Dr. Diggs: Despite the fact that we are in the year 2000, and we have made a lot of advances in medicine, there’s still a lot that we don’t understand, and I can’t tell you that I understand this next one, but this is certainly evidence that there is more that we need to understand. That is, if a woman gets pregnant with a child, during that pregnancy in the United States, she has about a 10% chance of developing what we call ‘hypertension of pregnancy’. That is, she doesn’t normally have high blood pressure, but while she’s pregnant, she does. Now that can sometimes progress and be dangerous. If a woman gets pregnant by a different man the second time around, she has a 30% chance of developing hypertension during pregnancy. Now on the other hand, if this woman gets pregnant by the same father as from the first child, her chances of getting hypertension of pregnancy drops to 4%. This suggests that there is some sort of immunological reaction that’s happening on the sexual level. There is also an issue of bonding. During the last thirty years, we feel like we have conquered the problem of people having sex with more than one person in their lifetime. We are not talking about promiscuity, per se, we’re talking about what people generally find acceptable, serial monogamy. You are only with one person at a time, whether that time is a day, a week, a year, or even ten years. But what we have found out is that when a person participates in sex, especially a woman, it releases a chemical called oxytocin. Oxytocin is a chemical that people know about because it has to do with breast feeding and also has to do with the uterus contracting after a child is born so that the woman doesn’t bleed to death. But what we are also finding is that, because oxytocin is released during the sexual act, it creates a level of bonding to the person you have sex with. Now this is something we don’t have full understanding of, but there is very clearly a distinction there which relates to why sex is such a powerful thing. Some people look at it as something that is simply recreational, something you can do with anybody. But the fact is, yes you can do it with anybody, but the bottom line is, it does serve a purpose, and one of those purposes is bonding you to the person you are with. And that bonding creates a stable societal structure that allows us to thrive. When society goes into chaos, then usually society decays at the same time. And this has a biological basis, at least in part.

Dr. Rudd: We sometimes don’t realize that babies have actually been breathing for quite some time, but they’ve just not been breathing air. In fact, they’ve been practicing breathing, but they breathe amniotic fluid, in and out of their lungs. If they didn’t do that, they would not be healthy, they would not develop a normal diaphragm, normal chest wall muscles, and they wouldn’t be prepared to breathe outside the womb. So they have been breathing, but they don’t drown. Why don’t they drown? They don’t drown because they get oxygen through that placenta, into their body, through the mother’s lungs (oxygen into her lungs, then transfers through the placenta and into the baby’s bloodstream). So the baby has oxygen, and it gets rid of its carbon dioxide and other waste products back through the placenta. It doesn’t need to do it through its lungs. So it is not the fluid so much in the lungs. If you put a proper balance of fluid into our lungs, it doesn’t create an irritating effect. If that fluid were to contain a super-saturation of oxygen adequate to transfer oxygen into our bloodstream, we could live with fluid in our lungs. In fact, that’s being done with animals today. They can take rats and put them into an oxygen-rich fluid, and the animal will survive, underwater, so to speak. So God has already prepared those lungs and that body to be able to handle the breathing process. So we call it a ‘herring-breuwer reflex’ when that baby comes out. It’s something that happens, and we don’t quite know what. It may be that the chest wall has been greatly compressed going through the birth canal, but it also happens with cesarean sections. And then when that chest is allowed to expand, there is a reflex mechanism that causes that baby to want to gasp and take in that first deep breath of air and get rid of the fluid that is there.

Mike: Baby’s first miraculous breath. Still more evidence of God’s creative genius. As the Bible says, man is fearfully and wonderfully made.

Mike: Dr. Jay Hollman is a physician and surgeon with more than two decades of experience in cardiology. Dr. Hollman holds an advanced degree from prestigious Emory University, enjoys a successful practice in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and also teaches medicine at Louisiana State University. In spite of his success and experience, Dr. Hollman retains a kind of scientific humility.

Dr. Hollman: I don’t know how this amazes other people, but it amazes me how people can have very badly diseased arteries, and you look and them and say ‘These people should be dead.’ And yet, because of the adaption, because of their personality, for a whole host of reasons I don’t understand, they are able to keep going. And somebody else, with maybe only one artery blocked, when that artery blocks up completely, they die, or they have a devastating heart attack. That’s one of the mysteries I don’t completely understand about heart disease. It is amazing that the heart continues to function as well as it does for as long as it does. There are all kinds of feedback mechanisms that take it through different stress periods and are able to accommodate a time when you need to have cardic output, say three times what you are at rest. And you are able to do that and sustain that for a period of time. Through mechanisms that are built into it, the heart, the volume in the heart, builds up with each stroke, and in a healthy heart, the heart rate also goes up, so you can also improve your cardic output by that, and yet, the fact that it’s able to rest as well as it is. The electrical system is another interesting part of the heart, to see how it is able to compensate, how it is able to keep you from fainting. Probably one of the things that the lay people don’t understand, and it’s even better seen in terms of, say, the giraffe, is how do you get the heart to pump, and how do you keep the pressure constant in the brain, for example? The difference between a giraffe when its head is bent over, to when its head is way up in the air, that is a tremendous difference in terms of height. And remember when you talk about blood pressure being a 100 millimeters of mercury, that’s like a 100 sonometers of water. That’s the pressure it takes to get the blood up to the head, and not let the giraffe pass out. Then when his head comes over, to be able to constrict and to restrict the circulation to the head, so that he doesn’t get this tremendous rise in blood pressure to his brain, and have a stroke, it’s a pretty amazing sort of physiologic mechanism.

Mike: You might imagine Dr. Hollman’s work to be stressful. After all, most of the patients he treats have suffered a heart attack, and their future is uncertain. But Dr. Hollman is a Christian, and he views this difficult time as an opportunity for positive change.

Dr. Hollman: It is a wonderful time to be able to help them to assess what they are doing in life, because when you realize, many times, as they do, that this could have killed them, this heart attack. It’s a time for people to really reassess what is going on. I have taken the opportunity whenever a patient will give me permission, to say a prayer with the patient. I’ve sort of done that as a routine. I’ve found it to be very helpful. If I was a charlatan, that is, if I was doing it, or practicing medicine simply only to try to do it in the best way without respect to conscience, I would probably still pray with patients, because it is a tremendous bonding thing for the patient, and they like it, by and large. Even patients who don’t pray much themselves.

Mike: Dr. Jay Hollman, a servant of Jesus Christ, providing his patients with both hope and healing.

Dr. Miller: I believe that when we investigate life, we are investigating something that God has created. God being the life-giver; life originates (comes) from God. Which makes life very precious incidentally, and is also the basis why there’s a lot of ethical issues dealing with life, taking away life, etc. Since God is the life-giver, to study that life, whether it’s in a cell, or in an individual, how that life works or functions, is to study the thoughts of God in a real way. And as we unfold some of these mechanisms, I see a lot of design, I see a lot of forethought, a lot of intelligence. I see a lot of intricate functions, and it just makes one sometimes sit back; it gives you a lot of awe. It’s almost a ‘ah-ha!’ experience that you get when you discover some of these unique things.

Mike: Dr. Miller says that one of the most striking aspects of human biology and of the world around us is the simplicity of God’s designs.

Dr. Miller: Simplicity parallels economy. When you devise a simple method, I’m talking just on a practical science level, a simple method to do a task, that’s usually an economic method. It tells me a little bit about the nature of God. God is also an economy kind of God in many ways. There’s a richness in God, a richness in God’s creation, but there’s also an economy, such that creation created order. The created things I see are not things simply things to waste. They are not in limitless supply, but there’s a limit, there’s an end. There’s a limit to the resources to our earth, there’s a limit to the resources in our oceans, and as children of God, as individuals who are created of God, we have a tremendous responsibility to be caretakers, because these things aren’t ours. But we do have the privilege of using them and taking care of them. So that tells me a lot about God.