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The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust | Francis S. Collins | January 2026
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This forum address, entitled the Road to Wisdom on Truth, Science, Faith and Trust, was given on January 27th of 2026 by Francis S. Collins, a renowned physician scientist. Well, thank you and good morning byu. It's a real privilege and an honor to be here to be your speaker this morning, and thank you for that kind introduction. Dr. Collings. I've been hearing about some of the things going on here which are really exciting in terms of what this university stands up for, and they were nicely represented in that introduction. Also hearing about the effort to start a medical school which will bring together medicine and faith in ways that we need more than ever. So exciting to see how that shapes up in the course of the coming years. Yeah, I thought I would talk to you today about this issue of Wisdom and about the pieces that seem to need to play into it for us to really be traveling on a road that takes us where God wants us to be, to really have not just knowledge because knowledge is not sufficient, but also to have understanding, to have a moral compass, to have common sense and experience. That really is what wisdom calls us to. And I'll walk through some of the ideas I have about this, but I'll particularly at the end point out that God has some really good ideas we can learn from the book of Proverbs and especially from the Book of James, in a scripture that I understand is familiar to probably everybody in this gathering. So I will give you, in the time allotted, which is going to go really fast, my own journey in science, how I came to be a Christian, which surprises some of my colleagues, the current state of our nation and the world, and it's not all good. Some reflections on how we got here in our current state of divisiveness and polarization, and some exhortations about how to find our way back. And I'm going to call on you individually to be part of that solution, because I don't see it happening without this kind of we the people response. And then there'll be a little surprise at the end that you will also be part of so my own journey in science began in this farm that you see a picture of in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. I didn't really go to school till the sixth grade because my parents thought they were better teachers than the county schools. And they were probably right. I learned to play guitar because in my family if you didn't play an instrument, there was nothing to do after dinner because we didn't have a television. And I went on to study chemistry in graduate school, getting a PhD in physical chemistry before I kind of realized that the most important scientific example of a chemical that I kind of ignored in my focus on chemistry was this one. And this, of course, is DNA, the amazing information molecule of all living things, which for each of the organisms that we study, has the instructions written into it that make it possible for that organism to do all the biological things it can do. Your genome, which is all of your DNA, is about 3 billion of these letters, A, C, G and T. And that apparently is sufficient to carry you from being a single cell to what you now are, which is an astounding thing to be able to say. I got trained then as a physician because I wanted to be able to apply this kind of life science to human medicine, and went on as a faculty member at the University of Michigan to try to uncover causes of genetic diseases that in the 1980s were really hard to understand. So hard, in fact, that I had to put myself in a haystack holding up a needle to tell people how hard it was to find the causes of diseases like cystic fibrosis, because they kept asking, well, haven't you found it yet? Ultimately, some of those did start to succeed. 1989, my lab, along with a group in Toronto, discovered the cause of cystic fibrosis. A discovery which I am overjoyed to tell you today, means that 90% of people with cystic fibrosis have the opportunity to live almost a normal lifespan, which was never the case when I was initially trying to study this disease. We studied a disease called Huntington's disease and found the cause of that. Still not yet with the kind of medical advance we hope for, but we'll get there. A disease called neurofibromatosis, a very common one, but rather disfiguring. And so it doesn't get as much attention. And more recently, my lab has been studying the most dramatic form of premature aging, a disease called progeria, which you see affecting this 15 year old standing between me and Cookie Monster. That's Sam Burns, who sadly, we lost a couple of years after this to a premature aging condition that causes you to. To age about seven times the normal rate and to die of heart attacks or strokes by about your mid teens. And we now understand the cause of that. And within a year we will have the first trial of in vivo gene editing to try to fix the one letter that's misspelled in the entire genome that causes this disorder. All very exciting. But I got asked then to give up my Michigan position and come to nih, the National Institutes of Health, to lead a truly bold, big science effort, which is the Human Genome Project, to read out all of the letters, all of those 3 billion letters, so that we'd have a reference copy of that to be able to understand better how it works. And it was pretty scary at first because the scientific community was not that excited about this and the technology hadn't been invented and I was afraid I was going to have to be the guy giving this speech about why the whole thing fell apart. But happily that didn't happen. And over the course of some 13 years, we did succe in inventing what needed to be done and reading out that first copy of the human genome, which meant you get to go to the White House and make announcements, but particularly you get to celebrate the accomplishments of the 2,500 scientists in six countries and 20 research institutes that it was my job to oversee and manage and try to set the goals and make sure they were achieved. And I think history will look back on the accomplishment of sequencing our own genome right up there in the same place as going to the moon as a big deal. And of course, we're trying to use that now to understand things about medicine. And that is moving at a prodigious rate, but much more yet to come because there's a lot of information here we have to sift through. I, after that, decided maybe I would do something else. But I got called back by the president, in this case Obama, to come back and be the lead of the entire nih, which meant I had to learn about things that I didn't know a whole lot about, like neuroscience and immunology. But that was fun too. And serving surprising to me, three different presidents, because usually that has not been the case. So I'm the longest serving NIH director, but having a wonderful time there, being able to identify areas of opportunity that we were not investing in as much as we might, and pulling together the leaders and the resources to make that happen, starting a new center to make sure that basic science discoveries get turned into clinical advances. That's what NCATS is starting a whole initiative on the human brain, which is now 11 years along and is making remarkable insights into how Those circuits, those 86 billion neurons between your ears do what they do. And that's going to have profound implications for diseases like schizophrenia and autism and Alzheimer's disease. And we started a bold program to try to figure out how genetics and environment and health behaviors actually interact in terms of whether people fall ill or not. And we've enrolled 880,000Americans in this program called all of us who are our partners in this. And they share their medical records and they get their genomes all sequenced. And the insights are coming now very quickly about things that we could really use to practice better prevention instead of waiting for people to get sick. And we've seen the advances in genetics go from diagnostics to therapeutics in remarkable ways. Sickle cell anemia, the first molecular disease, is now curable with gene therapy, which I did not know would happen in my lifetime. And there it is, and many more to come. Then I had an opportunity to spend a year in the White House starting a program to try to eliminate a disease that is killing 15,000Americans every year, hepatitis C. And we're on the path to a program to do just that. That's not just going to save all those lives, although that ought to be good enough. It's also going to save our country billions of dollars because we'll prevent all kinds of terrible consequences of hepatitis C, which is now a curable disease. So all of that was things that I was able to do in this course of time, but now, what about the history of my own faith journey? How did that all fit together? Let me quickly walk you through that. I was not a Christian. I was not a person of faith. I was an atheist when I was a graduate student studying physical chemistry. And then I went to medical school, and I maintained my atheism for the first year or two, avoiding those Christian medical students who wanted to have lunch because I knew they had some kind of program and I didn't want to be part of it. But then it was me sitting at the bedside of good, honorable North Carolina people who were facing the end of their lives. And I realized I wouldn't know how to handle that. And many of them seemed to have faith as their strongest anchor. Maybe not our medicine, but their faith. And I had to understand something more about that. And one day, sitting at the bedside of a patient of mine who I confess I'd gotten fairly attached to because she reminded me of my grandmother. She shared her faith with me in a very personal, compelling way. And I listened awkwardly. And then she turned to me and she asked me this question. What do you believe, doctor? Four words. What do you believe? I think Most of you in this room know the answer to that, but a lot of people don't. I didn't. And I realized I've just been asked the most important question that anybody ever has to consider. And I've spent almost no time trying to understand how people arrive at answers and what might be true here. I ran out of the room, I basically said, I don't know. And she gave me this funny look like, what you don't know, you haven't thought about this. And that started me on a journey which carried me through the next two years trying to understand how believers have come to that conclusion that traveled through the books of C.S. lewis, which was an enormous help to me as a fellow traveler who had gone through some of the same arguments and ultimately came around to being convinced that the rational choice is to believe in God. And eventually that also became my choice, but only after I realized that the only way I could really approach God, the Holy God of the universe, required some way that my sinfulness, my imperfections, could somehow be overlooked and the person of Jesus Christ emerged as a solution to my problem. I had always thought Christ was just a myth. I didn't realize the historical evidence for Christ was so compelling. And so, on a fall afternoon in the Cascade Mountains, on a beautiful hike, I could no longer resist the conclusion that it was time to give in to my resistance. And I fell on my knees and I gave my life to Jesus Christ, age 20, And to the skeptics who I was surrounded by, who then said, how could you possibly do this? I had by that time, also learned that there are pointers to God from science, from nature, that are pretty hard to ignore, that I had ignored until I started this journey. There's something instead of nothing. Science doesn't help you answer that question. The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. This is Wigner's term. Why is it that mathematics works to describe the behavior of matter and energy? There's no reason that should be. Why are Maxwell's equations so beautiful? And they are. What's that about? There's a mind behind this. And not only that, it had a beginning, the Big Bang. And we don't know how to explain how. Nature just came out of nowhere. Nature isn't supposed to know how to do that. That seems to require a supernatural influence. Oh, supernatural. That sounds like God. And then there's this whole business of the fine tuning. If there are people in this room who don't know this argument, this is worth looking into. Those constants that determine gravity and nuclear forces. You don't know from first principles what the value of those constants should be. You have to measure them. If they were off by just a tiny bit, none of this would work. We might have particles flying around, but there wouldn't ever be any coalescence into anything interesting. The fine tuning of the a way in which these have made it possible for us to be here is breathtaking as so many zeros in the probability statement. And yet how do you explain that? You either have to say there's multitude of other universes out there that have different values of this and we're just in the lucky one, or you got to say somebody's behind this, some person, some mind. And I think that's the more compelling of the options. So faith and reason in this case kind of coming together. And then there's the moral law. Why is it that all human populations have this sense that there's something good and there's something evil and we're called to be good, even sometimes when it asks us to sacrifice in ways that are a scandal to evolution? I can't explain that without seeing it as a signpost to something outside of what we can measure. Another signpost, which I'm particularly fond of and maybe more aware of as life goes on, is beauty. Why are we so attracted to the beautiful? Why does it lift us outside of our dailiness sometimes in ways that are achingly, poignantly sweet? Here's an example of the kind of beauty that I get to work with every day as a scientist, because scientists love the opportunity for beauty. That's DNA on the right, but not the way you usually look at it. It's looking down the long axis and my gosh, it sure looks like a rose window in some beautiful cathedral. And there are all those images that happen every day. God seems to care about beauty, and is maybe beauty a way of breaking through all of our resistance and all of our focus on things that don't really matter. I think maybe so. So I wrote about all this in terms of my own transformation from an atheist to a follower of Jesus in a book called the Language of God, which was nicely mentioned in the introduction, I'm happy to say. Earlier, a few months ago, had the experience of interacting with a class here at BYU organized by David Jarvis, who studies and teaches about genomics. And the class members apparently all read the Language of God, and to my pleasure, they apparently liked it and we had a nice interaction about that. So thank you, Professor Jarvis, for getting this started, and maybe I'll meet some of those students in the course of today? Well, those are some of my own background as a person of faith, a person of science. But now, what about now? What about the status of our world right now? How are we doing here? I'm afraid I am deeply troubled when I look at this current state of what is supposed to be the most technologically advanced, committed to progress, caring nation, and the world. How are we doing? Well, we have, over the course of not just a few years, but actually a few decades, gradually slipped more and more into a state where divisiveness seeps into almost every topic. And we're polarized and we're focused on grievances, and we're often looking for reasons to be fearful or angry. And it has created in our country, I think, a deeply unfortunate circumstance that is getting in the way of what all of us want to do, which is to flourish with all the blessings we have around us, which are phenomenal in this country, which has been the leader in the world in so many ways, but which is now seriously in a struggling circumstance that some of our international neighbors are really troubled by. And I'm troubled by, and I suspect you are, too. So what's happened to us as a society? There's a group called More in Common which studies this kind of question about societal structures, and they have done very careful surveys of Americans, and they conclude that actually there are the folks out there on what they call the wings on the right and the left, and they get a lot of the attention. But most Americans are not there. We're in the exhausted majority, and we are exhausted. All the animosity, all the vitriol, all the noise, all the things coming at you every minute, whether it's from social media or cable news or whatever, it's just hard not to feel embattled and feel like, okay, I'm just going to check out. We can't do that. We have to come back ourselves and figure out how to be part of the solution. Because part of our reaction here, if we are buying into the messages that we're hearing, is that you have to take sides and you have to assume that somebody on the other side is not just misguided, they're actually dangerous. They might even be evil. And for our issue to be resolved the way you want it, not only do you have to win, that other side has to lose. Kind of like these dogs in the bar saying, it's not enough that we succeed, cats must also fail. We can laugh about it, but you see that kind of consequence now, especially in our political Discussions taking much more traction than it should. And the consequences of this are not just unfortunate disagreements or fraying of relationships. It's life and death. And that was never more clear than with SARS. COV2 settled science about the vaccine developed for COVID19. More than 1 million Americans died from COVID19, most of them before the vaccine was available. Vaccines were developed, and I was in the middle of this for the year 2020, which was the year with no sleep, developing in 11 months a vaccine that was 95% effective against the original Wuhan virus, which is, I would think, will stand as one of science's greatest achievements of all time. The trials done on that vaccine involving 30,000 volunteers, God bless them for being willing to do so, not knowing if they were getting the vaccine or a dummy shot. And then we watched them for three or four months to see who got Covid and who didn't. Serious side effects, very rare and 92 to 95% effective in preventing serious disease. Now, side effects, to be clear, there is a side effect of this vaccine based on MRNA, which is about 1 in 10,000. Young males can develop this inflammation of the heart, which fortunately is virtually always reversible, but sounds scary, but it's a very rare event. 3.1 million lives were saved by the vaccines in the U.S. i'm sure some of you in this room might have been them. I might have been one too. It's hard to know who that person saved was, but that is the way in which you can do the math. And that's about the right answer. Internationally, somewhere between 14 and 20 million people are alive today because of those vaccines. That's the facts. That's without any political spin. But 50 million Americans said no thank you, and 230,000 of them died unnecessarily because the distrust, which was fueled by misinformation and disinformation, especially on social media and oftentimes by people who were making a buck by spreading information that was demonstrably false. And yet somehow we fell into it. And politics, I'm sorry to say, played into that in ways that made things worse. So our culture wars, in this case, killed a lot of people. Those gravestones, that is because somehow we lost our way in being able to tell the difference between an opinion and a fact and deciding who to trust. So that's part about why I wrote this book called the Road to Wisdom, which is also the topic of today's presentation. How do we get here? I would argue that they are traditional anchors to our society and they seem to have been lostmaybe not at byu, but they are in many other places. Let's consider four of truth. Do you believe in objective truth? I sure hope so. But there are 3,000 people who belong to the Flat Earth Society and apparently they are unswayed by objective truth. And that's just a silly example of what is an increasingly widespread ability for people to say, well that might be true for you, but it's not true for me. Well that's fine if you're talking about opinion about a movie, but if it's whether the earth goes around the sun or the other way around, sorry, your opinion doesn't matter. So think about truth in this regard. There are things that are objective, necessary truth. A lot of that's mathematics. And they're firmly established facts like this Earth going around the sun that we should not decide we don't like someday. They are basically placed upon a rigorous set of established information evidence. And if you going to encounter one of those and say I don't agree with it, you better have a really good reason. And then there's the zone of uncertainty, where is a great place for science to work and try to sort things out. And then there's opinion. All too often we get in one of these discussions and we forgot which circle we're in. And that's going to be really important if we're going to be able to bring ourselves back on track here to putting value on objective truth. One of the ways we get things into that zone of firmly established facts is science. That's what I've given much of my life to. That's a picture of the people in my former lab at NIH who spend every day trying to uncover things scientifically, basically glimpsing God's mind and getting a sense of how nature is put together. And science does these things by a rigorous set of approaches that I know are studied here at byu. And yeah, science makes mistakes, but very importantly it's ultimately self correcting because any conclusion that turns out not to be reliable, somebody's going to discover that. And the best way to make a splash as a scientist is to disprove something that everybody else is thought was already settled. But you better have your facts together to succeed at that. But science is falling into this same distrustful space as many other sources of information. And even for somebody say well the science says this, you'll get a lot of eyebrows raised in certain rooms at that point. So we have a problem with distrust in science. But what's another source here that we might have lost an anchor. Oh, sorry. Before I get to that, the distrust in science has also spilled out in ways that I'm really troubled about, which is resulting in undercutting the support of science, including of medical research. I'm glad BYU is going to start a medical school. I hope you have fantastic medical research capabilities. But if you look and see what's happening at medical research right now in many American universities, it's under siege because of serious cuts in staff and budgets and personnel that have happened in the course of the last year, despite the American success story for medical research, which has been the envy of the world for decades. But now there's real trouble. One thing I'm trying to do, and I hope it will have some impact, is to try to help everyday Americans who aren't working in medical research and don't live in a university town to understand why this is something they might want to care about. And this is an effort called We Are Living Proof. It's a story bank of hundreds of stories of patients whose lives have been saved or greatly benefited by medical research funded by the taxpayers. And we're willing to tell that story, encouraging people to believe this is a really good thing that America does and not something that you'd want to push off to the side at a time where everything seems to be suspicious in terms of trusting. But now, let me come to faith. I'm in a room where you are people of faith, as I am. Faith, as I mentioned, has a remarkable role to play here in terms of answering questions that science can't help with. Faith and reason are hand in hand ways that we find answers. And faith should also be an anchor in a storm like this one, because we have the guidance from the Bible, from the words of Jesus, from the Old and the New Testaments about how we are to handle things when they aren't going well. Psalm 46 sits on my wall. God is my refuge and strength, an ever present help in trouble. Okay, our country's in trouble. Faith should be helping us here. Christians should be in the best position to advocate against divisiveness, animosity, vitriol, grievances, and for love and grace and truth. That's not really what we're seeing in a lot of American Christianity right now. I'm an evangelical Christian, so sometimes my heart breaks to see the messages that are being attached to people that I share faith with. And the Christian calling doesn't say that. Christian calling says love your neighbor as yourself and love your enemies, which must have Been the most radical thing when Jesus spoke that in the Sermon on the Mount. Pray for those who persecute you and depend on truth. The truth will set you free. Those are all very clear callings, how we do it. And there's a warning too. Proverbs 6. There are six things the Lord hates. Seven that are detestable to haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies, and a person who stirs up conflict in the community. Sobering. And yet, I think it's not just the secular community that's doing some of these things. It's also the faith community in some instances that have fallen into this out of fear or anger or something that's causing people to lose their connection to what Jesus calls us to. And again, I read the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, 6, 7, every week, and I would recommend all of you doing that. If you're looking for the really most cogent guidance as to who we are supposed to be, especially at a time of trial, you won't find a better source. And then there's trust. And trust is steadily eroding in our country in virtually everything. Some of that's maybe trust losses that are justified by behavior of institutions. Some of it, though, is just manufactured, or some of it is just overall cynicism. If we don't have institutions that we can trust, then we have anarchy. And yet our temptation seems to be with any institution, to begin to take it down. And you can see the shift leftward here of everything except the military over the course of the last 50 years. And then there's trust. Ask you, how do you decide whether to trust a source or an institution that's giving you information? Think about it. I would bet you have certain criteria. I think basically most of us have four of these. Is it a source that has integrity? Are they honest? Are they competent? Do they know what they're talking about? Have they done the work in an area that may be kind of complicated? Are they humble? Are they willing to say, I'm an expert on this, but not on that? But then there's this fourth one that I think used to be sort of an equal contributor. Like, does that source align with my values, but now aligned values has become the dominant force. If that institution or that individual is in my bubble, my tribe, then I'm going to accept what they say. I'm not even going to be that skeptical. Whereas if they're in that other tribe, I don't care what they say. Say it's probably wrong. Don't tell me you're not doing that, because I know I'm doing it, too. And that means we're losing the more reliable areas that we wish we could spend more time on, which is integrity, competence and humility. So how to find our way back from this quandary? I don't think our politicians can be relied on to do it, although some of them are trying to. It's up to us, we the people. So very quickly re anchor your worldview to those biblical principles. If you've been seduced by political versions of that that really are quite different, reconsider whether that worldview needs a bit of work. Do everything you can with your intellectual radar to distinguish facts from fakes, and there's a lot of fakes. And don't be afraid to reach out to people who disagree with you. In fact, we need to do a lot more of that. More listening and less shouting. There's an organization I'm part of called Braver Angels that does this. You see me on the right there talking to a trucker from Minnesota who was just furious about what happened with COVID in terms of public health. Have that conversation in a case in front of hundreds of people and listen to each other and you learn stuff. By the way, your governor, Spencer Cox has been a big part of Braver Angels and getting that more into the political environment, and that's been wonderful to see. And then seek out community opportunities for dialogue. Maybe this is one right now, but in churches, churches should be a place of healing, not a place of animosity. And so many pastors would tell you they're just on absolute walking around on eggshells, afraid to bring up some of these topics because it will create such animosity, what's happened to us. And then demand more than maybe we're seeing right now in terms of character, vision and positive action from national leaders. And now maybe here's the one for you. Consider signing a pledge. If you've got your camera and you're allowed to use it in here, I don't know if you are. Grab that QR code and let me ask each one of you if you would be willing to do this. Go to the website there, which is Braver Angels website, and you will see there a pledge asking you, are you willing to. To agree to this for yourself, for your own behaviors and your actions? And you can see here a very brief version of what is in that particular pledge. And I would encourage you to have a look and think about whether this is something you want to make a priority and not expect everybody else to solve this. And finally, how then does one get wisdom? Well, I'm on this road, too, so it's rather bold of me to imagine that I could tell you how to find your way up the road. Half the time I think I'm on the ditch or up against the guardrails. Here's where you can really find it. And these verses in this case, decorated by my daughter as part of a birthday present to me a few years ago. James 1:5. You know this. But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all men generously and without reproach, and it will be given him. And then secondly, how do you know wisdom when you see see it? Because there's some fabricated versions out there. It's pure, peaceable, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering without hypocrisy. My prayer for myself and for all of you is that we remember that and we search by the means we've been given to find that kind of wisdom and then apply it to make our world better. Because the world needs us more than ever right now. And then there's a little surprise at the end. So I'm going to surprise you by asking you to join me in a closing hymn. I know you can sing. I heard you at the beginning of this. And in this instance, I'm even going to ask you to stand up. And I'm going to walk over there to stage left. And you will see suddenly a bit of an instrument is appearing. Don't go away. Are you with me? So thank you for standing up and not running away. I know you got class. This won't take long. Basically, I want to teach you a song which is a tune that you will know very well, and you would normally sing to the words about humility. Well, we're going to sing that tune, but with different words that are about faith and reason and how they fit together, which has been my whole theme. So those words will be projected and you'll be able to see them, and I hope you'll join in lustily with harmony as necessary. And these are words from a pastor in Colorado, the Reverend Thomas Stroger.
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Praise the source of faith and learning that has sparked and stoked the mind with the passion for. For discerning how the world has been designed. Let the sense of wonder flowing from the wonders we survey Keep our faith forever growing and renew our need to.
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Pray.
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God of wisdom we acknowledge that our science and our heart and the breadth of human knowledge holy part through them far, far beyond our calculation lies a depth we cannot sound where your purpose for creation and the hopes of life are. As to currents in our river by each other's undertone till converging may deliver one coherent steady. A single course till they joy as one returning. Praise and thanks you this morning. Amen.
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Thank you.
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