Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is a scientist who believes that there’s a place in life for both science and religion. To him, each seeks to answer a different type of question: Science asks how and religion asks why.

It’s when these boundaries are crossed, he suggests, that trouble happens — it’s when extremists negate the value of either type of question that the fighting begins. To this man in charge of America’s federal medical research agency, they’re two sides of the same coin.

Collins seems to take some comfort in the knowledge that there have been other scientists, like Albert Einstein, whose trust in the scientific method was absolute and who still wondered at the why of it all.