Daniel Davis

As much as I am fascinated by DNA and theories of evolution and the extraordinary work at NIH, I will focus on my personal journey of faith and science since age 15.
 
You may be wondering how someone decides to go to Medical School.  Well, the journey for me began in hi school when I balanced my interest in both science and faith.  On the one hand, I liked my science courses and did well in them and had excellent and engaging science teachers.  On the other hand, I was very active in the local UCC church in Hamden, CT which makes me a member of the UCC for 50 years.  We had an active youth group and usually had very knowledgeable and fun intern ministers who were students at Yale Divinity School. So it was easy to be involved in church and religion, not only on Sundays, but also for many church-related activities.  In addition, I had a strong relationship with the YMCA for both competitive swimming and the Tri-Y boys’ club which emphasized community service.

So, when I went to college I was keenly interested in a post-graduate education in either Divinity School or the Sciences.  My best grades were in the science courses so I felt that medical school was do-able.  I was less proficient in all the reading and writing disciplines, so I was NOT as confident about going to Divinity School.  This was not a matter of doubting my faith, but rather a practical matter of the learning experience involved with medical school vs. divinity school.  I clearly felt that I had the human compassion required for either choice. 

The solution to my dilemma evolved during the first 2-3 college years.  One summer I went on a mission trip to Northern Nigeria and helped build a school for a remote Muslim village; this experience taught me much about a very different culture and religion, and about helping to make the world a better place.  Another summer I worked as an orderly in a busy hospital Emergency Room; this taught me that I could handle the “blood and guts” of medicine and help people in a more scientific-technological way.

So- what do you think I did?  How did I satisfy both interests and my belief in both science and religion?  Well, I majored in religion [we had 6 full-time great professors in the Religion Dept] and minored in pre-med.  You know,….God does work in wonderful and mysterious ways and upon college graduation, I went to medical school.

After medical school I went into Obstetrics and Gynecology.  It is a specialty with generally healthy patients from age 8 to 88, and usually with happy results.  Advances in medical technology and science in Ob-Gyn over the years have been impressive and at times spectacular.  The medicine Rhogam virtually eliminated RH disease which often was fatal for the baby during pregnancy.  Ultrasound went from single one-dimensional pictures to accurate 3-D motion pictures of babies, bladders, and body organs.  Antibiotics and vaccines have been life-savers.  Look at the number of test-tube babies since Louise Brown was born in July 1978 (virtually 30 years ago)!  Laparoscopic surgeries did not exist when I was in medical school and look where it is today: major surgery can often be done as an out-patient and can even be performed remotely by using computers and video screens.  But practicing medicine for me also involved caring for and counseling of people and families, and having a personal faith that God would sort of oversee the good works of Mother Nature [especially in the area of fertility and pregnancy].

After practicing Ob and Gyn for 25+ years, I grew a little tired of being on call and dealing with all to HMOs.  You know what I mean?  I looked for another avenue with a blend of science and service to humanity.  I completed a Masters in Public Health and have been reviewing drugs at the FDA for the past 11 years; here the decisions I help make impact millions of women, both in the US and globally.  Many of the drugs and their delivery systems are truly on the cutting edge of science and technology.

To sum it all up, throughout my life, I have always felt called to help care for and make better (or healthier) the people of my local community and now the world.  To do this well takes a balanced combination of faith, science, technology, a caring heart, and (I must add) God’s helping hand.  I feel blessed that God has provided me with such a blend, that I enjoy my work immensely, and that my faith continues to give me the strength to carry on. 

Herein ends my short testimony. 

Do I hear an “Amen and Halleluiah!”

---

Calvin A. Johnson

Of all the crazy things the UCC has done recently, my favorite is the establishment of the UCC Science and Technology network.  What’s this - a denomination that places outreach ads in blog sites frequented by scientists?  Are scientists welcome in this church, too?  Do they have to compromise their scientific principles in order to worship God?  Too often, it seems the scientific worldview is at odds with the religious worldview.  Young-earth creationists denounce scientific evidence and consensus, while increasingly vocal anti-theists claim that one must reject faith altogether in order to maintain scientific objectivity.

My own work is right at the intersection between science and technology.  I work at the National Institutes of Health as a computational scientist.  As is common, most of my work does not directly touch any of the traditional flashpoints where science meets faith.  However, there is an underlying assumption of the evolutionary model in much of the science that NIH conducts and funds.  One cannot work at NIH in a scientific capacity for very long without encountering evolution, or the use of evolution as a predictive model, in research. 

For years, I had assumed that faith and science were incompatible.  Sadly, this view is held by many people and was a major obstacle for my own return to the Church.  I recall a PBS program many years ago on faith and science in which one scientist described how her practice of Christianity does not present a conflict for her as a scientist, because in her view faith and science operate in different realms.  I still remember thinking that while her ability to harmonize had a certain appeal, I thought that her ability to compartmentalize was probably far greater than my own.  Only recently when I learned that many Christians view Genesis not as a scientifically accurate account of creation, but rather as a faith testimonial, that I was able to rediscover and enjoy a faith in God.

Francis Collins is a respected medical geneticist and is currently the outgoing Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, one of the institutes at NIH.  Before he arrived at NIH, he made a name for himself at the University of Michigan, where he led a team that discovered the genetic mutation responsible for cystic fibrosis.  He then took on the challenge at NIH of heading the human genome project, the goal of which was the complete sequencing of all 3 billion base pairs of the human genome, encompassing all 25,000 human genes.  The interesting thing about Collins is that he is also a devout Christian.  The main theme of his recent book “The Language of God” is that the conflict between faith and science is not only unnecessary but damaging to both sides. 

I often marvel at the beauty of creation, from the rich diversity of life to the vastness of the cosmos to the beautiful elegance of mathematics to the moving spiritual power of music to the profound complexity of every living organism.  It occurs to me that biological scientists, like astronomers and other scientists, are like explorers, always devising better instruments and refining their methodology to explore and discover the awe of God’s creation.  Even the most primitive of single-cell organisms, bacteria, contain an awe-inspiring array of miniaturized molecular machinery so sophisticated that nothing humans can build even comes close.  Arguably the most extraordinary macromolecule, DNA is set up to make copies of itself, but only when assisted by those molecular machines inside a living cell.  DNA is known to code for the same proteins in all living organisms according to the universal genetic code.  So, where did DNA come from?  One is tempted to conclude, as intelligent design advocates assert, that God provided the DNA in a special act of creation.  But Collins, ever the uncompromising scientist, points out that intelligent design is really just another “God in the gaps’ hypothesis that relegates God to things that we do not yet have a scientific explanation for.  Placing God in the gaps is really doing God a great disservice.  Furthermore, intelligent design fails as a scientific theory because it has no positive predictive value, in contrast with evolution, which has succeeded as a scientific theory and is nearly universally accepted by biologists today.  Collins argues against intelligent design and instead advocates Theistic evolution, or BioLogos, as he calls it.  In theistic evolution, God set up the physical constants that allowed the universe to form from the Big Bang in a way that, against literally astronomical odds, can support life and the evolutionary process.  From this perspective, God is in a continual process of creation.  And what, or perhaps who caused the big bang?

So, in other words, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.  To me, the writers of Genesis 1 were expressing, in beautiful allegorical language, that everything we have and all that we need has been provided to us by God and ultimately belongs to God, not us.  Furthermore, we are to be thankful and take care of God’s creation because it is God’s and we are only temporary inhabitants of this planet.  From this understanding, I’d have to say that Genesis 1 is at least as true for us today as it was for the ancient Hebrews.

---

Michael Gove

There has always been tension between science and religion. Sometimes it is healthy tension but more often it is not. Over the years, the Church has had its differences of opinion with medicine and science.

There have even been times, like the era of the Inquisition where you had to make a choice- to choose between a religious person or a scientist. It was extremely black and white and you will recall what happened if you were on the wrong side of that decision.

The tension continues in today’s world. There still is public debate over classroom curriculum when it comes to teaching of evolution or intelligent design in schools.

I think we are expending a lot of energy for nothing. I believe religion and science are complimentary. Consider the following:

• They both offer the human soul the ability to soar
• They both share the search for truth and reality 
• They both seem infinitely expandable 
• They both can offer explanation, or consolation, or awe.
• And they both can and have been used for good purposes as well as evil ones.

This morning I want to share a couple thoughts with you on how I view my chosen vocation and my faith.

First thought:  God has blessed each of us with intelligence, curiosity and powers of reasoning. I think we use these gifts to explore both our faith and the universe in which we exist. I believe that God expects us to explore our world with the same vigor that we explore our faith.

I am energized to believe that my God wants me to be curious, to be ingenious, to be more exploring. After all, what fun would it be to be part of this creation and not explore it?
 
For me, science is not about belief. It is more about fact. Science is a systematic way to explain how things work but scientists don’t usually get into the philosophy of why.
 
If I drop a ball from the pulpit, it is going to fall to the floor. A physicist will explain how the law of gravity worked on that ball and will be happy to describe the speed of the fall in terms of acceleration and has a book of mathematical formulas to show how it works. But most physicists would be hard pressed to explain where that force came from and why it took the form it has. I think religion helps offer to find answers to the tough questions of why and gives us the opportunity to believe (or not).

Second thought: There are certain aspects of life that simply blow me away.  I am stunned by the simplicity and at the same time I’m in awe of the complexity. It’s just too darn elegant to have simply happened. I know there has to be some force or being greater than me behind the elegance. I get excited to know more about the God who created all of this and I guess that strengthens my faith.

In graduate school, I spent three years of my life studying the structure of DNA and the properties that make it one of the most elegant creations on earth. I subjected it to all kinds of physical experiments to detect how it behaved and the instruments I used detected the most subtle changes to its structure. And even though I could not see the DNA, I knew it was there. 

Since I could not actually see what was happening, I developed the ability to visualize what DNA looked like and what happened to it during my experiments. I learned how to draw a picture in my brain.

To this day, I can barely fathom that the DNA from one cell in my body will stretch from the floor to about five feet in a strand that resembles a ladder and is barely visible using the most sophisticated electron microscope.  And yet the molecule is able to compact itself into the nucleus of a cell that requires a microscope to visualize.

DNA provides the memory of life, the carrier of genetic information. This molecule is so good at what it does, it is hard for me to imagine how a man or woman could produce a material that is better.

• It can remember anything, let alone remember it for a millions of years.
• It is conserved across all species; that is, the information that codes for a protein in you or me is the same that codes for that same protein in a bacteria or a fly.
• It can be replicated with amazing precision to pass the memory of life onto offspring.
• And you want to know what’s really cool? The basic property of DNA that allows it to do all of these things is that DNA is composed of four basic building blocks. It is the order of these building blocks that make a ladder-like structure and form the basis of this memory of life.

I could easily bore you with more stories of how DNA works. [I’m equally passionate about several other fascinating chemicals that work 24/7 inside our cells.] But I will stop here.

There is a passage in the Letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 11 that says, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by this faith our ancestors received approval. By this faith we understand the worlds were prepared by the word of God so that what is seen is made from things that are not visible.”

In closing, let me share with you that I believe with all my soul that these marvelous molecules of life didn’t just appear. They didn’t just happen. I believe they are part of my God’s plan.

The opportunity I was given to study DNA and to contribute to the overall knowledge of this essential molecule is a gift. And I am still learning how this experience is an important part of my faith.