Religion: A Bad Prescription for America
Though faith may provide comfort to some, it cannot produce reliable facts about nature that can be used to repair a divided populace.
A review of The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust by Francis Collins; 288 pages; Little, Brown, and Co. (September 2024).
Francis Collins is one of the most prominent and influential scientists of our era. He has done pioneering research in medical genetics and led both the Human Genome Project and, for twelve years, the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Collins also played an important but controversial role in dealing with the COVID pandemic, in which his substantial achievements in promoting new vaccines were somewhat overshadowed by his attempts to discredit critics who suggested that the coronavirus escaped from a lab in Wuhan.
Still, Collins’s scientific credentials are impeccable. What sets him apart from many of his scientific peers, however, is his fervent embrace of religion. A committed evangelical Christian, Collins embodies the claim—one I’ve disputed elsewhere—that science and religion are perfectly compatible and even represent complementary ways to discover truths about the universe. This is his second book on the subject. The first, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, describes how he came to Christianity and gives the evidence that, he says, convinced him that his faith is true.
While much of the Road to Wisdom reprises the arguments of the earlier book, this new one takes things a bit further. Collins is deeply concerned about the divisions in American society highlighted by the last presidential election, by people’s inability to have constructive discussions with their opponents, and by our pervasive addiction to social media and its “fake news”; and he believes that accepting a harmony between religion and science will yield the wisdom that can mend America.
Collins offers four “sources of wisdom,” defining “wisdom” as not only “an understanding and incorporation of a moral framework,” but a way to discern truth and make good decisions in difficult situations. Each of the sources occupies one section of the book, and together they are prescribed as a form of social superglue: “The goal of this book is to turn the focus away from hyper-partisan politics and bring it back to the most important sources of wisdom: truth, science, faith, and trust, resting upon a foundation of humility, knowledge, morality and good judgment.” These soothing words are well meant, but in the end Collins’s thesis amounts to a jumble of bromides whose value is diminished by his insistence that “faith” is compatible with both “truth” and “science.” Immersed in his Christianity, Collins seems unaware of the divisiveness that religion has brought to the world, and especially of the fact that religion is totally incapable of finding the wisdom-promoting “truth claims that are universal and inescapable.”
By “truths,” Collins means “objective truths,” which correspond to what scientists consider “truth”: the acceptance of strongly supported—but always tentative—facts about the universe and any theoretical frameworks that underlie them. Such truths would include evolution, particle and quantum physics, and virology (including the fact that COVID is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus). As Collins says, “If something in this zone is true for you, then it has to be true for me and everyone else.” Truth, then, requires a strict consensus among observers.
It is in the discussion of his search for genuine truth—the story of his scientific work—that Collins really shines. His accounts of the heady days of sequencing the human genome, of finding a drug that can almost cure some people with cystic fibrosis, a once-fatal disease, and of his collaboration with Anthony Fauci in developing vaccines and a public-health strategy for COVID—all this makes for fascinating reading. The only problem—and one Collins doesn’t mention—is the whitewashing that he and Anthony Fauci engaged in about the origins of the COVID-19 virus. There were and are conflicting scientific views about where it came from: whether from an animal sold in a Chinese “wet market” or a release from a nearby virology lab. But instead of engaging in the civil and friendly debate that Collins applauds in this book, he and Fauci apparently tried to quash the lab-leak theory by using their positions of power to discredit their opponents’ credentials. This may be because the Wuhan virology lab was doing NIH-funded research on SARS viruses. Regardless, though, the disparity between Collins’s promotion of civil discourse and how he behaved during this controversy is not only disturbing but impeded the search for truth.
Jamie Palmer
And when Collins moves from science to religion, which he considers an equally important tool for curing America, his book goes steeply downhill. For when describing the advantages of evangelical Christianity, which Collins apparently considers the truest of all faiths, he abandons the search for objective truth and buys into one of the several forms of “untruth” he lists: delusion. (The others he names are “ignorance,” “falsehoods,” “lies,” “bullshit,” and “propaganda.”)
It’s clear that Collins sees Christianity, and faith in general, as not only the focus of his being—“My faith is core to who I am”—but also as a source of truth just as valid as science itself: “Faith has no meaning, has no effect on character, and provides no window to wisdom, unless it’s based on truth.” And here is where the fundamental incompatibility of faith with truth and science becomes blindingly obvious.
What are the truths that religion can produce but science can’t? Collins’s list is unconvincing. It includes the “fact” of Jesus’s resurrection and the author’s unshakable belief that “Jesus died for me and was then literally raised from the dead.” In support of this claim, Collins cites N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God as compelling evidence for the Resurrection, which Collins claims is “historically well documented.” But when I worked my way through the entirety of Wright’s 817-page behemoth, I found that the “historical documentation” consists solely of what’s in the New Testament, tricked out with some rationalisation and exegesis. Neither Collins nor Wright provide independent, extra-Biblical evidence for the crucifixion and resurrection, much less for the Biblical assertion that upon Jesus’s death the Temple split in twain and many dead saints left their tombs and walked about Jerusalem like zombies. Absent solid evidence for these claims, they are little more than wishful thinking.
Other “truths” that one finds in religion are “moral truths”: the confusing set of rules that Collins labels the “Moral Law.” To him, the fact that our species even has morality constitutes further evidence for God, for Collins sees no way that either evolution or secular rationality could yield a codified ethics. That claim is belied by the long tradition of secular ethics developed by people like Baruch Spinoza, Peter Singer, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls. While many faiths and societies aspire to common goals like “love, beauty, goodness, freedom, faith, and family,” this does not suggest the existence of a supernatural being.
Brandon Bretl
And of course morality is not a “law,” for it differs from place to place and is violated with distressing regularity. As for its supernatural origin, there is no reason to reject the more reasonable idea that morality derives from beliefs and behaviours that evolved in humans over the six million years during which our ancestors lived in small, cohesive groups—beliefs overlaid with a veneer of morality that arose from our now-larger society.
The “questions” that Collins claims can be answered by religion but not science deal almost entirely with personal dilemmas rather than investigations of the universe. They are queries lacking universal answers: things like “What is the meaning of life?”; “How should I live my own life?”; “Where do I turn when everything seems to be coming apart around me?”; and the old chestnut, “Why is there something instead of nothing?” While physicists are working on the last question, answers to the others naturally vary from person to person. All that can emerge from these faith-based queries are personal preferences, not empirical truths backed by a widespread consensus. And the answers differ not only among people, but among religions as well. If faith is a spiritual glue that bonds people, it hasn’t worked very well in India, China, the Middle East, and, indeed, in America itself.
Collins spends much of the book recounting, as he did in The Language of God, what he considers “evidence” for the truth of Christianity, much of it drawn from theology written by people like C.S. Lewis. Besides the undefined “Moral Law,” this evidence includes the fact that we experience moments of profound joy—I’ve had these, but never considered them evidence for God—and that we supposedly harbour a “God-shaped hole in the heart”: a longing for meaning that only religion can supply. Unfortunately, this hole seems to be absent in nonbelievers and most of northern Europe.
He also floats science-based arguments like the existence of physical laws as well as the “fine tuning” argument, which claims that only God could have produced the concatenation of physical constants that allow life to exist in rare places like Earth. But nearly all physicists reject the god conclusion in favour of other possibilities: for example, there may be a yet-undiscovered law that connects these constants; or there may be multiple universes with we humans living in one of the rare ones that has the right physical constants for us. Most of these “god-of-the-gaps” arguments are not new and have been answered by scientists for years. Yet they keep resurfacing. Sadly, most laypeople who haven’t encountered these arguments are unequipped to judge them.
But what about the majority of the world’s faiths, whose “truths” differ from those of Christianity? Is there one god or many? Was Jesus a messiah or just a prophet—or did he exist at all? If so, was he crucified and resurrected? (Muslims deny this claim.) Over and over, I wanted to ask Collins, “How can you be so sure that Christianity is the correct religion?”
He finally provides an answer. After exploring the world’s religions, Collins says, “I was struck by how one figure, Jesus Christ, stood out from all the rest—one who not only claimed to know God, but to be God, and even to be able to forgive sins.” In other words, for Collins, Christianity is true because to him it tells a more appealing story than that proffered by other faiths.
In the end, Collins’s insistence on the value of science and truth breaks up on the rocks of his third tenet of social salvation: religion. For religion is not a source of truth—even as Collins defines “truth”—and, though faith may provide comfort to some, it cannot produce reliable facts about nature that can be used to repair a divided populace.
As an evolutionary biologist, I can envision observations that would prove evolution wrong—for example, as geneticist J.B.S. Haldane suggests, the discovery of a fossil Precambrian rabbit—though no such observations have been made. I longed to ask Collins a related question: “What could change your mind about the truth of Christianity?” Given his ability to rationalise away facts about nature that seem inconsistent with a loving and omnipotent God—such as the death of innocent children from cancer or the “physical evils” of tsunamis and earthquakes—I suspect that Collins’s answer would be “nothing.” After all, he claims that “I have never encountered a situation where I found my scientific and spiritual views in serious conflict.”
At the end of the book, Collins proposes a five-part, public “Road to Wisdom pledge” that, he avers, will commit its signers to adopt behaviours that will heal the rifts between people. But it’s an anodyne commitment in which signers merely promise to engage in respectful dialogue with opponents, to seek to be “wise consumers” of news, and to bring “a generous spirit to interpersonal interactions.” This is virtue signalling pure and simple, and offers nothing new save the idea that by signing the pledge publicly, you’ll become part of the solution. But signing your name is far easier than changing your behaviour.
There’s one last part to the pledge: “I will resist the temptation to speak about, write about, or share on social media information that claims to be true but is of uncertain validity.” Unfortunately, over the preceding 238 pages of his book Collins has yielded to that temptation, proselytising that Christianity can unite a divided America.
