Living the life unprovable

You can’t avoid orienting your life by commitments that you can’t prove. Philosopher Barnabas Aspray asks why belief matters.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A person walks past a multi-coloured wall of graffiti with the word 'believe' in the centre of it.

Ran Berkovich on Unsplash.

Western Europe is weird. You may not think so if you’ve lived there your whole life. But if you’ve ever travelled anywhere else, you might notice a few oddities.

One of the strangest things about Western Europe is that it’s the only place in the world, at any point in time, that thinks of itself as ‘secular’, i.e. mainly non-religious. Everywhere else throughout history, people have not only been religious but have held religion as the most important framework for understanding reality. For them, the physical world is not all that exists, and the physical world did not cause itself. Something beyond the physical world must be responsible for it, and the ultimate source of meaning, value, and truth can only be found in that ‘beyond’.

Most things that matter can’t be proven

Religious commitments can’t be proven. But then, most things that matter can’t be proven. Your political views, your most significant life choices, what you think most worthwhile and admirable – none of these things are open to scientific proof. You can’t avoid orienting your life by commitments that are unproven and unprovable. The question is: what unproven commitments are you going to hold?

That’s why belief matters. Belief means becoming conscious of the principles that guide our behaviour – and then articulating them. A religion is simply an organised system of beliefs and practices that finds ultimate meaning in its bond to realities beyond the physical. The word ‘bond’ matters here. It is a translation of the original meaning of the Latin word religio which meant ‘to bind’.

The fundamental principles of Christian belief can be found in an ancient text called the Nicene Creed. This creed was written during a time when Christianity was struggling to define itself in contrast to many competing religions and philosophies. Ever since then, it has been seen as the definitive articulation of what it means to believe in Christianity.

The DNA of belief

The technical word for the Nicene Creed is ‘dogma’. But let us not be misled by that word. These days being ‘dogmatic’ can mean having a stubborn attitude that flatly refuses to question or debate some tightly held opinion. It can also conjure up images of people being kicked out of their communities for denying or questioning it. ‘Dogma’ is not a word that denotes open mindedness, humility, or inclusiveness. But in fact, dogma is just the DNA of a religion or belief system, the essential features that make it what it is. Atheism also has dogma. An atheist may, of course, start to believe in God. But if they do, they may not continue to call themselves an atheist. Similarly, a Christian may question the Nicene Creed. But they must be clear that what they are questioning is Christianity itself, and if they lose belief in any part of it, they are thereby abandoning the Christian faith.

Nobody can avoid living their life by unprovable and unseen principles. You can avoid becoming aware of them, but why would you want to do that? They are the lens through which you view the world and they affect every decision you make. For that reason alone, the Nicene Creed, as one of the available lenses, is worth a look.

Article

Assisted dying

Care

Creed

Death & life

19 November 2024

5 min read

“Shortening death” sidesteps the real battle

We need to do more than protest bad deaths, we need to protest death itself, it's more than biological.

Tom Dove

Tom is a physician and completing a theology doctorate.

A hand drapes over the side of an object out of shot.

Michael Schaffler on Unsplash.

What is “death”? It’s surprising the term has received little attention in the assisted dying discussion so far, because more hangs on the answer than one might expect. At a press briefing, Kim Leadbeater MP stated that the assisted dying bill she is proposing is about “shortening death, not ending life.”

But what meaning does “death” have here?

The current bill defines neither “death” nor “dying.” Granted, it implies a biological definition. The bill speaks of administering approved substances to “cause that person’s death” and of capacity and decision-making around “ending life.” These fit the understanding of death with which the medical profession operates—death is the point in time when the combined functions required for human life cease. It is a one-time event, the end of physiology, and so is recognised by a combination of physical signs.

Death, then, is a diagnosis.

So, too, “dying”—though here the waters are murkier. Setting aside sudden deaths, medical talk of dying takes us out of binary territory. Dying speaks of a process, of the “terminal phase.” Within medicine a diagnosis of dying heralds the expectation that a person’s death will occur within hours or days. And so, the focus shifts. The task of care is no longer the coordinated work of investigation, preserving life, and treating symptoms. Now attention is on bringing relief to the process of dying.

The bill seems wise to much of this. Though definitions of death and dying are absent, the bill does define terminal illness—“an inevitably progressive condition which cannot be reversed by treatment” and from which the event of death “can reasonably be expected within 6 months.” And so, it clearly distinguishes terminal illness from biological death and, implicitly, from dying.

Of course, terminal illness and biological death are related. Terminal illness is irreversible, and where terminal illness leads is death. Or, you might say, it leads to the end of life. Apart from the timescale of six months, the same may be said of ageing: ageing is irreversible, and where ageing leads is death. This is why Kim Leadbeater’s comment was puzzling to me. I suspect what she really meant was “shortening terminal illness.” If so, this is confusing because, within the framework of the bill, “shortening terminal illness” and “ending life” are identical. It seems she was getting at something else.

“It seems odd that in the name of eliminating suffering, we eliminate the sufferer.”

Stanley Hauerwas

I suspect Kim Leadbeater was echoing a conviction at home in the Christian faith. That is, try as we might to keep death at a distance and restrict it to a faraway frontier, the life of human beings involves death. I don’t simply mean the biological death we witness—the deaths of friends, relatives, or even strangers. I mean death intrudes upon the way we experience life. Death is more than simply biological.

The fear of death belongs in this category. For some, the impending loss of relationships and joys casts a shadow over life, giving birth to apprehension. Death is not simply a factual matter but something that exerts power and influence. Or take disease and illness. Built into the notion of terminal illness is the idea that the sickness borne by a human body will ultimately bring about that body’s death. That body already speaks of its death. Death is making itself felt in advance.

And so, death is more than a biological event. Even living things can bear the marks of death.

This is no novel claim. The creation account recorded in the Bible says that in the beginning, there was good. But an intruder appears. In the wake of humanity’s choice to go its own way rather than the way of its Maker, death arrives on the scene. And death is an imposter—not simply a physiological fact at the end of the road, but a destructive and alien presence in God’s good world.

Understood in this way, death is not something that God intends humans simply submit to. Death is something to protest. This is why Kim Leadbeater’s comment gets at something important: this kind of death should be protested. The marks of death should not be accommodated, because they do not belong to the goodness of what God has made.

At the heart of the Christian faith is God’s own ultimate protest against the force of death. Christians celebrate that God himself came in the man Jesus to “destroy death.” This is plainly more than biological. Jesus came to free humanity from the entirety of death’s grip. Hence why, when Jesus speaks of “eternal life” he means more than endless biological existence. He means liberation from all the havoc that death brings to bear within God’s world. To the Christian imagination, the power of death must be protested because God protested it first.

The question is how to protest death. Within the framework of the bill, shortening death or terminal illness is identical with ending life. This is the only form protesting death can take.

But the Christian faith makes a far more radical claim: God alone overcame death by dying. This is the point: Jesus was the one—the only one—who emerged resurrected victor in the contest with the power of death. In seeing his death and resurrection, an unshakeable hope emerges. Death is not the victor. And this hope stands above our present experience of death—in whatever form—and, at the same time, calls us to join the protest.

Ethicist Stanley Hauerwas once wrote: “it seems odd that in the name of eliminating suffering, we eliminate the sufferer.” I have deliberately avoided discussing suffering, not least because it would take me too far afield. Yet Hauerwas has put his finger on what I’m getting at. Protesting death—in the big sense—belongs to the Christian faith. Protesting suffering and pain, economic and racial injustice, fractured relationships and broken societies, are all part of this protest. But can eliminating those who live within the shadow of death be part of this protest? I think not. The Christian faith believes there is only one who can overcome death in this way, and that is God himself—who has already done it.