Proofless

Medicine and the Necessity of God

I am not temperamentally inclined toward religious belief. My natural instincts and inclinations have always favored rationalism, science, empiricism, and skepticism. I have never understood why faith alone should be regarded as a virtue. Why would it be good to believe something without evidence? Shouldn’t belief aim at truth, and shouldn’t truth be supported by reasons? From an early age, I wanted to know not only what to believe but why. To my mind, conviction without justification was not holiness but credulity.

I was raised Catholic. Like many children, I attended CCD, or what some call Sunday School, where parent volunteers did their best to teach the faith. I was an inquisitive and precocious child, more interested in causes than customs, and I suspect I needed a bit more metaphysical detail than they were prepared to give. One day our class discussed the world’s other religions. We learned that Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and many others each had their own doctrines, their own scriptures, and their own gods. Near the end of the lesson, I asked what seemed the obvious question: Who’s right?

The teacher’s answer startled me. “We don’t know.”

That answer dissolved the ground beneath my feet. If we did not know, then what had all of this been for? The prayers, the readings, the rules? Were we no more certain of our truth than the Hindus were of theirs, all of us guessing in the dark? The question lingered. It lingered all the more as the priest scandals erupted across the Church. My parents, shaken, withdrew from parish life. I was never confirmed. By the time I reached high school, I called myself at times agnostic and at others an outright atheist. I was mostly open to possibility of God, but I did not feel His presence nor did I even know how I would recognize such an experience were I to ever have it.

Medicine has not made faith easier. If anything, it has deepened my doubt. I am surrounded by suffering that mocks any simple notion of divine justice. The innocent die. The wicked are preserved. I have pronounced infants, toddlers, and teenagers dead, and each time it feels like a refutation of Providence. Every day I am steeped in death, but familiarity with mortality has not made me any more comfortable with it. Death is always horrific. The more I see of it, the less natural it seems. I have never found any meaning in it, nor any evidence that there is anything after but the terrifying prospect of oblivion and nothingness.

And yet, the desire to believe lingers.

I still am not given to religious feeling. I admit I am envious of my wife’s recent conversion, the immediacy of her faith and the joy and peace she finds within it. But today, I cannot call myself atheist, and as I age I find disbelief increasingly untenable. These days, I call myself Catholic.

What has helped to persuade me is that I know that objective right and wrong exist. I do not feel this as a matter of opinion; I know it as a fact. My conviction that certain acts are truly evil, not merely inconvenient, is as immediate as my awareness that fire burns. That knowledge is itself evidence of God. If moral truth exists, then there must be a mind for which it is true. A law implies a lawgiver.

To the secular mind, good is what works. Evil is what disrupts. Atheistic morality, when reduced to its essence, is utilitarian and Darwinian. It holds that moral instincts arose because they improved our chances of survival. By this reasoning, honesty is valuable only so long as it produces stability, generosity only so long as it yields reciprocal benefit. The moral sense is explained away as an evolved instinct, useful but not true.

Without God, good and evil dissolve into usefulness and harm. Morality becomes etiquette, adapted for survival. The secular man may still condemn murder, but he condemns it as maladaptive, not as wrong in itself. Murder is bad only as a matter of social evolution; it isn’t good for the tribe to murder one another, which is the secular explanation for why almost all human civilizations have regarded murder as wrong.

Should circumstances change, however, and should murder one day advance the collective, the atheist would have no ground on which to call it evil. If one day it became useful, if it benefitted the tribe, the ideology, the species, it would cease to be evil altogether. Even if an atheist may say that murder is universally wrong, what he means is that social structures and circumstances have not yet arisen under which murder would be palatable or even beneficial. Secular ethics are ultimately always conditional, not categorical.

We have seen this play out in culture. When a man regarded as politically wicked is attacked or killed, there is applause. His death is called justice because it serves the right cause. The act is not evil but useful. This is the logic of a morality without God: sin becomes strategy, and the ends justify the means. Such reasoning is inevitable once moral law is replaced with mere moral feeling.

Believers mean something entirely different when they speak of morality. To say that murder is wrong is not to say it is maladaptive or impolite but that it violates an objective law that exists whether or not it serves us. Right and wrong are not social inventions; they are features of reality. To deny this is to turn morality into arithmetic written in sand, to be erased and rewritten by every tide of circumstance.

The irony is that even the most convinced secularist cannot help but speak as if morality were real. He still uses words like good, better, and just, as if they described real qualities rather than feelings. Environmentalists claim that the earth would be better without humanity. Better for whom? If there is no God and man is a cosmic accident, the planet has no moral trajectory. A green world and a barren one are equally meaningless. To whom would it matter what color is the giant rock hurtling through empty meaningless space? To say that one state is better than another assumes a standard of goodness beyond matter, a cosmic preference that can only belong to a mind. Without such a mind, the language of better and worse is gibberish.

This same confusion pervades medicine. The modern bioethical lexicon is borrowed from the moral tradition that secular medicine has otherwise abandoned. Words like justice, autonomy, altruism, and beneficence once referred to truths grounded in the sacredness of the person. The form endures, but the faith that animated it is gone. Justice presupposes an order of right, and autonomy presupposes that life has worth independent of the collective. Both are remnants of a moral universe built by faith. In the secular hospital they persist but are repeated without belief.

It was not always so. The hospital itself was a religious creation. Monks and nuns tended the sick as acts of charity, following the example of Christ who healed the blind and the crippled, cleansed lepers, and dined with sinners. To care for the sick was to imitate the ministry of Jesus, who made no distinction between the deserving and the undeserving, the pure and the impure. The poor, the deformed, and the contagious were bearers of the divine image. Healing the body was inseparable from caring for the soul. Medicine was a ministry, not an industry.

Today, however, hospitals belong not to the church but to the state. They answer not to God but to government and to the financial mechanisms that stand in His place. Their language has shifted from sanctity to efficiency, from charity to compliance. Their symbols are no longer crosses but logos, their mission statements full of managerial prose. The physician’s duty is measured in outcomes and quality metrics.

This transformation has moral consequences. The modern physician is taught to weigh not sanctity but “quality of life,” a phrase that sounds humane but is, in truth, arbitrary. Who decides whose life is of quality? A ventilator-dependent man with terminal disease may be allowed to die peacefully, and few would call that immoral. Yet when a nation like Canada permits physicians to kill patients who are not dying at all, even those merely depressed or impoverished, it reveals how far the language of compassion can drift without an anchor in the sacred.

The same reasoning governs abortion. The fetus is said to lack quality of life, or to threaten the quality of another’s. The act is justified as mercy, as prudence, as choice. What it is not, any longer, is wrong. A society that ceases to believe in God inevitably ceases to believe in innocence.

Medicine has thus become the most visible experiment in secular morality. It still borrows the language of duty and compassion, but these words are suspended in air. Without God, there is no ground beneath them. When the moral law is untethered from the divine lawgiver, the physician ceases to be a servant of life and becomes an instrument of policy. The white coat, once a vestment, has become a uniform of the state.

I often feel the absence of God in my work. I do not sense His presence in the trauma bay or the ICU. But I cannot accept that the universe is indifferent, because indifference cannot explain the ache I feel when I see a child die or the moral outrage that follows an act of cruelty. These reactions are not evolutionary instincts; they are the soul’s recognition that something sacred has been violated. My inability to believe easily has become, paradoxically, a proof that belief is necessary.

If there is no God, then the human project is meaningless. There is no right or wrong, only cause and effect. The green earth is no better than the barren one, and the healed patient is no better than the dead. But if there is a God, then every heartbeat is sacred, every act of healing a participation in creation itself.

I remain, by temperament, a skeptic. Yet reason itself points toward faith. I believe that life is good, and that belief cannot be sustained without the God who gives it meaning. Medicine may not always remind me of His presence, but it continually reminds me of His necessity.