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A Matter of Health

What is science? What is faith?

by Ruth SoRelle, MPH

The assertion by President Bush's science advisor John Marburger III, PhD, that intelligent design, a new wrinkle on creationism billed as a scientific alternative to evolution, "is not a scientific theory" should not have made waves.

At the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers in Washington, DC, Marburger buttressed by his assertion by saying "I don't regard intelligent design as a scientific topic." However, in an administration criticized for politicizing science and dismissing it as conflicting with religious thought, his words created a bit of a surprise. They also raise the question of what is science and what is faith? Is it possible to have faith and science or even faith in science? Does faith necessarily negate science?

Certainly many in scientific fields combine the two successfully. Francis Collins, MD, PhD, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, is a particularly devout Christian who finds little difficulty in both belief and in science. As he said in an article in the publication Christianity Today in 2001, "I think of God as the greatest scientist. We human scientists have an opportunity to understand the elegance and wisdom of God's creation in a way that is truly exhilarating. When a scientist discovers something that no human knew before, but God did—that is both an occasion for scientific excitement and, for a believer, also an occasion for worship."

I too believe in science. Indeed, I have spent my adult years writing about its marvels.

Some may believe that the elderly are destined to lives darkened by the clouded lenses of cataracts. It took science and guts to find a way around that, but watching my father and his fellow octogenarians and nonagenarians and even centenarians revel in the visual world they can see again because of artificial lens implants is nothing short of miraculous. It is a particular miracle for an artist like my father to whom color is a virtual sacrament.

Twenty girl teens and tweens in white lab coats gather around a table with their hosts – all of them females and involved in science. Their questions about the brain are pertinent, and their attention rapt as they watch and participate in experiments with the brain. It's an outreach program from Baylor College of Medicine that takes science into classrooms where it has never reached before. It gives them hope and the promise of a career. These are young women who might never have been offered anything else. That too is science. Again, the miracles it promises are real.

Too often I have watched as elderly people lose their ways, tangled in brains that no longer remember or think with the clarity that guided us all through the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and beyond. Alzheimer's disease and the dementias that mimic it are tough monsters that we have yet to tame. Yet I believe in science and that some day I or my children will not have to face the prospect of losing all that we are to amyloid tangles of the brain.

In the early 1970s, during a stint at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, I watched people being told they had a malignancy and that the prospects were grim. Tools in those early years were rudimentary, and while they were used, little could be promised. Today, I know people who have survived two or three bouts of cancer. While it is still found too late too often, physicians now tackle the problem with more hope and patients know that even without a cure, they can live longer and more productive lives after the diagnosis. Do not tell me that miracles and science cannot coexist.

To me, science can be a miracle. It is the miracle of the right people coming together with the right theories, the right tools and the support of a society that wants to extend human life, reduce human suffering, and – most important – understand how the world and the human body work. We may never know it all, but the more we learn, the more miraculous it all seems.

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