THE CHURCH OF DOC LYLAH On my Facebook account, my status message reads: I worship at the church of Lylah Reyes MD.

Services every Saturday this September. For the past eight months weve put our health and happiness in the hands of one person. Our OB GYN. Dr. Lylah Reyes has the power of life and death over us. Our devotion to her is absolute, almost like a cult. Because Ate Lylah is not an easy master to please. Every week she demands to know what my wife is eating. How much weight shes gained. How her blood pressure has been. How her blood sugar is doing. If weve been good, her smile makes us glow for the rest of the week. If weve been bad, we pay for it with a couple of expensive days at the hospital. I believe in Ate Lylah despite not believing in god. Or maybe because of it. As an atheist, I value evidence over tradition, I respect the humane practice of medical science over superstition and blind faith. I dont have blind faith in Ate Lylah. Demanding as she is, our OB-GYN has a reason to be strict, and we have a reason to follow. The statistics show that the Philippines has an infant mortality rate of 22 deaths every 1000 births. The science also shows that women above thirty have a decreasing chance of giving birth to normal children. (My wife is 33.) High blood pressure and gestational diabetes are also deadly risks for both mother and baby, if neither is controlled early enough. (My wife has both high blood pressure and gestational diabetes.) Our obedience to Ate Lylah bends the odds in our favor just a tiny bit. Once upon a time we might have resorted to prayer, but studies have shown statistically that prayers make no difference at all. It takes people like Ate Lylah to make all the difference in the world. I believe we live in an indifferent, uncaring universe. I believe this life is all we have. Some religious people might say this view is nihilistic, that it demeans the significance of our lives. To me that means just the opposite. It means that goodness, compassion, and mercy are all human attributes, not divine ones. So when I am grateful for my blessings, I am grateful to people like Ate Lylah, and not to some being out there who takes all the credit for the good things ordinary people do. It means we are not perfect, but we can strive towards perfection. We can only be sure we dont know everything, but science and a rational outlook are the best way to improve our knowledge about the universe. As Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman put it, "I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything." It means that education and science, applied humanely, are more important than prayers that do nothing. And it means that when baby Miranda is born, she will not be a gift given by God, but that does not make her any less significant. She will come to be because her parents love each other, because sperm and egg got lucky one afternoon, and

because her parents had a very strict but caring doctor who saw her through the very end. And why shouldnt that be enough?