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On Doctoring

An Abstract for Theism in Medicine


By Nabeel Qureshi  

The summer of 2004 saw the culmination of every major effort in my life. By matriculating into the MD program at Eastern Virginia Medical School, I was finally fulfilling the ambition that had driven me since I could spell the word “goals”. I was becoming a doctor. Amidst a flurry of anticipation and initiation, we were given our white coats and a book titled “On Doctoring”.

 

In my academic trek towards medical school, I had been fortunate to receive a stellar pre-professional education. For four years of that time, I had immersed myself in the ancient language which is the foundation for much of our communication today. Latin had taught me that the word “doctor” meant “teacher” in the ancient world. To be sure, teaching is the responsibility of every good doctor even today.

 

But much has changed since Latin was alive, not the least of which is the modern mindset. The prevailing worldview today is one which dictates that reality is subjective, and that meaning itself is individually defined. This worldview is called post-modernism. Its underpinnings are found as early as the 1920’s in the works of Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger, which served to tear down the wall between subjectivity and objectivity. In the 1960’s, the advent of reader-response criticism stripped books of their ability to share intended messages, demoting them to the level of tools for self-reflection. Now, from Hamlet to Harrison’s, fact and fancy have been accorded the same position in the realm of Truth. The wholesale embrace of such relativistic theories by virtually all levels of academia has gradually permeated the minds of us medical students as we prepare to become the next generation of “teachers”.

 

And there’s the rub, for in that subjectivity of relativism, the lessons which can be taught when we have shuffled off all meaning must give us pause. Teaching, or doctoring, requires some standard of absolute Truth and fact. But if we adhere to post-modern concepts of reality, there is no such thing as Truth with a capital T, just truth with a lowercase t that only means whatever it might happen to mean to me.

 

This post-modernism is the shifting foundation upon which academia is building most medical students today. We are being asked to care for patients with compassion and altruism, but these words have lost all grounding in Truth, and are instead sentiments which may mean something to one student, something entirely different to another student, and perhaps nothing at all to a third.

 

But it’s hardly any wonder that meaning is so subjective to us. When medical students are not immersed in Barth and Heidegger (it may come as a shock, but sometimes we put those books down), we are often found in a world of Darwin, Miller, and Dawkins. We have been sold stories of randomly-forming proteins and self-replicating peptides that surgically excise the meaning out of life, altogether apart from philosophy and literary theory.

 

To illustrate, we are told that proteins formed when a chance collection of H2, CH4, NH3, and H20 met electricity in our atmosphere. These proteins later managed to become self-replicating systems which can loosely be called “alive”. Slowly but surely these amorphous, amoebic, one-celled life-forms have joined forces with random mutation and natural selection to produce 4th year medical students.

 

If this is true, as academia insists it is, then for what purpose am I here? Is there such a purpose? Of course, there cannot be any. If the collection of elements which produced me were the product of a blind force, then it necessarily follows that there was no vision for my existence. No purpose, no meaning. I’m here as a waste product of matter, time, and chance. I am the feces cosmic coincidence.

 

And let’s just say I play along and accept my place in the porcelain throne of purpose. What shall I do now with my life? Surely it should not be something as grandiose as “caring for others”, should it? Why care for other people when I have only a paltry 77.6 years of existence? In fact, I might not even have that much time; chance giveth, and chance taketh away! If I were to “care for others”, I would probably undergo some form of sacrifice or suffering, and why bother spending my short existence suffering for the sake of other meaningless, purposeless collections of carbon? I would do well to tarry in the advice of Epicurus, who said we should seek “the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul”. Or perhaps the advice of some of his modern followers would do me better: “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die”.

 

In fact, morality itself on the evolutionary model is no more than the product of a herd mentality. There is no true “good” or “bad”, just what is beneficial to society. Michael Ruse, philosopher of religion, has said “The position of the modern evolutionists is that morality is a biological adaptation, no less than our hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, and any deeper meaning is illusory.”

 

However, let’s just pretend we as medical students are dead set on sacrificing for others and offering compassion to those in need, despite the fact that academia has enlightened us to the foolishness of it all. Our efforts, even if they revolutionized the world, will last no longer than this earth. If hunger is abolished, or cancer is cured, or poverty is countered, there will be no lasting impact of these victories. All will be wiped away when man is gone. Be it on account of nuclear self-destruction, incurable disease, earth’s collision with a meteor, or the inevitable supernova of our sun – when man is no more, his efforts will go with him. All we did will be for naught. At least, this is what academia would teach us.

 

But, alas, we have no choice in what we do anyway. When we signed the dotted line which stated that man is simply a mix of math and molecules, the fine print required that we give up our free will. If we consist entirely of physical substance, then everything we are is dictated by physics. That means our actions are a result of chemical and biological processes in our brains, and any concept of “self-control” or “free-will” is just an illusion.

 

It is here, atop the summit of pseudo-intellectual self-righteousness, after academia has slain meaning, purpose, morality, altruism, and free-will, that it pontificates to medical students about compassion and love. It is no wonder we start tapping our feet and looking at our watches, wondering how many more seconds remain between us and our first paychecks.

 

But the human spirit demands. It demands many things and it refuses to go down this path. It demands that meaning does exist in this universe, meaning beyond social construct and evanescent emotion. Man has always sought for meaning and purpose. This has been the greatest question of all time: “Why am I here?” The quest for meaning is not only archetypal, but it is ubiquitous even today. It seems to be an age-old indicator that meaning and purpose do exist. For example, man’s thirst for water and his hunger for food indicate that water and food in fact exist. What man, other than perhaps the odd one in a bunch, would yearn for something that does not exist in some form or another? Yet virtually all men everywhere have yearned for meaning and purpose. So meaning and purpose must exist.  But if meaning and purpose do exist, and they have existed for all men everywhere, then they must be grounded in something Absolute. If the foundation of meaning and purpose were limited in space or time, then they would be relative and we would reenter our cycle of subjectivity and futility. So meaning and purpose must be grounded in an Absolute. If we are to have meaning and purpose in our existence, then we must have had an Absolute that created us that way.

 

The human spirit also demands that meaning and purpose last beyond the temporary confines of this world. So it must be that our Absolute must offer something beyond death. In fact, it must offer something that lasts into eternity, or else we will be confronted with some form of death sooner or later, and the Epicurean philosophers would have been right after all. Besides, our souls yearn for an infinite existence just as they yearn for meaning and purpose, and this infinite existence must also be grounded in this Absolute.

 

The human spirit also demands that morality exist. If morality is to exist in any objective sense, it must also be grounded in this Absolute thing. If not, morality would be a free-for-all. One man would define his morality one way, another man would define his morality in another. Thus the first man can be moral to the second by kicking him in the shins, while the second man can say “thanks” to the first by gouging out his eyes, and both might be being moral. Or perhaps one would argue that morality can exist by social convention, without needing to be grounded in an Absolute; if a society agrees to a certain code of morality, then morality can exist in a culturally relative sense. But if this were truly the case, then the Allies would have had no business taking the Nazis to task in the Nuremburg trials of 1945. The Nazis had sought to improve the world by cleansing out the weak. Yet the Allies responded by essentially saying “There is a universal code of standards which dictates that your actions are an abomination, and by those standards you are criminals.” And we would argue that the Allies were right. There is a code of morality greater than either society. Morality must therefore also be grounded in an Absolute.

 

The human spirit also demands to be altruistic. To satisfy our yearning for altruism, this Absolute must provide us a reason to be caring and compassionate. Be it through offering inherent value to our men, through a code of morality, or through some imperative injunction built into the very matrix of our being, the Absolute must be the source of altruism, or else there will be no real altruism, and the criticisms of Dr. Ruse go unchallenged.

 

The human spirit also demands that the universe should always and everywhere operate under the dictates of meaning and purpose. Thus, the universe itself must also be derived from this Absolute. And, considering that the universe is comprised of space, time, and matter, then its source must be beyond these things. The Absolute must be spaceless, timeless, and immaterial.

 

In sum, if we are to truly have lasting meaning and purpose in our lives, and if altruism is going to be something real and not just a social construct, if morality is to exist, and if we demand these principles to be universally applicable, we are left with a spaceless, timeless, immaterial Absolute that is powerful enough to create the universe, personal enough to call us to love our neighbors as ourselves, and promises us a life that will last forever. It is here, atop the summit of meaning, purpose, love, morality, and altruism that we can truly be doctors. It is here that we can love our enemies to the end instead of serving ourselves to their detriment. It is here that we can leap towards certain death to aid the poor and the suffering. It is here that we will always be able to have hope in eternity without scavenging for immediate pleasure and fulfillment. It is here that the hope of the ancients, the essence of love, the foundation of morality, the impetus for altruism, and the fount of meaning must be: at the feet of God.

 

If the word “doctor” is going to mean anything, meaning must be something. If a doctor’s choices are going to be valuable, then he must have the free-will to make a choice. If a doctor’s actions are going to mean anything, his actions must have ultimate purpose. If a doctor is going to truly love his patients and have an altruism that goes beyond a herd mentality, then altruism must be more than what it has become.

 

In order to truly be a doctor, one must be built upon a foundation of God.