'Costly empathy is the way of Christ,' Keswick Convention hears

|PIC1|Christians who talk about bio-ethics and the issues of life and death such as abortion, euthanasia, infertility, "must not talk about these issues with judgement or hatred", said Dr John Wyatt, Professor of Neo-natal Paediatrics at University College London.

Dr Wyatt was giving the final Keswick Lecture of this year's Convention on Thursday.

"I sometimes hear Christian people talking about these issues with harsh rhetoric - talking about the slaughter of the innocents or the baby murderers - but I believe this kind of language doesn't help," he said.

"It just twists the knife of judgement in the millions of people affected. Instead, we should talk about these issues with tears in our eyes.

"We are called to empathise, to enter into the experience of suffering people, to experience their pain from the inside - for costly empathy is the way of Christ."

Dr Wyatt listed a number of forces at work in modern healthcare, including reductionism or 'machine thinking', technology, ethical relativism and consumerism.

Quoting atheist Richard Dawkins, a prominent advocate of reductionism, Dr Wyatt said, "We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes."

He said, "Historians of medicine have noted how doctors have always taken the best scientific understanding of the world at the time and applied it to the human body ... we live in a world which has been transformed by machines, especially information processing machines - and lo and behold, the body is an information processing machine."

"It has to be said," he went on, "that there are major philosophical problems with this machine talk. Every machine you have ever come across is a device created by a human designer to accomplish a human purpose - that's what a machine is. But when Richard Dawkins says the human body is a machine, he says that it is a machine designed by no-one for no purpose."

Machine thinking, he went on, leads to the belief that technology can fix anything, and he cited abortion as a particularly technological response to unplanned pregnancy.

"Many women are profoundly traumatised by what was promised to be a neat solution. Sometimes there is life-long distress and unresolved grief," he said.

Putting forward instead the biblical view of humanity, Dr Wyatt said there was "no quick technological fix" to the problem of suffering.

"Suffering is not a question which demands an answer, it is not a problem which demands a solution, it's a mystery which demands a presence," he said. "And that's exactly what God does. He doesn't explain the mystery of evil and suffering, He enters into it. The Incarnation is the greatest example of empathy the cosmos has ever seen. That is Christ's way, Christ's example
to us."