Kuruvila Pandikat SJ

Paul Sudhir Arul Kalanithi (April 1, 1977 – March 9, 2015) was an Indian-American neurosurgeon and writer. His book “When Breath Becomes Air” (2016) is a memoir about his life and illness battling stage IV metastatic lung cancer. It was on The New York Times Non-Fiction Best Seller list for multiple weeks.

After graduating from medical school, Kalanithi became a   postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience at Stanford University School of Medicine, USA. In May 2013, Kalanithi was diagnosed lung cancer. He died, aged 37, in March 2015.   

Recalling his early childhood and religious beliefs he says: “Although I had been raised in a devout Christian family, where prayer and Scripture readings were a nightly ritual, I, like most scientific types, came to believe in the possibility of a material conception of reality, an ultimately scientific worldview that would grant a complete metaphysics, minus outmoded concepts like souls, God, and bearded white men in robes.”

But he could not succeed. “The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning — to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That’s not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn’t have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge.”

He recognised a clear paradox: “scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honour, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.

Between these core passions and scientific theory, there will always be a gap, he admits.  No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience. The realm of metaphysics is related to revelation. And atheism can be justified only on these grounds of revelation.

Before his death, Paul did not become a Christian, but returned to the central values of Christianity — sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness — because I found them so compelling. There is a tension in the Bible between justice and mercy. But he is truly taken up by the message of Jesus:  “The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.”