Technology is to magic as biology is to heresy.
Technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic. I can push a button and talk to someone a hundred miles away. Music vibrates through the air and comes out my speaker. Airplanes fly.
“Computers are very simple. You see, we take the hearts of dead stars and we flatten them into crystal chips and then we etch tiny pathways using concentrated light into the dead star crystal chips and if we etch the pathways just so we can trick the crystals into doing our thinking for us.” [source]
Really. It’s magic. And we’re all fine with it.
Biology, on the other hand, is heresy. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away; blessed by the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21). No. Not if science had anything to say about it. Humanity pushed back against the faithful acceptance of the Lord giving and taking. Medical science has been encroaching on God’s will for the body for a couple of centuries now.
Medical Science Saves Lives
Once the germ theory of disease was widely accepted, and microscopes and the scientific method spread, science began its onslaught on God’s will. And let’s be honest: God’s will sucked. The death rate for children under age 5 was heartbreakingly high. Women died in childbirth frequently. An infection could kill an otherwise healthy man in just a few days. Death and heartbreak everywhere! No wonder people found it easy to believe in a cruel God who sent people to war and shrugged at natural disasters.
Antibiotics and standards of cleanliness took aim at tuberculosis, which used to kill one out of every seven people [fn 2]. Hand-washing decreased maternal mortality because doctors were no longer going directly from corpses to deliver babies. Nutrition and hygiene decreased child mortality, and vaccines worked a scientific miracle [fn 3]. Mosquitoes were identified as a disease vector, and efforts to eradicate mosquitoes drastically reduced yellow fever and malaria [fn 4]. Insulin was discovered, and diabetes was no longer a death sentence.
I could go on and on. The point is that medical science pushed back hard on “God’s will” that people just die and there’s nothing we can do about it. There’s plenty we can do about it.
The first scientific assault on God’s total control over reproduction started saving the lives of mothers and babies [fn 3]. Some few Christians pushed back, but in general, no one was going to insist that mothers and babies should be denied life-saving medical care, or pain relief. The Bible is clear that women are supposed to suffer in childbirth (“To the woman he said, ‘I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children.’” Genesis 3:16). But most Christians happily left that behind, along with the command that Adam had to earn his bread by manual labor (Genesis 3:17). Women can have epidurals and men can have office jobs.
Birth Control and Fertility Treatments
Then effective and easy birth control was developed and Christians got nervous. Birth control was refusing God’s plan for procreation. A man who used the pullout method of birth control in the Bible was instantly struck dead by God (the story of Onan is in Genesis 38:8-10). Christian leaders spoke out against birth control, but the war has been lost. Most Christians use birth control, and are grateful for it.
And Christianity survived. Christians can use birth control and still be Christians. There’s room for Christianity and birth control both.
Fertility treatments also infringe on God’s will for reproduction. The Biblical story of Hannah teaches that infertility can be treated by praying in the temple and promising God that, if he’ll let you conceive a son, you’ll give the boy to God (1 Samuel 1:1-28). Samuel was born, and at age three, Hannah left him at the temple for Eli to raise. Samuel became a mighty prophet, and Hannah went on to have more children, none of whom had to be given to the Lord.
Biblical fertility treatments don’t work well in general. Christian leaders may be a bit leery of fertility treatments, including IVF, but they’ve mostly been given a green light by Christian believers. Just call modern medical science a miracle and see the hand of God in it, and go ahead and use it to conceive. Not everyone conceives, but it’s a better chance than using Biblical Hannah’s method.
Science and medicine have taken over conception – both preventing conception and aiding conception. And Christianity has survived.
Abortion, Gay Sex, Transgenderism
Now we get to the culture war topics – the issues that conservative Christians are fighting right now. Keep in mind that the number of Christians whose hearts have softened on these topics is growing daily.
However, some Christians believe their religious beliefs are under attack and that Christianity is going to be wiped out and outlawed if people have abortions, have gay sex, or transition genders without being persecuted for it.
Christianity is more resilient than that.
Jesus didn’t say anything about gay sex or about transgender issues. The only thing he ever said about pregnant women is, sucks to be you: “And woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days!” (Matthew 24:19). The Bible doesn’t forbid abortion. I know there are various scripture verses that Christians trot out to show that the scriptures have definitively spoken on these topics. But they aren’t any more convincing than the scriptures that Christians used to rely on to prove that the earth was the center of the universe [fn 1].
No one is forcing Christians to have abortions, have gay sex, or transition genders.
If Christians believe that God will punish them for things other people are doing ‘wrong’ then that’s the Christians’ problem. Mormons specifically reject that idea in the Second Article of Faith. “Men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression.” No one is punishing you for someone else’s sins.
Heresy
Biology (and its related sciences) is the reason conservative Christians are up in arms. Biology is more predictable than religion in saving lives. Biology has done a better job at reducing maternal and infant mortality rates than religion. Biology means a woman can terminate a pregnancy safely and easily. Biology helps more infertile/sterile couples conceive than prayer ever did. Biology has studied sexual orientation and concluded that not everyone is heterosexual. Transgender people have always existed, but biology has developed ways through medical treatments to help transgender individuals better live as their chosen gender.
Biology, sufficiently developed, is indistinguishable from heresy. It was God’s will that I die of croup when I was a baby. Instead, the ‘miracle’ of modern medicine put me in an oxygen tent and I lived to write this post. The priesthood blessing didn’t clear out my lungs; modern medicine did. No one accused my parents of committing a heresy when they took me to the hospital. And I lived to become a heretic.
When does defying God’s will over life and death, birth and conception, sex and gender, go from being heresy to being just God’s miracles dressed up in scientific advancements? If an abortion preserves a woman’s ability to have children later, is that a miracle or a heresy? If a transgender man transitions, marries a woman, and becomes a wonderful stepfather to her children, is that a miracle or a heresy? If a man with a low sperm count suggests that his wife use a sperm donor and they raise a beloved child, is that a miracle or a heresy?
When you pick up a stick, you pick up both ends. Church leaders use that catchy saying to say you can’t pick and choose your beliefs. It’s either all true, or none of it is. Most of us are a lot more nuanced than that. It takes some mental effort to pick and choose your beliefs.
When you pick up the stick of biology and modern medicine, do you pick up both ends?
—
Questions:
- Do you believe God “wills” life or death? Or can medical treatments put off death longer than God wills?
- Do you draw a line somewhere between “God inspired these scientific advancements to better our lives” and “humankind has no right to play God”?
- Does anyone have the right to make those decisions for someone else?
[fn 1] Shea, William R. and Artigas, Mariano, Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius, (Oxford University Press 2003).
[fn 2] Krishnan, Vidya, Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History, (Public Affairs 2022).
[fn 3] Klass, Perri, A Good Time To Be Born: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future, (W.W. Norton & Company 2020).
[fn 4] Crosby, Molly Caldwell, The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our History, (Berkley 2007). Shah, Sonia, Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years, (Picador 2011).
Wheat & Tares 
I lived on the Compostelle pilgrimage route in France. While there I realized something. The forerunners of hospitals – hotel dieu – were built along the route to repair the pilgrims. Hospitals are one of the enduring contributions of Christianity to modern society, and many are still run by churches. The objective is to save and heal, according to Christ’s mission.
Healing is not forever. It’s what we’re called to do in real time.
Honestly, once a human being becomes an adult – and is of a level of maturity to make judgements for themselves (18? Okay), I honestly don’t much care what decision they make for themselves. Really, the only place I “dig my heals in” is when decisions, declarations, legal threats and treatises, political prognostications, experimental medical treatments, etc. can irreversably affect those who are still “growing up” and who can sometimes be negatively influenced by “adults”; and popular culture – which (of course) can contain a paradoxical mixture of the wonderful…..and sometimes of the opposite.
Absolutely not – I don’t believe that God “wills” life or death. A loving God doesn’t just sit around killing babies with diseases.
We’re mortals living in a dangerous and imperfect world, and terrible things happen. I completely understand people seeking comfort and explanation for terrible things that happen in their lives, but I cannot believe that God would “will” a toddler to get hit by a car to “bring them back home.”
I also think that the notion of forcing a dying person to endure the full depth of their suffering is unbearably cruel, and I don’t believe that’s God’s will either. Anyone who refuses to euthanize a suffering pet is considered uncaring, misguided, or sadistic; however, we don’t offer that same mercy to people, even our loved ones, to the point of making it illegal.
I have no problem with the idea of God inspiring scientific advancements, but there is still that whole “free will” bit in play. We do sometimes get scientists trying to “play God”, and some attempts to advance science have been horribly unethical.
That said, I believe that God would expect us to use our human intelligence to improve our human condition. I hope that in the long sweep of human history, that we’re trending more and more towards goodness, freedom, and peace…even if it’s bumpy and slow.
Regarding hot-button issues like abortion, I think this has become so polarized that both sides refuse to even try to understand and acknowledge the valid points made by the opposing side. It’s become such an emotional and moral issue in both directions, that nobody can see clearly or act rationally….all or nothing are the only options on the table.
I’m not exactly sure what this question is asking. I think it’s asking whether or not people have the right to control whether others’ access to frequently-controversial things that have been improved/made safer by science (birth control, abortion, transitional surgery, etc). I don’t think there is a simple yes/no answer…there’s a lot of nuance to consider.
I think that adults should more or less be left alone to do what they want, but that doesn’t mean that society should be a free-for-all either. Science in a lab is often very very different than the broader world, and the general public tends to misunderstand science. Also, people often will take some very specific scientific finding and then use it to take a running leap into some unfounded (often stupid) generalization. There are always a lot of implications to try to consider, and we don’t discover many of them until long after the fact.
That said, I think we get too stuck on certain ideas and are resistant to change when new evidence emerges. I think the bigger problem is that many hot-button decisions tend to be made based on emotion rather than evidence…and that’s the case for both allowing and disallowing things, and it happens from both sides of every issue.
Science doesn’t seem more strange or less likely the closer you look. Can we say the same about religion? I wish I knew more science and less religion because the former seems pretty relevant while the latter seems pretty arbitrary. Just my opinion.
As I read your essay I cannot stop reflecting on the fact that RMN is a surgeon who pushed the possible surgeries forward to save the lives of children with congenital heart defects. He did so at great risk to the children he operated on; many of them died. He developed techniques that very likely were learned or built upon by the surgeon at Stanford that operated on my son’s heart defect, and saved his life.
Surgeons are scientists of a sort. They don’t just let God decide. They experiment on living and dying people at great risk.
My son had a recent surgery at Stanford that had never before been done there, but had been done once in the Netherlands. The surgery was successful, but the after care sucked. The surgeon was so wrapped up in doing exciting new surgeries that he couldn’t be bothered to provide adequate follow up care for my son.
It takes a certain type of arrogance, ambition and ruthlessness to be a successful surgeon.
RMN has to have met surgeons in his career that did surgeries on intersex babies. Although science has progressed in this area since his career, he has to have a basic grasp on the biology involved in LGBTQ issues.
So why is he supporting the anti science, anti compassion positions in the church’s new transgender policies? Why pound in the anti science anti compassion “Think Celestial”? I can only imagine he is ruthlessly interested in his own standing and career in the church. I can only imagine he has long ago sold his soul to support the anti science politics of the culture of the top leaders of the church. Or maybe age and frail health has allowed his choice of companions to dominate his decisions.
I don’t want to think such things. I want to respect him and follow him as he follows Christ. But as a mother of children with disabilities, who also has a transgender loved one, I feel deeply convicted that these policies are not Christ like, or scientific.
I believe people who have gender incongruence and gender dysphoria have a biological brain difference or disability (our culture makes it a disability). I cannot see how this is any different than being born with differences in the brain that cause autism as one of my sons has, or being born with only one testicle, as another of my sons has.
In my opinion science is just a way of uncovering and understanding what God has built. To me it’s more real and closer to God’s will than anything the scriptures have to offer.
When I was pregnant with my child with multiple defects I had a blessing where I was told to seek medical care. What was brought to my mind at that time was Christ talking to the lame man by the pool at Bethesda. He didn’t just heal the man. He asked him why he had not made use of the healing powers already provided before he offered his own healing.
God gave us brains, science, and smart and arrogant surgeons. These blessings should be used before we expect more blessings.
The science shows the church’s LGBTQ policies/doctrines, contribute to heightened suicidality in these populations. The church’s current policies undermine family unity and increase division between the generations, including adult child estrangement from parents.Scientific studies in family dynamics have begun to document this. Any church should support mental health and family unity instead of undermining it. I had higher expectations for the restored church, and for RMN as a scientifically educated leader of the church. My heart breaks.
Good comment, lws329. I think of RMN as a technician or engineer looking for ways to perform certain tasks better, rather than a scientist who is curious about the natural world. He doesn’t believe in evolution, for example. Consider that he graduated from college and medical school in the 40’s, before the structure of DNA was discovered. His worldview stopped evolving almost a century ago.
If you want to visit a beloved family member a few hundred miles away, you can hop in an air-conditioned car and drive swiftly down smooth roads, stopping at restaurants along the way. Your meals all come with salt, ice, and spices that sent whole nations to war. And if some misfortune befalls you, you will soon be in the company of some trained professionals who can help you with your problem, be it mechanical or medical. You can do all this while listening to your car stereo or earbuds where you can access all the music ever recorded.
Imagine explaining all this to someone from the distant past. We live like gods. Unless you live in a war-torn country or are experiencing homelessness, if you have a few hundred dollars in the bank or even just a credit card, you live better than kings. The view out the airplane window is more amazing than 99.99% of your ancestors could dream of. Next time you walk into a Target, let the colors and smells astound you. The modern world seems mundane because we’re used to it, but it’s objectively fantastic.
Science did all that in a couple hundred years. If God is a man with a will and power to enact his will, he had thousands of years to bless his children with antibiotics and chose not to. No. It’s much more plausible that our existence is a natural part of the development of the universe—chemical reactions and biological mutations shaped by the laws of physics and by chance. That makes way more sense to me than the idea that we are Important immortal spirits housed in suspiciously ape-like mortal forms with Divine Destiny.
And if that thought scares or depresses you, it shouldn’t! Because I think the resulting rapturous epiphany of a naturalistic worldview is this: How lucky we are! How lucky to be anything at all! To experience trees and mountains and beaches and grocery stores and vaccines and gelato and Netflix! And if you need someone to thank for all that, by all means, thank god. But you’d better thank science too.
It does seem that god is really, really bad at his job.
lol, that is probably the least nuanced strawman article I have ever read
It may be true that “biology is more predictable than religion in saving lives” and that “biology has done a better job at reducing maternal and infant mortality rates than religion,” but the logic appears flawed to me. It is also true that cars transport people better than pumpkins do, but the purpose of pumpkins isn’t to transport people. The purpose of religion isn’t to save lives, nor is it to reduce maternal and infant mortality. A purpose of religion is to make sense of life in a world where there is death, and guess what? There is still death. People still die. There is still hardship and heartache. I do not think that true religion needs to conflict with science. True religion looks to science to help understand our world and to improve it. Through time, people have improved food production, medical care, transportation, housing, transmission of information, and all manner of other things, and this is all good. None of this means that God is bad, hateful, spiteful, or cruel. Guess what? Notwithstanding all the great advancements made in mankind’s history, people are still cruel and unkind. Science does not make people better. Scientists pushed eugenics, for example, not only in Germany in the 1930s-1940s but also in this country. People are the root of evil, not God, and not science.
Some people think that the reason why modern medicine chose the caduceus as its symbol is that like Hermes the god of tricksters and thieves, medicine (when it goes well) cheats the gods of their due, at least temporarily. Other people think somebody just goofed and confused the caduceus of Hermes with the Rod of Asclepius, who was the actual Greek god of medicine. But either way, it’s kind of fun.
I am not sure what I believe about God’s will and the nature of God generally; many days I’m pretty agnostic. Maybe that’s not right. It’s not necessarily that I believe there is nothing, it’s just that more and more I think that whatever there is may be beyond my ability to comprehend, totally outside of any frame of reference I could use. I lean hard into science, which to me is probably one of our most effective tools for understanding the nature of what, for want of a better word, I could call God. I am more skeptical of technology, honestly. Cool as it is, it reflects all of the strengths and foibles of its creators (us). I love it even as I worry it may be the end of us.
Thanks for such a thoughtful post, Janey. Always love reading what you write!
Modern science is a tool, an extremely powerful tool that is growing more powerful day by day. It can be used for good or evil, depending on the intentions of those who wield it. There are certainly many examples of those who have used it for evil, but on the whole, I trust my fellow scientists more than most people.
Religion is also a tool, maybe not as potent of one as it used to be, but those who wield it still have a lot of power. It also can be used for good and evil. Unfortunately, on the whole global stage at the moment, religion seems to be more frequently used as a tool for what I consider evil. I include the those the propagate an LDS theology of sad heaven or vilification of LGBTQ individuals as examples of this. In contrast, I see DFU wielding religion for good. YMMV.
Over the past years, and only once in a while, I wonder about God’s will. Raised LDS, I learned that God wanted only good things for us. Bad things happened because of mortality, or sin. I went thru a phase where I read a lot of Catherine Marshall and her ideas that everything was God’s will, even the bad things. She had some really good ideas about seeing God in everything, even in death and suffering. Those ideas helped me for several years.
Now, I’m agnostic about God’s will. I don’t believe in a micro-managing God anymore. I think a lot of things happen that aren’t specifically his will. But then something very specific will happen and I have a hard time thinking it was a coincidence. Hence, the agnosticism.
One thing that attracts me to science and medicine is how consistent it tries to be. FDA trials, that are required before approving new medications, have to be tested on large samples of people to make sure the medicine consistently works and the side effects aren’t worse than the disease. Surgeries are supposed to have high success rates. It’s reliable, or it tries to be. I need that. I need it more than I need to believe that God has specifically designed my life’s good things and bad things just for me.
I would rather have consistency than blessings, I guess is what I’m saying. I would rather ask science to research a question than to pray for a miracle. That’s just where I’m at on my faith journey.
Georgis – I agree with your comment. Science and religion can co-exist very comfortably. Science has humanity’s morals, and while I believe science is mostly good, you are correct to point out that human morality can fail, sometimes catastrophically, as happened with eugenics.
The friction points happen when religions starts telling science to cut it out — God doesn’t want science to offer some options and so science should stay within the boundaries of religious beliefs. For me personally, I don’t want religion telling me what decisions I should make about medical/sexual/gender issues. Those aren’t religious issues anymore, not in my mind. They belong to science.
Janey, I agree that it can be quite complicated. I am horrified when I think about what Joseph Kennedy did to his daughter in 1941, at the age of 23 years: a lobotomy. The girl was born with disabilities, and she began sneaking out at night for to meet with boys. Daddy and his physicians had a solution. What they did to her was barbaric by our standards. It may have been within scientific norms of the day, but I think it was barbaric in its day, as these depraved men played science with a young woman who could not defend herself. Science in the hands of monsters (or well intentioned but ignorant men) can create monstrosities. Religion in the hands of monsters (or well intentioned but ignorant men) can also create monstrosities. I haven’t given up on religion, but I take what I hear in our pulpits and compare it against the scripture and my own prayer and conscience; I also don’t worship at Dr Fauci’s feet when he declares that he is science. (Don’t throw stones–I am vaccinated and boosted!)
I’m going to speak from my own experience here. I earned a PhD in molecular and cellular biology. Over the course of my academic research I received inspiration from time to time that improved my research and lead to some important (for me) discoveries. During my time in grad school, new molecular techniques emerged such as CRISPR/CAS and cancer immunotherapies that still hold so much potential. It causes me great awe to reflect on these modern miracles. I have since switched fields but still am actively involved in research. The research I do now impacts a broader swath of public health. Sometimes I have thoughts that feel foreign cross my mind that lead to good things. I have been able to share with many collaborators and those successes have snowballed. It feels a lot bigger than just me and I attribute the outcomes and opportunities directly to God.I believe in Divine influence in the sciences because that has been my experience. However, I don’t believe all scientific advances are Divine. I don’t have specific answers to your three questions Janey, but it is because I don’t understand God or his/their will well enough to say. I believe God is love and God is good. I believe we should do what we can to make Heaven on Earth. That includes healing disease and easing human suffering. It means advancing technology to bring people together and bind the human family. It seems reasonable to me that God would aid in those endeavors.
Amen waterbear. As an industrial research scientist for 30 years, science leads where it is directed, for better or worse, and most generally it leads to dead ends. So many wool gathering expeditions, so few breakthroughs. It’s a set of tools which in most cases were useful for screening out bad ideas. In my field statistical tools often worked the best to screen the useful few ideas from the useless many. Religion played no part in it, nor did “the science” some people worship.
Thirty years of research has patterned my thinking. Early in the COVID epidemic I closely followed what was going on at Sun Valley because I know the place. It became very clear that I didn’t want to catch it, and that it was trasmitted rapidly in crowded, dirty, poorly ventilated places like gondolas (thank you Holders) and ski bars. This patterned my behavior for the next two years.
It only took a couple months to realize that the Japanese epidemiologist Oshitani was using the same strategy, known as the 3C’s. I tried as best as I could to mimic his approach, and to date I have not had a case. I could only shake my head at our forced lockdowns, which completely violate the Japanese protocol on avoiding closed spaces.
I also tried some experimental research, based on a lifetime working with chlorine/bromine. It doesn’t take a lot to kill COVID, which leads to the importance of sanitation. And also to bathing and swimming pools: 1 ppm chlorine pool water has 90% COVID kill in 30 seconds. Public pools were one of the safest places to be during the pandemic. For me that meant spending lots of time in the hot tub. Did it help? Who knows. But it didn’t hurt.
@Georgis @Waterbear @thhq I really appreciated all of these comments and found them moving, thank you.
To quote Tyler Durden (Fight Club), “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” I think God wants us to do good things to one another on the brief time we have on this earth and to make a positive difference, whether small or grandiose, for future generations.
Your line about men being able to have desk jobs reminds me of a conversation with a college roommate who explained that being gay was a sin because if everyone were gay, humans would cease to exist in one generation. I replied, “By that logic, being an accountant is close to sinning because if everyone works for Ernst & Young and no one works on a farm, civilization is pretty much toast” He tried to tell me that accountants could grow their own food but I wasn’t having it. “Everyone knows sowing season is smack in the middle of tax season. Ain’t no seeds getting planted in April. Society is screwed.”