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The discourse on faith and medicine: a tale of two literatures

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Abstract

Research and writing at the intersection of faith and medicine by now include thousands of published studies, review articles, books, chapters, and essays. Yet this emerging field has been described, from within, as disheveled on account of imprecision and lack of careful attention to conceptual and theoretical concerns. An important source of confusion is the fact that scholarship in this field constitutes two distinct literatures, or rather meta-literatures, which can be termed (a) faith as a problematic for medicine and (b) medicine as a problematic for faith. These categories represent distinct theoretical lenses for viewing the intersection of faith and medicine. Observations about these two approaches are offered, along with insights about why the discourse on faith and medicine should become better integrated into discussions of religion and science.

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Notes

  1. This contentiousness is probably a function of the seeming impossibility of a healing power of distant prayer due to its apparent violation of the laws of physics or the laws of science itself. This is an oft-stated critique of the literature on this topic, which has been carefully rebutted [43, 62]. Contemporary physics has evolved considerably beyond the tacit understanding of those making such critiques, who tend to date themselves as largely unfamiliar with theories related to quantum and post-quantum models of the physical universe and with empirical evidence for the nonlocal characteristics of human consciousness. Another cause of the anger sometimes elicited by these studies probably stems from a general antipathy toward religion and spirituality on the part of skeptical critics. This hostility often bleeds over, unnecessarily, into the other classes of research studies, even though significant results for such studies are readily accommodated by naturalistic explanations. Findings linking frequent public religious behavior or greater self-assessed religiousness to, say, fewer depressive symptoms or greater positive well-being are of a piece with decades of empirical social and behavioral research identifying the wide-ranging impact of religion on things like socioeconomic mobility, voting behavior, family and marital functioning, prosocial behavior, interpersonal attitudes, and myriad other outcomes—none of which elicits controversy or assertions that the sanctity of science is being violated.

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The author would like to thank the two reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions.

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Levin, J. The discourse on faith and medicine: a tale of two literatures. Theor Med Bioeth 39, 265–282 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-018-9449-9

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