But is it really necessary to replace the hegemony of science with the hegemony of religion? Must the scientific and the religious approaches be diametrically opposed, fighting their own war to the death?
If the legal battle over Schiavo created this impression, it is misleading. John Paul endorsed the position of Pope Pius XII, who said that it was "for the doctor to give a clear and precise definition of death and of the moment of death." The church's concern is with treatment of the living. Similarly, many doctors, religious or otherwise, would endorse the pope's statement that "the intrinsic value and the personal dignity of every human being does not change, no matter what the specific circumstances of his life." Patients, the pope said, "are and always will be human beings and will never become 'vegetables' or 'animals.' "
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We hear most about the extremes, but I'm convinced that most Americans take a more balanced position in between. If the court-appointed neurologists who examined Schiavo concluded that, as neurologist Ronald Cranford reported, "beyond any doubt whatsoever Terri is in a vegetative state," we should not dismiss that evidence. When conscious awareness has gone, the patient's written instructions, or the wishes of the family, take over. The tragedy in Schiavo's case was a divided family.
But, though we listen to medicine, many of us refuse to reduce human identity to the body alone, to what one physician called "nothing but wires and chemicals." Out of that amazing structure we call the brain -- the most complicated natural system yet discovered in the entire universe -- emerges something that is more than the sum of its parts: personhood, human identity.
Some who integrate science and values in this way do so in religious terms, others eschew religious categories and adhere instead to a humanist philosophy. Human life has value and dignity for me, in part, because I believe that it was created and intended by God. But I look for the miraculous in the entire process by which life emerges from nonlife, not in individual miracles at each moment of conception. Similarly, I believe the qualities of personhood -- what religious people call "the image of God" -- emerge slowly during the months leading up to and following birth.
The humanist response is more subtle, amorphous and hence harder to describe. But for many nonreligious people, the sense remains that life is somehow sacred even if it is not grounded in a divine creative act. Something more emerges in life, and something more is lost when it ends, than medicine can ever fathom. Perhaps the value of an individual's life is a product of how we treat him or her.
It's not for religious people to tell doctors when a body has died. But we can say what it means to treat patients humanely and with dignity. As a religious person, I do not strike out in rage at Schiavo's doctors, at the opposing lawyers, or (God forbid!) at any members of her family -- as some of the protesters outside her Pinellas Park, Fla., hospice have apparently done. As her loved ones make preparations to cremate her body and to celebrate her life, I grieve with them, in the words of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted."
Philip Clayton is a professor at Claremont School of Theology and at Claremont Graduate University in California and the author of "Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness" (Oxford University Press).
