The Relationship Between Medicine And Religion

Superior Essays
In 1981, a Christian woman called Dodie Osteen was diagnosed with a monastic cancer of the liver. She was told that without chemotherapy, she would only have weeks to live. Her husband told the doctor that they believed in miracles, and the miracle worker, Jesus. She went home without chemotherapy, and prayed to God for help in curing her. She lived as though she was not sick, and went about her daily life as normal, all the while praying to God to heal her. And she healed! She lived on without chemotherapy. Years later, she was tested and it was as if the cancer had never been there at all.

So what do we know from this? We know that she did have the cancer. We know that it was healed without any help from the doctors or anything scientific, rather using the healing power of her God. So, how did this happen?

This brings us to the knowledge question: To what extent are religion and science independent from each other? There are two sides of different ways of healing, which are science and religion. People who believe in scientific healing believe in medical science. They look for healing and cures on a physical level, using various medicines and surgeries to heal people. Others who believe in the religious side of healing rely on their faith. They think that healing is spiritual, and use praying and scripture reading to heal themselves and others. We know that science is objective. Scientists use evidence in the form of facts and statistics to prove that something is the case instead of intuition and emotion, so most people are inclined to believe that it is the truth because to them it is more logical. So why was science wrong in this case? It is a well-known fact that religion uses emotion in their beliefs rather than reason. They believe their truths and belief in a God to be valid because of feelings they have, or their faith. Emotion is a way of knowing separate to reason. In this example, Dodie knows that she will be healed because of her faith, and feels that God will heal her. The doctors, on the other hand, used their reasoning and knowledge of evidence from the past cases to say otherwise. Another real life situation related to this case is about creationism and evolution. People claim that evolution is a scientific fact, however, in actual fact, there is no concrete proof that this is the case, hence the term the “theory of evolution.” So when people believe in the theory of evolution, they actually have faith in this theory, just as Christians do in their theory of creationism. Neither model of our origin has been exposed beyond reasonable doubt. This is a case of both opposing points of view having faith in something, one based on logic and reason and the other based on emotion and religious premise. Religion is subjective, and this can lead to bias, which points away from the truth, from a scientific perspective. In science people tend to use reason and logic rather than emotion to find the truth. People tend to believe things
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Growing up, a huge influence of what you believe is based off of people such as parents, teachers, and friends. People believing in different things have different types of authoritarian figures. Science, for example, tells us to listen to reason and logic. Meanwhile, religion tells us to listen to a God and our emotions.

So, to what extent can we believe what doctors and medical medicine tell us, and to what extent can we believe what a God and the teachings of that God tell us?

The relationship between religion and science has been studied by many people, such as philosophers, theologians, scientists and others over a long period of time. There are different perspectives on this issue, some saying that the relationship is conflict based, or one of harmony, or even nonexistent.

From the perspective of ethics, in Dodie’s testimony, she frequently mentions and emphasizes about how she focused on the moral and ethical teachings of the bible to help her heal. If we were to say that religion is subjective, then are the ethics and moral teachings of the bible also just an

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