Back Seat to Science

Science is eating away at the soul. It seems that with every new discovery there is less and less need for faith in a creator. Biochemistry, DNA and pharmacology explain the mysteries that are built into belief systems. When I announce in team meetings that this or that is happening with a patient, the reaction from the medical staff is that the medication is working, period. They are well trained and adept at using chemistry and skill to heal and the work of God in the patient’s healing is crowded more and more to the corners. I often feel like a second-class member of the team, or the middle child who is always struggling for validation and approval.

This is a problem for people of faith in all religions in our time and it’s a problem for our patients. It seems that the knee jerk response is to throw one baby or the other out with the bathwater. Fundamentalists and conservative Christians pick through science and throw out according to how much it threatens their beliefs. Scientists often throw out religion as superstition or fairy tales. Of course there are degrees of both of those on either side. While the nurses that I work with are practicing Christians, they usually don’t integrate their faith and medical science as well as they could. Perhaps it's because no one has suggested it or, for that matter, the church is so stuck in past eras that its leadership is unaware that there is a need.

It seems safer to maintain a schism between religion and science because nobody is healing the rift between the two. The church is responsible for the split between science and religion and in this day, it is either yielding too much ground to science or denying its place through sentimentalism and irrational thinking. The fear of Darwin’s theory is quite paranoid and irrational just as one example. To attack scientific inquiry as if it were itself an attack on God is ludicrous. It’s as if God were some Greek mythological character that needs protection from his enemies. Such anthropomorphic and thin concepts of God are probably at the base for why some scientists scorn religion in the face of rational thought at the start.