Listening to Francis Collins

I was able to attend an on-line meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation this weekend. The ASA is a wonderful organization for Christians who work in the sciences. I have been a member for many years. Francis Collins was the guest speaker, and I think about 30+ people attended. On a personal note, I sent Dr. Collins an email a couple of months ago about an unrelated subject, and he sent me a kind response.

Francis Collins is a well-known scientist who was involved in discovering the human genome, being the previous head of the NIH, and being an author of several books.

His talk on Saturday was about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic which was devastating to my country (U.S.) and to so many other countries.

He also talked about the scourge of misinformation that occurred during the pandemic especially in the setting of social media. This misinformation included personal attacks, often very vicious, on people such as Dr. Collins.

Although Dr. Collins expressed frustration and sadness about misinformation, he was very positive about how our country tries to cooperate with other countries in trying to prevent pandemics. He discussed about how difficult it is to make decisions in real time in the setting of a pandemic. I agree. It doesn’t take a huge amount of insight to realize the difficulty of making quick decisions in a country of 300 million citizens with a polarized political environment and in the setting of an often slow-moving federal response. I would argue that public health is incredibly important in this regard. The political nonsense coming from both of our U.S. political parties often wrecks public trust in the science of public health.

Such thoughts bring me to the newest editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine. The title is “Deja Vu All Over Again — Refusing to Learn the Lessons of COVID-19.” It is an open access article and free to read. I would recommend looking at it.

Our country’s inability to reconcile federal and state health coordination as well as some states passing laws preventing public health measures in emergency situations is quite dire. I wonder what will happen when the next pandemic occurs.

I will never understand why many of our federal and state political leaders ignore simple science, embrace conspiracy theories, and put their re-election ahead of the concerns of humanity. Theologically, one could argue that such national themes of on-line conspiracy theories and ignoring common sense public health runs into issues of “original sin”. Such sin is basically a genetic / epigenetic phenomenon involving millions of years of evolution leading to the importance of tribalism; to take away from others to supplement oneself; to hurt others even if it means potentially hurting oneself; to gain power at the expense of others.

I am a religious person. I find it so strange that many other people who claim to be religious are involved with conspiracy theories online, don’t understand simple science, and would rather be hateful as opposed to passing peace when pandemics occur. What to do? I have become a big believer in the individual acts of doing better. I fail here often but I try. In many ways, this falls into the idea of prehension from Naturalismppp (see prior posts). If I can make a change for the better in a small way during a short moment of time, perhaps this act moves forward in a way that influences the world positively. Some would say God is involved in such moments, defined as a divine lure to some degree.

Lots and lots of thoughts here but to summarize:

1. It was interesting to hear Dr. Collins talk in a small group setting even if the talk was on-line.
2. It was interesting to hear him talk about how misinformation really made the COVID-19 pandemic so much worse. Much of the misinformation came from social media.
3. I personally think that public health is one of the most important parts of modern medicine. This field of medicine is often misunderstood and underfunded.
4. When one observes how so many people (especially political leaders) responded poorly to the COVID-19 pandemic, it makes me wonder about the human condition. I think, from a theological and evolutionary viewpoint, that many in our species acted dangerously during this time to conserve some degree of power. This idea is tragic.
5. What can we do? We can do what we can to improve the life of others in singular moments of time. I honestly believe that such actions are a baseline way to improve the lives of others while co-creating with God for the good and for continuing creation.

image created by Meta AI