What Is Health?
We all want to be healthy. But what is health?
by Jack Hoehn | 14 February 2024 |
In my last essay in this series, we agreed that though it is easy to see that something is alive, it is not that easy to exactly define life. So let’s move on from asking what life is, to asking, what is a healthy life?
You might answer, “Health is the absence of disease.” But if I ask what you mean by disease and you say, “Disease is the absence of health,” then we are stuck in the intellectual crime of tautology—explaining a thing by itself.
A scientific answer was suggested by the British medical journal The Lancet back in 2009. Health, they said, is “the ability of a body to adapt to new threats and infirmities.” That is, health means you can protect yourself in a hostile environment. But what are you protecting? Life? But life can be healthy or unhealthy; life can be alive, but disabled. You can be living, but sick; suffering, and in pain. So health means a certain kind of life, not just staying alive.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health a bit differently than The Lancet. The WHO says health is “a state of complete physical, social, and mental wellbeing….”
Others suggest health means “living without pain.” But intoxicated people, people in a coma, and people under anesthesia are in no pain—yet neither are they necessarily healthy.
The health assumption
I am going to suggest that the very concept of health requires one to assume the risky concept of design. Anyone who talks about being healthy is really accepting that it means a good, functional, proper, expected, anticipated way life should happen—and we are healthy when everything is working as designed. We know a car motor is “healthy” when it is quietly, efficiently, reliably working for us, the way it was designed to work. Toyota, Chevrolet, or Volvo engineers designed the machine to work. This does not mean there could not be some evolution involved, some adjustments, improvements, efficiencies—but all those adjustments were done by minds: designers, and refiners of the design with a forethought goal. They were done on purpose, with purpose, intention, foresight—that is, by design.
If you have accepted the theory that life was not designed, that life is a lucky accident—random mutations, true Darwinian—you must also accept that concepts of dis-ease or dis-ability or health are not part of that theory. Because whatever has happened, health or disease, feast or famine, happy baby or stillborn monster, is just what has evolved; deal with it! The naked naturalistic assertion is that “there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” If that is so, then there can be no plan, no should, no must, no has to, no ought to—the way things “are supposed to be.”
Under this assumption, it is very difficult to speak of health. Health implies more than “the way we want things to be.” I think health means when things are the way they ought to be. And “ought” is a code word—what modern political speech calls “a dog whistle”—for the unspoken implication of purpose and design. So tune your ears to the frequencies only dogs can hear, and understand that a healthy life form is one that is functioning the way it ought to function, in spite of “new threats and infirmities” challenging the designed plan.
Planned defense
Disease—literally “dis-ease” or “not at ease”—is the uncomfortable, painful, dis-functional state of something not working as planned.
Anticipating possible trouble, an engineer designs in protections. She makes barriers, requires parameters, builds in redundancy, has backups, safety checks, or emergency functions. All these kinds of defensive functions require anticipation, planning before the event happens—what chemist Markos Eberlin calls “foresight.”
The very earliest cells (arche-bacteria, now called archaea, created in geologic time 2.7 to 3.8 BYA) have systems—immune systems—to protect themselves from being destroyed by viruses, phages, and transposons. It appears that mechanisms to protect against viruses, phages, were present before those dangers themselves “evolved.” In evolutionary terms of mutations and survival, how could these tools to defend themselves have evolved before they were attacked and destroyed by those viruses, phages, and transposons? Luck after luck after luck? Or engineering with foresight? Immune systems are found in the most ancient life forms.
Our church, within a few weeks of being organized as a denomination, was given a “health message.” This message was personal: God cares how you take care of your body. Your choices about what to inhale, chew, and swallow are spiritual duties. Health choices are God’s laws to be obeyed like moral laws.
But the equipment to fight against disease was gifted to all life forms as part of their design. Those protections are built into all life systems.
Built-in protection
The first designed protection—primary protection—is a barrier. The material world is largely constructed of hard ionically bound elements. The living world requires large covalently bound softer structures that need to be protected. So before life could exist, before a single cell could be designed, a membrane to protect the life chemicals from the outside world had to be designed and constructed. These barriers also prevent bacteria or viruses or toxic chemicals from getting inside cells to destroy them.
The next designed protection—secondary protection—is what happens if the barrier fails—if a toxin or a virus or a bacteria gets through the membranes and inside a cell. Here is where soldiers or guards respond by identifying the invader, and then producing weapons to attack and destroy it before the cell sickens and dies.
Both ancient tiny roundworms with tiny genomes and fewer than 1,000 cells (c. elegans) and our 37 trillion human cells all contain homologous proteins always present and poised to react against pathogens.
In addition, cells have specialized and powerful mechanisms that are normally silent but respond to attacks with potent mechanisms to neutralize or eliminate the dangers. Single cells have vacuoles and lysosomes. Multicellular bodies have macrophages, neutrophils, lymphocytes, plasma cells of great specificity, etc.
The last stage of designed life—tertiary protection—is healing or repair. If a cell or a living thing is damaged, cut, broken, weakened—if primary and secondary protections fail—there are additional designed mechanisms that heal or repair the damage. The formation of a scar is a designed mechanism. The healing of a fracture is a designed mechanism. The formation of a clot to stop bleeding and the increased production of red cells after hemorrhage are all designed mechanisms. Not just when to clot, but also when to stop clotting, when to not clot, when and how to replace the clot.
Breathtaking
Texts cover almost all of these “breathtaking levels of complexity” of the systems designed to protect life with breathtaking levels of simplification by a naked proclamation that cells “have evolved these systems.”
When, how, and why this could possibly have happened by any unanticipated, unintentional, un-designed process is simply assumed for the sake of the holding the materialistic view of life.
Health lost is in old English a “woe.” Health protected is a “weal.” Old English “weal” (weal-ness or wellness) versus “woe” (woe-ful) is an assumption I am asking you to recognize. “Heal–th” (health) assumes a design that should be protected, maintained, and if attacked, repaired or healed. Health and the mechanisms to preserve it are gifts that science should help us recognize—if not yet with worship, at a very minimum with great gratitude.
God lives in me, in all I feel
Of love and hate, of joy and pain,
Of grace and greed, or woe and weal
Of fear and cheer, of loss and gain… Robert W. Service
This is #4 in a series on worship guided by science. Jack is also known as Dr. John Byron Hoehn, MD, CCFP (Canada), DTM&H (London). His book Adventist Tomorrow—Fresh Ideas While Waiting for Jesus in its second edition continues to be the most popular book Adventist Today has published. Jack’s wife, Deanne, has published a delightful new book called Loving You—I Went to Africa about their 13 years as medical missionaries. These books are available at SHOP in the menu at the top of the page or at Amazon.com.