An uncannily observant friend remarked – “There is a lot of God in you” (referring to my frequent observations of how cool God is) and went on to say that “it seems strange to hear so much ‘God’ from you considering your background and education”. I responded by saying that I do not think a scientific training is incompatible with the belief in a God-like phenomenon. Even though Stephen Hawking has recently claimed the non-existence of God and stated that everything can be explained on the basis of laws of physics – duh where did the laws come into being from? The questions will not end, they will just keep getting deeper and more esoteric.
In medicine not all that we practice is based on an explanation of mechanism – not all that we take to be ‘true’ is based on knowledge of how and why it works. A lot of it is based on ‘observation of effect’, in fact today ‘observation of effect’ has become the most regarded ‘scientific proof’ in the medical community. Whereas a lot of understanding of mechanisms of disease and the action of drugs is based on an underlying reasoning and understanding of the physiology, anatomy and biochemistry of the body, and a doctor prescribing a drug can explain how and why that drug will work based on ‘explanation of mechanism’. But when you have 10 painkillers which have the same mechanism of action – how do you decide which one to prescribe given that you cannot differentiate between their mechanisms to help you decide one drugs superiority over the others – for your current knowledge is not developed enough to enable you to distinguish between the minute differences that may exist between the actions of the drugs.
So then we resort to ‘observation of effect’ – what we have come to call ‘evidence based medicine’ – we essentially take 100 people and give 50 drug A and give another 50 Drug B and see which group reports greater pain relief (this is a simplistic model, the actual study designs are much more complicated). And when we are convinced of our observations – we declare that Drug A is better, feed that information into our guidelines and start prescribing Drug A over drug B.
Modern medicine – a scientific discipline is now placing great emphasis on ‘observation of effect’ (aka evidence-based medicine) to guide its work. So here I draw a parallel between the practice of medicine and the practice of believing in the existence of a God. I do not know his mechanism, I do not know how he works or what he is – but I do think he manifests himself in our lives – I do think we can show that he ‘works’ if we but observe the effects of his presence in the world around us. Believing in him/her gives me strength and makes me strive towards being a better person. Everyone is built differently, perhaps some people don’t need that and are comfortable being atheists – I am not comfortable being an atheist – I do believe in the existence, benevolence and greatness of God – it keeps me humble, grateful and grounded.
