In 1980, the World Health Organization (an agency of the United Nations), made an unprecedented type of announcement: Smallpox—one of the most dreaded and dreadful of diseases—had been eradicated from humankind.... Even before the World Health Organization devised its worldwide plan, the development of a vaccine for smallpox had become a textbook example of a discovery representing the beneficial potential of science. The hero of that frequently-told story is the 18th-century physician Edward Jenner. That inspiring story tells how in 1796, the English physician Jenner inoculated a boy against smallpox by rubbing matter from the related disease of cowpox into an incision in the boy’s skin.
That famous story, however, is given a new twist by one of a recent group of writers dubbed the “New Atheists.” Those writers do not just argue against the existence of God but also argue that religion itself is dangerous. One of those atheists, Christopher Hitchens, in his slyly titled book God Is Not Great, claims that:
The attitude of religion to medicine, like the attitude of religion to science, is ... often necessarily hostile. 1
He cites as an example the Christian writer Timothy Dwight, who lived through the turn of the century following Jenner’s discovery. Hitchens claims that Dwight’s having been “opposed to the smallpox vaccination” is a demonstration of how (supposedly) religious faith consists of closed-mindedness that opposes scientific advancement. 2
If Hitchens had known more about the history of Christianity, he would have known that the Christian Church has a long history of providing medical care.... Moreover, Hitchens’ cherry-picking the case of Timothy Dwight ignores one very awkward fact in the history of medical science’s development of vaccination: Namely, that in the American colonies during the early 1700’s, the most important advocate for inoculation against smallpox was a Puritan preacher.
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