Did God Really Save Patrice Muamba's Life

When Bolton Wanderers footballer Fabrice Muamba collapsed at White Hart Lane while his club was playing against Tottenham Hotspur, it was clear that something had gone wrong, and as time snailed on it became clearer still that something had gone wrong in a serious and grave way. It later transpired that the young man had suffered a cardiac arrest and that he was not just seriously ill in a hospital, he was in extremis. Early on, his heart had ‘stopped’ for 78 minutes, so his condition was touch-and-go. But a few days ago, after a month in hospital, Muamba was discharged from the hospital, a zapper fitted to his heart.

     Although he took a picture with two doctors who helped save him both on and off the pitch, Muamba has been repeating in interview after interview that it was God who saved his life and that his recovery was a miracle. Now Muamba has the inalienable right to say his life was saved by anything or anyone, but something that I have noticed, reading the interviews carefully, is that the young footballer has been stingy with his praise of the doctors, nurses and paramedics who might just as well have done Patrice's god’s work for him.   

     Did any god save Muamba’s life? Before I continue, I would like to repost here an exchange on the Facebook page of a fellow humanist and friend, Deo Ssekitooleke. A Christian friend wrote to Deo:

     Deo’s Christian Friend: ‘I am sorry to learn that you are sick. God is looking after you and I urge you to take medication and please one of these days, kneel down and pray for this world because it is said that God listens to prayers of people who do not usually go to church.’

      Deo: ‘Thank you very much. But science and modern medicine helped me to recover. The pathogenic organisms that attacked me for their selfish ends had to be neutralised or killed. Prayers or psychological comfort can always come when everything has failed. You cannot stop a hungry lion that has come to eat your goat for its survival with prayers. Likewise hungry bacteria or viruses cannot be stopped by prayers. When you catch fish from water and you have appetite for it, there is no way it (the fish) can pray to its god for you to leave it to live for another day. Life is a struggle for the fittest. The bacteria within want to survive you to produce new offspring to represent it in the new generation of the genetic pool. It cannot wait for your prayers to your god when it is eager to maintain its genetic survival. Humans may invent prayers but they have not prevented the death of over 100 billion humans who have ever been born but died. ...now another 7 billion are waiting for their death, including the death of their children and great-grandchildren.

     I wonder whether one can easily overlook the fact that ‘Deo’ translates as God in Latin. But that is beside the point, the answer Mr Ssekitooleke gave to the piously presumptuous believer/question-asker is so quietly sensible, courteous, pellucid, intelligent, even exemplary that I now consider it as one of the subtlest ripostes I have read for some time. But what really seized hold of me was the puncturing of the religiose balloon the question-asker had let loose, a man who said, God is looking after you and I urge you to take medication, as if the two things had anything to do with each other. A man who also said to Deo, kneel down and pray for this world, as if someone who was sick should bother his head praying for the world.   

    Anyway, if  Muamba had been suffering from any kind of viral ailment, I would have suggested that the answer Deo gave is enough to dampen the footballer’s ‘I-thank-God-for-my-recovery singsong. But the problem was with Muamba’s heart, which is as serious a medical matter as any. The young footballer could have died right there on the pitch, but he didn’t, and he didn’t because his body, his constitution, wasn’t ready to succumb. And because some people went out of their way to help him live - doctors and nurses that Muamba often neglects to thank.

     For philosophical reasons, I might even concede that a certain god may have saved Muamba’s life, the god he believes he speaks and prays to and who does such things as waking up people from the dead. Immanuel Kant’s ‘noumenon’ - unperceived and uninterpretable ‘thing-in-itself’ - would come in handy here. But then again, I would argue that even if such a god existed, he did not save Muamba’s life. Why Muamba of all the people who were on death’s kill list for the day and who died on the self-same day Muamba was pulled back from the brink? Or did he pray better than those who were taken away?

     The theology of exceptionalism in which a few would think their equally puny lives were saved at the expense of tens of thousands of lives does indeed grate, it chafes. Apart from being an arrogant way of viewing life, it is also downright insensitive, ungenerous, if not callous. Even if  no one died on the pitch on which Muamba’s life was saved, he could easily have spared a thought for others who were suffering, whose lives the all-benevolent god was not about to spare. He could easily have remembered children in such hospitals as Great Ormond, children who are innocent martyrs to every kind of pain and terminal condition.

     The young man could have shown more curiosity and probed into the nature of what happened to him, he could have tried to catch up on what the odds were of surviving a cardiac arrest. Instead of thanking the Jewish god and calling his recovery a miracle, he might just as easily be grateful to Asclepius, the Greek god of healing and medicine, a mythic deity whose record of  ‘power of healing’ the writers of the gospels plagiarised when writing about Jesus of Nazareth.