Can science and faith heal rifts over vaccines?

We are a society in desperate need of healing; these days, we cannot even find agreement in diagnosis. Consider the issue of vaccination, which raises the specter of science in conflict with individual values and, particularly in some cases, with faith. Our society has long treated science and faith as competing narratives. What if we instead recognised science and religion as two halves of a societal consensus that must connect in order to learn from one another?

A common strategy to reconcile faith and science is to assign them each their own sphere to ease conflict, but this makes it all too easy to avoid the hard questions and oversimplifies the issues faced by humanity today. Science offers a model of the world that, when it is strong, is predictive and quantified. It provides a rational and informed basis for making decisions. Science, though, cannot make societal decisions for us, according to the Tribune News Service.

For this, we turn to our values, which for many are housed within faith. Science may tell us that we have cancer and offer a variety of treatment options with a predicted range of outcomes. But to decide what is right in our own lives, each of us must take such information and look inward, to our faith or other value system. In each of us, these two spheres not only coexist, but also collaborate intuitively. In contrast, our society lacks pathways to discuss how to balance the varied and sometimes opposing risks and benefits of possible solutions to threats such as infectious disease, environmental degradation or food insecurity. How can we heal long-standing divisions to empower this type of collaboration on a societal level?

As we considered this question a few years ago at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois, we created our Genomics for Faith programme, funded by the Wayfarer Foundation. Here, we saw shared values, humanitarian goals and, more often than one might expect, membership. And here we’ve discovered that faith and science, united through dialogue and understanding across faith communities, is our pathway to connect.

Our workshops are designed to encourage curiosity on a specific topic of broad and compelling societal importance. What are stem cells, where do different types come from, and how do we decide whether and when to use them to treat disease? How does gene editing work, and what are the ethical implications of editing the gene of a microbe, a plant, an animal, a human tissue? How has the theory of evolution advanced in the last century and a half, and are there situations in which differing scientific and spiritual understandings of life’s origins prevent us from working together on practical issues? Faith leaders have met with scientists on campus and off since 2023 to learn the latest science on these and other topics. They teach scientists what issues may arise in approaching the topic with their communities.

Dialogue is key to the process. Before each workshop, a few faith leaders meet directly with scientists (sometimes even in the lab) to learn what it is they are researching and how their findings may be translated into new technologies in the future.

In a waning summer season that has seen multiple outbreaks of measles, our group has embraced the topic that first inspired our partnership: vaccination. We were especially moved to address this issue given numerous recent policy steps that reduce access to and public confidence in vaccination, even as we face a fall and winter resurgence of respiratory illness.

Faith communities have been the centre of some but by no means all recent outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease, even though no mainline religious organisation explicitly forbids vaccination. But for decades, there have been religious and other social concerns about the specifics of vaccine development and use. Examples include disapproval of laboratory animal or human stem cell use in vaccine development or production and theological concerns about medical interventions that thwart a divine plan.