Last weekend I attended a conference on issues of life and death in the medical sciences. These days such issues exemplify the extent to which the presumption of knowledge, supposedly verified by empirical methods, is being exploited to the detriment of respect for human life, in individuals and on the whole.
Dr. Paul Byrne shared vital information about the threat from such presumptions at the end of life, when it comes to determining so-called “brain death,” so that human organs can be harvested from people who must still be alive for that purpose, or else the organs will not be suitable for transplant.
Mercedes Wilson addressed the issue at the start of life. Encouraged especially by Planned Parenthood’s ideology of death, prevalent methods of family planning involve aborting nascent human offspring, even though a more reliable method, informed by God’s careful respect for human life, dispenses with the need for child murder.
Walter Hoye spoke about notorious historical episodes of so-called medical research that exploited the ignorance and vulnerability of black Americans. Under the guise of treatment, people were infected with deadly diseases, then placed in “control groups,” to be left untreated until death, their lives extinguished in order to generate research data.
Robert Schindler spoke about the judicial murder of his sister, callously deprived of conscientious care he and her other family members were anxious to provide, all to respect the perverse whim of a husband, his marriage vows forsworn, who was perversely determined to prevent others from doing what he no longer cared to do.
Once upon a time, “Abstain from harm (injury, injustice)” was the preeminent rule of the medical profession. I’m sure that many doctors of old who joined the profession did so on account of their positive commitment to the welfare of their patients. But the knowledge to help people was acquired along with extensive knowledge that could be used to injure them. Therefore, the sworn rule of their profession also served to reassure people that no bribe or blandishment would induce its learned members to abuse their knowledge in any way that harmed their patients.
In a world where an abortionist is accepted as a bone fide member of the medical profession; where a so-called medical doctor can assist in suicide; where medical prescriptions are ad-driven matters for supply and demand in the general marketplace; where profit opportunities or political ambitions almost exclusively drive funding for medical research; why would anyone in their right mind simply trust medical professionals?
The word “professional” once applied to people whose love of goodness, truth and the ideal of their profession led them to swear a sacred oath that no promise or threat would induce them to betray. These days it is often taken to mean almost the opposite, referring to people who work for some extraneous or material reward, as opposed to amateurs, who aim to serve and realize a beloved ideal.
When it comes to medical, or any other field of science, it should be obvious that this change implies corruption. True science isn’t just a matter of scrupulous method and accurate observation. It involves applying the results they produce in the service of truth, accurately distinguishing what has been empirically verified from what has not; and refusing to make claims that ignore that distinction. The problem with defining a science-based profession in terms of its rewards is that verified facts will be hidden or ignored in order to maximize profit.
Thanks to its success over the past century and more, the credibility of the empirical scientific method has vastly increased. It has therefore acquired dogmatic authority, totally at odds with its logic. For that logic makes no claim of definitive knowledge beyond what has been verified by empirically disciplined observation. Dogmatism is therefore entirely alien to its character.
But the overall corruption of the professional ethic means that most scientific professionals are now bound to be mastered by considerations extraneous to what would have been the ideal of their profession. Pressured by those considerations, they give themselves over to a reprobate mind, abusing the reputation of science to impose dogmatic opinions that either have not been, or could logically never be verified by the empirical method. This is particularly true when it comes to matters involving relations among human subjects, where questions of good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice, inevitably arise.
Scientists can tell us more and more about what killed the person whose body they are examining. But they cannot scientifically determine whether the person died justly or unjustly. They can help Hitler or some other instigator of mass slaughter devise efficient means to take the lives of millions. But they cannot scientifically determine whether the slaughter purifies or degrades the human race. Even if they scrupulously observe their empirical method, they cannot tell us whether waiting to observe the consequences of mass slaughter, before approving or condemning it, is morally justified.
Such human moral judgments require standards for action that cannot wait upon empirical results. We need to know that such egregious slaughter is wrong before it is done, by means of a standard we can discern and apply before the data is in. Was this the reason ancient doctors were bound by a general rule to do no harm, without regard to extraneous considerations, however subjectively expedient? Was it that moral judgments have no basis in fact, as some have openly argued in the modern era?
Or was it because the empirical basis of certain sciences cannot adequately address the truth of conclusions radically dependent on the factual activity of human subjects. Their actions and reactions depend on determinations that elude immediate observation, even though they are immediately known by the subjects responsible for them? As Macbeth says of his schemes, “strange things” they have “in head that will to hand, which must be acted ere they may be scanned.”
“Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow,” as T.S. Eliot put it. From evolution to “brain death,” from the “Big Bang” theory to apocalyptic speculations about population growth or climate change, there are supposedly “scientific” prognostications that ring hollow when they dogmatically claim the authority of empirical science for events that, by their very nature, are banished from the stage of human cognitive understanding.
Is this one reason the Biblical understanding of God has such cogency that it remains an obsession even for those who question or deny it? In the Biblical account, Adam searched among the animals for a being like himself, but he found none, until God intervened. Then, by the representation of God, he immediately knew himself in Eve. But how did he recognize what he was seeing for the first time? Somehow he knew the truth without first observing it, understood its meaning as the subject of an experience he could not observe, but that informed him nonetheless.
At its heart, doesn’t every observation that is subject to our understanding have this elusive certainty about it? It is the same certainty with which we know that we ourselves exist, even though, in every observation, we are always standing, as it were, behind the camera’s lens?Thus we are invisible to ourselves, just as God as such is invisible to us. If our way of knowing requires that we deny His presence, what are we to make of it? If, on the other hand, we effectively know ourselves to be, how can we claim to deny that being itself is known to us, though only in effect?