How Science and Medicine was (Accidently?) Discovered
“Denying evolution happens not only stifles the scientific thinking of students but also sets them back as would-be researchers in the biological sciences and public health.” So says a recent editorial. The thought is that any alternative to human evolution suggests that there is some sort of god-like being, and that god-like beings are invariably contrary to science. The common notion is that god-like beings were created by primitive man to explain away everything that happened. “It just rained, or Melvin got sick, or my cow died, all because the Oggie-boggie spirit is unhappy,” or something like that. The idea being that capricious sprits randomly thrust down lightening bolts at mere mortals, and help or hurt humans at their whim. Any attempts to determine an order to those whims would be folly, so better to appease the kinder spirits. Therefore, the thought goes, the first task of any real scientist must be to kill off any notions of a higher-being and believe that nature “is all that there is, or was, or ever will be.”
This may be true for gods that were thought to be fickle. This Greek god takes sides with human A against that Greek god and his consort human B and causes boils to spring forth on human B’s nose; but then feels betrayed and has human A’s sandals eaten by worms, etc. The Greek gods were amusing because you never knew what they would do next. They formed and broke alliances and laws with more abandon than the silliest “reality” TV show’s cast. One did not so much “believe in” such gods as try to figure out whose side one should be on at the moment. To find the laws of nature would have been an exercise in futility.
But what of a God of order and law? What if there was only one God who created all? What of a God that could not go back on His word; Who can not, by His very nature, contradict laws previously created? Imagine one who would die rather than break the law, that would imply that the law, and one’s very being, were indivisibly intertwined. The Christian God is a God who set the laws of the world and could not change them. The Christian God made a law that required an equal and opposite reaction (i.e., penance), for going against the design of nature (i.e., sin). Ultimately, it took the most painful sacrifice imaginable to fulfill that law. The law of this God can not be changed, broken, or amended but only fulfilled. Such that God adhered to His own law, so does the universe adhere to His laws of nature. Such silliness as the Oggie-boggie man making up the laws of the universe as he goes does not apply to this God. God created the heavens and the earth and “it was good.” The study of nature then is a good thing, as it exposes the perfect order created by that God.
The objection that miracles contradict this does not hold water for two reasons: first, miracles are by definition rare, so this or that miracle holds no practical interest for a scientist. Second, miracles may not be breaking natural laws. C.S. Lewis noted that the laws of motion may dictate the motions of billiard balls on a billiard table but that if a ball traveling in a straight line suddenly changed course it may mean, not that the laws of motion were suspended, but rather that someone nudged the table.
The concept, that nature is God’s design and therefore must be orderly and is worthy of study, was taken by Issac Newton. Newton did not merely say that things fell due to gravity, he determined how fast and with what force they would fall. He did not say, as the Greeks did, that an apple would fall as the seeds therein wanted to return to the earth. He did not say, as possibly some primitive person would, that it was because the tree nymph threw it down. He concluded that a God of absolute order would have architected the world such that there were laws regarding such phenomena. Newton laid the ground work for basic physics and invented calculus. His lasting impact can be felt today by engineering students, hundreds of years later, take at least eight classes that are directly based on what he discovered. Newton’s “scientific thinking” was not stifled by a belief in a creator. Nor was it even in spite of it, it was because of it. There was more science in Newton’s toenail clippings than in any thousand stuffed shirt college professors of today. Later on, other illustrious mathematicians and physicists, like Bayes, Boyle, Kelvin, and Faraday, also Christians, also made their mark.
What of researchers of medicine? Did the lack of Darwin’s theory or the
adherence to the concept of a creator hold back medicine?
Since the Greek philosophers, and especially Galen (with his theory of
humors, which led to things like bleeding people who had a fever), medicine floundered
hither and yon for hundreds of years. The Greeks, and most inquirers after that,
sought some sort of universal theory that would explain all medicine. That was fruitless.
Medicine advanced a bit at a time as the complex human anatomy and
physiology was explored and cause and effect were meticulously tested. This concept, to replace arm-chair theorizing with
careful experimentation, came from Francis Bacon (d. 1626), an Anglican. It was Bacon who said that “A little science estranges a man from God. A lot of science brings him back.” With the inductive “scientific method”
established, the stage was set for modern medicine. The
Discovery of the circulation of the blood, by William Harvey, another Anglican, in the
1700’s ushered in modern anatomy and physiology.
Contrary to revisionist history, religion in general, and certainly Christianity, was never opposed to medicine. Luke, as in The Gospel According to Luke, was a physician, and in the early church up to the Middle Ages priests were usually also physicians. Creation was good, but corruption was brought in by man. To fight that corruption, pain and sickness, was akin to fighting the forces of evil. The idea that Christianity blames illness on the ill is un-informed lunacy. Christ healed the sick; he did not curse them. As one prays for the poor and gives them alms, so too should one pray for the sick and do what can be done to heal them as well. A simple scan of the yellow pages suffices to put an end to the imbecilic argument: Methodist Hospital, Baptist Hospital, St. Mark’s Hospital…such church originated hospitals (and orphanages, and homes for the destitute) are not new and are as old as the days when official Roman persecution was lifted.
The beginnings of modern medicine, medicine that directly saved lives in a systematic manner, could be traced to the 1700’s with Edward Jenner’s research into inoculations. Jenner was a practicing Anglican and seems to have done very well none the less. In the 1800’s, Louis Pasteur, a devout Roman Catholic, established the germ theory of medicine. Later in that century a Quaker named Joseph Lister developed anti-septic methods of surgery which enabled surgeries to have a chance of success for the first time. In the 1800’s, without any assistance from Darwin, some devout Christians took on viruses and bacteria…and started beating back those villains for the first time in history. They were sure that a God of order would have made an orderly world, and that by discovering that order the occasionally ill-effects of nature could be put right.
In the middle 1800’s a Monk named Gregor Mendel discovered the laws of Genetics. His work was exacting, time consuming, and largely ignored at the time. The Monk was sure that there laws of genetics, just as there was a moral law that he followed even after the “age of enlightenment” and what not. There were no guesses, no assumptions, no “some day it will be known,” none of that. God was law, and the Monk found out how God designed genetics. About the same time, a man named Darwin set forth a theory that, some how, everything came from basically nothing. There were some observations, some arm chair deductive logic, and a conclusion (perhaps not so stated, but clearly implied) that man was an accident. Darwin thought that if one could breed a domestic animal into a slightly different domestic animal, that anything could therefore be bred into anything else given enough time and natural selection. The exact biological how and why to this was left to be discovered at a later date…and is apparently still waiting. The Monk said that traits could be inherited, but not stretched infinitely to turn anything into anything. The Monk was the scientist. Darwin was an amateur philosopher masquerading as a scientist. People in the 1800’s gave science credence because of practical inventions like the steam engine and the telegraph and because of life-saving medical advances. By claiming to be scientific, Darwin took advantage of a public ready to believe anything scientific, even though his methods were no more scientific than Plato, Aristotle, or even Galen.
So after Darwinism swept the smart class in their wish to dispense with religion once and for all, what great scientific discoveries can be credited to him? Bacon established the inductive method (which Darwin did not use). Newton discovered basic physics and calculus. Jenner, Pasteur, and Lister developed and made use of the germ theory. Mendel discovered modern genetics. Whither Darwin’s contributions?
In the non-medical aspects of science in the twentieth century, the atom bomb and the Apollo program stand out as the most significant icons. The greatest physicist of the twentieth century was Albert Einstein. While not a religious man per se, he did hold that there was a creator of some sort behind it all. Strike one against Darwin. The Apollo program set man on the moon while some schools still taught creationism (e.g., the Butler Act, the subject of the Scopes trial, was not repealed until just before the moon landing). I once met an electrical engineer who had worked on the Apollo program…he was teaching a Sunday school class. It was a rocket scientist, Werner von Braun, who publicly rejected what he called the “a priori assumption” that there was no creator. Strike two. Moreover, if the rejection of the idea of a creator was essential for good science, why did not the atheistic Soviet Union, with their legions of materialist scientists and engineers, beat America to the moon or to much of anything? Strike three.
In medicine, since the age of Darwin, what impact has his theory made? Penicillin was discovered by accident. Strike one. Insulin was discovered by a religious man in Canada. Strike two. Organ transplants, the heart-lung machine, etc., have no bearing on the theory. Strike three. Modern drugs are based on the Baconian scientific method. The only lame retort may be that of vaccines for drug-resistant viruses. One is not sure if one claims that as evidence of the “survival of the fittest” or if one claims that there is some diagram or formula in The Descent of Man that helps scientists design vaccines. Being able to fit something after the fact into a theory means little—the Galen theorists did that for centuries. In reality, it appears that certain DNA is damaged by drugs that results in resistance to future attack. Mendel, Jenner, and Pasteur still take the credit for Vaccines.
As bacteria and viruses were the fight in the 19th and early 20th centuries, so was cancer in the mid and late 20th century. And, so armed with evolution, what glorious triumphs hath this new science wrought? An assurance that it all has to do with gene mutations, which also just happens to be the latest and greatest explanation for evolution since the original infinitely-plastic theory of genetics was debunked by Mendel. But any success against cancer has come about from the Baconian experimental methods. If evolution truly explains all, and the materialistic world view creates super-man scientists, then where are all the cures? Where are the basic discoveries to end cancer? Besides slow trial and error success (again, thanks to Bacon) one sees nothing but requests for more tax payer funded salaries to research the issue. Darwin’s disciples took on cancer, and went home crying to momma. The average mechanic knows how cars works, and can fix a car when it goes wrong. Modern Darwin-obsessed medicine can not fix the human body except by trial and error. Darwin's theory does not seem to do much good, which is to be expected if it is false to begin with.
In closing, the awesome giants of science and medicine had nothing to do with neither Darwin nor with materialism. A conviction that creation is orderly and functions by law and that all humans are infinitely valuable has resulted in millions of lives saved since the, largely Christian-led, dawn of modern medicine. And what benefit is there of Darwin? The idea that all life is pointless? That there is no absolute right or wrong? Granted these are useful concepts for post-modernists, Marxists, and genocidal dictators; but what does this have to do with science? Liberals are not often hypocritical when it comes to one thing: population control. They are aborting and birth-controlling themselves out of existence. If they do not do something soon there will be few liberals left to lord it over the rest of us. Their aborted “fetus” in the trash can is not going to carry on the fight, even if it could have otherwise some day have gone to Yale Law School, so they need to do what they can to create little materialists at every opportunity. 25 of the 26 states with the highest birth rates are “red states” and the 16 states with the lowest birth rates are “blue states.” What’s a liberal to do to fight the new red menace? Make sure that materialism, AKA human evolution simply must be taught in schools and ban and shout down and sue all who would dare even to question it. Even if the students learn nothing else of science. Even if it is scientifically dubious at worst, a scientific distraction at best, one must confess to the new de facto state religion of materialism, at least if they want to pass a biology exam.