By Steven Willing, Public Discourse.
Genuine humility is the road to wisdom.
Francis Collins led the Human Genome Project, headed the National Institutes of Health for twelve years, founded BioLogos, and is a devout, practicing evangelical Christian. Few figures in American public life combine scientific accomplishment and sincere Christian faith at that level. In The Road to Wisdom, Collins argues that our cultural crisis is fundamentally an epistemological one, a collapse of trust in mainstream media and institutions. We lack wisdom, he declares—and who could disagree?
Collins claims that wisdom contains four essential ingredients: truth, science, faith, and trust. There is a certain paradox here. Collins’s fourfold prescription is considerably more problematic than he suggests. But the path to wisdom is much simpler than he proposes: not a better method for vetting experts, but the cultivation of humility in the seeker.
What follows is not an indictment of Dr. Collins, whose leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic saved countless lives. His treatise serves as a helpful springboard for a continuing conversation about what truly is “the road to wisdom.” What are perhaps lacking in his analysis are two major issues: first, that the case for science skepticism is much stronger than he allows; second, that humility on the part of the observer is fundamental to all other elements.
Science: A Source of Wisdom (Except When It Isn’t)
Much of Collins’s treatise is a defense of science as a source of wisdom. He decries a common (though not pervasive) skepticism of science among religious conservatives. But he overlooks the many reasons skepticism may be warranted, regardless of one’s political orientation.
Collins poses the question, “Do scientists always deserve our trust?” and, in a rather paltry three pages, concedes rare instances of scientific misconduct. But the grounds for skepticism extend much further. Only by admitting and understanding tremendous failures of the last hundred or more years can we wisely navigate between the Scylla of blind trust and the Charybdis of reflexive mistrust.