A journalist tries to understand a jealous god - materialist science
After reading American journalist Pam Winnick's A Jealous God (Nelson, 2005), I informed her that I wish I had written it.
Winnick and I each started writing a book on the intelligent design controversy at about the same time. My By Design or by Chance? is a closeup look; Winnick used the ID controversy as a jumping off point for a number of interrelated science controversies - and produced a highly informative, easy-to-read book as a result.
She may also have damaged her career, as the Expelled film suggests, because she did not stick to a party line on many topics, but looked at what the evidence actually showed.
Party line vs. evidence? In science? Yes indeed. A profoundly illiberal trend is growing up in science. Once a party line becomes widely accepted, not only are dissenters ostracized and punished but truth, fair comment, and good intent are not permitted as defenses. If that sounds like a Canadian "human rights" commission, the resemblance is not accidental. The trend in science is part of a larger trend in society, though it is expressed in different ways.
Winnick begins with the 1970s debate on the use of live human fetuses in research. She focuses in particular on the sudden importance of "bioethicists" - whose main job, it appears, was to construct justifications for what researchers wanted to do. (pp. 28-29) For example,
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"Research on the Fetus" was filled with the moral doublespeak of bioethics, the intellectual shifting, the illogic and the numerous loopholes that soon would typify nearly all writings in the emerging field of bioethics. (p. 80) These are the things that mainstream journalists like Winnick, who wrote for the Pittsburgh Gazette, are just not supposed to say.
One must rather speak of "anguished choices" and "no easy answers" - as if, in the entire history of the world, the word NO! had never been invented and there had never been a reason to use it. She adds: Virtually unnoticed at the time was the sub-rosa dismantling of the Judaeo-Christian ethic, the "bias for life" that at least in theory, holds each life dear. (p. 29)
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In my experience, that dismantling wasn't so much unnoticed as impolite to mention. To notice such a thing implied the moral judgement that the loss of Judaeo-Christian ethics was a genuine loss. But our North American society has grown suspicious of moral judgments of any kind, especially judgements in favour of that kind of thing.
Significantly, foreshadowing later developments, advocates of live fetal research called their opponents "scientific know-nothings" who were "anti-research," thus subtly positioning science itself as on the side of dehumanizing trends.
Next: Part One: Science as popular religion
All the parts:
Introduction A journalist tries to understand a jealous god - materialist science
Part One: Science as popular religion
Part Two: The social justice costs of glorifying "science"
Part Three: Celebrity cosmology and assorted flimflam
Part Four: The simple, basic information needed to blow it all up the river
The Baby With the Baboon's heart
Denyse, another highly provocative article - I was particularly interested in your commentary about baby Faye - it reminded me of that Paul Simon song from so long ago.
As a scientist and a Christian, I have no problem at all with people having the highest possible respect for the scientific method - naturally as with all human endeavors mistakes will be made, and one must not confuse the process of science with the body-of-knowledge that is also called "science". These are quite different things.
You ask the question might Faye have not died had a less invasive procedure have been used? Possibly, but my understanding is not - she was born with a critical heart disease which barring a miracle would have caused death in an estimated 2-10 days.
For obvious reasons, healthy infant hearts are in very short-supply - and I can understand why the doctors would be keen to find an alternative supply of hearts given the urgent need to operate. I did not find any evidence to corroborate your suggestion that the surgeons used a baboon-heart in preference to an available human heart. If true that would be criminal malpractice.
There are valid arguments both for and against whether she should have undergone this experimental treatment, none of the arguments against come from religion. Indeed my own religion, Christianity, does not offer any specific prohibition against heart-transplantation, or even xenotranspantation. Like many Christians I believe that Christ's ministry is for all time, and if this were an issue that God had intended to provide guidance on then I'm sure he would have done so by now.
Many so-called "religious objections" to medical procedures are really cultural objections. We naturally find the idea of heart transplants (even amongst adults) icky, but had we allowed this feeling to discourage the early (and mostly fatal) experimental adult transplant procedures then we would not have had the body of knowledge that allows heart transplantation today.
I agree that for many people that science has replaced religion, in that it attempts to answer many of the big questions that religion has traditionally answered - I do not see this as an example of a conspiracy by scientists, but that we as people of faith have not been effective at communicating how our answers are better than those of the secularists.
Your comments please?