The story is told of a scientist and a theologian who met at a party. After some polite conversation the scientist said, "Admit it now, religion can be boiled down to nothing but the Ten Commandments." The theologian replied, "Perhaps you are right, if you will agree that all of science can be reduced to nothing but 'Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are."
I believe that it is primarily the media that sustains the ongoing fight between science and religion. Heated argument between fundamentalist religious fringes and fundamentalist scientism fringes makes good copy but in reality the vast majority of scientists are persons of deep religious faith.
My own journey began at birth. Growing up in a parsonage, I was in church every Sunday from the day I left the hospital. But while I was in college majoring in chemistry I became an atheist. Science had all of the answers and religion was superfluous. One day during a private conversation my chemistry professor took off his watch, held it out and said, "What would you say if I told you that the pieces of this watch all just happened to fall into place and it started running?" Well, of course I said, "That's ridiculous." The analogy to the universe was obvious and I set out on a journey to learn about this mysterious force that created it.
That journey continues to this day.
That journey led me into the field of medicine. Medical science, like all the sciences, is based on the premise that the only reality is matter. So I learned mostly about anatomy, biochemistry, physiology, pathology, and pharmacology of the physical body.
It is said that science is morally neutral but its materialistic worldview has pervaded our society. So, while science has produced miraculous benefits in the material world, many if not most great scientific discoveries have been put to use in the creation of weapons of death and destruction.
That same materialism has brought us to a so called health care system in which getting sick is good for the economy. The sicker we get the more we boost the gross domestic product. Our health care providers are pushed into competition to see who is best at keeping sick people off their rosters and recruiting as many well people as possible. Most are more responsible to shareholders than to patients.
Perhaps it is ironic that it was science that revealed to us the evolution that has brought us to the point where our brains are capable of awareness or consciousness that we are alive. The scientific name of our species is Homo sapiens sapiens. We know that we know! What is it that we know? We know that we were born and we know that we will die. That leaves us with life's basic questions: Why am I here? Is there any meaning or purpose to life? Why is there suffering? What happens to us when we die? Medical science has no answer for these questions. These questions are the essence of spirituality.
That deficiency of medical science has become very real to me in 50 years of medical practice, most especially at the times when I have had to make that long walk from the intensive care unit to the waiting room to inform an anxious family that they have just lost one of their precious members.
The goal of modern, scientific, medicine is to save lives. There are notable exceptions, like cataract or joint replacement surgery, but the vast majority of the trillions of health care dollars expended in our country is to save lives, often in the last few months of life. But everybody dies, so we have set ourselves up for 100% failure. Medicine is the only profession that I know of where we have set ourselves up for 100% failure. Since death is inevitable, death is not the issue, Life is. This is where spirituality and religion come in.
It has been my privilege for a number of years to hang out in the anatomy lab at Emory, helping the freshman medical students grapple with the non anatomy aspects of working with human cadavers: What is life? What is death? Where is this person now? The risk is dealing with those questions and the feelings engendered by seeing the body as an object to be studied, and carrying that perspective into a lifetime of medical practice.
I have learned from my patients over the years that they want to know how much I care before they care how much I know.
Those who use their spiritual eyes and ears will, like the psalmist, see the divinity ever more clearly as science reveals ever more deeply the complexity and functional beauty of the human body and indeed of the universe.
In the last analysis, I believe Einstein, perhaps the greatest scientist of the 20th century, summed it up best when he said, "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind."
Thanks be to God for religion and for science.