DNA. He went on to serve three Presidents as the Director of the National Institutes of Health.

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Speaker 1:

A multifaceted understanding of wisdom is essential for a functioning society. Only with this broad understanding can we humbly dialogue with those who disagree with us and, piece by piece, build a culture of conversation who disagree with us and, piece by piece, build a culture of conversation. This is the Aiming for the Moon podcast and I'm your host, taylor Bledsoe. On this podcast, I interview interesting people from a teenage perspective. In this episode, I sit down with geneticist and physician Dr Francis Collins to discuss his latest book Road to Wisdom. Dr Collins argues that we must return to the four core sources of judgment and clear thinking truth, science, faith and trust. Dr Francis S Collins' groundbreaking work has led to the discovery of the cause of cystic fibrosis, among other diseases. In 1993, he was appointed director of the International Human Genome Project, which successfully sequenced all three billion letters of our DNA. He went on to serve three presidents as the director of the National Institutes of Health. If you like what you hear today, please rate the podcast and subscribe. You can follow us at aiming the number four moon on all the socials to stay up to date on podcast news and episodes. Check out the episode notes for links to our website, aimingforthemooncom and our podcast sub stack Lessons from Interesting People. All right with that? Sit back, relax and listen in. Thanks again to Paxton Page for this incredible music.

Speaker 1:

Now, in the silence before the interview, I want to make a quick note, because Aiming for the Moon has a diverse audience, and this episode deals with some points in contemporary politics. I strongly believe that developing your own perspective comes from speaking with people who you both agree with and disagree with. Iron sharpens iron. That's why this podcast is a platform that hosts interesting and successful people from a variety of worldviews. Gen Z has the opportunity to trailblaze a culture of conversation, so let's go so. Thank you so much, dr Collins, for coming on the podcast. It's wonderful to have you on.

Speaker 2:

I'm glad to join you, Taylor.

Speaker 1:

So you're publishing, in the processes of releasing a book called the Road to Wisdom, on Truth, science, faith and Trust, and to kind of set the stage for our audience, I want to highlight what are these, this actually combined road of wisdom, and why are they not contradicting each other or in paradox? So could you explain, expound on that before we dive into the rest of the book?

Speaker 2:

I will do my best. As a scientist, a physician, a Christian, I'm really troubled by the way in which our society seems to have lost its anchors to things that have helped us a lot over the many centuries, and that includes truth and the fact there really is such a thing as objective truth and it's not just somebody's opinion. Sometimes truth doesn't care how we feel and you need to accept a fact as a fact. It's not always happening. Now, science, another anchor that has helped us a lot over many centuries to discover truth about nature, now seems to be a topic of considerable distrust amongst many people, as if maybe a scientific conclusion, even though well-established and replicated, can't really be trusted if it doesn't sort of fit with your gut feeling about what the facts should be.

Speaker 2:

And as a person of faith, faith is another anchor that has helped us a lot.

Speaker 2:

Faith is all about truth as well different kinds of truth, more transcendental truth, and yet faith in our current climate seems to have gotten very tangled up with other kinds of messages like politics. And then you put it all together and it all points to one really fundamental issue that is causing us, I think, a great deal of suffering, and that is the inability to decide who to trust and how to anchor your trust appropriately in things like competence and integrity and humility, as opposed to I'm just going to trust somebody who thinks like I do, even if it was just a post on Facebook. So put those together, okay. Truth, science, faith and trust all ought to be foundational principles for a flourishing society, but all of them are really now brought into question, perhaps feeling a little frayed, and I can't look at that and just walk away. It feels like I have to try to say what maybe are some of the flaws in the current circumstance and how could we get ourselves back on a better path.

Speaker 1:

There seems to be this reductionism almost across American culture and Western culture, especially where we're saying that wisdom or living well, I guess, would be another definition of wisdom is only defined by one of these four. So you can only do it by faith, you can only do it by science, and we emphasize one of these when really it doesn't feel like you can reduce living well to just one of these. So could you talk about that a bit? Is that a real thing that we're doing?

Speaker 2:

I really like the way you phrased that, taylor. Yeah, I think that is the point that the book is trying to make. What is wisdom anyway? Wisdom is all about knowledge, but it's more than that. But if you don't have the knowledge, your chance of getting to wisdom is pretty limited. So you do have to have this fundamental agreement about established facts that society has basically come to the conclusion these things are true, and your wisdom has to build on that and you can't just decide to reject the established facts that you don't like. But then, on top of that wisdom has to include judgment, understanding what does that fact actually mean for me and for people I care about and even a moral compass about what's right and what's wrong. And part of what's right and what's wrong also sort of reflects how we deal with each other, and I think a moral compass for the present time would argue that we should be loving to each other, we should be listening to each other and not railing at each other, and we've lost our way, at least in many settings, about that as well. So yeah, we need to be on that road to wisdom. I'm on it too.

Speaker 2:

By the way, I hope nobody looking at this book thinks oh, Collins has it all figured out. He's going to tell us how to get to the end of the road. No, I'm very much on the road and I occasionally slip off and fall in the ditch like everybody else, but I do think there's some longstanding principles that have been around ever since people started thinking about these things, and many of which are foundational to the Christian faith, that have gotten frayed or set off to the side and have been overtaken by other kinds of angry, fearful, vitriolic environments that are just. That's not who we are, and I guess this book aims to try to convince people. It's not enough to say it shouldn't be like this. We could also say I shouldn't be like this. What can I do to try to turn this around?

Speaker 1:

A big topic I've been thinking about along the same lane is we almost I feel this nihilism and cynicism from culture, and even sometimes myself, where it feels like we've well, we've tried to love our neighbor, we've tried to do, we've tried to be nice, but now, you know, everyone, no one cares anymore. So let's just, let's go for the throat, let's go all in. And you feel this very intense vehemence as you discussed that. Well, I mean, we tried that already and that didn't work out for us. So now we're on the attack. How do we turn back that culture? And, yeah, what do you think about that culture?

Speaker 2:

I think we are infected by sort of a catastrophism mindset that, like you know, our entire way of life is under threat of immediate destruction by evil forces that are coming at us from all directions. That is way, way beyond the current circumstance. But we're making it worse by taking that view and along the way we may even say to ourselves as people of faith well, you know, those words of Jesus were fine about loving your neighbor and loving your enemies, but we're at war now. That won't work anymore. Wake up, get real. That is so far beyond what we should be depending upon in terms of the foundation of things that really matter. But we've kind of gotten that place and we could argue and discuss about what are the sources of that are.

Speaker 2:

I think there's a group called More in Common. That's kind of surveyed society in both the UK and the US, and they would argue that what we hear primarily are coming from the fringes, both on the left and the right, and they are angry and they're ready to demonize anybody who doesn't agree with them and they imagine that people on the other side of the political spectrum are really much more radical than they are. But most of us aren't in that space. Most of us are probably in what's called the exhausted middle. We're just tired of all the nastiness, all the accusations, all the vitriol, but we're not quite sure what to do about it.

Speaker 2:

Some of us are a little more on the blue side or a little bit more on the red side of the political spectrum, but we're not in those fringes where politics is everything that matters. But if you look at social media or if you look at cable news, it looks as if that's all that matters, because that's all. You see, messages that make people angry get quickly spread fearful, quickly spread. Messages about truth and harmony well, they land flat, and that's part of our issue. We're absolutely surrounded by negativity, and yet most of us don't like it that way. But we can't figure out what to do about it.

Speaker 1:

This has been a topic of conversation on the podcast before Dr Chris Bale of the Polarization Lab at Duke, which was fascinating because it was that same idea of the loudest voices are the most vicious and they get the most shares. And even the people who are liking and reposting those posts. They're also the most extreme and the most loud because everyone else is reading the post and being like I'm not sure that's a good idea, that doesn't feel like a great thing to do. But they don't want to insert themselves into this ring because I mean, for most people living their lives it doesn't seem it doesn't really gain anything for them. Like why would I want to like a repost or even comment? It's just I'll back away and kind of live my own life.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, although there are also people like well, I don't know if it's true or not, but I'm going to send it out to a lot of people and see what they say, and that's how things go viral. One of the things I would really advocate is anybody who's listening to this. If you're on social media and a message comes through to you that makes you upset, but you're not really quite sure if it's true or not, then don't be part of the distribution of something that will get a lot of other people upset and which ultimately, in the long run, turns out to be fabricated, because that happens all the time. The lies spread like a wildfire. The truth just sits at home.

Speaker 1:

That's what a great metaphor them to say like have that opinion or something, not in this demeaning kind of analyzing way, but like genuinely caring about that person and having humility. I love that theme. Could you talk more about that?

Speaker 2:

I've learned a lot about that from a group called Braver Angels, and people listening to this who don't know about Braver Angels look up braverangelsorg, because you might actually want to get engaged as well. They have 100 chapters around the country trying to bring together people who have very different views about a particular topic, but teaching us not just to shout at each other, but to listen. I mean really listen. Listen for understanding, not listening to plan your snappy response.

Speaker 2:

By spending a lot of time in those settings, I have come to realize that some of my own positions on particular issues were not as carefully thought through as I would have tried to claim they were, and I've really been able to see why people who have very different views about things like public health have arrived at those decisions. And I'm better able to understand that, even though in many instances I still don't think it's quite correct. But I can see where it's coming from. We need to do a lot more of that and we at the present time are really poor at it. We go into a discussion with somebody we know we don't agree with and we have our plan about.

Speaker 2:

I'm going to prove you wrong and you're going to come at them with your facts, and of course they have their version of the facts and you're going to come at them with your facts and of course, they have their version of the facts and they demonize you and you demonize them and pretty soon there's only demons in the discussion. That doesn't turn out well, so that's the wrong way. In fact, you can even cause people to double down on misinformation if you attack them and put them into a corner. That's the wrong thing to do. Got to take the time. Recognize this is a real person with real values, many of them the same as yours. They care also about love and truth and beauty and goodness, just like you do, but they have these other layers on top of that. Help understand the layers and then you might make a friend, even though you hadn't expected to.

Speaker 1:

I'm curious how you yourself mentioned that you're a Christian earlier in this episode and throughout it. How has your perception of the world and how to communicate and engage with people changed, as you've been attacked by people I guess, quote unquote on your own side by Christian evangelicals? How has that changed the way you live your life and perceive the world and communicate ideas as well as carry yourself?

Speaker 2:

Yeah yeah, the harshest, most personal attacks I've received as NIH director during COVID were from Christians, and that was pretty hard to see. I got plenty of attacks from people who were not people of faith, but the ones that really went straight with the sharp implements to your heart tend to be Christians, questioning whether you could possibly be a believer if you stood up for the importance of getting vaccinated, for instance, and to see that politicized the way that it was. Why should vaccines, a purely scientific public health issue, have gotten so completely tangled up with faith perspectives and with politics? They just didn't belong in the same conversation. But boy were they ever in that space. It did not cause me to question my faith, because that doesn't come from people. That comes from Jesus and from the Bible. And when I look at the words of Jesus in this situation, they're incredibly reassuring. Psalm 46, God is our refuge and strength of ever-present help in trouble.

Speaker 1:

Okay, we got trouble but God is right there and I claim that and, gosh, just go back.

Speaker 2:

If you're having a bad day, go back and read the Sermon on the Mount Matthew 5, 6, and 7. The clearest explanation from Jesus about what we're all about. Why are we here? What is our goal? How are we supposed to treat each other? And then re-anchor yourself and feel like, okay, there's going to be a lot of people who don't agree with this, but this is going to be my stance. I'm going to try not to get knocked off my position by incoming missiles that are pretty nasty but are really way out of the context of what I think I'm here for.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you mentioned, as you've been famously a proponent of science and faith not being paradoxical at all, in fact, oftentimes intertwining together and helping each other, understanding parts of faith through science and understanding parts of science through faith as well and it seems that same idea is now not just an intellectual idea like oh, that's kind of cool, that's a cool spiritual thing and intellectual thing, but now it's the forefront of our society with the pandemic and a lot of new regulation, with artificial intelligence and new technologies and, yeah, that was a big theme of the book that I just found absolutely fascinating.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, people of faith I think need to be in these conversations and not stepping away like, oh, I don't really know if I trust science and I'm not sure those scientists are not just trying to undercut faith. We're not. 40% of scientists are believers and they don't always talk about it as publicly as I have. So if you really want to have the best hopes for our future, you can't have science win and faith lose. Either one of those is like a terrible outcome, but together the harmony. You can find there faith bringing insight, bringing a moral compass. You can find there Faith bringing insight, bringing a moral compass, bringing a sense of purpose and why we're all here and what really matters and what's the basis of morality. That adds a lot to what science can teach us about the basic facts, about how nature works and how we can discover things about nature that can help us with flourishing. Although science can make mistakes, they are self-correcting over time because people tend to go back and try to replicate that. So you put the two together and you've got a wonderful foundation for advancing the cause of a loving kind of human society. But unfortunately, all too often, and especially right now, there seems to be this sense. Well, you've got to go with one or the other. The left has become the party of science and the right has become the party of faith, and I don't want to be in those exclusive clubs Back to the exhausted middle. I think they probably see the value of both, but they aren't quite sure how to sustain that with all the messages that are coming about, the incongruity or even the conflict between science and faith.

Speaker 2:

I became a Christian at age 27. I was not raised as a Christian. Part of what convinced me was that faith and science were so beautifully rationally connected. There's so many bits of evidence for God that science discovers, like the Big Bang and the fine-tuning of the universe and the moral law. How could we possibly take a position that one of those has to survive and the other has to be pushed aside? It's irrational, it's unloving, it's destructive, and we have a chance, when we put those things together in the current climate, to try to see if we can bring our society back to a better place.

Speaker 1:

And kind of to highlight this idea of faith and reason and science not being paradoxical to each other, but also this idea of well, I believe that all of those are connected. Therefore, I shouldn't go out and kind of hear pushback to these ideas. You are famously friends with many well-known atheists and that hasn't had you lose your faith or your scientific credibility at all.

Speaker 2:

No, it's the opposite. You know the biblical verse about iron sharpens iron. If you really want to discover how strong is your faith, are there some weak places you need to work on? Have a really vigorous discussion with an atheist and see how that suits you. I became quite a close friend with Christopher Hitchens, one of the most famous atheists, who was outspoken until the very end that faith had no use for him. In fact it was evil and dangerous.

Speaker 2:

But we became very good friends and he didn't mind my praying for him, even though he thought nobody was listening, and I learned so much from his perspective about how better to understand and defend my faith in a circumstance where somebody didn't accept it. We're too often, I think, reluctant to do that and we want to hang out in our own crowd of people who share our views, in these so-called bubbles, and that's about faith issues and that's about politics, and it's not the way in which we can expand our own intellectual and emotional and religious perspectives that we're missing out on the chance to really enliven and enrich ourselves by just having the same conversations with people who all agree with us no-transcript aren't just matters of opinion that we're disagreeing about, but these are morally.

Speaker 1:

these are moral questions that we're disagreeing with about, and if you frame a debate in terms of moral questions, then not that there are things that are wrong and not good, but it makes it really easy to then say, well, now I'm going to war. And especially in a multicultural society like America, you have different religions, different worldviews and people sometimes disagree about what's morally correct and what's not. So how do we go about having a good conversation and still figuring out issues with people who might disagree morally about some of the things that we say? How do you have that multicultural conversation?

Speaker 2:

I'm doing a lot of listening and not coming into it with your own agenda about how you're going to correct the errors of the other person. Remember, each one of us is in the image of God. Even if you're meeting with somebody who you have heard has a very different view about something that you consider absolutely wrong and dangerous, that person is in the image of God. That person has a history, a circumstance, a family, social circumstances that you need to understand a little bit and see. Okay, how did this happen? The first question I try to ask when I have a conversation like that is how did you come to believe in this particular perspective? Walk me through that, help me understand where your views come from, and then somebody will start to tell you a bit about their life story and suddenly this is no longer a cartoon figure. This is a person with all kinds of experiences, some of them deeply painful, some of them triumphant, and you can start to see something taking shape and immediately your opportunity for empathy starts to go up.

Speaker 2:

We have way too low empathy most of the time in these conversations and then as it goes along you may even get to the point and this is a real game changer where, after you've expressed your views gently and not like you, have to believe what I do.

Speaker 2:

but let me tell you about why I believe One of you maybe you, if you're starting the conversation can also say but you know, I'm not entirely sure about every part of the argument I just gave you. There might be some places where I still need to work on this. If you can get the other person then to engage with you that way and both can start to admit the shakiness of what seems to be very dug-in positions, then you've really got a chance to make a friend and move each of you in a direction that's going to be closer to what I think God calls us to. Not that we agree on everything, but you're not going to be disagreeable of it.

Speaker 1:

I wrote a piece recently for my Substack listeners it's linked below Abstracting the dangers of abstracting individuals in a divided society, and it's based around Russian author Dostoevsky His idea of when we he has a quote actually in Crime and Punishment, he was abstract and therefore cruel. You deal in ideas of people, not with the individuals themselves. You can justify a lot of terrible things because you're not, you don't love that person, you just see them as kind of an object out there. And he provides the solution then to that, which is this idea of of active love, like sacrificial and and humble actions of conversation and and doing things for people, so kind of going down that route. How should we then live? Like? What do we do about this?

Speaker 2:

Well, I think we should start by stepping back from all of the attitudes that we may have been infected by in the current animosity-laden society that we live in and say okay, wait a minute. What are my foundational worldviews? What do I really consider to be virtues that I want to represent? Love, beauty, truth, goodness, family freedom all of those things that I think most everybody agrees to, but maybe they haven't been as prominent in our attitudes and our behaviors because we've got all these other layers on top of it. Step back and try to re-anchor yourself to that worldview. What is it that you want to be as a person? And, if you're a believer, as a child of God? And maybe go back and do read that Sermon on the Mount again and ask yourself am I actually living this the way that Christ called me to? And then examine your own time and how you're spending it. If you're on social media for hours and hours every day, is that actually a source of information that is elevating you, that's inspiring you to be a better person, or is it just making you mad and fearful? And maybe think about whether your time could be better spent in some other activity than looking at the screen and getting upset about it and then really make a resolution If we're going to try to change something a resolution to try to be part of the solution and try identify a few people who you really disagree with about something but you kind of think they might be reasonable people anyway and reach out and practice this idea of having a conversation where the opportunity to really listen and even to the point of being able to say back to that person well, what I heard you say was and articulating it and explaining why you think that person feels that that's the only way people really know they've been hurt. Get into that attitude and then spread that around a little bit, maybe not just one-on-one, find other like-minded people, start to build a grassroots effort here. That is the antidote to all the animosity. That's the best hope.

Speaker 2:

I don't think the solutions are coming from politicians. They seem more polarized than the country. I don't see the media solving this, because they basically seem to be most successful when they make people angry and they're really good at that. It's got to come from us and our communities and our churches. Unfortunately, a lot of churches have been more the site of animosity than they have of love and good listening, but that ought to be changeable too. I know I sound like an optimist, but I do think there's enough motivation in this exhausted middle, which is two thirds of the country, that we ought to be able to turn this around. If we all decide to take some responsibility to do so, that we ought to be able to turn this around.

Speaker 1:

If we all decide to take some responsibility, to do so. Wrapping up with the last two questions, we ask all of our guests what books have had an impact on you?

Speaker 2:

Well, I would have to start with the Bible, and yes, I know some people say that and they've never read it. I have read it all the way through and I read it most days first thing in the morning when I get up at 5 am to try to get myself in a good space here for facing whatever the day has to bring to me, In the same reaction when I was an atheist and I was trying to figure out how people could actually believe this stuff.

Speaker 2:

somebody gave me CS Lewis's book called Mere Christianity, and that timeless explanation of the rationality of faith and the irrationality of atheism just totally blew me away, destroyed my worldview of atheism in the space of a few chapters.

Speaker 2:

So I still think of that as just an incredible gift from an Oxford scholar who himself had been an atheist and came to faith, and so he knew what my counter arguments were going to be, and he demolished those too. So in terms of current ones, I would say Jonathan Rauch's book called the Constitution of Knowledge is a really well argued explanation of the dangers of giving up our anchor to truth and the fact that there are facts that we all have to accept because they've been well established. It criticizes both the right and the left inappropriately, but it really nails the argument about what we are missing if we're starting to give up on that particular constitution.

Speaker 1:

We have a constitution of laws.

Speaker 2:

We all know about that, he argues. It's a constitution of knowledge, which is our shared sense of things. That are true, but it's getting a little bit more likely to be questioned and that's dangerous. Yeah, that would be three. I could go on. I read a lot of books.

Speaker 1:

And then our last question is what advice do you have to teenagers?

Speaker 2:

Well, in that case, I am deeply troubled about the harms that are being done to teenagers on social media.

Speaker 2:

the connection between the rapid increase in mental health problems in adolescents and college students. And social media, and particularly for women, where they coming online of Instagram, with all that that carried in terms of selfies and the opportunity to look down on oneself because you're not as perfect as the other people you see, posting has done enormous harm. With boys, it's more like video games and countless hours that get wasted and pornography. You know, these influences, which were supposed to bring us together, have been driving us apart and making us sick, and I'm totally in agreement with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy saying there ought to be a warning label on social media. This could be harmful in a major way to your health, particularly for adolescents, but also for adults too. We are all addicted to something that is generally bad for us, and if there's some effort underway, like keeping cell phones out of schools, for instance, I'm 100% in favor.

Speaker 1:

Well, thank you so much, Dr Collins, for coming on the show. I've really enjoyed our conversation. It's a big part of building a culture of conversation going forward and it was really inspiring. So I'll link the book below and, of course, this will be released with the book cover as well. So guys get the book. And again, thank you, Dr Collins.

Speaker 2:

Well, thank you, Taylor, for doing this podcast. I enjoyed being your guest. You asked great questions. Keep it up.

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