Detours on 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.  

What were some of those failures?  

The most structural problem is one John Ioannidis identified in his landmark paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”—the most downloaded paper in the history of PLOS (Public Library of Science). The entire scientific enterprise is biased toward new and positive findings. Negative results go unpublished. Replication goes unfunded. The problem isn’t occasional misconduct; it’s the normal operation of a system with misaligned incentives. Funding pressures, political pressures, and editorial bias further sway the scientific enterprise away from the pursuit of objective truth. 

A fuller accounting of science’s limitations might include what many would consider major missteps that continue into the present. For example, generations of clinicians, scientists, and laypeople were raised on the research of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Kinsey. Both advanced theories that sexual constraints were socially constructed and unscientific, that deviant behavior was the rule rather than the exception, and that personal fulfillment is found in sexual license. Freud was more philosopher than scientist; his interpretations were more imaginative than empirical. History has been harsher to Kinsey: his study populations consisted largely of prisoners and sex offenders, his methods were crude and unethical, and his personal conduct would today be prosecuted rather than celebrated. Scientific organizations have offered almost no acknowledgment that they were wrong—and not just in hindsight. Red flags were present from the start. 

Opiate narcotics were once widely understood to be highly addictive. That consensus eroded in the early 1990s as a movement gained traction to treat pain more aggressively. A new belief took hold: that addiction from prescribed opiates was actually quite rare. There was never any evidence for this, and considerable evidence to the contrary. The wildfire was unwittingly sparked by a five-sentence letter to the editor in the 1980 New England Journal of Medicine, which noted that addiction seemed rare in hospitalized patients receiving low doses under direct supervision. That letter was cited, then those citations were cited, snowballing into a false consensus. Almost 218,000 Americans died from prescription opioids between 1999 and 2017, the annual fatality rate rising 400 percent over the same period. 

The most recent example of “unscientific science” is pediatric gender transition. Until the early 2010s, pediatric gender dysphoria was exceptionally rare, specialists acknowledged that most would grow out of it, and watchful waiting was the standard of care. Over a brief period of years, more and more centers began to apply the “Dutch Protocol,” a highly investigational, controversial, and unvalidated treatment involving puberty suppression and cross-sex hormones administered to adolescent and preadolescent children. By the early 2020s, an increasing number of Western democracies began to backtrack on the practice. Major nonpartisan critical reviews of the practice, such as the Cass Report (UK) and the 2025 HHS report (U.S.) exposed the weakness of the evidence. It isn’t simply that the practitioners were mistaken, but that they were militant: and remain so. 

In these and other instances, tradition was vindicated while medical and scientific institutions demonstrated an entrenched resistance to correction. The mistrust is well-deserved. But lest this read as an indictment of the whole scientific enterprise, I hasten to add that these errors were corrected by better science. The challenge Collins glosses over is the harder one—not whether to trust science, but when. How does one distinguish the plausible from the implausible when the institutions that should guide that judgment have repeatedly failed? He writes extensively about trust, but that raises the question: how do we know whom to trust? 

Collins, the Great Barrington Declaration, and a Missing Mindset 

A particular episode in The Road to Wisdom points to the root of the dilemma. The COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in a context where a certain deserved skepticism was already high, and more so among conservatives than progressives. When the virus hit the U.S. in March of 2020, Francis Collins was Director of the NIH and Anthony Fauci was Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the NIH. American policy guidance didn’t come from either the NIH or the CDC; instead, President Trump appointed a Coronavirus Task Force of sixteen leaders from various fields, headed by Vice President Mike Pence.  

By October 2020, the U.S. had evolved into a chaotic patchwork of contradictory policies. Even the White House Task Force was divided, with deep divisions between Scott Atlas, who advocated fewer restrictions, and Collins and Fauci, who favored a more restrictive approach. 

That October, the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) was released. A trio of epidemiologists—Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), and Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford)—argued that lockdown policies were causing serious collateral harm and proposed an alternative: focused protection of the elderly and vulnerable, with fewer restrictions on the low-risk population.  

Collins’s response to the GBD was visceral. He called the proposal “lethally wrong” and “dangerous,” coordinated with Anthony Fauci on a “quick and devastating takedown,” and—writing years afterward—maintains he has “no regrets for the point,” but only for his choice of words. He associates the GBD’s authors with Donald Trump, Scott Atlas, and political opportunists, without engaging their core epidemiological argument. He cites the Swedish experience as a cautionary tale, noting Sweden’s elevated mortality relative to its Nordic neighbors—while omitting the fact that Sweden’s COVID mortality by the pandemic’s end was proportionally comparable to or lower than that of most of Western Europe, and significantly lower than that of the United States. 

What he frames as dangerous and wrong would actually have been the normal way of responding to an epidemic prior to 2020. Collins frames it as a moral dispute, not a scientific one. The more measured response would have been to refute the GBD on scientific grounds, but that wasn’t where things landed. 

This type of response is very human. Because of pride, we tend to reconstruct past events in ways that are more self-serving than may be warranted. Collins almost certainly believes his own account—that his response to the GBD was purely scientific, the heated rhetoric notwithstanding. 

Apart from memory, pride also makes us resistant to updating our conclusions when new evidence challenges them. Psychologists call this “belief perseverance.” Collins has had access to COVID mortality data, but has yet to concede the benefit of doubt, even in hindsight. He still frames his certainty as scientific integrity. It may be something else. 

The solution to our epistemological crisis is not faith, science, trust, or even necessarily truth. It is the elusive quality known as epistemic (intellectual) humility, the type of humility that admits one could possibly be wrong. 

Epistemic Humility: A Crucial Ingredient 

When addressing trust, Collins emphasizes that much hangs on our choice of experts. He advises us to evaluate our sources based on the principles of integrity, competence, aligned values, and humility. Few would disagree. However, Collins’s application of humility is mostly consumer-facing, calling on readers to trust humble sources, without enjoining humility on the part of the reader.  

The biggest problem isn’t finding trustworthy sources; it’s that proud people will quite naturally assume that the humblest, most honest, and most competent experts are those who agree with them. And of course people will prefer experts who share their values. But what if those values are wildly off base? The human propensity toward self-affirmation and the nearly 200 named cognitive biases explain why this is a problem.  

The root problem, then, isn’t ultimately one of misinformation, but pride: “the beginning of all sin,” according to Augustine. Pride, properly understood, is a lack of humility, and it afflicts us all. Pride turns mere opinions into certainties. Being wrong can be harmful; but being both wrong and certain is much worse. We cannot avoid being wrong. We can avoid being arrogant. 

This principle applies across all domains. Over the course of a long medical career, I’ve witnessed many medical misadventures. Accidents do happen, but the accidents I’ve observed were not random. The physicians with the highest complication rates always seemed to be the most confident.  

Returning to the key element I believe Collins overlooked, Scripture has long taught that the essential prerequisite to wisdom is epistemic humility. Proverbs 11:2 tells us, 

When pride comes, then comes shame;
But with the humble is wisdom. (NKJV) 

Elsewhere, we are enjoined: 

Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and depart from evil. Proverbs 3:7 (NKJV) 

Do not be wise in your own opinion. Romans 12:16 (NKJV) 

What does intellectual humility look like? Acknowledging the limits of our knowledge, experience, and wisdom; admitting the possibility that we could be wrong, and avoiding complacency and self-satisfaction by engaging in a lifelong process of study and growth. Aquinas pointed to it in the Summa, citing Gregory: “A swollen mind is an obstacle to truth, for the swelling shuts out the light.” 

Collins names science as a source of wisdom, a position I share despite its documented failures. On the matter of humility, science has validated 3,000-year-old scriptural admonitions against pride. Research shows that intellectually humble people are less polarized, more reliable, better thinkers, healthier, and, not surprisingly, easier to get along with. 

Humble people can be corrected. Humble people are curious. Humble people are not complacent about their level of knowledge, and that drives them toward new information and personal growth. All of these traits foster wisdom. And as we grow in wisdom, we come to realize how much we still don’t know, leading to even greater humility. Growing mastery of a domain exposes complexity where the uninformed see only simplicity. Nuance enters the picture. 

Genuine humility is the road to wisdom. And growth in wisdom leads to even more humility. It’s a virtuous cycle.  

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