Veni Quid Veniat

     One could argue that few, if any, medical studies have had the same impact as Andrew Wakefield's study, published in the British journal Lancet, attempting to establish a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Certainly, no study has had the same impact with as small a dataset - Wakefield's twelve case studies, eight of which were claimed to show a temporal correlative link between autism and vaccines, were an incredibly small sample size for such a groundbreaking study. Still, from 1998, when the study was published, to 2010, when it was completely retracted (Lancet had already published a partial retraction in 2004), the study stood as ostensibly sound science. Of course, the scientific community, which had already viewed the small sample size with a jaundiced eye, saw the total inability of any other study to replicate Wakefield's findings (Hurley et al., 2010) as the final nail in the coffin of an already suspect idea, but that wasn't enough to stop the study from launching a new wave in the anti-vaccine movement. This new wave brought with it an increase in the rate of vaccine-preventable disease. Measles in Ireland, Whooping Cough in the US - declining vaccination rates inevitably brought the return of diseases previously reduced to a historical footnote. A single slip in peer-review brought hundreds of deaths, perhaps even thousands, by the time the movement runs its course. With this in mind, it is worth examining the course of events that led to the publication of something so resoundingly rejected by the scientific community and so harmful to the world at large.

     When Wakefield started his study, he was working in conjunction with Richard Barr, a lawyer, to bring a lawsuit alleging that the MMR vaccine was the cause of autism, and seeking damages for nearly 1,500 families. His proposed bowel-brain syndrome was the centerpiece of the lawsuit; his study thus had the potential to be incredibly financially beneficial if it reached the desired result. To that end, Barr emailed the families he was representing, asking any families who had symptoms that matched the desired sequence (the MMR vaccine followed relatively closely by intestinal distress and then autism). Wakefield's twelve were selected from this group and from patients at the Royal Free Hospital, where Wakefield held a non-clinical position. This should have been the first warning sign: a doctor with an egregious conflict of interest selecting an exceptionally small sample. It would be difficult to imagine a situation more conducive to cherry-picking data.

     Strangely enough given the opportunity he had to cherry-pick his data, optimistic data selection wasn't enough to prove Wakefield's point. His hypothesis was that the MMR vaccine brought on bowel-brain syndrome, which then lead to regressive autism. From NHS records, we know that his sample of twelve included between one and six examples of regressive autism - given his already-small sample size, not enough to even pretend to have reached a conclusion. To sidestep the issue, he committed the cardinal sin in science: he fabricated his data. In his paper, three patients who definitely did not have regressive autism, and five whose symptoms were unclear, were reported as having regressive autism. Nor did he stop there - the next two steps in his hypothesis were that the patients have non-specific colitis, a bowel disorder, and experience their first symptoms less than two weeks after receiving the MMR vaccine. Only three of the twelve showed non-specific colitis, and only two showed their first symptoms less than two weeks after receiving the MMR vaccine (five even showed symptoms before receiving the vaccine). Wakefield reported that eleven had non-specific colitis, and that eight experienced symptoms less than two weeks after receiving the MMR vaccine (Deer, 2011). The data Wakefield started with matched subsequent studies almost exactly; the data he ended with, however, was a different matter.

     How did peer-review miss it? In hindsight, it seems obvious: a doctor being paid to find a link between MMR vaccines and bowel-brain syndrome found a previously undiscovered link between MMR vaccines and a previously unknown species of bowel-brain syndrome. Even without knowing that Wakefield had fabricated his results - although that was predictable enough - the conflict of interest should have been enough to prevent the study from being published. In fact, the conflict of interest not only should have been enough, it would have been enough. Wakefield never reported it. Despite taking more than $600,000 from Barr for his work on the lawsuit, Wakefield did not disclose the income, and the Lancet went ahead without knowing that the lead author of the paper had been paid to reach the conclusion he did. The problem couldn't be solved by looking at the fabricated data, either: because of privacy concerns, that only became apparent after an intensive investigation, after the conflict of interest had already been found out and the paper retracted.

       The Railroad Commission, composed of three members, has primary regulatory jurisdiction over oil and natural gas extraction and transport, natural gas utilities, and coal and uranium surface mining operations.

     "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." As a general rule, human behavior varies very little, within certain norms - fallen human nature's desires and fears are constant, so that "what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun."

     God is perfectly sovereign, and man's will is free. At the risk of dangerously abbreviating a fascinating discussion, I'd like to prove both phrases in that sentence, and, more important, provide a commentary on why they are anything but contradictory.

     The first is easy. The Bible makes it perfectly clear that God is sovereign over all things. In Psalm 103:19 we are told that "the Lord has established His throne in the heavens; And His sovereignty rules over all." Again in Isaiah 46:10, "remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,'" Yet again, Psalms 103:19, 115:3, and 135:6, among many other verses, speak to God's sovereignty. The final piece is Ephesians 1:11, which tells us that God "works all things after the counsel of His will." We are left in no doubt that God is indeed sovereign. In addition, we are told that we are created in the image of God. We are not given his power, so the implication is that we are given the ability to be free moral agents, responsible for our own action - that man has free will.

     How is it possible to reconcile the competing facts that man's will is free and that God is sovereign? The answer, I think, lies in properly understanding the nature of God. Too often, we approach God as if He were simply a human like us with a particular ability - for example, when we think of God's omnipotence we think of a human who can do anything, or when we think of His omniscience, we think of a human who knows everything. To a certain extent, this is inevitable. We will naturally compare an unknown to what we know. Generally speaking, this is an effective aid to our understanding, but it isn't perfect. When we start probing too hard into the nature of God - His sovereignty, for example - this approximation will always be imperfect. To correctly understand the coexistence of God's sovereignty and man's free will, we need to look closer at who God is.

     If any human were to be sovereign in the way God is, he would completely preempt free will. Humans can create systems over which they have a certain limited sovereignty, but only if certain conditions are met. The system must be deterministic (that is, for any given situation, given a unique input, there will be a unique output) closed (that is, free from outside influences), and it must be understood completely. Assuming a system meets all three of those requirements, a human could theoretically uniquely determine all events in the system by determining the starting conditions (making the system deterministic and closed allows the starting conditions to determine the course of events, and understanding the system completely allows the starting conditions to be manipulated to produce a given event). Unfortunately for "fortune-tellers" everywhere, the real world is nothing at all like this. At a very general level the purely physical world can be thought of as a deterministic system, but in actuality it is probabilistic. Even worse, humans aren't just probabilistic, they are free agents, and are not bound by external circumstances except in the most general sense. For this reason, if a human were sovereign, free will could not exist, and if free will exists, no human can be truly sovereign. This, in my opinion, is the source of much of the apparent conflict between free will and sovereignty.

     This is only true if a human were sovereign - the solution to the contradiction lies in how God differs from us. For us, the contradiction exists because the world is not deterministic. We cannot possibly know exactly what the output will be for every input, and so we have no way of knowing how to manipulate the starting conditions to produce a desired event, even if we had the ability. What if we were omniscient, though? If so, we would know exactly what would happen in any given set of circumstances, which is simply another way of saying that for any given input, we would know the output - not because the system was limited to one output for that input, but because of our hypothetical omniscience. One could argue about whether this means that the universe is actually deterministic to an omniscient being or whether the universe is merely similar to a deterministic system, but that's not particularly important at the moment: what matters is that the universe is perfectly predictable for an omniscient being, and thus can be determined through setting the starting conditions.

     We can go farther than that, though. Not only is it possible for an omniscient being to determine an unrestricted system by setting the starting conditions, since God is omniscient, He knew precisely what effect any variance in the starting conditions would have. Because of this fact, we can conclude that God decided what every event would be - had He wanted something else, He could have changed the starting conditions to produce a different outcome. Every molecule in the universe acts according to His plan.

     As an aside, it should not be assumed from this discussion that God only acts by setting the starting conditions. Certainly, that is the way He usually chooses to work His will, but he can also intervene supernaturally if He chooses to. For the purposes of this discussion, since God is the only source of external input, the fact that setting the starting conditions requires that He be sovereign implies that He is sovereign. The fundamental point is that an omniscient creator God logically must be sovereign.

     We've essentially arrived at the conclusion that those who argue for God's sovereignty support, but remember how we got there: we assumed free will in a probabilistic universe. We didn't arrive at God's sovereignty by limiting man in any way - God is still sovereign, but our will is free, at least to the extent that our nature and God's power (recall Pharaoh, whose heart God hardened) allows. This should not be taken as a license to lethargy or wrongdoing. Because our wills are free, we are still responsible for our actions. God doesn't preempt your will, rather, He uses it to work His ends. Both God's sovereignty and man's free will are important elements of the Christian worldview, and - far from being contradictory - they are perfectly compatible as long as we recognize who God is.

     Early this year, Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT), which advertises itself as the “most active political youth organization” in Texas, released a press release discussing Republican candidate for lieutenant governor Jerry Patterson. This press release closely paralleled Dan Patrick’s campaign literature, and like much of Dan Patrick's campaign talking points, it strayed from being precisely correct on a number of points. In the interests of maintaining a standard of scrupulous honesty, it is important not only to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" oneself, but also to call out dishonesty whenever possible, in order to allow others to be truthful without being tempted to resort to their own fabrications to counter their opponents’. With this in mind, a careful point-by-point examination of YCT’s press release is very much in order.

     Passing over YCT’s opening vitriol and moving to their first charge, the first problem becomes readily apparent. YCT correctly points out that Patterson supports a guest-worker program - for the record, I do not agree with him on that point - but then goes on to claim that he called efforts to secure the border first a “cop-out.” This is certainly a compelling argument against Patterson; it would be even more compelling if it were true. The precise quote was “the cop-out response among some Republicans is, ‘Well, we have to secure our borders first.’ Ok, yeah. This is part of doing that.” Obviously Patterson’s argument is that most people who make that argument don’t intend to do anything beyond it - that’s the cop-out. You don’t have to agree - I don’t - but you do have to be honest about what he said. YCT went on to discuss some of Patterson’s comments on the implications of a guest worker program, and wrapped up their discussion by asserting that Patterson supports an “essentially open border.” The term “open border” has a precise definition - a border between jurisdictions which allows passage with limited or no restrictions - and what Patterson advocates does not fit that definition. Looser than is wise? Yes. Open? No. Patterson’s biggest “soft” stance on immigration lies in advocating legal status for those already here, not in advocating decreased border security. I disagree with Patterson’s stance on immigration, but YCT is simply wrong in their analysis of his position.

     Everyone – or almost everyone – enjoys a good story. An exciting plot, relatable characters, frightening dilemmas - when confronted with these elements, weaved into a compelling narrative, we almost can't help but be drawn in to the story. We are built to be curious about what happens next and to empathize with those we encounter. Good fiction, whatever the medium, draws us in through both avenues. Because it is often used simply as a source of amusement or diversion, fiction may sometimes be dismissed as a genre as entirely unprofitable, or, at the other extreme, accepted regardless of its content. Both positions are flawed - the truth, as usual, lies somewhere between.