英文自修73：我们并非无所不能
本系列内容英文原文取自BBC Thought for the Day节目网站，朋友们也可以下载节目录音收听。
译者：默谦
审读：武太白
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Thought for the Day - 20140506 - Rev Dr Giles Fraser
I probably shouldn’t be doing Thought for the Day this morning. For the last couple of weeks I’ve had a nasty chest infection that I can’t seem to shift and indeed I’m asthmatic. It feels like I am sucking air through a wet sponge and I’m constantly exhausted. Yesterday, I finished a course of antibiotics – which usually sorts the thing out. But this time they don’t seem to have worked. Which was why I was particularly alert to the recent warning from the World Health Organisation that antibiotics are becoming less and less efficacious and that we are heading towards a post-antibiotic world.
可能我今天早晨不应该做“每日一思”，因为过去的几周里我患了严重的胸腔感染，以至于我不能走动，而且我确实有些气喘，感觉好像在透过一块湿海绵吸入空气，这让我感到筋疲力尽。昨天，我结束了一个疗程的抗生素治疗，这通常都会使得情况好转。但这次似乎不管用了。这就是我对最近世界卫生组织的警示特别警惕的原因，警示说抗生素越来越不管用了，我们正迈进后抗生素世界。
As a spokesman for the WHO put it “Effective antibiotics have been one of the pillars allowing us to live longer, live healthier. Unless we take significant actions to change how we produce, prescribe and use antibiotics, the implications will be devastating.”
正如世界卫生组织发言人所说：“有效的抗生素已经成为我们更加健康更加长久生活的一个支柱。除非我们采取重要的措施改变我们生产、开处方和使用抗生素的方式，否则这个影响将会是毁灭性的。”
Perhaps then it makes little ultimate difference who owns AstraZeneca. For just maybe, we are facing the prospect of a terrifying new world in which pharmaceutical technology will no longer provide us with the sort of protection that we’ve got used to since the mid part of the twentieth century. Just maybe, we are losing our immunity from those medical conditions we thought we had beaten. In which case the enlightenment dream of continual never-ending progress looks increasingly hubristic. It seems we are no longer mini-gods after all.
或许拥有阿斯利康公司的人也无法有大的作为。或许是因为我们正面对一个令人恐惧的新世界，在新世界里，制药技术无法再给予我们自20世纪中叶就习以为常的那种保护。也或许，对那些我们认为已经攻克了的疾病，我们的免疫力也在消逝。在这种情况下，这种进步永不停息的启蒙之梦看起来愈加艰难，似乎我们不再是无所不能的。
And this is where the theology comes in. For one of the things that the Judeo-Christian tradition has always insisted upon is that we are not gods. That is the point of iconoclasm: that radical Biblical distrust of anything other than God that presents itself as being of ultimate concern. Only God is God. And we are mortals, and intrinsically vulnerable.
而这正是神学起作用之处。犹太教和基督教传统共同坚持的一件事是我们不是神。这也是打破旧习的关键：圣经中激进的唯信神论，神以一种终极关注的姿态展示自己。只有神是神，我们是凡人，本质上脆弱易受伤害。
For a while, some people believed that all our technological swagger could augment the human condition in a way that would protect us from our intrinsic vulnerability. There was, of course, always a terrible unreality about all of this – as if, through technology, humanity could find release from the very things that make us human: not least, sickness and death. It was, I believe, an escapist fantasy.
一些人曾一度相信技术上的大手笔能够增强我们在天性的脆弱下保护自己的能力。当然，这永远有一种可怕的不真实性——仿佛通过科技，人类能从那些生来注定遭受的事情中解放出来：尤其是疾病和死亡。我认为这是逃避现实的幻想。
And we are reminded of this once again as we entertain the possibility that bacteria can evolve faster than pharmaceuticals. The very real prospect of the end of antibiotics reminds us that we are fragile, vulnerable creatures after all. And maybe we’re better employed in making our peace with this reality rather than pretending we are something other than we are.
我们再一次被提醒，我们需要接受细菌比药物进化更快的可能性。抗生素终结这一非常现实的前景提醒我们终究是脆弱容易受伤害的生物。比起不承认自己的本来面目，或许与这个现实和平相处会更好。
Speaking personally, I have never been all that impressed by the claims some people make for life-changing technology. This is not a counsel of despair. Yes, of course I’d like my chest infection to go away. And yes, of course I wish the Amoxicillin had done its job. But ultimately, the failure of my physical form is something that I will have to face. For me, that’s always going to be a theological issue: a matter of life, death and ultimate meaning. And no amount of technology can ever begin to deal with that one for me.
就我个人而言，面对有些人声称科技能够改变人生的断言，我从来不为所动。这并非一种绝望的忠告。是的，我当然希望自己的胸腔感染能好起来，而且我也希望阿莫西林能起作用。但最终，我要面对身体的衰退。对我而言，永远有一个神学上的关乎生命、死亡和无限的议题，即便再强大的科技也无法应对。