Science has contributions, limitations in end-of-life issues

Posted: 3/14/08

Science has contributions,
limitations in end-of-life issues

By John Hall

Texas Baptist Communications

SAN ANTONIO—Science has made great contributions in helping people with end-of-life issues, but it also has limitations, Allen Verhey, professor of Christian ethics at Duke Divinity School, told the Texas Baptist Christian Life Conference.

“Today I invite your attention tonight to the end of life—and to the contributions and limitations of science at the end of life,” he said.

“I want to ask about the place of science at the end of life, its contributions to care at the end of life and its limitations, and I want to suggest that when those limitations are not recognized, care at the end of life can be distorted.”

Science has helped extend life and lessen people’s pain in some instances, Verhey noted. The advances in medicine have helped all of humanity.

But at the places of limitations—such as when someone is “brain dead,” but still “alive” because of respirators—faith plays an integral role in making ethical decisions, Verhey said. One’s belief system helps a person determine what death actually means, whether that is measured by loss of brain activity, the loss of functioning organs or the loss of both.

“Death is a human event,” he said. “It may not simply be reduced to the objective criteria used to determine it or a flat line on paper. When the criteria are not acknowledged as insufficient, we risk the sort of reductionism to which the neurologist gave voice. The tidy and eminently reasonable criteria for the determination of death do not quite fit with the messy and not altogether manageable experience of death.”