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New doctors, at least in the United States, are trained to navigate conversations with families who are waiting for divine intervention to bring their loved one back from the brink. They're waiting for a miracle.
the doctors use what's known as the Amen Protocol. Or I guess they say Amen. The Amen is an acronym for Affirm, Meet, Educate, and No Matter What. Take this patient. A middle-aged man is on a ventilator and dying as a result of a recurrent brain tumor. He's on three medications to try and control the seizures, but it's not working.
Doctors have had to cut away large chunks of his skin from infected bedsores because he's been incapacitated for so long. He has septicemia and the infection is resisting all treatment. He is unresponsive.
The patient's family won't entertain any suggestion that the end is near and that it's time to talk about hospice treatment. We believe in miracles, they say.
We're waiting for a miracle. The Amen protocol was designed for just this situation. Researchers had observed that for a religious patient, not even an esteemed or beloved physician will win in a contest with God. And that puts doctors who don't believe in miracles in a pretty awkward position. So here's the Amen script. Ready?
If the patient's family member says she's hopeful, you repeat her name and say, Mrs X, I'm hopeful too. That's A affirmed.
If a family member says they're praying for a miracle, you say, "I join you in praying." That's M, meet them where they're at. Once you've gotten that out of the way, you clear your throat and say, "Now I want to offer some information as a medical advisor." That's E, educate. And then you say,
No matter what happens, I'll be with you every step of the way. And that is N. No matter what. Amen.
The same people who came up with the Amen Protocol conducted a survey with the University of Connecticut and Georgetown University. They found that 57% of adults randomly surveyed believed that "God's intervention could save a family member," even when physicians said that any further treatment would be futile. The same study found that only 20% of trauma doctors and nurses believed in miracles.
Actually, I'm surprised it's that high. The R-Man protocol gives doctors something to say, even if what they really want to say is, well, you can believe all you want, but that miracle isn't going to happen. But what if it does?
Our guest today is a celebrated professor of bioengineering at one of the world's top-ranked universities. He spent a lifetime studying cell biology, and particularly cell dysregulation. Cancer, in other words. And he says miracles can and do happen.
And he's going to tell us how he reckons we can see them, even with the staggering advances in medical science today. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions
This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic. Get discounts on master lectures, video courses and exclusive samples of their books at zondervanacademic.com forward slash Undeceptions. Don't forget to write Undeceptions.
Each episode here at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, philosophy, history, science, culture, or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. And with the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. Undeception
This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.
And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.
Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith. He's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.
You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. So I'll get you to sort of sit where you are most comfortable to chat to me here, and then I'll just move the mic. And once I've said it, don't even worry about the mic. Just, you know, it'll, yeah. Okay. Perfect. Perfect.
And your process, you just record everything, then you take it back and turn it into something. Doug Laufenberger is the Ford Professor of Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. That's actually Biological Engineering.
He has a classically reassuring look about him, right down to the grey hair and glasses. Perfect blend of doctor and scientist. Which is appropriate. His specialties as a leading chemical engineer have an incredible bearing on the future of medicine, molecular cell bioengineering. Aimed at understanding cell functions in order to promote the development of molecular and cell-based technologies.
We're talking about the proliferation, adhesion, migration, differentiation and death of cells and how to manipulate those processes to create better healthcare technologies. We'll put a link in the show notes for more on how Doug first became interested in science and where that interest has taken him. It's incredible. But for now, all you need to know is that he's a nerd and a lifesaver.
Doug, thank you so much for giving me your time. Can we begin with a really basic definitional concept? What is bioengineering?
So bioengineering is a very broad term, and it's used by different people in different ways. Some use it as application of engineering to problems in human health, medicine. Some use it as an intersection of biology and engineering, which may have applications that are more in basic science understanding areas.
environment, materials, energy, agriculture, rather than medicine. Our department here, which we founded in 1998, we expressly called biological engineering to make a very important point that it's engineering on biology and using biology. This is a little bit more precise term than bioengineering. Bioengineering
often doesn't actually even involve biology. It's more physics or chemistry-based engineering applied to human health. Got it. So can you give our listeners a few examples of real-life stuff that you can create with biological engineering? Yes. So, for instance, stem cell engineering. One can now start from...
pretty much any type of cell in an adult organism and with the right genetic programming, turn it into something that can then differentiate into the kind of cells you might want it to be, a neuron, for instance, or a cardiac cell. Another is a development of new therapeutics that might be antibodies, they might be programmed immune cells, they might be organisms that now
can fix nitrogen so that you can help enhance photosynthesis in some types of agriculture that aren't capable of it, otherwise production of energy by microorganisms. So the whole biotech revolution, this is what biological engineering is about, is using biology to solve problems in society.
But Doug would be the first to agree that the successes of that biotech revolution have often been challenged by controversy. Take stem cell treatments. The modification of stem cells to create other cells, the genetic reprogramming of cells, if you like, has led to the successful regeneration of damaged or diseased heart, cartilage and nerve cells.
Stem cells have been used to treat blood disorders like leukemia and lymphoma. They have been used to regenerate damaged organs like the liver and even grow replacement organs like the bladder. They can be used to safely test new drugs on specific tissues. And they can also show scientists how diseases develop and might be treated. But those advances have been tempered by serious objections.
The use of embryonic stem cells is really controversial because it requires the destruction of human embryos. Some say this represents the destruction of a future human life. And it's of particular concern for people, whether they're religious or not, who hold that a human life begins at conception.
There are also concerns about the safety of stem cell therapies, especially where the resulting cells aren't well characterized or where they're used in unapproved ways.
And genetic reprogramming leads us on to another just as controversial issue. And if you'll pardon the pun, it's right at the bleeding edge of medical technology. I'm talking about genetic editing. That's technology that recalls the family planning in the film Gattaca, one of director Mark's favourites. Of course. You have specified hazel eyes, dark hair and fair skin.
I've taken the liberty of eradicating any potentially prejudicial conditions premature baldness, myopia, alcoholism and addictive susceptibility, propensity for violence, obesity, etc. We didn't want, I mean diseases, yes, but... Right, we were just wondering if it's good to just leave a few things to chance. You want to give your child the best possible start. Believe me, we have enough imperfection built in already. Your child doesn't need any additional burdens. And keep in mind, this child is still you.
simply the best of you. That's a pregnancy consultation taking place in the film Gattaca. It's a dystopian science fiction thriller where parents are able to create their perfect offspring by eliminating genetic material that's considered to be undesirable. Like premature baldness. No wonder director Mark was drawn to the film.
Anyway, Gattaca, at least the half I watched, highlights the ethical dangers that accompany our picking and choosing, which elements make up the perfect human being. It also shows the uneven society that could develop in a world populated by the genetic haves and have-nots.
But genetic editing isn't a process limited to Hollywood futures. Enter CRISPR-Cas9, a process that combines clustered, regular,
regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats with the enzyme Cas9. Let's just call it CRISPR-Cas9 for short. It's a technique that allows scientists to target and cut DNA sequences within a cell's genome and then add, delete or replace specific genes.
CRISPR-Cas9 has been hailed as a major breakthrough in genetic engineering and is being used in a wide range of applications from treating genetic diseases to developing new crops and even breaking down pollutants. Bioengineers have even played with eliminating malaria by genetically sterilizing the female population of the mosquitoes that spread it. So, wins all around, right?
But in 2018, a study published in the journal Nature Biotechnology reported that the use of CRISPR-Cas9 in mice led to unexpected mutations in other parts of the genome. And in 2019, a study published in the journal Cell Reports showed that the use of CRISPR-Cas9 in plants might result in the unintended activation of dormant viruses.
The same technology could theoretically be used to create Gattaca-like designer babies. In 2019, a Chinese researcher, He Jiankui, apologies if I mispronounce that, claimed to have used CRISPR-Cas9 to edit the genes of embryos resulting in the birth of twin girls. Scientists worldwide condemned He's actions as both dangerous and unethical.
Playing with the human genome is where things get very personal, like the tireless search for a cure for cancer. Your own research focuses on cancer. Can you tell me specifically in this vast field you're focused on?
Yeah, what I would say is, so first of all, my own research is in complex disease, cancer being obviously a preeminent example, but increasingly, especially over the last decade, inflammatory diseases, infectious diseases, vaccines. So my lab has been very much a part of vaccines with HIV, Ebola, more recently COVID. And what's the unifying feature is that
These are complex diseases. They're not as if one gene somehow has gone wrong and you fix that gene or you have a drug against that particular protein that that gene would make and then you're done. The system has gone wrong. Many pathways that regulate cells have become dysregulated and so cells now are not behaving the way they should. Or pathogens can hijack and distort the immune response in ways that it's not effective.
So engineering comes into play because you've got to understand this complex system now as comprehensively as possible. So one thing to know about engineering is there's two arms of it. One is synthesis, and that's what we were talking about before, making things like programming stem cells. The other, of course, is analysis.
that if you're making things without understanding, then you're just tinkering. It's trial and error. So what we're aiming to do to help create better vaccines, to help create better cancer drugs, is analyze the immune response against pathogens, analyze what's gone wrong in tumor tissue to find out where are the vulnerabilities, where are the best targets, because then you know what to do to treat them.
But if you don't analyze it in as much complexity as possible, you're going to make mistakes. Those sorts of mistakes have had international implications. Consider the impact of just one poorly designed solution, the swine flu vaccine released back in 1976.
The vaccine was developed to combat a new strain of the H1N1 influenza virus, the swine flu virus, and was rushed to market before it had undergone sufficient testing. In this case, the cure proved as harmful as the cause. Many vaccinated people developed Guillain-Barre syndrome,
a debilitating autoimmune disorder that affects the nervous system and can proceed rapidly to paralysis. This genetic horror story contributed to widespread fears during the recent COVID pandemic, fears I don't personally share, I'll add, that vaccines were similarly being rushed to market without adequate testing because of large profits at stake. I've met people and argued with them over this very issue. But
But while the complexity of finding such genetic solutions daunts some, it excites others.
Is it the complexity that's drawn you to this specific area or something else? It's both. It's sort of right time and place. An engineering background prepares you to deal with complexity. It's what you're educated to deal with and to try to affect outcomes that are desirable. And of course, the applications, they can feel so impactful if you're helping move a new cancer drug into the clinic or you're helping move a vaccine forward.
You've said you're continually humbled by how little we actually know. But you're a scientist. You're the ones who are meant to know this stuff. Well, that's one of the distinctions of biology, and that is, as has been used before, the unknown unknowns.
that one would like to get to a point where it's like physics and chemistry and one has really good hard-fixed laws and able to simulate and predict effects of things. To do that, you have to know the components involved. You have to know how they interact and have some quantification of how they're going to do these things. And then, you know, that's how you put people on the moon because you know exactly what's going to happen because the laws have been all worked out.
In biology, the reason that, you know, sometimes cancer drugs don't work or they have side effects or vaccines don't work as well as you'd like or you wonder why you couldn't fight off this pathogen is so much is yet unknown. And you go decade by decade and things that were previously either not known to exist at all or viewed to be unimportant now in a new decade are
turn out to be crucial to the operation of a living organism. Dugsfield has the potential to inspire wonder in the scientist and the onlooker just as much as stargazing does. Think of the intricacies of the human brain as a system or the mechanisms of consciousness. The immune system is also truly wondrous, even if so many things are still unexplained.
Then there are mysteries around chronic pain, why it affects some people and not others. Gut microbiome seems to play a huge role in our overall health, but we're only just discovering that and coming to understand it. It seems like the laws of nature, whether cosmological or biological, are stunning. What are they?
I'm curious to know your view of the laws of nature. You know, what are they? And where do you see them in your specific area? Yeah, so to me, laws of nature are descriptions of observation, that there's enough observation to say, okay, this is the way a cell behaves, the way an organism behaves, the way a heart will beat, the way neurons will fire.
And so with enough observation, you can describe those observations. And in biology, sometimes they're mathematical, sometimes they're more qualitative. So are the laws of nature real things? I mean, is there, you know, is maths imprinted on stuff? Well, ultimately there are, because ultimately underlying all these biological mechanisms is chemistry and physics. There's no question about that.
the granularity, the resolution, the confidence that we have in being able to cast these things in mathematical formalisms is stymied by the unknowns. We can be as precise as we want and then realize, oh, wow, we left out 80% of what's actually affecting the phenomenon. Yes, there's a profound randomness, especially in
Cell mutation. I've read something you've written on this. Is that just the limits? Let me just interrupt myself quickly to share that passage with you. Doug writes,
appear random across individual cells within a population. Some cells might divide into two cells sooner or later than other cells under the same conditions, while other cells in that population will not divide at all.
Similarly, some cells within a population might be killed by a drug sooner than or later than other cells, whereas others are not killed in the very same treatment. Is that just the limits of our knowledge so far, our perception of randomness, or is it something more fundamental?
Well, there's two different things. So one is what I was speaking of a moment ago, and that is just things we don't know. And so for things we don't know, one way to treat them is...
if you're trying to cast some kind of laws mathematically, is to treat them as random inputs. Say, we don't know what's going on, so something else might intervene and perturb the system, and we'll just assign it random numbers so that we can accommodate things that might happen. That's more unknown. Randomness, that happens all the time, whether it's in things like mutations or things like even molecular reactions within cells, so molecules.
You know, there's a couple types of cell phenomena we've worked on that are fascinating in their randomness. One is cell death, that you can have identical cells all sitting side by side, give them a treatment that should lead to them dying.
And some will die fast, some will die slow, some will still remain. And it has to do with, the number of people who have shown this, is differences in the reactions happening that lead to death. And that can't be chalked up to something unknown. We know those reactions, but they can take place at rates that are
on the average something, but sometimes faster, sometimes slower, and so sometimes it leads to the cells dying and sometimes it leads to cells not dying. Migration is another one. Your immune cells, your vascular cells, your neurons are programmed to move to useful locations to fight off infections, say, or to make neuronal connections or to form blood vessels.
But there's an intrinsic element of randomness in there because they're sensing small numbers of molecules that impinge on their surface and again induce reactions that say, oh, I'm going to turn this way or I'm going to turn that way.
And those are random in nature because sometimes, even though the cells are bathed in these myriad of molecules, there's a few more that impinge on this side than that side, and the cell turns that way, even though 90% of its compatriots will turn the other way. So those are things where there's nothing unknown about the biochemistry, what's going on, but there is randomness or stochasticity
that plays out in what looks like a different phenomenology. The cell dies, it doesn't. Dies faster, dies slower. It turns this way, turns that way. And that's intrinsic randomness in biochemistry that we know.
The seeming randomness in the natural world has suggested to some a godless universe. We talked about this from the perspective of mathematics and physics in our episode last season titled Beautiful Science with celebrated theoretical physicist Ard Louis. We'll put links in the show notes. But I wanted to know what Doug made of randomness at the biological level and what this tells us about God himself.
and even miracles. So stay with us. 68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.
It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.
There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Tarat.
It is simply untrue to say that there was no science before the Renaissance. Once medieval scholars got their hands on the work of the classical Greeks, they developed systems of thought that allowed science to travel far further than it had in the ancient world.
Universities where academic freedom was guarded from royal interference were first founded in the 12th century. These institutions have always provided scientific research with a safe home. Even Christian theology turned out to be uniquely suited to encouraging the study of the natural world, because this was believed to be God's creation. Today, when we talk about science, we have in mind a clear and specific meaning. We picture a laboratory where researchers are carrying out experiments.
But the word science once had a much broader definition than it does now. The word comes from scientia, which means knowledge in Latin. Science encompassed all intellectual disciplines, including politics, theology and philosophy. Theology was, famously, the queen of them all. Quoted from God's Philosophers, How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science by James Hannam.
Okay, so concepts like the laws of nature and randomness inevitably, well, at least for the philosophically minded, lead us to questions of theology and God. And you've been relatively open about your Christian faith. Does your Christian faith come into play at all in your work, or do you compartmentalize science and Christianity?
I don't compartmentalize at all. To me, Christianity is 24-7. It just should be how we live and be part of everything we do. This conversation, you know, my breakfast with my wife, my meetings with my students after this, the research work. I would say the main place it enters, I think you alluded to this earlier, is just the fascination I feel. I love studying biology, living organisms, life.
It's just fascinating how they work. We talk about the immune response, and there's many different types of cells in the immune response, and some are programmed to respond to some kinds of things and not others, and vice versa, and they choreograph their interactions with each other. Inside each one of them are these intricate reactions that tell them, depending on what they see out there, they should do this, and that'll inform their neighbors.
It's just fascinating how living organisms work. So what I find is often I'm reading scientific papers written by other people, learning what they've discovered.
And I feel compelled to worship. Say, you know, my Lord, this is, what a fascinating world you've created for us. So that's where it just enters in all the time. I mean, it sounds very much like those first 16th, 17th century scientists who thought they were reading God's second book or something like that. Yeah, I think we're doing that in biology day by day. Yeah.
Some of my skeptical listeners, and I have a lot of skeptical listeners, might point out that you medical scientists are way more reliable than God on the healing front. So they might want me to ask you, do you, you know, as a scientist, do you really believe in miracles? How could you possibly think about the supernatural within the rational scientific framework you must exist in?
Two things. Let me give a little preface first, and that is one thing that I think is unfortunate in the lay public is this impression somehow that medicine is infallible and perfect and always knows the right thing to do.
Treatment had no effect, rules out endometriosis, and her hair sample was negative for residue drugs. This woman lived in the fast lane until six months ago. Maybe we're missing something. She admitted drug use. Doubt she's holding out on her days as an asbestos miner. Cryoglobulinemia might account for the symptoms. Except for the one you missed. There's no change in her condition. I'm not talking about a new symptom. I'm talking about one that presented six months ago. Look, she's nuts, but we can't just give her 10 cc's of atheism and send her home. Religion is a symptom of irrational belief and groundless hope.
altered mental status, on the other hand, is a symptom of porphyria. Shouldn't develop uncontrollable anger, crying... That's Dr. Greg House, Hugh Laurie's famously cantankerous and brilliant MD at the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. In this scene, he's proving that religion is a symptom of some underlying sickness.
Cool story. House famously goes around offering brilliant rapid-fire diagnoses and showing disdain for those who don't know what he knows. It's a pretty judgy series, and maybe that's the attraction. We feel simultaneously blown away by House's big brain and transfixed by the unstoppable power of science.
But Doug says one of pop culture's greatest myths is the infallibility of medical science. How can that be when I just talked a few minutes ago about how much we don't know? So to me, it's amazing how well medicine works, whether it's surgery, whether it's drugs, whether it's other types of interventions, stents and arteries.
It's amazing they work as well as they do with how little we know. And what troubles me about it is then often the lay public gets frustrated then when something goes wrong. Okay. Oh, there was this adverse reaction.
Oh, how horrible. They must have covered up all this information because they didn't want anybody to know about it. No, it's really hard and we don't really understand everything perfectly and we don't know enough to get it right all the time. So anyway, medicine works, I think, marvelously, but people shouldn't get the impression that it's somehow omnipotent because there's so many things we don't understand and doctors are doing the best they can.
Yeah, I guess I'm getting at within that universe in which you inhabit, the medical science world, do you still believe in the supernatural? What place can you give to the supernatural? Yeah, absolutely. This is one of the questions I'm most intrigued by. And I wrote an article with a pastor friend a few years ago that was more an exploration of our own thinking. It wasn't an article that said,
We know how to view this. Let us teach you how to view this question. It was more, wow, we think this is a really important question and we haven't seen too much written on it. So we're going to just try to ponder it ourselves. And the question is...
The article Doug's talking about is called Medicine and Miracles, Cancer and Cures. In it, Doug and Pastor Michael Burbeck consider the complicated intersection between science and faith. And the idea they're most interested in discussing is the way human medical practice relates to the transcendent actions of God in the treatment of disease and injury.
The science behind pills and the faith behind prayers. How do they work together? It's a great piece. So, yes, of course, we'll put a link in the show notes. And the question is, what is the relationship between medicine and human science?
And so if I have to go to the doctor and get treated and the doctor says you should take this drug, I say, okay, good. Give me the prescription and I'll follow it and I expect good things to happen. Even though I might read the label and say, well, here's some of the potential side effects. At the same time, I will ask my friends to pray for me and I will pray. And what will I be praying for? Well, a couple of things. Obviously, I want to have a good outcome.
I'd like to be healed of whatever the ailment is. And of course, regardless of what happens, pray for God's presence that I would feel peace and my behavior and so forth. But so to me, what I realized was I can do these two things simultaneously. I can pursue therapeutics myself.
and work with biotech and pharma companies and clinicians to try to improve treatments. And at the same time, if I'm taking a treatment or if any of my colleagues is taking a treatment, I can pray for them, believing that God can also be present and guide the outcome of that treatment. Where we got to in this article was really the key resolution is back to the randomness you were speaking of, that there's so much room for God to work
in the outcomes of when we do our best with our medicine. The examples I gave before, that some cells might die in response, you know, tumor cells, some fraction might die, some fraction might not. Metastasis of the tumor cells, which is migration to the wrong places, some might migrate to the wrong place, some might not. And there's so much randomness in those responses
of those cells, I can very easily see there's plenty of room for God to emphasize the randomness in one direction or another. Then on the whole, the statistical distributions are not violated, but in specific instances, the randomness
random numbers generated and selected to guide the behavior in terms of chemical reaction rates and so forth may predominantly reside here and lead to this outcome versus another. That's sort of where we came to. Yeah. And with that essay in mind, I want to ask you my next question because you quote the famous physicist priest John Polkinghorne in that article. I want to read the quote and then ask you a question. Polkinghorne said, recent advances in science
point to an openness and flexibility within physical processes, not only at the microscopic level of quantum theory, but the macroscopic level of large systems. They began to offer hope of some understanding of how both we ourselves and also God can exercise our wills in the physical world. This is picking up on what you just said, but is this saying that God avoids breaking the primary laws, but likes to play in the spaces in between?
Yeah, interesting question. And that goes to your earlier casting of it as what about miracles? And there may be a sharp categorical distinction there. It may just be qualitative that intervening in the stochasticity and the randomness and influencing the outcome that way, that doesn't
appear to violate any laws, but it was just unlikely. Just a quick chime here. Stochastic means lacking a predictable pattern. A stochastic process is just a random one. Watching stochastic behavior in diseased cells is what gets Doug animated. That could be a miracle if it's so unlikely, so, so, so unlikely that everybody is astounded. Wow, we really...
this was a desperation treatment and it works in less than 1% of people, but you had no choice and there we go. So when does it actually become a miracle that this is astounding? We just couldn't imagine this happening. And I certainly believe that is feasible too, because after all,
If the fundamental premise of Christianity is that God created the universe and everything in it, and the laws we speak of are descriptions of how things have been set up to operate, those are laws that his design generated, and there's no reason why he couldn't suspend them any time he felt like it, that it was important for his purposes.
So I certainly believe that that's feasible. What I'm saying is that there's, I think, even many more instances of where God has intervened that we don't even maybe notice and call it a miracle. You just say, well, okay, I'm sure glad we got the good outcome there. You know, 60% of people do fine and 40% don't. Okay, we got the 60%. That's good. And there's plenty, I think, God is...
continually intervening in those spaces. Many people see religion as a function of the gaps in scientific knowledge. So the more science discovers, the less room there is for God, God of the gaps, etc. I'm guessing that's not how you see it. No, that's, yeah, I've obviously encountered that reasoning. And not only I don't see it that way,
I hesitate to actually say this because I haven't thought through it. But the more I learn, at least about biology, the more I'm fascinated and the more it points to me about a creator. So I'd say as gaps diminish, I'm even in a more profound wonder and worship. Thomas Aquinas would agree with you. But I won't be quite so hesitant. It's not the gaps in our knowledge. It's the knowledge that tells us there's a mind behind it. Yes, that's the way I view things.
Not many cancer patients get a front row seat to the research that could one day save their life. Give me goosebumps. Martina McGrath was diagnosed with lung cancer in March.
That's a seven news report in what news producers might call a classic second break story. After a first break full of things that explode and bleed, news bulletins often move to things that are more thoughtful, like scientific breakthroughs and miracle cures. Existing treatments are like atomic bombs, destroying both sick and healthy cells. This vaccine is more like a sniper.
Only attacks the cancer. The first clinical trial results are promising. Like Doug Laufenberger, the man behind this Aussie breakthrough sees medical science as an expression of his love for the creator. It's Professor Bruce Robinson of the University of Western Australia, where they're at the forefront in the search for a cancer vaccine.
Bruce was an elite sportsman, Aussie rules, award-winning author and West Australian of the Year. He and his wife, Jackie, are also dear friends of ours. And I see Bruce as something of a mentor. In fact, one of my books is dedicated to him. So I thought I'd phone a friend. Bruce, can you explain your research? I mean, I could give it an attempt to
You sort of analyze the DNA of cancer patients and then you design a vaccine that somehow targets just the cancer cells. But I'm probably wrong. So just tell me exactly what you do. No, that's pretty much it. That's implausible. Well, it is, as you might imagine, extraordinarily difficult. So, for example, identifying the mutations in a cancer cell, given that there are six billion letters in your genetic code,
finding the mutations, the spelling errors in what would be 10,000 books is what we have to do. And then of those mutations, we have to find the ones that we think the immune system would best respond to. Anyway, so we do that using AI-driven all sorts of algorithms and a whole team of people. We make vaccines and then we give it to patients. And the basic idea
is that the immune system should fight mutations because they should look like viruses, foreign, but it doesn't. So we wake up the immune system and we force it to mount an attack. The other week I saw one of the patients because the regular doctor was away and I said to her, "Got any side effects?" She said, "None, except one."
The first injection you gave me, no problem at all. But the second, third, fourth and fifth, I get this great big red lump in my arm. And I went, yay. And you said, why are you so excited? I said, it proves that the first injection had no red lump. So you had no immune response to your mutations. And then we made it happen with our vaccine. I said, this is like a spiritual moment for a
doctor who's a scientist been working in this for 20 years. We made your immune response wake up and mount an attack capable of killing the cancer cell. That's what we do. Is it only working on certain kinds of cancer at the moment? Or is that where the hope is? Or is it possible one day that this is a kind of an approach to all cancers? I think the latter, John, but we don't know. I mean, I think that
Within maybe 10 or 20 years, we'll be able to cure a lot of the cancers that at the moment are incurable. Breast cancer, advanced lung cancer, bowel cancer. And this approach may be a key to that, but we just don't know. But I mean, all cancers are caused by mutation. So this could be actually applicable.
to all cancers. But whether it would be effective in all cancers, we don't know. I mean, 9 million people die every year around the world from cancer. So there's a lot of people that we could help. You've been doing this kind of science for a while. Tell my listeners how you feel about the wonder of science. Because when I think of you, Bruce, I think of you as someone who's still like a kid in a lolly shop when it comes to science. When I was a medical student...
Early on in my medical student years, I used to laugh at all the Christians going to Christian unions and, you know, all that sort of stuff. But I started to study anatomy and physiology, and I had a sense of awe and wonder about the human body. I really did. I thought, it's hard to imagine that this is an accident.
And now, all these years later, here we are digging deep into the human genome and looking at people's DNA and all sorts of incredibly high-tech things, a very deep dive into how the body works. I still have the same sense of awe and wonder that I had back then. It is astonishing, really, that human beings exist and that they all work so well. Yeah, I mean, you're a living example of something we often say on this podcast. It isn't
All the things we don't scientifically understand that leave room for God. It's the fact that we're finding regularity and rationality and, you know, sense in the universe and in the human mind. That is the space where God is. It's not the God of the gaps. It's the fact that we understand so much that is so incredible. Yeah.
Yeah, so I go to a lot of scientific meetings and drink wine and beer with various colleagues. And one of the things I notice is the argument for Christianity from science is actually quite compelling. It's not a done deal. It is, after all, faith, but it's very compelling. So what I watch, John, is why people reject such a possibility. And it is not a scientific rejection. It's that they are floundering around looking for some other way to think about it, whether it's multiverses or all sorts of things.
So I sit there and I ponder as I watch them talking, not what they think, but why they feel the need to think that way. Why they have to try and look under all sorts of other stones rather than taking the plunge. It's a very compelling argument, the current status of science and Christianity, the Christian view of life. I have to ask you, though, as someone who's looking into the darkness,
every day, you know, yes, there's the wonder of science, but there's also the darkness of cancer. I mean, I can hardly imagine what it's like to think about stuff that's going wrong at the cellular level every day. So how do you cope might be the best word rather than explain. How do you cope as a Christian believer with the just the darkness and wrongness of cancer?
Yeah, pretty much, John. Well, maybe I just take you into my consulting room for a moment to what I do. So I've had to break the bad news to people that they've got cancer and are going to die. Probably. I don't know. I counted it up recently. It's hundreds and hundreds of times. Hard to be accurate. Maybe 500 times.
It is the most poignant thing a doctor can do with their patient. Usually it's a husband or wife sitting there. One of them's got the bad news. They're going to die. They're not going to see their kids grow up, not going to walk them down the aisle. They hold hands and they cry. And sometimes I cry too, to be honest. And two things happen. One is possibly trivial, but nevertheless, it does drive me forward in my research. You know, it's the human beings that I might help. And I had a 21 year old
man in my office last week with his mum and dad sitting there wringing their hands with fear. And, you know, you just want to get driven forward. And our research has already helped lots and lots of people live longer lives. So that's one thing. But really, as a Christian, to be honest, I consider it a privilege. Most people don't get told that news very well. There's a best practice to doing it. And I've learned what it is. I'm not saying I'm perfect, but there is a best practice that really helps them.
And what I found is that practice is essentially a Christian practice where you like Jesus to people. You reach out in compassion to them. And most doctors find that so difficult that they sort of push them out of the room pretty quickly. And it's kind of the front end where you're breaking the news and you've got to help them to think through how they're going to talk to the children and how they're going to spend the rest of their time.
is a very deep, deep thing. And so I find it a privilege. Occasionally, a patient will say to me, you know, if I get up, especially I've had a few tears myself, as they walk out, I put my hand on their shoulder and I say, look, you know, all the best. I'll see you next week. We'll talk some more, come back with some questions. We can talk about how to tell the kids and what have you. And occasionally they say, well, Bruce, this is obviously shattering for us, but it's obviously hard for you. So how do you cope? And I say to them,
I just consider this a privilege to be here at this moment to try to help you through this. I want to drill down though, just briefly. I mean, why doesn't it damage your faith in divinity behind the universe? Strangely, it strengthens it because one of the things, there's a few things I think that distinguish Christianity from other religions. And one of them is that we embrace suffering. I mean,
It's part of life. It's how we grow. It's the mathematics of Christian growth that you grow a whole lot more from suffering, as terrible as it is. And God doesn't promise. There's no sign outside the valley of the shadow of death that says detour. All he does is promise to be there with you. And that gives people a personal experience of God. And of course, Jesus suffered as well. I mean, he could have like in the Garden of Gethsemane. He had to die, right? We accept that. He could have just got stabbed and bled to death in the Garden of Gethsemane. He suffered.
And God, you know, allowed his son to suffer. This is part of the equation of Christianity. And because I've seen so much of it, I can see how it works. As terrible as it is, I can see how it works. Bruce has actually written a whole book on medicine and suffering. It's called Behind the Tears. Highly recommended. But for now, let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you.
Marianne was a local Jewish woman in Galilee whose daughter, Yaitha, was struck down by a terrible fever. In the ancient world, this was often a death sentence.
Marianne went to a Jewish holy man and asked for a special blessing. The sage prepared an amulet, a kind of good luck charm with special words expertly written out. And these were to be said repeatedly over Jaietha in the hope that God would hear and heal her.
Marianne could never have imagined that centuries later we would find her amulet on the eastern side of Lake Galilee. I've viewed it several times in the small but beautiful Golan Heights Museum. And you've been with me, haven't you, Director Mark?
The first time I saw it was with you. Yeah, I remember it well, and I know what you're going to say now. Yeah, of course you do. We catch a glimpse in this amulet into the real-life terror of illness in the ancient world and of a parent's longing for the welfare of the child. Here are the words translated from Aramaic.
I'm not making this up, by the way.
In the name of I AM WHO I AM, Amen, Amen, Silah. A good amulet to drive out the fever and the shiver and the hectic fever from Yaitha, the daughter of Maryan. In the name of Cariel, Kaziel, Zariel, Sissah, Sissah, Sissah, Sissah, Sissah, Sissah. In the name of K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K.
And it goes on. The strange repetition of nonsensical words and letters here was part of a widespread belief at the time that specially crafted incantations could win the favour of the Almighty. The contrast with Jesus of Nazareth could hardly be greater.
For one thing, Jesus explicitly critiqued this kind of praying. In his introductory remarks to the so-called Lord's Prayer, Jesus said,
I would love to have seen a debate between Jesus and the holy man who gave Marianne her amulet.
But more than that, instead of complicated prayers and blessed trinkets, Jesus in the Gospels simply spoke and people were healed. On one occasion, as Jesus was preaching in the synagogue in Capernaum, a man said to be demon-possessed screams out, "'What do you want of us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?'
Jesus simply says, be quiet. And the man falls down instantly in his right mind. No rituals, no amulets, just a word. And then we're told Jesus leaves the synagogue and he goes to the home of Peter, one of his key disciples. And Peter's mother-in-law is sick in bed with a fever.
Jesus speaks a word and she's immediately well. In fact, the text says she gets right up and makes everyone dinner. There was no rest for women in the ancient world or much today either.
By sundown, a virtual doctor's waiting room has sprung up right in the middle of Capernaum, we're told. The whole town is at the door with their sick. And with a word or a touch, Jesus heals them all. Go check it out toward the end of Luke chapter 4.
This is striking in an ancient context. I talked a couple of episodes ago about the evidence for Jesus' healings compared with the evidence for other miracle workers in the ancient setting. Check out the episode on B. Spoiler, there is a weird amount of historical evidence for Jesus alone.
But my point here is that while healing in the ancient world very often took the form of magic, amulets, special words, sleeping in temples and so on, the striking thing about Jesus was that it all apparently happened with a word or a touch.
The impression we're left with is that this is someone who doesn't have to manipulate the physical forces through the intermediary of spells, incantations and placation rituals. This is someone in charge of the physical forces. It's like they're his. You can press play now. Good morning, Dr. McConnell. Good morning, James. This whole process started with the Lazarus Serum. The goal here is simple, to bring someone back from the dead.
That's the Lazarus effect. The sort of movie I'd rather pay director Mark to watch and analyse than watch it myself.
And Mark loved this film. Absolutely loved it. It's like in his top three. Oh, gosh. It was awful. In it, a group of medical researchers, Mark assures me, discover a way to bring dead patients back to life.
With predictably tragic consequences, it seems that some things are just meant to stay dead. The movie is maybe one of them. But The Lazarus Effect is not the only film in which questionable scientists bring someone back to life. Think of Flatliners, Reanimator, and of course, Frankenstein, just to name a few. All of them in director Mark's vast collection of VHS tapes.
Resurrection is an enduring theme. It's not just for horror films. And Doug reckons there's even room in his intellectual world for this great miracle. I'm sure some of my listeners will want me to ask, but surely not the resurrection of Jesus. You're a specialist in what cells do, right? Cells, they die. They don't come back to life. Yeah. And of course, one has to hit that head on because that's
the central fact of Christianity. But to me, it all hung together because if everything we know was created by this God, all the laws that we know, all of life itself, that he could bring
not only intervene, but manifest himself in any way he chose because the laws are his. The universe is his, the earth is his, living beings were his. And if he chose to appear in human flesh, die a human death, but then resurrect into now the transcendent life, how could I say that's impossible for the God who created everything? So I've never had a problem with the resurrection. It's very C.S. Lewis-
of reasoning, isn't it? I mean, he said immaterial things became material and became animate. We all believe that happened. And if there's a God, who's to say a dead body can't come back to life? Oh, yeah. And he was so articulate. And I read ravenously a lot of the C.S. Lewis books. When I went off to graduate school, then I was very, very young in my faith. And fortunately...
One of my PhD mentors, an English gentleman named Rutherford Aris, was a very strong Christian and loved C.S. Lewis and the others. He would give me lots of C.S. Lewis books. In fact, after his death, he kind of bequeathed me the C.S. Lewis part of his library, which was very meaningful to me. So that was a big part of growing up in my faith. Finally, Doug, do you feel there's a disdain
toward robust Christian faith in the scientific community? Or is that just a cliche of popular consciousness? I think there's a distribution that may fit along the following kind of spectrum. At one extreme, yes, that there's disdain that Doug Laufenberger or Ross Picard or Ian Hutchinson or any of my colleagues here
who profess to be scientists but also profess to be Christians, there is something truly profoundly wrong with them. There is some intellectual discord that we haven't figured out, and we are to be pitied for that. But I'd say that's an extreme. I think what's more common is maybe puzzlement, where many colleagues will have the view, well, that's just peculiar science.
He, she seems to be a pretty good scientist. You know, they're reputable, they do good work, you know, we respect them. Yet they profess this other thing that to us seems to not make sense. That's just peculiar. But we can't really disdain them because we respect them as a scientist. So that's what's much more common is just we're a little bit peculiar.
And do you think this is sociological in the sciences? You know, it is such a cliche that science is against religion, or is it something more fundamental? Oh, I never, you know, you never want to attribute motives to anybody else because I hate to have that done to me. I guess what I would say is sometimes if there's things that I disagree with, that I view vehemently differently,
It's easy for me to then decide there's something actually profoundly problematic with that, that that can't be respected, that there's got to be some other motivation for it, that you just can't be taken at face value. And so I think that can happen in return. Some people say, well, this Christianity makes no sense to me, for somebody who's also a scientist.
There has to be something that's profoundly wrong or motivated in problematic ways. So I think whenever we disagree with somebody, it can be easy to jump to undermining them as a person rather than just disagreeing with their view of the world. ♪♪♪
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Next episode, we're talking about one of the Bible's most confusing and hard to read books, the book of Revelation. We'll be looking at its misconceptions and how reasonably to interpret the book in light of the 21st century and its pandemics, political upheaval and economic turmoil. Something to look forward to. See ya.
Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark VHS King Hadley. Sophie Hawkshaw is on socials and membership. Alistair Belling is a writer and researcher. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. And Lindy Leveston remains my wonderful assistant. Editing, of course, by Richard Humwey. Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com, letting the truth out.
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