If God wanted us to…

I had a bit of a chat with an “If God wanted us to…” person this morning. As you might guess, it was about vaccination. She knew I had received a first dose of the Pfizer vaccine, and this was her last-ditch attempt to prevent me from sinking even deeper into “heresy” by going for the second one.

 The “if..” argument must certainly be as old as the belief in a deity. I can easily imagine a prehistoric person saying to that senseless neighbour of his, the one who foolishly started mounting on the backs of horses, “If God wanted us to ride a horse, he would not have given us legs.” But the “if…” argument apparently still has something compelling about it and that is why even intelligent, well-educated people still use it today. After all, if you can get God on your side of an argument, that’s an even better advantage than playing on home ice!

It is interesting to note that the “If…” argument is often used by anti-vaccers who deeply believe in alternative medicine. Many of them are themselves health care providers. It is rather strange that they think God would not agree with scientific interventions but fully supports their own interventions in healing people. I wonder how an acupuncturist, for example, would react to someone telling him, “If God wanted us to poke needles under our skin, he would have made us porcupines!”

I, for one, am grateful that the cardiologist who saved my life 30 years ago was not an “If…” person. Had he hesitated to treat me because of a theological doubt that set him wondering, “If God wanted me to inject this substance that will unclog that blocked artery he would have…”, I would not have survived long enough to hear the end of his sophisticated argument.

What the “If…” argument always wrongly implies, is that God cannot possibly act through scientific development and technology, or any other such rational means of bringing about positive change in our world. That is obviously uh… I am searching for the technical term for such a perspective… ah yes, bunk!