Belief in a higher power should not be mocked

Believers deserve respect as science evolves, writes

“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” – Dr. Thomas Sowell

“And we are still debating and still questioning whether life was a divine intervention or whether it was coming out of a natural process,” said Gov. Gen. Julie Payette at the recent Canadian Science Policy Conference.

Her thoughts were endorsed by Justin Trudeau. However, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer replied, “It is extremely disappointing that the Prime Minister will not support Indigenous peoples, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Christians, and other faith groups who believe there is truth in their religion.

Premier Brad Wall was also critical: “I am concerned recent comments you made did not meet the standard of conduct that comes with your position.” He advised her “to avoid denigrating or mocking the many adherents of faiths that believe in a Creator.”

In fairness to the Governor General, I am not defending astrology or climate-change deniers. Unlike fundamentalist Americans, most Canadian Christians do not believe that the Earth was created in six days some 6,000 years ago.

However, according to a 2015 Angus Reid survey, two-thirds of Canadians do believe in a god. Religion is deemed important in the lives of more than 90 per cent of persons from the Philippines, India and Syria — the top three sources of migrants to Canada in 2016.

In 2005, my wife and I visited the Colosseum in Rome. Like most tourists, I mentally tried to put myself back nearly 2,000 years, and imagine how it was constructed with the equipment and tools available. Intelligent people lived then who felt that they existed in “modern” times. Yet they did not know the Earth was round or that it revolved around the sun. They did not conceive that there was such a thing as electricity, nor that there might someday be automobiles, airplanes and rockets. They did not foresee radio, television, the internet or a computer that one could hold in one’s hand. They could not think outside their box. The corollary is, what technology will our children and grandchildren take for granted that we cannot even imagine?

When I graduated from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1970 — again in what felt like “modern” times — I naively assumed that by then, all major diseases had been identified. The future would merely entail the development of new antibiotics, anti-cancer drugs, blood pressure medications, etc. as well as new diagnostic procedures.

In the late 1960s, if you had been examined by the top cardiologists in the world and they heard a click and murmur, they would not have known its full significance. With the development of echocardiography at that time, soon mitral-valve prolapse was widely recognized.

Beta-blocking medications were absolutely prohibited in patients in congestive heart failure until early trials in the mid-1970s. By the 1990s, lower doses of these drugs were found to be beneficial; they are now recognized mainstream therapy.

Several infectious diseases were totally unknown in 1970. They include Lyme disease, recognized in Connecticut in 1975, Legionnaire’s disease and Ebola virus, described in 1976, AIDS, first observed in the U.S. in 1981, SARS in 2002, and Zika in 2013.

It would have been heresy to postulate that peptic ulcer disease was sometimes related to an infectious agent. However, in 1982, H. Pylori, was identified and linked to gastritis and peptic ulcer disease.

I tell medical assistants at my clinic — many of whom are applying to medical school — that they should be prepared to unlearn and replace many of the “facts” that are initially imparted to them.

Scientific “facts” are forever evolving — sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly. Though predicted by Einstein in 1916, gravitational waves were not observed until February 2016. Yet as described above, sometimes “facts” in medicine or other branches of science can undergo a major change in just a few years.

Rarely phenomena elude explanation. Consider the behaviour of a supernova 500 million light years away, mentioned on the CBC website.

Those Canadians who hold religious beliefs should be respected, not mocked. It is hubris for scientists and politicians to reject and dismiss that which cannot be seen, touched or measured by our current technologies.

Ottawa physician Dr. Charles Shaver is chair of the section on General Internal Medicine of the Ontario Medical Association.