Bioethics without god: The transformation of medicine within a fully secular culture

Abstract

Medicine is always set within particular cultural contexts and human interests. Central aspects of medical practice, such as concepts of health and disease, bioethical judgments, as well as the framing of healthcare policy, always intersect with an overlapping set of culturally situated communities (scientific, moral, religious, and political), each striving to understand as well as to manipulate the world in ways that each finds socially desirable, morally appropriate, aesthetically pleasing, politically useful, or otherwise fitting. Such taken-for-granted background conditions, in turn, impact clinical expectations, understandings of scientific findings, and appreciation of bioethical obligations. As background norms shift, so too do diagnostic categories as alternative modes of classification and treatment prove more useful for achieving socially, culturally, or politically desired outcomes. It is on this point that the essays in this number of Christian Bioethics strike an important chord. As the authors demonstrate, the most fundamental disagreements in bioethics turn on those who seek to frame culture and moral choice around the recognition of God's existence and those committed to recasting all of our social, moral, scientific, and cultural institutions in terms of a foundational atheism. In various ways, each paper illustrates that without canonical grounding in a fully transcendent God, morality- A nd epistemic claims more generally- A re demoralized, deflated, and brought into question. From the religious practices that guide the provision of Catholic health care and the underlying social norms governing psychiatric medical diagnosis, to whether God should be subject to scientific measurement, and the supposed existence of a "common morality," the essays in this number of Christian Bioethics explore the implications of significant cultural changes that have impacted the taken-for-granted norms that undergird medicine and bioethics.