Contingency, modern medicine, and God’s providence

 

There is no apparent limit to medicine’s ambition to control the circumstances of human life and death by bringing them under human control. Billions of dollars are invested each year in research that has as its ultimate aim the elimination of contingency from the biological circumstances of human existence, and few people seem interested in asking whether or to what extent such an aim is appropriate for creatures of a providential God.

Joel Shuman and Brian Volck, M.D., Reclaiming the Body: Christians and the Faithful Use of Modern Medicine (p. 35)