4 thoughts on “Abortion debate question

  1. The question of whether a new, distinct human life would exist would become more complicated, but I would say that until a genetically complete human zygote or embryo or later stage organism came be, there would be no human life.

    I’m not sure I would agree with the idea of human lives being sacred. Since we are created in His image, we have what I would call dignity, not sacredness. I would reserve the word sacred for God and things He designates as sacred. Not a major point I guess, but a distinction that could be important later.

  2. I am of course “taking the limit” of the threshold question – at some point the cell-cluster passes from being fairly worthless to being highly valued. The difficulty in getting consensus with where this point is, has led some to identify the point of conception as the threshold, but this step may be removed in the case of the cloning…putting them back to square one; this is what I am interested in – forcing the logic to try to get to the bottom of the question: what makes a human?

    From the atheist evolutionist perspective humans are animals and so we have a similar threshold issue to solve – if all intermediate forms had survived how far would our special treatment of humans extend?

  3. That’s one of the reasons the atheist evolutionist approach is a dead end. The thing that makes humans different is that God breathed “life” into us. At that moment, we stopped being animals, and became creatures created “in the image” of God. To me, that means that we were given the ability to choose between “right” and “wrong”. Animals have no sense of morality. Scientists will have a hard time finding out when our ancestors went from being animals – without this morality and therefore without any ability to choose between right and wrong. Call it becoming self-aware, or becoming sentient, but that’s the difference, right?

    Most atheist evolutionists just assume that once our brains got big enough, we just became self-aware. But what if the brain is not where creative thought occurs? What if our minds are similar to our souls, in that they are non-material? What if they are on temporary assignment while we are in the body, thinking thoughts and sending messages to our brains, which then do the processing? That would seem to suggest a reason for dreams: just brain impulses with no spiritual direction from our minds, which are asleep.

    As for babies – if conceived in the normal way, it’s clear that the zygote is genetically complete at the moment of conception. But as for a cloned human, as I said, the question becomes more complex.

    A related question – Will the cloned human animal also become self-aware? Will he/she become sentient? Will he/she become a human being, or just an unthinking animal? And if it’s an animal, do we care for it or kill it?

  4. God’s breath *could* be the threshold between animals, however, this is an extremely complicated solution to a question science doesn’t even think *is* a question. Again there’s no testable evidence for God’s intervention.
    Sentience has not been well enough defined to declare that humans ‘have it’ and animals don’t. Does a zygote have sentience, or a sleeping person? As for morals – some animal behaviour has moral-looking aspects (Google for eg Marc Bekoff for his recent book).
    True or not, with all this still up for debate, I think the ideas of sentience or moral-giving ‘soul’ are too vague to be useful in categorizing humans as different. All the solid evidence (physical characteristics, fossil record, genetics) says we are simply animals.
    As some parts of Christianity assert some difference, it is up to them to provide evidence if they want this proposal accepted.
    Moving swiftly on, the idea that a cloned human will somehow be soulless is of course a testable hypothesis, so we can wait and see. I know what I am betting, and I think it’s a shoo-in 😉
    PS, an atheist evolutionist does not necessarily suggest we treat humans more like animals – perhaps we advocate treating animals more like humans.

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