Faith just fragments over time. Science has no sacred text. It is brutally challenged at all times. Faith has sacred texts - most thousands of years old. Challenging the texts themselves leads to rejection by the faith community, sometimes a violent rejection.

Science does not have saints. Scientists are respectful of the accomplishments of the past, but their greatest desire is overturning past models as new information becomes available or hypotheses are developed.

scientist believes he or she has demonstrated. That's the beauty of it. It's competitive - sometimes sharply so. The path to the Nobel Prize or an endowment-funded professorship is a new theory you publish that appears to be correct.

My work requires me to read a lot of journal articles about neuroscience research. Most of them are not useful, really. But, from time to time, someone reports some research that provides new insights that are valuable. The need to publish is strong out there in academia, which explains the sharp rise in the number of journals in most disciplines. It also means that finding the sharp needles in the haystack is more difficult.

Since most journal articles are hidden behind a paywall, except for their abstracts, it can get expensive to weed out the wheat from the chaff. Thank goodness for University libraries that grant online access to scholarly journals for their alumni. But, oh my goodness, there is a lot of publishing going on in most scientific disciplines.

This past week, I downloaded a dozen articles. Only one of them had anything useful in it. My favorite was one with an abstract that said one thing, while the actual research was about something completely different. How that got accepted for publication, I do not know, but the Ph.D. candidate who wrote it was deliberately deceptive in the abstract. I wasted about half an hour of my time. I won't be looking at that journal again for articles.

Science provides that. I am not at all comfortable with the dismissive "We aren't meant to understand" notion so common in religions, nor the whole "God's will" rationalization. I find that way of thinking particularly odious when used to give thanks for being spared some devastating event that affects others - your house survives a wildfire or flood, but your next door neighbor's does not, etc, etc. Or the whole idea that "God loves you so much he's testing you," by giving your child leukemia or allowing your spouse to be killed in a car crash (again, etc, etc).

I have been watching most of the March Madness games, and more than a few players and coaches have been attributing their victories to God. God didn't win those games - the very hard working college athletes did. I think that idea takes away from the credit that should go to the players.

I think blind faith is a way not to have to think for yourself, or to accept responsibility. Perhaps even a way to not have to fully grieve the loss of a loved one - "He/she is in a better place."

I had a young patient who was the eldest of 5 kids in a very fundamentalist family. During an exam of one of her sibling one time, she happened to sneeze, and piped up, "God must have wanted me to sneeze." I normally make no comments to such utterances, but I was unable to restrain myself. I said, "I think God might have bigger decisions than that to make. She was only 7, and already brainwashed. Her family stopped immunizing midway thru the usual shots for their 3rd child. The older 2 were fully protected. When I asked about the change of heart, the dad replied that their church had told them they shouldn't immunize. It was one of the husband-is-the-head-of-the-household brands of Christianity. The mom waited for me at the end of a work day one time, in the parking lot, sobbing because she wanted to get all the immunizations, but was not able to override her husband's dictates. I felt awful for her, but there was nothing I could do.

There's nothing in the Christian religion that says anything about such a thing. But, once you accept things by faith, you'll trust your pastor to advise you, rather than your medical professional. How sad that is. Truly.