family teaching #2: creation

 
GOD's amazing creation can be seen and understood at the cell level,
but the unbelieving world remains ignorant of the simple basics of life.
 
GOD must supply qualified specialists in all fields, thru CCCInc. Bible tests,
enabling His true witness to mankind, rather than satan's lies, myth, theory.

What prompted you to go back and look at human physiology and cell biology, subjects that you hadn't studied since medical school?
Like everybody else, the question that consumes me is: Why are we the way we are? I gradually realized that most people who have made great pronouncements on the human condition have done it blissfully unaware of the basic equipment we bring to it - the human body. After 30 years of being a surgeon, I decided that the most basic thing that explains why we are the way we are is the human body, not so much its structure but its functions. I've always been struck by how our organs respond to threats to their stability.
 
You've seen that in the operating room?
Yes. Marge Hansen, one of my patients, suffered a massive bleed. I did all these quasi-heroic things, but for about an hour she had no blood pressure. There shouldn't have been much blood getting to her brain, and she should have been in terrible shape, squashed, bingo. But once we found and repaired the source of the bleed, a rare rupture of the artery that supplies the spleen, she recovered beautifully with all her faculties intact, thanks to one of the body's last-ditch emergency survival systems.
 
What was it?
We have sensing devices in our arteries that are always sending messages to the brain: "The blood pressure's normal." But when the
The body has a kind of collective awareness, even at the level of individual blood cells.

 
pressure drops, the number of messages decreases, sending off an alarm, and the brain makes the arteries squeeze down so that the entire blood supply is shut off except to the heart and the brain. The little bit of blood you have is being sent to these two small structures that you can't survive without. Not only that, but the brain tells the heart to speed up, so the smaller amount of blood is doing much more work. It's an absolutely amazing thing. And this coordination works even at the level of individual cells.
 
Give an example of how it works.
You've got 75 trillion cells, and a lot of those cells are reproducing while we're talking; they're replicating their DNA - huge long strands of millions of bunches of little     submolecules     called nucleotides. It can't happen perfectly;

 
there are mistakes. So cruising up and down the DNA molecule are a bunch of patrol boats: DNA-repair enzymes. They see an error and they grab it, snip it out, and fix it. While we've been talking, that has probably happened a few thousand times in each of us. I hate to use cliches, but that really does boggle the mind. And this sophisticated coordination happens at the molecular level, the organ level - the whole body is a unity, and the purpose of the unity is to keep us alive.
 
And the body's unity affects other parts of our lives?
I think we have an awareness of what's going on inside us - the steadiness of the heartbeat, the blood streaming through the veins. Something inside us understands the importance of unity and harmony. Each cell lives on a knife

 
 

edge between chaos and order - chaos means death, order means continued life. In our culture we use those metaphors, good versus bad, life against death. We human beings are somehow aware of that closeness of death, disaster, chaos, and we're also aware that the answer to survival is to make symmetry, harmony.
 
You even argue that we have a biological need to create poetry.
Poetry arises out of our need to create harmony, order, predictability - rhythms, rhythms, rhythms. The heartbeat, the intestine's contractions and relaxations, the ways cells move around - these are all rhythms within the body that reassure us against the imminence of death.
 
You find the body's tenacity appealing.
I find it enormously reassuring. The human body is going to serve you very well for six, seven, maybe eight decades. It's hard to get sick, and 90 percent of the people who go to the doctor either don't have anything wrong with them or will get better on their own. Why do you think alternative medicine has become so popular? Because its practitioners listen to their patients, and their patients are going to get better anyway. Allopathic doctors, real doctors, are impatient with people who aren't really sick, so they don't give them what they really need, which is nurturing.
 
That's quite a statement from a surgeon.
Well, people like to be rescued, which is one reason people like surgeons, who come in and save the day. But by and large, surgeons simply correct certain mistakes so that nature takes over, as with Marge Hansen.
 
And nature can be pretty powerful.
Absolutely. By all rights my patient Marge Hansen should  have  died,  but  she  lived.  She remembers

thinking, in her last conscious moment, that she didn't want to leave, she wasn't ready to die. Her body marshaled its forces to save her. And maybe she lived because of my instinct for survival in which I said, "I will not let her die." And every endorphin and every serotonin and every adrenalin molecule that was available to me poured into my bloodstream so I could think more clearly, I could be so decisive that everyone in that room immediately marshaled themselves to help me, to work quickly to find the source of the bleeding and stop it before it was too late, then work hours more to repair the aneurysm. Even the blood bank technicians were rushing upstairs hand-carrying the blood. Everybody became a part of this effort. And I know why it happened. There's something about taking command and transmitting this energy to everybody that makes them just pour out effort. That's what happened that day. All of us in the operating room called on a force within ourselves that even now I don't understand. I don't know what it was. And I don't want to be a New Age prophet; I'm not.
 
But you pray, and you think a lot more about the human spirit than you did when you were a young surgeon.
I have a great belief in spiritual strength, but spiritual strength, to me, comes from within. I want to restore people's belief in nature. I want to restore people's belief in the realization that there are so many failsafe mechanisms in our body that, unless we are truly overwhelmed, we're going to be healthy. And I'll tell you something else that's reassuring. Toward the end of your life, your body is giving you signals, sometimes very recognizable signals, that the time has come to recognize that nature has won and you must go with nature. Recognizing this gives you the most emotional comfort. It allows you to die the way people used to die 75 and 80 years ago, surrounded by those they loved. I find that very comforting.

 
 
 
Part 2
 

     In 1981, the United States National Academy of Sciences passed a resolution saying that "Religion and science are separate and mutually exclusive realms of human thought whose presentation in the same context leads to misunderstanding of both scientific theory and religious belief." The statement was intended only for use in a public-relations campaign against the creation science movement, and it has never been invoked against evolutionary pantheists, agnostics, or scientific materialists. For example, the Academy makes no protest when Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) uses the authority of science to promote atheism, or when physicists promote a "theory of everything" that will allow its possessors to "know the mind of GOD," or when Carl Sagan proclaimed in his Cosmos series that "the Cosmos is all there is, or ever was, or ever will be." On the contrary, the National Academy gave Sagan its Public Welfare medal.
     Chet Raymo is another in the long line of scientific metaphysicians who yearn to make a religion out of science; and so he argues that Christians should adopt for religious purposes what he calls "the new creation story." His description of the new story is more in poetic than scientific language, as befits an admirer of Teilhard de Chardin, but he clearly is referring to the standard version of evolutionary naturalism. According to this story, nature did its own creating through unintelligent material processes, particularly the purposeless Darwinian mechanism of random mutation and natural selection. GOD was involved if at all only in the very beginning, in setting up the laws, and thereafter nature runs by itself. In Raymo's words, nature itself "becomes the sublime scripture," humans are viewed as the universe becoming conscious of itself through evolution, and prayer consists of rejecting miracles while giving praise and thanksgiving to nature.
     The National Academy's motives may have been partisan, but there is clearly some truth in its warning that mixing science with religion can produce a highly intoxicating brew. Teilhard's comment that "less and less do I see any difference between research and adoration," which Raymo quotes with approval, is about as far from the ideal of scientific objectivity as one can go. When scientists begin to worship their own concepts, they are tempted to proclaim vast philosophical systems rather than stick to what the data is showing.
     So  it  was  with  Teilhard,  and  so  it  is  with evolution-worshipers generally. The first thing to understand about Raymo's "new story" is that scientists cannot prove that known natural forces can produce complex biological organisms. They assume this crucial and highly debatable fact, regardless of the evidence. No one has demonstrated that chemical evolution can produce life in the first place. Indeed this field is in a state of confusion and cannot even begin to account for the information

content of the simplest organisms. Despite what you were told in school and in countless public television nature programs, natural selection has no substantial creative power. Ask for evidence and all you will get are examples of trivial variations in fundamentally stable populations. Look at the fossils and you will see a general pattern of unexplained sudden appearances of new forms of life followed by stasis - meaning the absence of fundamental evolutionary change. Neo-Dar-winism is more accurately classified as materialist mythology than as science.
     The highly regarded Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin explained the true basis of evolutionary science in a remarkably candid essay in the New York Review of Books (January 9, 1997). Lewontin has as low an opinion of the adaptationist "just-so" stories of the neo-Darwinists as I do. In spite of his skepticism, however, he accepts the basic story of evolutionary naturalism because, in his own words,

We have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material   explanations,   no   matter   how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

     If you are going to define science as applied materialist philosophy, then of course you are going to end up with a materialist creation story, one that excludes the possibility of a personal GOD who created us and answers prayer. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that this new story has been validated by scientific testing. The important questions are all decided in the assumptions and definitions.
     In fact the new story is rapidly becoming an old story and it may not be around much longer, even in the scientific world. For a look at the way things are going, see the recent article in the Boston Review by James A. Shapiro, professor of microbiology at the University of Chicago, with the provocative title "Scientific Alternatives to Darwinism: Is There a Role for Cellular Information Processing in Evolution?" (The Boston Review is available on the Web [https://www-polisci.mit. edu/BostonReview/]). Just to give the flavor of the article, here is a string of excerpts:

The molecular revolution has revealed an unanticipated realm of complexity and interaction more consistent with computer technology than with the mechanical viewpoint which dominated when the neo-Darwinian modern synthesis was formulated.... It has been a surprise to learn how

 
 

thoroughly cells protect themselves against the kinds of accidental genetic change that, according to conventional theory, are the sources of evolutionary variability.... The point of this discussion is that our current   knowledge   of   genetic   change   is fundamentally at variance with postulates held by neo-Darwinists.... Is there any guiding intelligence at work in the origin of species displaying exquisite adaptations that range from lambda prophage repression and the Krebs cycle through the mitotic apparatus and the eye to the immune system, mimicry, and social organization?

     Shapiro takes jabs at both the Creationists and the neo-Darwinists, accusing both groups of "presenting a static view of the scientific enterprise." He blames Creationists for refusing to credit the successes of science, but also comments that, when faced with new ideas, neo-Darwinists "assume a defensive posture of outraged orthodoxy and assert an unassailable claim to truth, which only serves to validate the Creationists' criticism that Darwinism has become more of a faith than a science."
     James Shapiro plays by the same scientific rules that Richard Lewontin does, and so he is still talking about the origin of cellular information-processing systems as a

problem in "evolution." But the systems he describes are analogous to sophisticated computers, and there is no known natural process that can produce anything of that kind. Scientifically, Shapiro's program is identical to that of Michael Behe, the molecular biologist (and Roman Catholic) author of Darwin's Black Box (1997). The
difference is that Shapiro tries to use language that scientific materialists can conceivably tolerate, whereas Behe dares to make the obvious inference that the evidence of biology points unambiguously to design, and hence to the reality of a Designer.
     In short, Chet Raymo is urging Christians to rely for their salvation on a theory derived from materialist philosophy, rather than from scientific testing. Since scientific materialists don't hesitate to give advice to religious people, I suggest religious people should return the favor. Let's gently advise the evolutionary scientists that they need to cultivate a bit more of that objectivity they are always recommending to others. They could make a start by learning to tell the difference between what they assume and what they investigate.
  
Phillip E. Johnson is professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is Defeating Darwinism By Opening Minds (Intervarsity, 1997).

 
from Commonweal '98