Stem Cell Lies

Michael Fumento, the National Review's go-to guy for science stuff, has a particularly nauseating essay in this week's issue dealing with embryonic stem cell (ESC) research in the wake of the President's veto. It deals with a letter written to Science by three prominent ESC researchers taking to task a list that's been floating around claiming that adult stem cells (ASC) can treat upwards of 70 some-odd diseases, whereas ESCs haven't cured anything. Science has a nice article this week on the reality of some of those "cures", most of which are in foreign countries with undocumented, anecdotal results. These scientists are correct to take issue with Congress touting out "patient testimony" as evidence of ASCs curative powers.

Fumento gets riled up, however, by the supposed dishonesty of these scientists by downplaying the curative potential of ASCs, claiming that they are apparently "at odds" with the whole medical community. Why? Because they claim “adult stem cell transplants from bone marrow or umbilical cord blood can provide some benefit to sickle cell patients” and “hold the potential to treat sickle cell anemia” [emphasis Fumento's]. He claims that, no, ASCs have full curative power:

An article from the May 2006 issue of Current Opinion in Hematology notes that “there is presently no curative therapy” for sickle-cell anemia other than allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. “Hematopoietic” means from marrow or blood; “allogeneic” means the cells are from another person. Seminars in Hematology (2004) states, “. . . curative allogeneic stem cell transplantation therapy” has “been developed for sickle cell anemia.” Meanwhile, “. . . curative allogeneic stem cell transplantation therapy [has] been developed for” sickle-cell anemia according to Current Opinions in Molecular Therapy (2003), while “hematopoietic stem cells for allogeneic transplantation” are “currently the only curative approach for sickle cell anemia” observes the journal Blood (2002).

What does everybody seem to know that the Science writers and editors don’t?

Hmmm. I'll tell you Mr. Fumento. They know you need to read more than one sentence into an abstract. Take the Curr Opin Hematol article. Fumento needed to only read the next sentence: "This therapeutic option, however, is not available to most patients due to the lack of an HLA-matched bone marrow donor." Wow. One curative therapy exists and it remains unavailable to most patients. I'd say that, on the whole, allogenic stem cell transplantation therapy holds potential and provides some benefit to patients as a group, which is how we generally think of the benefits of a therapy. And since immunocompatibility is a major problem for organ donations (which stem cell transplantation essentially is), that's why the all the papers he cited go on to talk about gene therapy to overcome that problem. I'd hardly say the powers of ASCs were falsely underplayed:

Sometimes it prints easily falsifiable studies, such as this, attacking the usefulness of ASCs.

Yes, it is easily falsifiable, as in, one can attempt to falsify it by

reading the literature. However, as is obvious from reading, oh say,
the entire article, one realizes that ASCs aren't nearly as useful as
you'd like to believe.

Will ESCs help us in our pursuit of the holy histocompatibility grail? Maybe, maybe not. Point is, ASCs probably won't because they are a lot harder to manipulate. Studying ESCs is basic science research and may provide some clues towards this manipulation by helping us understand early differentiation, for example. And that research needs to be funded by the federal government.

Fumento ends, of course, by implying that the recent South Korean stem cell debacle shows that Science is a "propaganda sheet:"

Other times it falsely promotes ESCs. That culminated in January when the journal was forced to retract two groundbreaking ESC studies that proved frauds.

Yes, but it didn't falsely promote ESCs. The journal itself was defrauded by the authors. And it immediately retracted them. It was not intentional and not only was the journal defrauded but the peer-reviewers and several co-authors as well. Not everyone involved with the publication of data is expected to independently verify every detail of the work submitted.

Whatever one's opinion on ESC research is, I simply abhor when irresponsible "journalists" misrepresent science. Abhor. Like I abhor Richard Gere. Oh yes, that much.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel...

... is October, baby! A little later than I wanted it to be but whatever. My committee meeting went swimmingly. And in just four short months I am going to insist that you all start referring to me as "Dr."! Apparently my work on the modification of bilayer mechanical properities by poly-unsaturated fatty acids, specifically the interplay between changes in elasticity and curvature, was a hit with the biochemists!

I'm on tonight and my hips don't lie....

Mmm Tastes Like Chicken

This weekend the boy and I went to the Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. I highly recommend it, and not just because they take a nicely produced swing at Intelligent Design Creationism. In a serious of video discussions Ken Miller, Eugenie Scott and Francis Collins, among others, neatly lay out the definition of a theory and discuss why ID isn't one.

But that is not the focus of the exhibit; the focus is Darwin's journey from simple observations to his detailed, revolutionary idea. The whole exhibit has a very Victorian feel and you get a true sense of how pathologically curious the man was, as evidenced by the fact that he ate every species he came across to see what it tasted like. Seriously. Apparently those endangered Galapagos iguanas taste like chicken.

And while the IMAX movie of the Galapagos islands enhanced the experience, it really isn't all that necessary; it's too short to actually give you any scientific detail, although widescreen IMAX movies of nature are always pretty cool.

Together At Last...

I have only two google alerts set up to notify me weekly on the two topics I find near and dear to my heart; intelligent design and gay marriage. I was shocked this week to see one story appear in both alerts! I mean, it is from Renew America, but still, it heartened me to realize that someone else shares the same interests that I do...

WARNING: People with any knowledge, however scant, of either science or philosophy should refrain from reading the above cited article, as it may cause nausea, upset stomach, insomnia, itching, burning, redness, dry eye, mental retardation, epilepsy, consumption and, in rare cases, death.

Absence of Proof...

I'm almost finished with Ken Miller's fantastic book, Finding Darwin's God (which I'll probably comment on at some point), and what with the president's recent statements about intelligent design, a thought popped into my head that I thought I'd get down.

Recently, Rick Santorum has been flip-flopping about teaching ID in schools but he recently said

We should lay out areas in which the evidence supports evolution and areas in the evidence that does not. And as far as intelligent design is concerned, I really don't believe it's risen to the level of a scientific theory at this point that we would want to teach it alongside of evolution.

I'm happy about the second sentence but the first sentence illustrates perfectly the problem with this entire brouhaha. There is much evidence that supports evolution; only the crazy young earthers deny that. But there is no evidence, and I mean actual evidence, that does not support evolution. I'm not talking "gaps" in the fossil record, kiddos, I'm talking actual evidence that does not support evolution. I'm not even asking for a direct contradiction, just some actual piece of biological evidence (whatever that word means!) that doesn't help evolution one iota.

But see, there isn't any. The closest you can come is claiming that there is no direct line of evidence to support the transition of one species into another. All we have to do, though, is keep digging and we're sure to find it. Because lack of evidence for evolution is not evidence against.

Inadequacy

I'm brushing up on my knowledge of ion channels in order to procrastinate from working on my dissertation. I have just been treated by the author of the book I'm reading to some of the contributions of Arrhenius, Fick, Einstein and Nernst to electrochemistry. He has also, however, made it a point to mention that they were 28, 26, 26 and 24 respectively when they made such major contributions as the dissociation of strong electrolytes, aqueous defusion flux and microscopic random walk of particles. At 27, I have just learned how to graph something in Excel and how to open up a bottle of nitric acid without burning myself. Needless to say, I don't feel as smart as I used to...

Survival of the Fittest

In creationist or ID circles, "survival of the fittest" is often accused of being a tautology and thus completely meaningless; of course the fittest survive! They're the fittest!

Setting aside for a moment the many problems with trying to whittle down the extremely complex theory of modern evolution to an oversimplified soundbite, I intend to show that "survival of the fittest" is only a tautology if evolution were a logical argument rather than a scientific argument. A logical tautology can be obvious or it can be subtle. "No vegetarian eats meat" is a tautology because by definition someone who eats meat cannot be a vegetarian. Recently I was told in an on-line discussion that "no conservative calls himself gay". Pointing out that there are many gay conservative pundits I was corrected; they are obviously not really conservative. Because to this commenter, the definition of conservative requires heterosexuality.

Well what about "survival of the fittest"? Is that a tautology? Logically, perhaps. By definition, an organism's level if fitness is directly related to the probability of its survival. But evolution isn't a logical exercise; it's a scientific endeavor. And evolution doesn't revolve solely around "survival of the fittest". In fact, it is only the second half of the true (and admittedly less impressive) soundbite: variations exist in nature and those organisms with more favorable variations survive.

Tautological or not, the "survival of the fittest" is merely an observation. But as a soundbite it obfuscates the truly fascinating observation underlying evolution: that organisms need to survive in the first place; that they vary, if ever so slightly, and that variation helps them interact with a changing environment. "Survival of the fittest" is indicative of the fact that the earth is not Eden. An organism may be best suited for the environment it finds itself in and less suited for a different environment. But since its environment isn't static, it finds itself in competition with other organisms for food, for shelter, for a mate.

Of course "survival of the fittest" is a painfully obvious observation. Evolution addresses why survival is necessary. Both a creationist and a "Darwinist" would say that it's because the earth is not Eden but only the evolutionist asks whether or not it is the imperfections in the world that create such changing diversity. In Eden, "survival of the fittest" would be meaningless because there would be no "survival"; there would be only life and death (if at all) in a regular cycle.

Stem Cell Angst

Don't be fooled. The current bill in Congress to expand stem cell research has nothing to do with catching up to the South Koreans or opening up a back door for reproductive cloning. All it would do is expand the availability of embryonic stem cells to already created embryos that have been set to be discarded by fertility clinics.

Some say this is about ethics and that we should err on the side of caution when it comes to using federal money for something that certain people find morally objectionable. Morality aside, the president's initial ban and veto is a real danger to the autonomy of science. It would be a more consistent position (and safer for government science in the long run) for ESC research to be considered outright illegal. The reality of the situation is that the NIH is by far the major funder of American medical research, as well as employing many of the top scientists in the country. Congress and the president should not be able to micromanage what can and cannot get funded. If, as some say, no American taxpayer should be required to fund from her own dollars what she regards as a moral outrage, what is to stop the public from pushing to pull all federal research in HIV? Or other STDs? Or genetic disorders that primarily affect Jews like Tay-Sachs disease? Or to stop funding on individual, peer-reviewed grants that they deem morally repugnant, like Congress attempted to do a few years ago on certain AIDS and transgendered studies? I am a huge supporter of federalism, but states and private companies cannot and shouldn't have to pick up the slack in this arena of national interest (even though they seem to be doing a good job of it). If the American people feel that it is important to fund medical research with federal tax dollars, they should accept what the scientists deem promising enough to fund and not second-guess the peer-review process.

Yet if its ethics you are concerned with, consider this: when Bush limited the stem cell lines government scientists were allowed to use, ESC research was about 3 years old. That's worse than saying it was in its infancy as a science. In those days, the only way they could get ESCs to proliferate was to grow them on a layer of mouse "feeder" cells, which we have recently discovered have contaminated the approved cell lines so that they are probably unusable. In fact, it is quite possible that to attempt to use these lines for any therapeutic treatment would be unethical, given their state. In other words, the ban itself is probably unethical, since the president is more or less saying that he gives scientists permission to continue to pursue therapeutic uses of ESCs as long as they continue to use cell lines that would be unethical to actual use therapeutically.

But of course this never comes up. Nor does the fact that it was politicians and pundits in the 80s that started using the term "embryo" for any stage past a fertilized egg; to an embryologist you have to progress considerably farther. Nor is mentioned that fertilization and conception are functionally two different stages; that women have eggs that are fertilized much more frequently than they conceive.

Of course ethics is about peoples opinions, but they need to have informed opinions. And for anyone to conflate the current debate over the expansion of ESC research with the advent of human cloning is particularly uninformed.

Where Does The Time Go?...

I have told myself that I will have the discussion to my paper written by Friday, when my advisor returns from a meeting. This morning I wrote the word "Discussion". This afternoon I decided it needed to be underlined.

I think I'm off to a good start.

Fatty Acid Head

I have learned, much to my dismay, that the first witness called in the Kansas "kangaroo court" on Intelligent Design was William Harris, a leading authority on the importance of fish oils to human health.

My heart weeps.

What's Wrong With Kansas? Part Deux

The Board of Education in Kansas has been flip-flopping over evolution since 1999, when they voted to teach creationism alongside modern evolution. That decision was reversed a few years ago when certain fundamentalist board members were replaced. Well it's back. The Panda's Thumb has great coverage of all things evolution. This is the latest from Kansas. Apparently there is going to be a hearing next month in which the Kansas Board of Education plans to fly in dozens of pseudo-scientists to testify on behalf of Intelligent Design. Can't they be doing something better with their tax dollars? Like actually teach actual students actual science?

Sometimes I want to kill.

Questioning Darwin

I've been thinking a lot about science education recently, having just given a two-day lab on bacterial transformation to a group of high school freshmen in the Bronx. It's really a great lesson; the kids get to transform bacterial with GFP and make them glow green. It shows them, first hand, the concepts of cloning, antibiotic resistance, and the link between DNA and protein expression. It really piques their curiosity. Which is what science is supposed to do. And why I was both pleased and dismayed by an article in the WaPo today.

The author goes on for a bit about some old high school history teacher that made him question everything and made history fun for him, whereas his science classes were boring and rote memorization. And if it's one thing the IDers have done for him was show him that biology can be questioned in the same, exciting way.

And it can. But not the way that IDers do it. He writes:

The intelligent-design folks say theirs is not a religious doctrine.
They may be lying, and are just softening up the teaching of evolution
for an eventual pro-Genesis assault. But they passed one of my tests.
They answered Gould's favorite question: If you are real scientists,
then what evidence would disprove your hypothesis? West indicated that
any discovery of precursors of the animal body plans that appeared in
the Cambrian period 500 million years ago would cast doubt on the
thesis that those plans, in defiance of Darwin, evolved without a
universal common ancestor.

See, that's all fine and good. That is a great way to disprove Darwin's hypothesis. Only such an ancestor has yet to be found. And until it has, evolution has not been disproved. Now, this author must turn around and ask the IDers how to disprove their hypothesis. What? They can't do it?

See the difference? Not questioning the facts of Darwinism in a science class is bad teaching. Bad teaching is a problem that is entirely exclusive from whether or not evidences for intelligent design or theories of irreducible complexity should be presented to students. If students aren't being forced to ask tough questions in their science classes, they aren't being educated properly.

But to introduce ID, specifically, alongside evolution and proffer it as another possible explanation is like teaching medical students that mental illnesses can be diagnosed by phrenology. Sure, there are probably a few doctors out there who may think that that is an alternative method, but any curriculum that gave phrenology any semblance of credence would be laughed out of accreditation. Saying that our current methods of diagnosis are incomplete, however, is a whole other story...

Don't Piss Off a Scientist

Earlier this week, P.Z. Myers lambasted some recent idiotic ID claims by David Berlinski of the dreaded Discovery Institute, which actually does more than just attack science (who knew?). Honestly, he's more restrained than he should be. When I was working on an Evolution v. ID workshop a few months ago, I spent many a day fuming at my computer (or the boy) and when I heard William Dembski speak to a bunch of Christian fundamentalists I nearly curled up under my seat and cried. Which is presicely how Myers (and other scientists) feel:

So what should I do in a debate with some sleaze like Berlinski, who
pulls this kind of dishonest crap? Spend 20 minutes teaching the
audience about Hardy-Weinberg, pull up the results of a half dozen
studies, and get all technical and detailed? Or walk across the room,
beat him unconscious with any one of hundreds of readily available
books that demonstrate his dishonesty, and kick him until he pukes?

And better yet, when Berlinski's essay had devolved into random babbling:

What the hell…?

This doesn't even make sense; all I can imagine is that Berlinski,
sitting in his little fantasy bubble, imagining how biology works
without ever consulting reality, has drifted off into some bizarre
alien plane where he is now warring with his own misconceptions.

Check out the article...

More Shameless Self-Promotion

Often in my free time I get into long, heated discussions on other people's blogs. But sometimes I write letters to the editor. Rarely do I do so because it's harder to be short and concise than blustery and long-winded. So, ladies and gentlemen, yours truly has just had a letter to the editor published. Granted, it was for the Cornell Daily Sun up in Ithaca, so I had a better chance of getting in than the general public, but it's still a letter and it's still print and I have officially defended evolution in a more public arena.

Go me.

It's also interesting to see the editorial process in work. The letter was not edited for content or clarity, however they chose to emphasize in the title what I would have considered the minor point (that ID isn't a testable hypothesis) rather than the major point which was evolution is not a theory of origin.

Oh well. Go me anyway.

Dawkins and the Pope

This weekend there was an article about Intelligent Design in the New York Times Magazine. While the author doesn't say anything particularly new, one paragraph at the end pretty much sums up my entire position about evolution v. theism, namely that it's not an either/or situation. He writes:

One beauty of Darwinism is the intellectual freedom it allows. As the arch-evolutionist Richard Dawkins has observed, ''Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.'' But Darwinism permits you to be an intellectually fulfilled theist, too. That is why Pope John Paul II was comfortable declaring that evolution has been ''proven true'' and that ''truth cannot contradict truth.'' If God created the universe wholesale rather than retail -- endowing it from the start with an evolutionary algorithm that progressively teased complexity out of chaos -- then imperfections in nature would be a necessary part of a beautiful process.

He perfectly juxtaposes an avowed atheist and an avowed theist in the same paragraph, something that needs to be done more frequently. I'm becoming more and more convinced that we need an organization called "Christians for Darwin" or something like that. Kind of like "Jews for Jesus" only not as cult-y...

Microsoft Strikes In The Most Unlikely of Places...

So, in case anyone was wondering, my research is on polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), specifically long-chain PUFAs, and they generally come in two varieties, omega-3 or omega-6. The omega means that the first double bond (or first locus of unsaturation) is the third (or sixth) position from the terminal carbon. Carbons are usually named from the head-group, beginning with the alpha carbon, followed by the beta and gamma carbons, etc, but when you're talking about 22 carbons, for example, that gets unwieldy.

Now, if you read the literature, you often see omega-3 or n-3 interchangeably. Now why n, do you ask? I've often wondered that. Classically, omega and n aren't really related. And if you look in the literature, the terminology only changed in the past five or ten years. Before 90s, they are never referred to as n-3 or n-6 fatty acids. What's up with that?

Well, I will tell you. Microsoft apparently doesn't use standard symbol encoding, so when transferring from Word to Adobe or a Postscript printer, omegas magically turn into ns and they are a pain to get back. And somehow, over the years, the fatty acid community has just come to accept the fact that n-3 = omega-3.

Damn you, Microsoft!!!

From the Mouths of Babes

Yesterday was the beginning of the so-called "revolution in evolution" in Dover, PA, and thankfully the earth hasn't spun off its orbit yet. So let's see how effective this "revolution" actually was by seeing what the ninth-graders actually thought of the 1 minute long statement about Intelligent Design:

"I really wasn't paying attention."

"If they're going to teach that, then they should teach everything — like Rastafarianism."

"It (the statement) was kind of confusing."

"I feel that, if they (the board of education) are for something, then there should have been discussion allowed. I was wondering why we weren't allowed to ask questions?"

Well ladies and gents, there you have it. The great Intelligent Design revolution. A confusing statement that no one really paid attention to and left the kids more confused than they were to begin with. I guess that's what happens when you let bureaucrats decide what goes into a curriculum....

I Don't Know Whether to Laugh...

... or cry. Or vomit.

I wish I had watched the O'Reilly Factor last night. Bill takes on evolution...

"But, what if it turns out there is a God and He did create the universe and you die and then you figure that out? Aren’t you gonna feel bad that you didn’t address that in your biology class?"

I can't... I mean it's just... I think that...

Shit.

Read the whole thing. Preferably on an empty stomach. And pay careful attention to his argument that human cloning isn't science because it hasn't happened yet...

Santorum and Intelligent Design

Don't get me wrong; I have extraordinary little respect for Rick Santorum, if any at all. Which is why I find it fitting that language he adopted when drafting an amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act (which I have less respect for than Santorum) is now being used to defend the constitutionality of teaching Intelligent Design in public schools. To his credit, he doesn't support Intelligent Design, but says:

"I am not an advocate for intelligent design and I do not believe that public schools should be teaching biblical creationism in the science classroom... However, I do believe that evolution should be taught as a theory — not fact. It's important to teach the controversy of evolution so that students fully understand the depth of discrepancies regarding Darwin's evolution theory and the increasing number of respected scientists beginning to question evolution."

I have so many problems with this.

First of all, evolution is taught as a theory. A scientific theory. Which is based on virtually irrefutable facts. A scientific theory is also unifying and predictive. The theory of Intelligent Design is narrowing and predicts nothing scientific. This is not the colloquial definition of a theory. If there is any problem with the teaching of evolution it is that proper scientific definitions and terminology aren't being emphasized.

Second, while it is indeed important to understand the discrepancies regarding Darwin's evolution theory, it is even more important to understand how respected scientists have been modifying and adapting his theory for 140 years and how most of what his original theory predicted has been verified by reputable science. These "respected scientists" that Santorum references are not evolutionists of any kind. And this is important class: They are generally chemists, biochemists or mathematicians. They do not have training nor have they contributed any original research to the field of evolutionary theory or the origins of species. Not one "respected scientist" that has come out in favor of Intelligent Design has ever formally been involved with any research regarding this topic. Got that?

Look, if a judge is seeking expert testimony on the mental state of a defendant, he's going to ask a psychiatrist not a cardiologist. Just because they're both doctors doesn't mean that they can speak with equal weight on specific subjects. So why is it that IDers can't find any scientist who has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology to come to their defense? I'll let you think of the answer.

Right now, I'm going to get back to chiding Rick Santorum, who is unabashedly Catholic and who should know that the Vatican has formally supported evolution but not Intelligent Design. You don't see the Pope rushing to endorse it so why should our public schools? Come on, Rick! Be a good Catholic! You're so great at keeping the gays from marrying and eroding the culture, why can't you help us keep this obviously fundamental Christian crap-ola out of our schools? You're right, our kids should be encouraged to think independently, but they should also be taught to think correctly.

More On Dover and ID

The following is the text of the four paragraph statement that will be read to ninth-graders in Dover, Pennsylvania next week, regarding Intelligent Design Theory (my emphasis):

The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part.

Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.

Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.

With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life to individual students and their families. As a Standards-driven district, class instruction focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency on Standards-based assessments.

Pay careful attention to the bold-face type. What is my mantra, people? Say it with me, all together: The theory of evolution is not a theory of origin! While the statement is, I believe, technically correct insomuch that Charles Darwin would probably support abiogenesis over divine creation (but he's dead so we can't very much ask him) the modern theory of evolution picks up only after life began. It's a given.

It's bad enough that these poor children have to be put through this crap; it's insult to injury that the clarifying statement is WRONG. Wrong wrong wrong.

I am, however, extraordinarily pleased, pleased to the point of tears, in fact, that all but one of the Dover science teachers wrote a letter of protest requesting to opt out of reading the statement. In the letter they write:

INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS NOT SCIENCE. INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS NOT BIOLOGY.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS NOT AN ACCEPTED SCIENTIFIC THEORY.

I believe that if I as the classroom teacher read the required statement,

my students will inevitably (and understandably) believe that

Intelligent Design is a valid scientific theory, perhaps on par with the

theory of evolution. That is not true. To refer the students to "Of Pandas and

People" as if it is a scientific resource breaches my ethical obligation to

provide them with scientific knowledge that is supported by recognized

scientific proof or theory.

Tears, I tell you, tears. I've taught in high school classrooms before and worked closely with teachers. Being a high school teacher is a thankless job. Dealing with administrations and school boards can be one of the most frustrating experiences ever. It can beat you down and just make you accept whatever stupid idea they throw at you because it's easier than rocking the boat. The fact that these eight teachers had the integrity to stand up and identify this idiocy for what it truly is gives me hope for the future. For someone who's life mission is going to protect and strengthen science and science education in this country, it's heartening to know that I don't have to look very far for help.

These teachers are truly unsung heroes, being called saboteurs by the anti-evolutionists. Well I say, when the anti-evolutionists have a theory that can actually hold more water than evolution, bring it on! But until then, go back to church. Or read some Thomas Aquinas.