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The Miracles of Science
It strikes me as ironic that, at a time when science and faith are apparently in conflict in our culture, science has or is on the verge of duplicating many of Jesus' miracles. About the conflict between faith and science: for example, the battle that's been going on in the courts lately between those who view "Intelligent Design" as an alternative scientific theory to be taught alongside evolution and those who view it as nothing more than pseudoscience or thinly-veiled creationism that might be taught in church but not in school. I really don't think there is actually an inherent conflict there, as I discussed here. However, if faith and modern science aren't inherently in conflict, they're orthogonal to each other. Science relies on observation. "faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see" (Heb. 11:1). I've been thinking about a different kind of conflict. Or maybe it is a way that they are complementary. When questioned about his identity by the followers of John the Baptist, Jesus pointed to his acts of healing as proof of his identity: "Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor." (Matt. 11, Luke 7) Recently, I listened to a very interesting segment of NPR's Science Friday. The summary:
Doctors announced this week that they have created a bladder using living cells, the closest they've come yet to making a fully functioning organ. The bladder was tailor-made using the cells of a woman suffering from spina bifida. The researchers say that the replacement organ seems to be well tolerated by the human body, and it did work as a functioning bladder. In this hour, we'll take a look at tissue engineering. How close are scientists to making organs to order, or getting limbs to regrow? Plus, a look at bionics. We'll talk with the inventor of a computer controlled hand for amputees, and hear about the latest in bionic eyes.
William Craelius, a biomedical engineer from Rutgers University, was on the show. From a press release from a few years back:
Bionic limb replacements that look and work exactly like the real thing will likely remain a Hollywood fantasy, but fast advances in human-to-machine communication and miniaturization could bring the technology close within a decade. That is the outlook of Rutgers biomedical engineer and inventor William Craelius, whose Dextra artificial hand is the first to let a person use existing nerve pathways to control individual computer-driven mechanical fingers. Craelius published an overview of bionics entitled "The Bionic Man - Restoring Mobility," in the international journal "Science," ...
Advances in prosthetics have allowed people who have lost one or even both of their legs to walk around freely on their own. In addition to bionic limbs, scientists are also developing the bionic eye...attempting to treat blindness via chips to be implanted in the retina. According to wikipedia, "leprosy is easily curable by multidrug antibiotic therapy." Cochlear implants have restored a form of hearing to people who are profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing. From wikipedia:
A cochlear implant is a surgically implanted hearing aid that can help provide a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing. The cochlear implant is often referred to as a bionic ear. Unlike other kinds of hearing aids, the cochlear implant doesn't amplify sound, but works by directly stimulating any functioning auditory nerves inside the cochlea with electrical impulses. External components of the cochlear implant include a microphone, speech processor and transmitter. An implant does not restore or create normal hearing. Instead, under the appropriate conditions, it can give a deaf person a useful auditory understanding of the environment and help them to understand speech when coupled with post-implantation therapy. According to researchers at the University of Michigan, approximately 100,000 people worldwide have received cochlear implants; roughly half are children and half adults. The vast majority are in developed countries due to the prohibitive cost of the device, surgery and post-implantation therapy...
Of course, scientists can't bring people back from the dead on demand, but it's not exactly uncommon for cardiac resuscitation techniques to revive people who are clinically dead. It's interesting how, in a sense, science has been able or is on the verge of being able imitate most of the miracles that Jesus used to confirm his message. It makes me wonder what sort of miracles he would have used if he had been here today. The guests on the Science Friday show emphasized that the main obstacle preventing further advancement is funding as the governemnt funding agencies are having to divert funds elsewhere. I'd much prefer my tax dollars go to research like this than to some of the other ways they've been used lately.
India Driving
This video of the traffic pattern at an intersection (purportedly in India) is kinda funny:
God or the Girl - First Impressions
I watched the first two episodes of God or the Girl series on A&E. I was afraid it would be silly or cheesy or a joke or a soap opera or something, but it's not. It's actually a serious show. It almost seems more like old-school documentary instead of new-school reality TV. Four interesting, dedicated, and like-able young guys are trying to make the agonizing decision of whether or not it's God's will for them to choose seminary and celibacy. Set your vcrs or Tivos for 1 to 5 PM and 10 to 11 PM this Sunday (April 23) to see the five episodes.
Islam and Civil Society
via Andrew Sullivan, truthdig has an interesting interview with Sam Harris, who it calls the most prominent atheist in America. He wrote the book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason in which he argues that faith is the most dangerous element in modern life. A thesis like that may sound a bit shaky a first...but not so much after you think about all the misery in the world today that is associated, for example, with conflict between different religions...but then begins to seem to be on shaky ground once more if you suspect that faith may actually be just one possible convenient mode/excuse for conflict, the existence of which wouldn't be jeopardized by the absence of religious conflict and would probably just find another convenient pretext for expression of the underlying thirst in human nature for conflict itself or as a means to an end to other desirables like wealth, for example. Here's the quote that got Andrew Sullivan's attention and also mine along with a bit more:
But what about the tradition in Islamic societies of consulting with Mullahs or Imams before acting on a directive in the Koran? Don't those people tend to moderate the harshest edicts of Islamic law? It's not that there's not a wealth of discourse about what the Koran actually says. There is a lot of Muslim scholarship out there. The problem is that there really is no basis for what we would call a moderate and genuinely pluralistic worldview to be pulled out of Islam. You really need to do some seriously acrobatic theology to get an Islam that is compatible with 21st century civil society. This is witnessed virtually every day we open the newspaper now, the latest case being the apostate in Afghanistan who converted to Christianity. The basic message of this episode should be clear: this is a government that we came in and reformulated and propped up, and the fact that it had to have a constitution that was in conformity to Islam, opened the door to the true face of Islam, which is: apostasy is punishable by death. That is a fact that no liberal exegesis of Islam is going to change. We have to find some way to change it, of course. Islam needs a reformation. But at present, it's true to say that the real word of God in Islam is that if you change your religion, you should die for it. Isn't that also the case in the Bible? Don't we see similar edicts and punishments for apostasy? Yes. There's nothing worse than the first books of the Hebrew bible: Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Exodus, these are the most barbaric, most totalitarian, most Taliban-like documents we can find. But there are a few loopholes, and these loopholes don't exist in Islam, to my knowledge. One loophole for Christians is that most Christians think that Jesus brought us the doctrine of grace, and therefore you don't have to follow the law. While it's true that there are other moments in the New Testament when Jesus can be read as saying that you have to fulfill every "jot and tittle" of the law (this is in Matthew)- and therefore you can get a rationale for killing people for adultery out of the New Testament-most Christians, most of the time, don't see it that way. The Bible is a fundamentally self-contradictory document. You can cherry-pick it in a way that you really can't the Koran, even though there are a few lines in the Koran that say, "Allah does not love aggressors"-if you hew to just those few lines, you can say things like, "Osama Bin Laden is distorting the true teachings of a peaceful religion." But the basic fact is that Osama Bin Laden is giving a very plausible reading of Islam. You have to split hairs to find a basis for what we would recognize as real moderation in Islam.
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