Category Archives: science and technology

Black Gold

Kenworth Pilgrimage I wish people would stop whining about the cost of gasoline. Instead of complaining, we should stop buying gas-guzzling SUVs and other tank-like monstrosities, use public transportation more, and put pressure on auto manufacturers to make more fuel-efficient cars. The current price spike is very different from the 70s crisis. Back then, Americans used innovation – gasohol and fuel-efficient compacts – to break OPEC’s spirit. Today, people are buying SUVs and the like at high rates. It’s obvious that the high prices haven’t really hit people where it hurts. When people start trading in gas-guzzlers for efficient vehicles, I’ll believe that prices are high enough to worry about. Even then I’ll have little sympathy for drivers until they start pressuring Detroit to produce more efficient cars. So long as there’s demand for inefficient vehicles, auto makers will keep supplying them. Innovation is expensive and it won’t happen if there’s no demand for its fruits.

Right Out of Left Field

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Some folks have wondered what the Terri Schiavo case will mean for the conservative
cause, including Ales Rarus regular, DLW
(see March 28, 2005); perhaps we should pay a little more attention to leftists
like the Rev.
Jesse Jackson and Nat
Hentoff before labeling Terri’s cause a right-wing one. Or even those disability
activists that get mentioned from time to time, but have largely been ignored in
media coverage. (Maybe they don’t fit in with this left-versus-right template that
the media chose?)

Life, Death, and God’s Sovereignty

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Theomorph, our resident atheist, has asked an astute question in a comment to yesterday’s post about Terri Schiavo.

"If suicide or murder are wrong because they contravene God’s alleged desires for the course of a life, how can you not apply the same reasoning to technological attempts to extend a life in the face of otherwise insurmountable difficulties? I.e., if a person would die without medical intervention, how is medical intervention also not a contravention of God’s apparent desires? If "rights come from God and God alone," then the right to live also comes from God and God alone, does it not? How does one ascertain when God has removed that right, beyond which point all human efforts to maintain life are in opposition to the will or desire of God?"

How do we reconcile God’s sovereignty with modern medicine? Are those who renounce medical and pharmaceutical technology in favor of healing by prayer actually right? How do we decide the will of God? When do life-saving techniques stop being appropriate efforts and start being contrary to God’s wishes?

What say you, Christian readers of my blog?

Science and Christianity Showcase

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Allthings2all is hosting the Science and Christianity Showcase. It’s a clearinghouse for

posts by Christians addressing the general theme of scientific reason as it relates to Christian faith. I

submitted Jerry Nora’s

primer on stem cells. The posts are diverse and many topics are covered. There is one topic, however,

which was forbidden: creationism vs. evolution. I was glad to hear of the topic’s exclusion since I see it as

a red herring and an albatross to the Body of Christ.

Since we’re on the topic of science and Christianity, here are some relevant articles.

Scientist With “Religious

Vision” Wins Templeton Prize

NEW YORK, MARCH 13, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Charles Townes, whose inventions include the maser and laser, and who

has spent decades as an advocate for the convergence of science and religion, has won the 2005 Templeton

Prize.

A life where science and faith

coexist
By Robert Tuttle | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

NEW YORK ? When Nobel Prize-winning physicist Charles Hard Townes was a professor at Columbia University

during the 1950s, a colleague, Willis Lamb, asked him if God ever helps him in the lab. Dr. Townes gave the

question some thought. “Well,” he recalls telling Lamb. “I think so.”

Faith and Reason Aid Each Other, Says John

Paul II

VATICAN CITY, JAN. 13, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Faith and reason are necessary and complementary in the quest for

wisdom, John Paul II explained when receiving a delegation from a Polish university.

Psychology That Is True to Science, True to

God
Gladys Sweeney on What Therapy Can Do for Troubled Believers

WASHINGTON, D.C., JAN. 13, 2005 (Zenit.org).- A psychology rooted in the Catholic understanding of the human

person is not only true to science, but true to God.

Religion or Science?

The two laws at work under which we are limited and from which we seek answers to life’s questions are religion and science. Our conscience introduces us to the first, formal education introduces the second. Albert Einstein loved science, yet expressed humility upon finding himself buried beneath seas of data pointing to the existence of a mind behind the numbers. If he didn’t deny God, why should we?

Embryonic Stem Cells: A Bum Deal

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New Technique Devised For Human Stem Cells
Scientists in Massachusetts reported yesterday that they have developed a new means of growing human embryonic stem cells, the versatile cells that show promise as treatments for various diseases.

Interesting, as this bears on how many of the nominally-approved hESC lines in 2001 turned out to be corrupted by the mouse cells in those lines. However, while the ESCR people fiddle around with parameters for *in vitro* work , we are seeing the real deal with adult stem cells. I know this is something of a broken record on this issue, but so is the media. At least I’m a broken record on the facts. 😉

Take a hypothetical situation: If you were a real estate developer, and the contractor building your homes came to you and bragged about a big breakthrough–they dug a whole foundation that day!–while the other developer had people *moving into* his subdivision, wouldn’t it be time to fire your contractor?

People invoke progress and the inevitable march of scientific knowledge when they try to sucker the public into supporting ESCR. But if it’s so inevitable, why are the ESCR advocates spending their time kicking and screaming for state and federal money in lieu of getting FDA approval for human trials, as their adult stem cell counterparts are doing? If this field is so robust, why does it always need legislative life support and tender loving care and protection from those evil Christian luddites? And always, more money. We’ve seen several advanced countries dive into this research head-first (e.g., the U.K., South Korea and Singapore), so even in countries where the opprobium against government funding for this research doesn’t exist, we don’t see magic happening.

This does not mean that ESCR won’t deliver significant results in the future–I’d be surprised if it didn’t, though I doubt it’ll do anything clinically that we will not be able to do better with other methods–but perhaps some of its advocates should tone down their rhetoric about its tremendous benefits, and the huge disservice its opponents are doing by blocking funding for it. The evidence does not seem to justify such inflammatory means.