The Republican National Convention (RNC) and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump have brought a renewed focus on God in the American public discourse.
Both of my parents grew up as religious Jews in Germany. My mother continued as such in her new home in New York, while my father lived with a non-religious uncle in Sydney, Australia, and became himself non-observant. When they met in Chicago, they decided that they would have a Conservative Jewish home, and my brother and I grew up in a mostly secular home that did include celebrating the High Holidays, bar mitzvahs, and not bringing pork products into the home.
My wife and I are something known in the Jewish world as “baalei teshuva,” which is the title for non-religious who become religiously observant. I started my path during my doctoral studies in Madison, Wisconsin. It was a challenging transition that included no longer rowing or going to the lab on Saturday, not eating my roommate’s delicious cooking, and making a life based on Sabbath observance, kosher eating and learning to pray and study traditional Torah texts. I started wearing a baseball cap until I mustered the courage to wear a kippah in public. One day, when coming home from the lab, I was wrestling with this new direction in my life. Was it the right way to go? Was I making one big mistake? I asked God for a sign—not a good idea. The words had barely left my mouth when a B-52 pigeon released its entire payload on my hat.
God had always been a central part of the American story. One can read the writings of the Founding Fathers or look into the founding documents to see mentions of God everywhere. The rights that we enjoy are described as God-given and thus not subject to abrogation by any human government. Politicians from Washington forward mentioned God’s great bounty and help in creating and maintaining the United States. Roosevelt tied America’s ultimate victory over the Empire of Japan as being tied to God’s help. President Trump mentioned God five times during his brief January 2017 inauguration address.
Even with all of the above, religious observance and belief in God have been in decline in the US and other Western countries. If one looks at many of the hot-button issues in the US, those who support the extreme side are primarily secular individuals and organizations. The left dreams of a completely secular society in which any mention of God or humans’ relation to Him are erased. What is important to the left? Some issues:
*Trans mania that flies in the face of God creating two sexes, male and female.
*Climate hysteria not only ignores scientific facts that do not support its extreme views but flies in the face of God giving the world to mankind for its development and benefit. The left wants mankind to go backwards in food availability, comfort and travel.
*The open border and the damage it creates via millions of poor newcomers who destroy local communities and the drugs that enter and destroy American lives can only be understood through a lack of belief in God and the blessings he gave to the American people. If they felt that America was special, they wouldn’t let the whole world in as they do.
“Belief” in God—or anything else—is the opposite of actual definitive knowledge. If one were to say that he believes that the Yankees lost last Tuesday, he would be ridiculed, because the outcome of the game is known and easily verifiable. Belief in God has meaning because one could be wrong. President Trump himself said that the few millimeters between a bloody ear and instant death could either be from God or luck. Belief in God demands that there can always be another explanation. Without it, there can be no reward for believing in God and no proof that one is on God’s side.
While belief is something that involves the possibility of being wrong, there is nothing improper in better understanding our world to see God’s role in it. My degrees are in Biochemistry. Below are a few biological facts from a short science book I wrote. There is no debate on any of these facts. They are literature numbers accepted throughout the scientific world:
*Estimated average number of cells in the human body: 37.2 trillion
*Length of DNA in a person: if all DNA was placed end-to-end, its length would be enough for over 20,000 round-trips to the moon and back
*Total length of blood vessels (veins and arteries) in your body: 60,000 miles
*Alveoli, the 700 million little air sacs in the lungs that allow for oxygen to get into the blood, if spread out would cover a surface area of 750 square feet
*Number of genes in the DNA: 20,000 spread over 46 chromosomes
*Fastest enzyme (an enzyme is a protein that can perform one or more chemical reactions): carbonic anhydrase at 1 million reactions per second
*Estimated number of enzymatic reactions per second in the body: 1027—more than the number of stars in the universe
*Number of heart beats from birth to 80 years old: over 3 billion
In my book, there is a reference to a scientific source for every statistic above. There are generally two possibilities to understanding these data: it just happened or it came from God. One who believes that matter just appeared and somehow became more complex and eventually became alive and after a lot of time produced a human in my mind is fooling himself. The incredible, documented performance of our bodies is a reflection of an all-powerful Creator. In our lab at Harvard, a Nobel laureate tried to reduce a large enzyme to a much smaller protein molecule with the same chemical activity. He never succeeded.
With many articles attributing President Trump’s miraculous brush with death in Pennsylvania to God and speakers at the RNC who believe in traditional families and values, God is appearing more frequently in the national conversation. God has gone nowhere. The only question is whether we will get closer to Him and move back to what the US traditionally was or will we continue on the road to secular oblivion where a Supreme Court Justice can say with a straight face that she does not know what a woman is because she is not a biologist. The assault from the left on virtually every aspect of American life is ultimately a drive to make the US one nation no longer “under God” or indivisible.
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