Playing God and Invoking a Perspective

¶ … Verhey, Allen. "Playing God and Invoking a Perspective." Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 20 (1995): 347-364.

Any physician of a moral and ethical frame of mind would be reflexively offended if a patient, or the loved one of a patient, accused that physician of 'playing God.' But what does this phrase mean? According to Allen Verhey's essay on medicine, modern bioethics, and "Playing God and Invoking a Perspective," the phrase "humans should not play God" has been used quite often by individuals of a particular, naturalistic ideological frame of mind to argue against using of supposedly unnatural forms of medicine, technology, and the use of related forms of biotechnology to sustain human life, or to ameliorate the sufferings of human life.

The idea that physicians, scientists and medical practitioners should not play God has even been used to argue against such processes as cloning and genetically modified food because these methodologies are considered unnatural.

Who and what, Verhey asks, is this human-generated notion of 'God' that has become so venerated, in popular discourse, whose methods we should not attempt to play at? The core notion behind the phrase 'humans should not play God,' used in the vein delineated above, is that humans must respect natural processes and thus interferences by physicians are inappropriate and contrary to the natural will of the divine law.

Whatever will be, must be, whatever is natural -- that is, whatever is untouched -- is inherently better than what can be accomplished by human interference. Taken to its logical extreme such an argument could be used against vaccinations and antibiotics, as well as the extremes of modern medicine. The notions of God, and of not interfering or "playing" at the works of God, are often drawn in a fuzzy fashion, with even fuzzier logic.

This naturalistic notion of what is God's realm and what is science and humanity's realm seems to be drawn along the lines of what makes the human advocate of 'not playing God' as uncomfortable in the present day. However, technology is always shifting and changing.

Conceivably, many years ago, playing God could be putting fluoride in the water, or pasteurization -- anything that changed the natural, chemical composition of a natural product, even if these unnatural, human created processes and chemicals improved the fate of humanity and the fabric of human daily life. As a further warning to become over fixated upon a narrow definition of the phrase 'playing God,' it is important to note that these same words have also been conversely used to suggest just the opposite.

People should not 'play God,' say individuals who state that that mercy killings -- the so-called 'pulling the plug,' on terminally and hopelessly ill patients -- or even not providing life-sustaining and life-generating means of survival is a kind of playing God. To play God, in such a line of thought, is to say that Teri Shaivo should die and be taken off life support, because she cannot speak for herself and say she does not wish to be subject to heroic measure to sustain her life.

Also, according to such a line of thinking, a doctor who refuses to allow a woman to make use of currently existing reproductive technology is playing God, by deciding who will be able to have children, and who will not, based upon the moral judgments of the physician -- that the woman is too old, or not economically or emotionally capable or raising a child in the 'correct' fashion, as deemed by the doctor. If the technology exists, the woman should be able to use it.

It is fascinating that how the same phrase, can invoke an entirely different kind of reasoning Verhey comments. The same phrase that has been used by other authors to argue against extraordinary or life-prolonging medical equipment can also be used for the use of such equipment, even though the equipment is hardly God-created.

Presumably, the theological, as opposed to legal or scientific argument of such proponents of the uncritical use of life sustaining measures is that as God is the one who has the sovereignty to decide when a patient should die.

Only God can decided, and thus the physician must do all at his or her disposal to prevent the patient's death, even if the patient has lost all cognitive abilities or the probability of the patient's recovery is quite unlikely in the future, or the prognosis of the patient's potential quality of life is poor.

In other words, the physician should not be playing God by "pulling the plug," rather the doctor must do everything technologically possible to make sure that a patient stays alive until God takes patient, rather than any intervening decision by the doctor. Only if all of the efforts of the physician fail, only after the maximum efforts of the physician have been exercised, can the medical profession know that it is truly the will of God for the patient to leave this world.

Thus the idea that doctors should not "play God" is more semantically repugnant, as in playing with patient's lives and wills, rather than having a real, coherent, and singular meaning in this culture. It can be used both ways -- that doctors should not use technology, because technology allows doctors to assume the functions of God, and that doctors should and must use every measure at their disposal possible to sustain human life, because to do so is to decide who lives and who dies.

Both uses of the same phrase assume knowledge of God's, and by extension, a physician's function in an ethical as well as a medical fashion. Yet both show completely contradictory lines of thinking.

How to reconcile these apparently incommensurate notions? The article "Playing God and Invoking a Perspective," sorts through these different and contrary uses of the phrase "playing God," and ultimately, its author states that the phrase "playing God" does not so much state a principle or suggest a coherent notion, code, or rubric of ethical behavior as invoke a perspective. "Playing God" is simply a perspective from which scientific and technological innovations are assessed. It suggests the relevance of a perspective in which "God" is taken seriously and "play" playfully.

When discussing the notion of doing everything technologically possible to sustain a patient, Allan Verhey invoked the notion of "God of the gaps." "It is an old and unhappy story in Christian apologetics that locates.