NEW YORK — The relationship between faith and science has faced its share of strain during the coronavirus pandemic — but for some scientists leading the nation’s response, the two have worked in concert.
National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins founded a nonprofit focused on “the harmony between science and biblical faith.” Anthony Fauci, NIH’s senior infectious disease specialist, has said he isn’t active in organized religion but credited his Jesuit schooling with burnishing the values that drive his public service.
And Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, describes his faith and his public health work as mutually reinforcing.
“One of the great things about faith is, you can approach life with a sense of hope — no matter what the challenges you’re dealing with, that there’s a path forward,” Redfield told The Associated Press.
The influence of faith on some of the government’s top coronavirus fighters illustrates its complicated connection to science. While tensions over public worship’s effect on public health arise amid the pandemic — with President Donald Trump declaring religious services “essential” — personal spirituality, in all of its forms, remains an unquestioned guidepost for some scientists guiding the U.S. response.
Redfield said that during major crises he’s faced, such as his role responding to 2010’s Haiti earthquake and the death of his son, his faith had helped orient him toward the potential for “greater good” to arise from tragedy. Faith and science have not been in tension for him, Redfield said.
During the early weeks of the pandemic, the 68-year-old virologist was not as much of a fixture at the televised White House briefings as Fauci, his fellow Catholic. But Redfield’s modesty is itself a facet of how his faith plays out in his public persona, as his longtime friend William Blattner put it.
Redfield sees people of faith as “not holier than anybody — we’re just who we are,” said Blattner, who co-founded University of Maryland’s Institute of Human Virology alongside Redfield and a third prominent AIDS researcher, Robert Gallo, in the mid-1990s.
“You don’t see him jumping up to the microphone. You see him speaking as he’s required,” Blattner said of his friend. Faith helps Redfield “filter out the noise and distraction” of the push to contain the virus, Blattner added, affording “him, and us, the ability to see more clearly.”
Redfield was tapped by Trump, while Collins and Fauci’s stints as government scientists predate 2016. Collins, for his part, was already a vocal advocate for communicating what he sees as the consistency between religious belief and evidence-based science before he was named to lead NIH.
After writing a 2006 book about his journey from youthful atheism to belief in God, the 70-year-old Collins founded the BioLogos Foundation to help further a dialogue about religion’s relationship to science. Since the pandemic began, he has received a major religion prize for his work.
“I see science as the most reliable way to study nature — and that includes this virus,” Collins said by email.
“But science doesn’t help me with deeper questions like why suffering exists, what we are supposed to learn from it, what is the meaning of life, and whether there is a loving God who grieves with us at a time like this,” he added. “For that, I rely on what I have learned as a person of faith.”
