That is just ridiculous!

*Another potential source of controversy/ Extremely long post*

This week has been a seminar week* at school, the topic being "International Women's Health." Yesterday one of the first year students gave an amazing presentation about his work in rural India last year and today a U of Michigan doctor came to talk to us about his work with maternal and neonatal health.

The guy is definitely an authority on the issue, making 35+ trips to Ghana since 1986 to work on the issues of maternal health. And he presented a lot of very good information on a broad range of topics. Overall I was really enjoying his presentation... that is until he got to the end.

He concluded his lecture on why there has been no significant changes in the maternal death rates, even while the infant death rates are declining. I cannot remember the 3 words he initially stated as the problem, but I do know that under one of them he listed the problem as being two-fold: Religion and Anti-Scientism.

And here is where I wanted to stop him and saw, "Hold Up! Do you even realize what you're saying here? Where is your evidence?" Let me explain.

He started with the aspect of religion as being one of the reasons that maternal death rates haven't changed.

He wasn't saying religion in general, he was saying that it was the Church's fault... And here is where he made his first mistake. The Church does not refer to just the Catholic Church (however, technically** if he had used catholic church he could have gotten away with it...), and the Church, universal, does not go by the standards of the Catholic Church. In his argument he stated the problem to be the condemnation of the use of condoms.

Let's stop and clarify: the Catholic church has come out as being anti-contraceptive. However, other denominations within the church do not hold this view. This is a Catholic view. Both do support abstinence as being the best protection (and let's be honest, it is... you can get anything if you ain't getting any). But, even here he left out a detail: The Vatican was thinking about relaxing it's rules about the use of condoms in those who were HIV positive, especially concerning Africa. Now, I admit, that was in 2006 and I don't know all the details of how that played out...

And, the non-Catholic Christians are out there supporting the ABC method for HIV protection (that being Abstinence, Being Faithful, Contraceptive/Condoms). In fact, Christian organizations are doing more than just supporting it, there's a bunch of them on the front lines teaching it. Let us not forget that non-religious NGOs are not the only people working overseas to make a difference... Not only are there Christian-NGOs (as well as those for other religions), there are also these things called Missionaries.

To say that the Church is holding back the advancement in maternal health is preposterous.

Let's move onto his second topic: Anti-Scientism, which to be honest, was just another attempt to bash Christianity.

Now I'm not entirely sure how he made the jump to this one, but he somehow said that anti-scientism (aka religion) is to blame for a whole host of problems here in the States...

And while he didn't actually make any real agrument (or at least one worth pulling out), I do want to address the fact that he listed "Intelligent Design" as firstly being anti-science, and secondly, somehow related to the non-advancement of maternal health (a case he never actually made, nor do I think he can make).

This brings on a whole new issue of the Creation-Evolution SPECTRUM (it's not just 2 sides my friends), which is a topic he clearly did not know enough about to even mention.

Intelligent Design is not a Christian theory. Yes, it has been adopted by the Christian community, but it started off in the scientific community. And ID does not equal creationsim. ID was first proposed by scientists who were studying the intricacies of biology (etc) when they came to the conclusions that they didn't think the evolution could have happened by chance alone. Now, let's not jump and say, it's that the same thing as Creationism? No, it's not... they never defined what that Divine Being was or who it is, they just stated that evolution was not by random chance. The Church then started using this as one of many theories to allow them to find harmony between faith and science. (If you want more information on some of this, I've uploaded a document that I gave to my students while teaching biology in Thailand here.)

And Christianity is NOT anti-science, as he was implying. Yes, there are some religious people who are anti-science, but the religion as a whole is not. And it's not only the non-Christian who think they're being a little ridiculous for denying things that science has shown***, a lot of Christians would agree with you on that point. However, I'd like to point out that most Christian universities are not only offering science majors, but they are also exposing their students to views that a lot of these extremists would disagree with completely.

For example (jumping back to the creationism thing), I had professors that ran the gammet of the creation-evolution spectrum, from a literalist to a theistic evolutionist. They did not force their views on us, but presented all the materials and wanted us to come up with our own conclusions on the issue.

To say that Christianity is anti-science is an ignorant view lacking any true supporting evidence. What's even more horrendous, is that this ignorant view was used to show Christians are being ignorant. That clealry is not always the case.

I could go on, but I'll stop there. But I would like to add, that I'm open to your thoughts on the issues addressed or other comments about interface of science and faith. Also, if you have any thoughts on the paper listed above, or about Christianity, please let me know.

P.S. I'll try and tone down the controversy in future posts.... but it just keeps throwing itself at my feet.


* Seminar weeks are special topics in medicine presented at lunch. If you attend you can get credit towards a program called Co-Curricular, which (if you do the necessary volunteering and seminar hours) goes towards a free month off during 4th year.
** Catholic, with a capital "c", refers to the denomination, whereas, catholic, with a lower case "c" actually means universal.
*** To say proven, is technically outside the scope of science. Science can never actually prove things, they just get overwhelming evidence that points to it as being true.