Mommy Brain

How could a good God allow such a blemished world to exist? Brand had responded to my complaints one by one. Disease? Did I know that of the twenty-four thousand species of bacteria, all but a few hundred are healthful, not harmful? Plants could not produce oxygen, nor could animals digest food without the assistance of bacteria. Indeed, bacteria constitute half of all living matter. Most agents of disease, he explained, vary from these necessary organisms in only slight mutations.

What about birth defects? He launched into a description of the complex biochemistry involved in producing one healthy child. The great wonder is not that birth defects occur but that millions more do not. Could a mistake-proof world have been created so that the human genome with its billions of variables would never err in transmission? No scientist could envision such an error-free system in our world of fixed physical laws.

“I’ve found it helpful to try to think like the Creator,” Brand told me. “My engineering team at Carville has done just that. For several years our team worked with the human hand. What engineering perfection we find there! I have a bookcase filled with surgical textbooks that describe operations people have devised for the injured hand, different ways to rearrange the tendons, muscles, and joints, ways to replace sections of bones and mechanical joints - thousands of surgical procedures. But I know of no procedure that succeeds in improving a normal hand. For example, the best materials we use in artificial joint replacements have a coefficient of friction one-fifth that of the body’s joints, and these replacements only last a few years. All the techniques correct the deviants, the one hand in a hundred that is not fuctioning as God designed. After operating on thousands of hands, I must agree with Isaac Newton: ‘In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.’”

I kept proposing exceptions, and Brandt dealt with each. Even at its worst, he continued, our natural world shows evidence of careful design. Like a tour guide at an art museum, he excitedly described the beautiful way torn muscle filaments reconnect, “like the teeth of interlocking combs,” after an injury. “And do you know about the ductus arteriosus? A bypass vessel, it routes blood directly to a developing fetus’s extremities, instead of to the lungs. At the moment of birth, suddenly all blood must pass through the lungs to receive oxygen because now the baby is breathing air. In a flash, a flap descends like a curtain, deflecting the blood flow, and a muscle constricts the ductus arteriosus. After performing that one act, the muscle gradually dissolves and gets absorbed by the rest of the baby. Without this split-second adjustment, the baby could never survive outside the womb.”

from Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church by Phillip Yancey