brave and bittersweet

Alex once again has a very well-written blog post, but I disagree with it entirely. I could leave a really long comment or just write myself a new blog post. Andy Crouch took up the secular hope vs. spiritual hope compare & contrast and you picked it up, so I will add my thoughts (mostly restating Crouch, honestly.)

A secular hope is a great thing for educated people who have the resources to avoid most of the pain and insecurity that come with disease, hunger, war, and oppression. In fact, a sense of self-sufficiency and self-determination permeates most atheistic discourse that I really don't think can be extended to those who are suffering around the world. Even Steve Jobs, confronted by a horrific medical fate, was able to game the system in order to get a liver transplant that anyone in a similar situation in his part of the country wouldn't be able to get. The sad part is that this is only a mild example of the sort of injustice that allows the rich to live well at the expense of the poor across the world. To say to the billions of people who do suffer around the world and will continue to suffer until they die that we can have hope in this world really is a cold comfort.

I would argue further that a secular hope is not much of a hope at all, even to the educated and wealthy. Any part of life that gives us meaning can be taken from us at pretty much any time, no matter how hard we might try to protect it. Our health, our intelligence, our friends, our financial or physical security-- all of them are guaranteed not to last, and most of them will pass from our hands before we die. You can plan to die well and you can satisfy whatever meaning you've picked out for yourself before then, but it's still a crap shoot whether your kids will turn out alright, your work will be used for good, or your love will mean something to another person. And that's just in this life. If there is a world to come, then such a hope and the meaning we derive from it is laughably insignificant.

Furthermore, you can't know that the meaning you choose for yourself is truly... meaningful. We look with pity on, say, the people who died fighting to preserve slavery or the Tuskegee researchers, but we can't know if perhaps our choices will be just as harmful to others. Lots of people, regardless of class or religious preference, choose terrible meanings for themselves to actualize, most of which are oblivious to the needs of others or contravening them entirely. You say, "Which is the better source of hope: this world, small, and often backwards as it is, but certain, or transcendent meaning and eternal life, known by invisible evidence? What can comfort?" I would argue that the hope of this world is not in any way certain and it is the security & comfort that we have bought for ourselves that deceives us into that certainty.

Now, turning to spiritual hope. I don't think that you can have hope without faith. After all, on a superficial level, hope is simply wanting something good or better to happen in the future. Like buying a lottery ticket. No one is going to buy a house beyond their means expecting to pay it off when they hit the mega millions. But if you've got hope that isn't just what you want to happen, but something that will happen-- then that's the sort of hope will motivate you and give you security. You might buy a house beyond your current means if you know your trust fund will start paying out in 6 months. So a truly substantial hope will lead to truly substantial things. A temporal, worldly hope is always tenuous, because you can never actually give yourself to it with reckless abandon. Yet spiritual hope allows you to give yourself to others, to pour yourself out in love knowing that even if you lose everything else, you have the treasures of heaven. This hope is born out of faith grounded in what we can see & feel but not limited by it. Secular hope is a like buying a lottery ticket in the expectation you'll hit it big; spiritual hope is like being adopted by a rich man with a huge trust fund in Switzerland knowing that you'll get it the day you turn 21. Even if you can never see the millions, you have his constant reassurance and testimony in the past and today that he's taking care of you.

Starting from the Resurrection of Jesus, we see God showing us that we can have a true hope. Jesus, the firstborn from the dead, gives us a meaning that is far more powerful and beautiful than anything we can come up with ourselves. Anything else is like buying the lottery ticket: false hope that's a waste now and foolish in the light of eternity.

also regarding that xkcd comic

Alex recently wrote a good post about a recent xkcd comic that I found rather annoying; he and I talked about it together and decided that we would write separate blog posts. He wrote first, so I am sort of responding to what he wrote as well but mostly responding to the comic.

The comic annoyed me primarily because I'm almost a doctor, and I feel like the comic really misrepresented medical science. Quick caveat: I am really thankful for medical science and everything that $100 billion a year in R&D has gotten us. I'm alive because of it, and so are a lot of patients that I've taken care of over the years.

That being said, I think that there are a lot of things that $100 billion a year in R&D hasn't gotten us. It hasn't done much to help us talk to a patient who needs a drug that cost millions of dollars to develop because he smoked for decades. It hasn't stopped us from giving people million-dollar drugs that don't need them. It keeps some people from dying, but it leaves us speechless when we try to talk about whether or not to let them die. It sure hasn't figured out how to give people the fruits of our labor without the possibility of harming them further (one could argue that I was nearly dead because of medical science just as much as it saved my life.) There isn't a huge list of medical treatments that work with p <0.05 confidence, and most of what we do is based just as much on experience, intuition, and conversation. A gentle touch, sitting down, or listening without interruption are often more valuable than million-dollar drugs. And that's not even touching how much of that $100 billion a year is spent trying to reformulate drugs we've had for decades so that they can be re-patented and resold for higher prices.

So I was bothered by that aspect of the comic. A little. But I was also bothered by another thing-- and that is the pitting of a worldview that isn't looking for answers beyond science against one that does. To me, this is the more dangerous fallacy. It's been noted before that generally, only atheists perceive that there is an impassable conflict between science and religion; most religious folks are very willing to say that science and the scientific method have their place in our worldview. There is intense debate among Christians about what that place is, but they all have a place. Furthermore, I doubt many atheists would put science on such a pedestal that it ought to somehow define all of our lives and livelihoods-- there are far too many failed attempts at this in the last century that would stop such a suggestion dead in its tracks. Science is a like a set of woodworking tools: incredibly useful in their place and powerful in their own right. But take them into a machinist's shop and they're dangerously useless.

Science is really great. It's done a lot of really spectacular stuff, especially in the world of medicine, and I'm thankful for it. But it can't give us answers to a lot of the questions that really bother us, which is why the person in the comic answering the question didn't say anything about what else beyond science. He seemed very content with a system that has given us 20-40 more years of life and made the other 40-50 years of life more comfortable. I am pretty happy with that myself, but certainly not anywhere near satisfied. And if you are genuinely content with the power of science, I have to ask: Is that what you'll settle for?

The question asked in the comic is, I think, a reasonable one. Assuming that the two dudes are friends, I think there's grounds to ask it. I might compare it to a doctor asking a patient if they had thought about reconsidering their own diet after the patient's dad got admitted for a stroke or a heart attack. I do not think that all suffering comes with a built-in meaning that will reveal itself to us if we would only have enough faith. However, that is a totally different proposition from the one that says that your suffering might be entirely meaningless. Both of those extremes-- that suffering always has a meaning that you can perceive if you're strong enough, or that suffering is meaningless-- are incredibly callous, especially to people who suffer a lot. When we experience tragedy and suffering that overwhelm us, it's an entirely normal impulse to ask, "why?" Furthermore, I think its an entirely reasonable response to say, "Because."

The practice of medicine, to me, has a lot of similar to the practice of believing. Day after day when a doctor sees his or her patients, he or she encounters questions that don't have double-blinded randomized clinical trials to answer them. A lot of a doctor's decisions are shaped by evidence, and when something is crystal-clear then he or she does it without hesitation. But practicing well-- and living well-- takes a lot of careful thought in weighing the evidence we've seen, the reason we've been given, the experience we've had, and the intuition we nurture. Science has done a lot in the last 100 years, and I hope that we see even more in the next 100 years. God has given us incredible blessings through science that we ought to be thankful for. But there are things that I don't think we'll ever answer with science, and we should not be so hasty to assert that the progress science has made somehow makes those questions irrelevant. Because they still are, and the God who gave us the power to investigate the world also gave us a way to learn some of those answers.