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You will not find many Christians who deny to God the use of
means. The story goes, the river begins to rise, and the householder
is driven to the attic by the flood tide. A small boat piloted by a
neighbor cruises by, and the neighbor, seeing him peering through
the attic window, asks him, 'Do you want a lift?' 'No, thanks,' says
the man, 'I'm waiting for God to save me.' The neighbor's boat
putters off. A larger craft piloted by the firemen shows up; 'Here,
get in our boat!' they shout to the man, now perched atop the
roof-line. 'No, thanks,' he says, 'I'm waiting for God to save me.'
Last of all, a National Guard helicopter hovers overhead and drops
down a harness, but the man refuses to grab it, protesting, 'No
thanks, I'm waiting for God to save me!' The National Guardsmen
shrug and are off. Throughout the water keeps rising, and at last
the struggling, drowning man sinks to rise no more. He was a
Christian, though, and standing at last before the throne of God, he
protests, 'God, I specifically asked you to save me from drowning!'
'What do you want?' asks God. 'I sent you two boats and a
helicopter!' The story is intended as a joke, but no one has shared
the punch-line with this tribe of 'scientific' authors.
As we've seen, no sparrow falls to the ground without the Father:
"Are not two sparrows sold for a copper coin? And not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father’s will." (Matthew 10:29).
What this does not mean is that, 'gravity does not exist.'
Certainly if the sparrow fell to the ground, gravity played a role
in this event; a dead or injured sparrow in a zero-gravity
environment would not fall to the ground. And the fowler's blast,
hawk attack or illness must have worked their harm, to have caused
the sparrow to deviate from his flight plan. Jesus is not
saying that the sole and only cause for sparrow mortality is God's
wrath. All events which occur in this world are within God's
permissive will at the very least. People like Andrew Dickson
White adopt a reductive scheme of causation. Of, say, Aristotle's
four-fold understanding of causation, they leave standing only the
efficient cause, and only such efficient causes as are of material
nature. What motivates adoption of this model of the world, that it is
an immense field of dominoes each of whose fall is brought on by a shove
from the posterior domino? Whence comes this universe where there is
naught but atoms and the void? It is a mechanistic ideal, espoused
by some, but brought into full realization by no one ever:
"This is how Walter Charleton, writing in 1654,
summarized what would soon be called the mechanical philosophy. .
.'Consider we, that the General Laws of Nature, whereby she
produceth All Effects, by the Action of one and Passion of another
thing, as may be collected from sundry of our praecedent
Discertations, are these: (1.) That every Effect must have its
Cause; (2) That no Cause can act but by Motion; (3) That Nothing can
act upon a Distant subject, or upon such whereunto it is not
actually Praesent, either by itself, or by some instrument, and that
either Conjunct, or Transmitted; and consequently, that no
body can move another, but by contact Mediate, or Immediate, i.e. by
the mediation of some continued Organ, and that a Corporeal one too,
or by itself alone.'" (Quoted p. 513, The Invention of Science,
David Wootton, spelling as in the original).
This mechanistic, billiard-ball universe has been a dream, a
desideratum, but fell far short of achievement, even when its
goals were widely accepted. Charleton's 'Goads, Poles, Levers' are
absent even from Newton's gravity. They recede further into the
distance with time; quantum mechanics is like this even less than
Newtonian mechanics. Aristotle's scheme, by contrast, underlies many
an explanatory narrative to this day, in a far from tendentious way. When, in your morning stroll, you come across a new house
that wasn't there before, this demands an explanation. It didn't
come from nowhere! There is of course the material cause: without a
pile of bricks, and mortar to bind them together, no house would
have risen from the dirt. Then there is the formal cause, the
architect's plan,— even if only a contractor's sketch on the
back of an envelope. It's not a shapeless heap after all! Lest we forget, unless a work crew had shown up
when their presence was demanded, and laid brick to brick in a line,— the
efficient cause,— there would be no house. And without the
final cause, the homeowner's desire for more spacious quarters, the
process would never have got underway in the first place. I'm not
arguing in favor of that particular scheme, but to say, because
there are bricks, that therefore there is no architect, is a futile way to
argue: there is not one, and only one, cause for each entity, event,
or circumstance in this life. Certainly White is correct in pointing
out that poor sanitation plays a role in epidemics, as Christians
like Lister discovered, though it does not cause them; some of these
authors seem to want to return to the old miasma theory. Christians like Jenner and Pasteur saved many lives by their
discoveries. But to say that, because germs cause disease, therefore
prayer is futile, is missing the point in a monumental way. God's will
is not a contributing cause, because nothing happens outside of it;
but neither are micro-organisms uninvolved by-standers. And, by the
way, how many lives were lost to the miasma theory? Who answers for
those?
What went wrong with medicine? Its history is one of
massive underachievement, and it's difficult to see why. Far from
showing hostility to this venture, Christians
opened hospitals to provide nursing and medical care to the indigent,
but it's not clear whether, up until the middle of the nineteenth
century, these sufferers were really benefited by a doctor's care, more
than they were harmed. To this day, by some counts, medical mistakes are the third
leading cause of death; but the way they used to kill people wasn't by
'mistake.' Medicine, from its start among the Greeks, proposed to itself
the method of empiricism; indeed, 'Empiric' is an old name for a doctor.
And the theories that were adopted early on were faultlessly
materialistic, if that's what you're looking for. The theory of the four
humors ascribed as universal cause for disease an imbalance in the
body's quantities of blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. Therefore as
'therapy' they would bleed the patient, reducing the supposed excess. How many lives did they cut short by doing that? Even the father
of our country, George Washington, may have made an early exit thanks to
the learned doctors.
You cannot blame Christian doctrine for any of this, though they
do; the theory of the four humors, which predates the proclamation
of the gospel, is an instance of reductive materialism which has no
resonance with any Biblical theme. Its founders were pagans, as were
the founders of the Ptolemaic system of astronomy and many other
things they blame Christians for. 'Not invented here' is no excuse in
the eyes of these accusers; not only do they blame Christianity for
inherited secular science, but for superstitious folk beliefs and
practices they themselves realize were survivals of paganism.
Paganism, after all, is just as 'theological' as is Christianity.
Atheists have no concept of
moral accountability, so you'll never see an apology for all the
thousands of needless deaths caused by this misguided therapy. Nor will
you ever see an apology for any of the other unhelpful and unavailing therapies suggested by all
manner of false and discredited scientific theories, which now seem laughable.
At the time this out-of-control theorizing was taken seriously, and so
people died, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. Nor did self-policing
by the medical profession ever put an end to this kind of thing;
rather, the political process, from the outside, imposed on them the
discipline of the Food and Drug Administration. Where that agency
cannot reach, it's still the same old business as usual: Freudian
psychotherapy, a totally quack form of therapy that never cured
anyone of anything, although it swallowed millions of dollars,
caught on like lightning in the twentieth century. It had no
therapeutic efficacy whatsoever. Yet they cannot stop talking about how
brave and heroic they are, for making up nonsense, simply because the
nonsense is not religious:
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It
is difficult to imagine who the people are who would not perceive an
earthquake as a "geologic event," which it is by definition. The
guiding principle behind this thinking, to the extent that anyone is
thinking here, is that only those natural events can be traced to
God's hand which have no analogue, no precursor, no explanation. But it isn't only natural events contrary to law that reveal God's mighty
hand. The lawfulness of nature is itself testimony to its legislator, who
calls His creation by name: "He counts the number of the stars; He
calls them all by name." 
