There is a pretty good chance I’m going to offend some people today, but please give me the benefit of the doubt.
After a couple of minutes, I’m sure that we’ll all be back on the same page.
Here goes nothing: It has become irrefutably obvious that scientists are tearing down religious beliefs at a breathtaking pace.
Just take a look at the miracle cures in the New Testament. Science has provided the means to recreate all of them.
Leprosy and other diseases have commonplace cures. The invalid and crippled walk again thanks to doctors and medical devices, and the deaf can hear thanks to cochlear implants.
Antibiotic and antiviral drugs, vaccinations, prosthetics, and other treatments have conquered what was once so out of reach that people could only believe a son of a god was capable of such power.
Even death has been reversed with defibrillators for decades, provided the person isn’t dead for too long. A U.K. man completely recovered via resuscitation 70 minutes after cardiac arrest in 2013.
I Have Some Explaining To Do...
Though you may not believe it, I really do think I can dig myself out of this hole.
Science is constantly eroding religious beliefs, but that is just because of human nature.
People have a terrible habit of creating a “god of the gaps.” This concept, with a different wording, was introduced back in the 19th century by a Scottish evangelist named Henry Drummond.
The basic concept is that using divine intervention to explain the physical aspects of our world and the universe we don’t understand is not theologically sound. An omnipotent god is everywhere, and knowing how something works doesn’t take the god out of it.
Yet people have a nasty, fallacious tendency to invoke the divine when they truly are coming face to face with their own ignorance or incomprehension.
A prime example is Bill O’Reilly’s now notorious, “The tides come in, the tides go out. You can’t explain that” speech.
Gravity exerted by the moon explains that, and Isaac Newton explained the effect of gravity pretty well in the 17th century.
Newton himself wasn’t immune to the “god of the gaps” either.
He invented calculus (in his twenties) to explain planetary motion, but failed to handle the complex math behind the interactions of all six planets known in his day.
Newton invoked intervention by God to nudge the planets a bit and keep the orbits stable.
It took another 125 years for Pierre-Simon Laplace to expand on Newton’s work and prove divine intervention wasn’t required to understand why the planets and moons weren’t crashing together.
So really, this isn’t an attack on religion at all, just how it is improperly applied.
What I’m trying to do is show how far science has brought us, and point towards how truly groundbreaking our achievements are becoming.
Quite literally, to our ancestors who ascribed the divine to what they didn’t understand, scientists would be like gods walking amongst men.
All it takes is an insight by a brilliant man or woman to tear down beliefs about what is outside of our capacity to know or do.
The Blind Shall See
This brings us right back to where we started: how scientists are recreating cures once considered miraculously divine.
Here are a couple of examples to illustrate how this is progressing right now.
Prosthetics have existed for thousands of years — if you count wooden legs, hooks, and such — and electronic hearing aids have been widespread for about half a century.
Yet they hit a wall that was simply too complex for scientists to comprehend. They couldn’t truly interact with our brains.
We simply were unable to isolate and map complex brain signals, or come close to sending information back to a brain that made any sense to it.
After decades of work on the problem, scientists have begun to make true progress.
In the past, hearing aids simply amplified sound. This meant a certain threshold of hearing was necessary for hearing aids to do any good.
After a decade of research, a method was found to truly restore the ability to hear.
Using an implanted electrode and advanced software to translate sounds into a signal compatible with the inner ear, cochlear implants became commercially available in the mid 1990s.
Since then, cochlear implants have been given to over 324,000 patients worldwide. The deaf shall hear.
A little over a year ago, a U.S. Army staff sergeant became the first patient in trials that allow interaction between artificial limbs and the brain.
Sensors were implanted in the muscles on the remaining part of his arm. Tiny movements from the muscles were captured and sent wirelessly to a small computer worn on his waist to mimic nerve impulses.
This was the first time a prosthetic arm could truly move like a natural one by allowing three degrees of simultaneous movement: wrist rotation, individual finger movements, and lateral thumb movement. The crippled are healed.
Most recently, interaction between electronics and vision has become possible.
First, a camera captures a scene. The video is sent to a video processing unit to translate the data into a format that is compatible with the device and remaining cells in the eye.
An antenna sends this repackaged information to the glasses, which prompt small electrical signals from an electrode array implanted within an eye to create visual data for the patient.
This method bypasses damaged neurons in the eye, and allows those who have become blind to regain some of their sight. The blind shall see.
This progression of complexity shows how scientists are gradually unraveling one of the greatest mysteries of modern medicine — our minds — to accomplish seemingly miraculous feats.
All It Takes Is One Man
This progression also shows how profound of an impact one man can have on closing the gaps of what we can understand and do.
The same inventor is behind the cochlear implant, advanced bionic limbs, and restoration of sight that is on the cutting-edge of how we can design technology to interact with brains.
It doesn’t end there either. This inventor went from inventing power and energy systems for the military and NASA, to inventing a smaller and rechargeable pacemaker, to creating the insulin pump.
Along the way, he has founded 17 companies, and became an expert on how to commercialize his breakthroughs.
Nine have been acquired for $8 billion over the years.
The company he created for his breakthrough in restoring sight is sitting on 200 patents to protect his breakthrough. Plus, the company recently IPO’ed.
We live in truly amazing times. What once seemed to be exclusively in the realm of the supernatural and divine has been brought squarely into the realm of humanity.
Even when we can’t do it ourselves, we can put our money behind the people restoring senses and quality of life for millions. That, to me, seems almost miraculous on its own.
