A mug reads: "Please Do Not Confuse Your Google Search With My Medical Degree" on a shelf, a reminder of the illusory truth effect, a psychological bias where people jettison facts to believe information based merely on multiple mentions, even if it's wrong.
The mug belonged to Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, former Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
“Trust is critical for a society to be able to work together. But trust seems to be in short supply at the moment,” writes Collins in The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust, in which he provides detail about those four pillars of wisdom.1
On Truth, Dr. Collins warns about impulsive dissemination of unverified reports. Aim for objective facts.
With Science, Collins explains the scientific method as he unravels his unique background. His research identified the genetic cause of cystic fibrosis (1989). That base built, it applied to thousands of diseases, at the Human Genome Project and as Collins got invited to the NIH (1993).
“I learned that failure is not an affront to science, it’s an element of science,” Dr. Collins says. New technologies for reading DNA (called sequencing) arose as Dr. Collins worked at the NIH, and by 2003, were well in hand. While science explains the mechanics of our physical world, our belief in a higher power, Collins’ third pillar, targets why we exist.
Faith provides moral grounding and ethics. When deep questions confound us, we can allow non-literal interpretations (of Scripture) to ground us in our spirituality.
That leads to Trust, the last pillar. Nowhere before had Collins seen such trust questioned, but in the COVID-19 pandemic, some let fear override trusted wisdom, which warped all four of the pillars. The ability to discern truth, understand science, and even remain anchored to fundamental faith challenges people still.
Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair. “We are seeing little building, a lot of breakage, and almost no repair right now,” he writes.
How Pillars Collided
In fall of 2020, after the world went on lockdown, people spent endless hours in their homes to halt the spread of a deadly disease for which there was no prevention.
Working 100-hour weeks, by November of that year, public health officials awaited data at the unblinding stage of the clinical trials, approximately eleven months after intense vaccine development and rigorous testing.
“Both vaccines used a sophisticated mRNA approach that had been under development with government support for 25 years,” Dr. Collins explains. “But it had never been brought all the way forward to approval. … For both vaccines there was 90-95 percent efficacy in preventing illness that caused respiratory symptoms and close to 100 percent efficacy in preventing severe disease and death. Side effects were minimal in the tens of thousands of volunteers who had taken part in each trial.” Emergency approval was granted and the vaccines rolled out through health departments at no cost to citizens.
Within months, however, more than fifty million adult Americans declined vaccination. This stunned scientists and had not happened with prior achievements (e.g. polio vaccine). White evangelical Christians (a group of which Collins considers himself a part) comprised a large percentage of the distrust. Rather than believe science, many formed opinions from the Internet, social media, cable news, and people who had no medical training.
Communicating Better to Bridge the Divide
Speaking at Politics and Prose Bookshop, Collins recounted that between July 2021 and April 2022, the Kaiser Family Foundation released that 235,000 people died unnecessarily because of misinformation that scared them away from vaccination.2
Dr. Collins believed truth was blurred as some asked if Covid-19 was even real. Science, people doubted. Different faith perspectives, having become political, complicated matters. People withheld their trust of public health because they granted it to those who had social media platforms, broadcasters or celebrities.
Collins concedes that experts, trying to tell it like it was, weren’t as effective at communicating what was NOT known. Those omissions likely came across as elitist. People couldn’t relate and rejected the science. He writes, “We should have said: Today’s recommendation is the best we can do based on current evidence—the information is changing quickly, and the recommendations next week might need to be different.”
Wisdom Essential Reads
Trying to see both sides, Dr. Collins befriended a man named Wilk Wilkerson, who runs a trucking company in rural Minnesota, who didn’t agree with pandemic recommendations that affected his business and community. Collins and Wilkerson are part of Braver Angels, a group that helps to bridge gaps between disparate views, not just on public health but on gun control, immigration and other charged issues. They held a public meeting (see references) where they modeled how to listen to one another in moderated sessions. The two remain friends who don’t always agree but are willing to see the other side of a debate.
Truth or Mistruth by Repetition
In April 2024, Georgia researchers Jessica Udry and Sarah J. Barber wrote in the Current Opinion in Psychology that repetition of misinformation, false headlines and conspiracy beliefs—the illusory truth effect—could be countered with interventions that reduce their magnitude.4
They advise actively evaluating a claim rather than passively reading it, to educate oneself and others about how repetition creates a false sense of credibility, and that there’s no substitute for objective facts.
In his book, Dr. Collins encourages people to pledge not to disseminate or report what you don’t verify as factual. He says not to lose track of good sources of wisdom, to trust that science is self-correcting, and be willing to escape a bubble or echo chamber to learn more.
Use AI very cautiously. Collins touts the “enormous potential for advances in science and medicine” yet also calls out AI’s “unprecedented potential for mischief and a possible deterioration in access to trustworthy information.” There’s no need to reject science, and people of faith can pay it forward in workshops and homeschooling/high school curricula. It’s why Dr. Collins founded the BioLogos Foundation in 2007 after intense interest in how rigorous science and serious Christian faith fit together.5
© 2026 by Loriann Oberlin, MS, LCPC.