Only God Can Save Medicine

If Doctors Want Us To Believe In Them, They Need To Start Believing In Him

Medicine in America is on life support, vitals fading fast. Yet rather than get in there and start chest compressions, our leading doctors are tripping over one another in the race to pull the plug. Yes, medicine in America is dying, and my fellow doctors are killing it. Let me show you their deadly mistake – and the only way it can be fixed.

To begin, let’s take a step back. What is trust? What is authority? One can define them simply as whatever qualities the American medical establishment has been hemorrhaging for at least a decade. Accounts of the loss of faith in medical expertise abound – see here for the sobering statistics, here for another alarm being sounded. But if fewer people than ever trust their doctor, why are doctors doubling down on their arrogant claims to authority?

It is an age-old question. One might as well ask why the royalty-beheading leaders of the French revolution could not predict their own inevitable dates with Lady Guillotine. The revolution always eats its own, yet the ones most enthusiastically serving up the hors d’oeuvres never fail to express surprise when the time comes for their own heads to end up on the platter.  

Pictured: The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Mission Statement

Now, it’s true, human nature doesn’t change, the gods of the copybook headings are undefeated, but my goodness, shouldn’t my colleagues have picked up a few pointers over the centuries? Alas, doctors have never been this poorly read. Among other failings, they’ve neglected their Shakespeare. When Richard II decides, in a moment of greed, to overthrow the established customs of inheritance in England, he fatally undermines his own authority. After all, did he not inherit his own crown? Mark these words of warning from a wise man to his short-sighted monarch:

Let not tomorrow then ensue today;

Be not thyself; for how art thou a king

But by fair sequence and succession?

The king ignores him and proceeds with his usurpations, sealing not only Richard’s bloody fate, but dooming England to decades of hellish civil war. All because Richard vainly thought he personally was the authority, instead of understanding that he was merely a representative of a system of authority that stood above and beyond himself.  

I don’t know if they read Shakespeare in Narnia, but C.S. Lewis shows us, contra Richard II, one noble king who feels this lesson in his bones. As King Lune of Archenland puts it, in The Horse and His Boy, when explaining his refusal to bend the laws of inheritance, “The king’s under the law, for it’s the law makes him a king.”

What Lune knows, what Richard II doesn’t, is that we cannot be our own authority. To believe otherwise is a foolproof recipe for disorder, catastrophe, and anarchy.  

In short you have a ghastly mess!

If I may be so bold, I will go so far as to say this is the defining crisis of our time.

Remember when I told y’all how much Augustine still has to teach us? Here, courtesy of Professor Esolen’s treasure of a translation, are the most important lines you’ll read today. Towards the end of Confessions, recounting a frustrating debate with a stubborn egotist over a close-reading of Scripture, Augustine makes the point that meaningful conversation is quite literally impossible unless you acknowledge that the truth does not reside in you, but outside of you (my italics):

If we both see that what you say is true, and if we both see that what I say is true, where, I ask, do we see it? I surely do not see it in you, nor do you see it in me, but we both see it in that unalterable Truth that stands above our minds.

What does this mean? Well, there was no Mountain Dew 1500 years ago, but, judging by our waistlines, there definitely is today, which means Pastor Doug Wilson can proffer the following memorably bubbly restatement of St. Augustine’s point (you can watch it starting at the 7:10 mark of this video):

If this [water bottle in my hand] were a bottle of Dr Pepper and I had a bottle of Mountain Dew and I shook both of them up and I unscrewed the caps and I put them both here and they both foamed over, and then I said, ‘Now, people, which one’s winning the debate?’…

You would say, ‘They’re not debating, they’re just fizzing.’

If there is no God, if all we are is time and chance acting on matter, then your thoughts and my thoughts are nothing but brain fizz. If they’re nothing but brain fizz, then all we’re doing is fizzing at each other. Who’s winning the debate?

Still confused? Well, if you, like me, prefer milk to Mountain Dew, let’s turn to C.S. Lewis (once more, with the invaluable assist of my italics):

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It’s like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course I can’t trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.

Enough of Lewis, Augustine, and Shakespeare. Let us highlight a more fitting voice for our times. I’m not here to attack Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of American public health, as a liar. He is one, but that’s besides the point. Yes, many accuse Fauci and others like him of destroying trust in American medicine through their lies. Yet I believe it goes far deeper than that. They are destroying American medicine through their truths.

Not the truth - their truths. For their fatal flaw is their sense of themselves as embodiments of truth and authority. Like Richard II, they cannot grasp that their great power was granted them not because they are authority incarnate, but because they are part of an institution whose authority is gifted from on high. Undermine the institution, fatally undermine yourself. Yet here is Fauci, in a rare moment of honesty, providing the perfect epitaph for American medicine:

“I think my own personal ethics of life are, I think, enough to keep me going on the right path.” – Anthony Fauci, explaining why he doesn’t go to church.

You see, he doesn’t need God, he doesn’t need anybody! He’s got it all thought out, personally. The fact that there can be no right path if he’s the only one who decides which way to go – think of searching for buried treasure that doesn’t exist on a map you draw yourself with an X that marks no spot at all – doesn’t seem to perturb this deep thinker.

Like the French revolutionaries, like Richard II, like Augustine’s unknown antagonist, like a Narnian villain, Fauci and the medical elite he represents believe they themselves constitute authority. Authority does not exist above them or outside of them: authority is them. Yet, as Augustine so patiently explained over a millennium ago, such a belief cannot hold up to even a moment’s reflection.

It would defy rationality for us to have faith in our medical establishment. After all, why have faith in the faithless? Fauci and his ilk are of course free to worship themselves, to put all their trust in their own thoughts – but why should I? If Fauci can so cavalierly dismiss He who created the heavens and the earth, what’s stopping you or me from dismissing some eighty-three year old Brooklynite?

Let me be clear and honest. Nothing in the above – not the Lewis, not the Wilson, not the Augustine – makes a case for the existence of God or any other higher authority. Some of you may believe that we truly are nothing but spilled milk, nothing but fizzing soda, that there is no unalterable Truth that stands above our minds. All I am saying is that, if that is the case, there is no authority we can trust, for neither trust nor authority can exist. These are not qualities we can individually generate, despite Richard II’s egotistical claims. They exist only outside ourselves, and if there is nothing outside ourselves – as far too many of our leading doctors believe – well, even modern medicine’s pitiful 40 percent trust rating is roughly 40 percent too high.  

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot pull the plug and then curse out the ventilator for shutting off. If it’s anarchy you want, so be it. Go and fizz to your heart’s content, and hope that things won’t get as bloody as the Wars of the Roses.

If, on the other hand, you want us to trust you, you need us to trust you, well, you better start trusting in Him, and do it quick. The patient is about to code. Godspeed.