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Heisenberg Was Right About the Theology of Frightened Warts
When I learned how to scare warts, my view of the whole world changed. The procedure is pretty simple. A patient comes in and asks me to remove a wart from his hand. I’m busy or don’t want to deal with cryo or surgery that day, so I frown at the wart, stroke my chin, and say, “Yeah, well, sure, but to remove that is a very painful procedure that takes a long time. We don’t have sufficient time in the schedule today for it. Come back in six weeks. We’ll do it then.” The patient comes back in six weeks, and the wart is gone. It’s called scaring a wart. I was taught this in my post-graduate training, and I used the technique (It often works!), I just didn’t understand how it worked. Because what that means, is that if your brain really wants to get rid of that wart, it can. But how?
One of my board certifications is in Clinical Lipidology, which is sort of the study of the underlying biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology of atherosclerotic plaque deposition and rupture. I was at a Lipidology conference some years ago when a researcher brought up scaring warts. This seemed like an odd topic for a cardiovascular conference. But he had been researching the scaring of warts for years. (He must have been fun at cocktail parties: “…no, I don’t actually scare warts, I study the molecular biology which allows for the scaring of warts…” * …pretty girl slowly backs away with a frozen smile on her face… *)
Anyway, he would isolate the particular white blood cells which attack the particular viral particle which causes that particular type of wart on that particular person’s hand. Then he found a way to mark these particular cells with radionucleotide tags. He would then scare the wart, and perform serial radionucleotide scans to track the movement of these cells around the body. Simple experiment, although the details are a little tricky.
He found that these cells were pretty evenly distributed around the body, as one might expect, until he scared the wart. And then a huge majority of these cells would go directly to the wart in question. They would not go to other warts. Only the wart in question. Now think about that for a second.
That means that one of those particular white blood cells is drifting around the body, minding its own business, until it receives some sort of signal from the brain. Then, in response that signal, the cell will come to an intersection in an artery, and choose right or left, and choose again at the next intersection, and again and again and again, until it completes an extremely complex journey through a convoluted system of arteries, arterioles, and capillaries, until it gets to a very specific location on the person’s hand. And then it starts kicking some viral butt.
Now how on earth does that cell know where it’s going? How does it propel itself (or how do the arterial walls propel it) down a certain course? How does the signal from the brain work – does it use some system like GPS coordinates? Apparently blood does not flow around your body like water in a stream. It seems to be an organ which intelligently distributes resources to where they are needed at the time. Or something like that.
How on earth?
We have no idea. Not a clue.
But we spend a lot of time researching this because if we ever figure out exactly how this works, we’ve just cured cancer. We could give someone chemo, tag it to go only to the pancreas, and give enormous doses of chemo with no side effects elsewhere in the body. We could send antibiotics only to the lungs, to treat pneumonia, with no risk of intestinal complications. Just imagine what we could do. The possibilities boggle the mind. But during the lecture, that’s not what my mind was boggled by.
I was sitting there, a cup of Starbucks getting cold in my hand, wondering how something like that could simply evolve through random chance, natural selection, evolutionary pressure, survival of the fittest, and so on. Lightning hits a mud hole, and a few hundred million years later we have cellular anti-viral assassins with GPS guidance systems and elaborate communication systems to an intelligent central control hub? Man, I don’t know. That’s a little different from Boyle’s Law or something.
So I’m a slow learner. I lived my whole life surrounded by God’s miracles and I completely missed them. Until one day, God whaps me upside the head with wart research. And I just couldn’t avert my gaze any longer.
God: “Yo! Mr. Genius! Maybe things will look a little clearer to you if you OPEN YOUR #$%& EYES! C’mon! Why don’t you try using that brain I gave you, for a change?!?”
I suspect that God whapped Heisenberg upside the head with something a bit more glamorous than warts. Something like quantum mechanics. Whatever works, I suppose.
When I started my study of basic science, as a child, everything made sense. Basic science just makes sense. You can see it. But as I delved deeper and deeper into more advanced scientific study, it started to make less sense, rather than more. The things I knew became less obvious, and the things that I didn’t know became more difficult to ignore. Until I felt myself becoming less certain of even the things I thought I knew. Of everything, really. For a math/science guy, searching for understanding, it’s a disconcerting feeling.
But once I realized that perhaps things were not necessarily as random as I had previously believed, then things started to make sense again. There is a lot about science that we can understand, but I think we will eventually reach a point where we’re staring into the mind of God, and we won’t necessarily understand what we see.
I am one of the many who feel that they lack sufficient faith to remain an atheist. I tried for years. I really did. I thought I was so clever. But even clever people can’t rationalize away the obvious, sometimes. They often can, but sometimes they just can’t.
Some people see God when they look at a sunset. I see Him when I study subendothelial pathophysiology. It’s beautiful, once you know what you’re looking at. I now see the study of science sort of like a course in Art Appreciation. It’s ok if you don’t always understand what you’re looking at. It’s ok to just marvel at the wonder of it all sometimes. You continue in your unending search for understanding, but you accept that there will always be some things which remain beyond your grasp.
Atheists tend to find this to be scary – an urgent problem to be fixed – or perhaps ignored – or even more dangerously – a problem to be rationalized with false hypotheses which confirm their pre-existing biases. Religious students tend to find these same problems to be exciting – wondering “Cool! How the heck did He do this?”.
I can understand atheist artists, or atheist auto mechanics or whatever, but I really don’t understand atheist scientists. They are a very recent phenomenon, historically. How you can spend your whole life in the pursuit of scientific knowledge and not believe in God is one of the many things that is beyond my understanding. How can you not see that which you spend your life studying?
Although I couldn’t see it either, for years. It sometimes takes a while, especially for us slow learners. I hope God understands.
I know that Mr. Heisenberg does.
Published in General
There’s a very interesting essay by David Gelernter (professor of computer sciences at Yale) in the spring edition of the “Claremont Review of Books.” In it he discusses three books which explore the profound questions that modern molecular biology poses for Darwinism or neo-Darwinism. He concludes the essay with the idea that biological science must “get over” Darwinism and “move on” in a manner like the study of physics after Einstein moved beyond Newton. Right on target with Michael Brehm’s contribution in comment #57 above.
Thanks for the tip – I’ll go read it.
Gelernter is not alone in that opinion. The idea that Darwin was wrong about many of his major hypotheses is not a new idea – it’s just becoming more obvious as we do more and more research, and learn more and more about molecular biology. Electrophoresis seemed cool in the late ’50’s, but it changed the world.
Again, evolution happens, somehow. But apparently not the way Darwin thought.
We should cut him a little slack though. It was just an interesting hypothesis that he turned into a book. Didn’t work out. Ok, fine. Let’s move on.
I just had a session of this with my 7th grade science students. We’ve been beginning our study of gravity, and today they got the actual formula, with Isaac Newton’s Gravity Constant (G). I shared with them that Newton (old dead white guy) didn’t know what gravity actually “is” other than by being able to describe and measure what gravity “does”. The Law of Gravity is a scientific law because once it was described mathematically, it has been proven correct by 100% of the observed data. But we STILL don’t know “scientifically” what the heck it is! Why the heck does all matter have this particular characteristic trait? We can measure it, but we don’t know why it exists. I hope they found it reassuring that their science teacher could admit that what we DON’T know about the universe is far greater that what we DO know.
(And, it goes without saying that I kept Colossians 1:17 to myself…)
The thing is, no one can prove God does or does not exist. Each person forms a hypothesis and then gathers or rejects evidence to prove it.
Each of the Gospels is eye-witness testimony to the miracles Christ performed in his three-year ministry, and they are largely repetitive, which in a courtroom would be convincing in and of itself–these four witnesses describe pretty much the same events. And Luke was a physician–a scientist himself.
When I compare that to the actual evidence we have for the theory and mechanisms of evolution as the genesis of all biological families and species on the planet, the evidence for Christ’s miracles is pretty strong. As fraught with errors as it so often is, eye-witness testimony is taken seriously in American courtrooms. So the Gospels seem much stronger than the theory of evolution for which there are no eye-witnesses. There’s abundant tangible evidence that evolutionary forces have shaped the biological life on the planet, but as to the spontaneous emergence of whole families and species of organisms, the evidence remains pretty weak. Even carbon dating is suspect in my mind–any time I read “millions of years old,” my skepticism kicks in. How do human beings validate that test? :-)
I’ve read so many science books that delve into the history of scientific thought. We have been drastically wrong in just about every field of science. We mock the flat-earthers of the past whenever the subject of evolution of entire species comes up. But we forget how ardently the flat-earthers believed their theory. It should be a cautionary tale for us with our own consideration of all modern scientific theories.
The human error rate has been similarly high in the theories of evolution. I’ve been reading evolution theory for the last forty years. An enormous pile of facts scientists believed to be true forty years ago has now been upended by DNA and genetic evidence (Alice Roberts, The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being: Evolution and the Making of Us). It is just hard to take the theory seriously anymore. And yet they are so confident. :-)
For me, random evolution doesn’t explain as well as intelligent design does the existence of a flutist. So many talents and physical traits need to be in place at the right time in the growth and development of a flutist–miss one of these and you get a violinist or a percussionist or something else entirely. :-)
Whenever a new invention or technology comes along, I always think, the people who are working with this right now did not even know it existed when they were kids themselves–yet they have all of the mental ability and manual dexterity to work with it. I put that in my proof-of-intelligent design file. :-)
This still seems like the G-d of the gaps argument to me. Obviously, Darwin didn’t get evolution exactly right. Humans don’t get things exactly right. There is obviously a ton of stuff we don’t know about biology, genetics and evolution. But I don’t like the argument that, “We don’t know stuff therefore G-d exists.”
Exactly.
And it is exactly what I’m trying to say. There are significant gaps on both sides of the argument. Each says, “Yeah, I know we don’t understand that yet. But that doesn’t mean the theory isn’t plausible.”
There’s a certain amount of simple faith that is required to align with either theory.
Except one argument uses lack of knowledge or understanding to admit ignorance, the other uses lack of knowledge or understanding to create an infinitely powerful being.
@hoosierdaddy: What I used on an arrogant atheist friend (and he is a dear friend) when that comes up:
Okay, since the science is settled, is an electron a particle or a wave?
@henrycastaigne, copy that. But the “we think we know what happened and it took a long time so therefore there can be no G-d” is equally weak.
Yes.
Physics is hard.
Atheists have faith that there is no G-d. I think our mutual atheist friend has mentioned that he tried to join a church of atheism but he couldn’t because they weren’t atheist. They were anti-theist. As Jean Paul-Satre said, “God is dead. The Bastard.”
An election is a particle.
You’re thinking of a photon. That one sort of depends. Not well understood.
2 common things we don’t understand: gravity and light.
Amazing.
Yes. Sorry.
But, an election is the particle that shut out Hillary and gave us Trump, defying the laws of political physics, apparently.
Ah. Right. Good point…
Oh, I just read my comment. Sorry.
Stupid autocorrect…
Hey, Doc, don’t worry about it. You gave me a teeny tiny window to jiu-jitsu the step-on-a-rake-physics of my mangle. So, thank you.
That’s OK. Political physics makes the Democrats crazy! That might save us all.
Uh, the original question works just as well with electron and photon. Same reasons, too, under the hood. To the extent we’ve looked far enough under the hood, of course.
Schroedinger makes my head hurt. /:
Y’all just need to accept reality as it is. 👹
It’s not a cat. It is a probability of a cat.
Yeah, but the probability is computed with this:
https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/0de8741a7d26ae98689c7b3339e97dfafea9fd26
Via this.
Phil, no way I’m clicking on that link. No way, no how.
It’s only the mathematical formula.
Thanks, ‘Hant. That’s exactly why I wasn’t going to click on the link.
Oh, come on, Boos. Not afraid of a wee bit of math, are you?
Afraid? No. Disdainful? Eh. Any physics/math more than F=MA is overachieving.
I am totally afraid of math.
Makes my head hurt, too. But everything makes my head hurt.