Religion Part VI: Excerpt From "When Breath Becomes Air"

When Breathe Becomes Air is a #1 New York Times Bestseller written by the late Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon at Stanford University who died of lung cancer at the age of 37 after having just completed a lifetime's worth of medical training. Paul began writing this memoir upon receiving his terminal diagnosis, but was unable to complete it. His words are both beautiful and heartbreaking, and offer so much to think about when it comes to searching for meaning in life and death. Paul's perspective on Christianity especially resonated with me, so I have shared an excerpt from his book below.

"On a crystalline spring morning on the third Sunday of Lent, Lucy and I went to church with my parents, who had flown in from Arizona for a weekend visit. We sat together in a long wooden pew, and my mother struck up a conversation with the family sitting next to us, first complimenting the mother on her baby daughter's eyes, then quickly moving on to matters of greater substance, her skills as a listener, confidante, and connector fully evident. During the pastor's Scripture reading, I suddenly found myself chuckling. It featured a frustrated Jesus whose metaphorical language received literal interpretation from his followers:

Jesus answered and said to her, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water." ...Meanwhile, the disciples urged him, "Rabbi, eat." But he said to them, "I have food to eat of which you do not know." So the disciples said to one another, "Could someone have brought him something to eat?

It was passages like these, where there is a clear mocking of literalist readings of Scripture, that had brought me back to Christianity after a long stretch, following college, when my notion of God and Jesus had grown, to put it gently, tenuous. During my sojourn in ironclad atheism, the primary arsenal leveled against Christianity had been its failure on empirical grounds. Surely enlightened reason offered a more adherent cosmos. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God.

Although I had been raised in a devout Christian family, where prayer and Scripture readings were a nightly ritual, I, like most scientific types, came to believe in the possibility of a material conception of reality, an ultimately scientific worldview that would grant complete metaphysics, minus outmoded concepts like souls, God, and bearded white men in robes. I spent a good chunk of my twenties trying to build a frame for such an endeavor. The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning -- to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That's not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn't have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge.

Yet the paradox is that science is the product of human hands and this cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is based on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue. Between these core passions and scientific theory, there will always be a gap. No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience.

Yet I returned to the central values of Christianity -- sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness -- because I found them so compelling. There is a tension in the Bible between justice and mercy, between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And the New Testament says you can never be good enough: goodness is the thing, and you can never live up to it. The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.

Not only that, but maybe the basic message of original sin isn't "Feel guilt all the time." Maybe it is more along these lines: "We all have a notion of what it means to be good, and we can't live up to it all the time." Maybe that's what the message of the New Testament is, after all. Even if you have a notion as well defined as Leviticus, you can't live that way. It's not just impossible, it's insane.

So what, I wonder, is the aspiring metaphysician to do?

Give up?

Almost.

Struggle toward the capital-T Truth, but recognize that the task is impossible -- or that if a correct answer is possible, verification certainly is impossible.

In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer and eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth. Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete. And Truth comes somewhere above them all, where, as at the end of that Sunday's reading,

the sower and the reaper can rejoice together. For here the saying is verified that "One sows and the other reaps." I sent you to reap what you have not worked for; others have done the work, and you are sharing the fruits of their work."