In the debate over a woman's right to an abortion, the chief
difficulty arises from the definition of life. When does life begin? What makes
something alive? What constitutes a human life? Why does human life have value
to begin with? It's a troublesome argument to have because it hangs on such
huge questions. If you are a Naturalist (someone who believes that only the
natural universe exists and that the human mind is nothing but neural activity)
then you cannot conclude that human life begins before conscious and complex
thought since there is no other difference in the Naturalist worldview between
human beings and any other animal. I believe that human life begins at
conception because I am a Supernaturalist.
The only way anyone can justify the pro-life thesis is to say
that we are defined by more than our natural characteristics, that we are in
fact defined by a supernatural quality which gives us values and determines
what is and is not morally right. In Naturalism, there is no good reason (apart
from friends and family) for treating a mentally disabled human with a
different level of concern than would be shown for a chimpanzee at the same
level of intelligence, but a Supernaturalist (who believes that the soul,
beauty, moral law, and other abstractions are objectively real) can say that
the human in question is of greater value than the chimp because he or she is
made in the image of God and the chimp isn't. This need for a supernatural
characteristic (namely, the imago dei) may seem like a major blow to the
plausibility of the pro-life stance, but in reality it is a problem that
extends well beyond the topic of abortion and is in fact at the heart of every
human rights issue that ever has or will exist.
In the absence of any concept of an imago dei, the
secular community has put forward a number of standards by which to justify
human value, most notably the standards of self-awareness, intelligence, the
ability to form goals and find value in one's own life, and social/evolutionary
usefulness. The problem with each of these standards is that none of them
justify equal rights among human beings since each of the above characteristics
exist to differing degrees not only among people in general but even between a
given individual at one point in time and that same individual at another point
in time. In fact, out of all of these standards, only the standards of
evolutionary usefulness and social usefulness justify regarding a human baby as
a person even after it has been born; by every other secular standard,
infanticide is actually an animal rights issue. Those same standards which
alone out of the secular standards of human value listed are able to justify
the personhood of an infant are also flawed in that they rely in the circular
logic of one person deriving value from their contribution to a larger
collection of people. If one person is justified by their value to the
community or human race (which is itself nothing but a larger group of those
same people whose existence is in need of validation) then where does the value
of the community or the race come from? By any of these standards, the mass
euthanizing of men, women, and children is entirely within the realm of
justification.
It is perfectly reasonable for an opponent of the imago dei definition of humanity to
respond that none of this actually proves it to be right or any of the other
standards to be wrong, however up until now such a direct proof has not been
the point. Like all legal stances, the pro-choice proposition rests upon an
assumption of human value, namely that the unborn child is of little or no
value and the mother is great value. The pro-choice advocate takes it for
granted that there really is moral value in the world, and if you take that
away there is no good reason to say the mother has the right to anything or
even that any laws should exist. Many have argued that there are no objective
moral values but we should still follow subjective moral laws because doing so
leads to a good society, yet if there are no moral absolutes than the desire
for a “good society” is no different from a desire for strawberry jam instead
of blueberry jam, especially for someone whose life may be made considerably
less pleasurable by obedience to a moral law. All of this would be perfectly
fine with the secular standards I have listed except for the fact that this
fundamental assumption is made on the basis of intuition (although many
pro-choice advocates may have sacred texts to inform them about morality, that
intuition is still the only justification for their stance which is held
universally) and as such any standard which is fundamentally at odds with what
our moral intuition tells us about human value is inadmissible. The pro-choice
advocate could just throw up their hands and say that our intuition must be
flawed rather than the standard of human value, but then they have just
undermined their whole argument by rejecting the only universally accepted
evidence that there is any human value to begin with.
Furthermore, Naturalism is unable to justify the value (as we
are here using the word) of anyone or anything. To begin, outside of theism
there is no good basis by which to determine anything so abstract as human
value. That is to say that the atheist has nothing but their own feelings by
which to judge the truthfulness or falsehood of any statement about intrinsic
value, and they similarly have nothing at all by which to judge whether or not
their own feelings are honest judges on such matters. The theist on the other
hand can point to God as the foundation of all physical and abstract truth and
in doing so discuss these matters with a real standard of truth and falsehood.
Additionally, Naturalism itself is founded on the notion that only mathematics
and that which can be studied through science exists. Clearly, there is no
ethical matter that can in any way be tested in the laboratory, nor can the
claim that only that which can be studied by science exists itself be studied
and tested through science (paradox fail!). In other words, the claim
that human beings, animals, or the environment have moral value is in the
exclusive hold of the Supernaturalist worldview. That said, it still remains to
be seen whether or not Supernaturalism is true at all, seeing as the intrinsic
value of human life is not such that we can automatically call it true.
There are many subtle arguments concerning whether or not
abstractions exist (remember how Naturalism fails to pass its own standard of
knowledge?), but perhaps the best of them was presented by C.S. Lewis.
According to Lewis, Christianity regards intelligence as a gift from God, a
strange bond to the absolute and abstract laws of logic, while Naturalism
considers human thought to be entirely a result of the activity of atoms in our
brain. Lewis argues that if our thoughts are really nothing but a series of
chemical reactions we have no good reason to assume that they can ever be
trusted to be logical and are certainly untrustworthy in debating such abstract
topics as Naturalism and Supernaturalism. In other words, the Naturalists own
argument denounces his own claim to rational thought and therefore invalidates
his whole point. For a long time I did not find this argument compelling since
I reasoned that if those atoms in my brain are themselves subject to the laws
of logic it would make sense that logic could be worked out through them. It
wasn't until about a year ago that I realized this only applied to the logic of
mathematics since it may be possible to work out issues of addition and
subtraction chemically, but there is no way to translate any of the logical
arguments present in this article into the logic of an atom. In short, the
value of human reason in discerning truth is unjustifiable in the Naturalist
worldview.
Additionally, our sense of morality is inexplicable in the
story that the Naturalist has to tell. It has often been argued that moral law
was an adaptation that allowed us to live together effectively and peaceably,
but there are two major flaws in this argument. Firstly, morality is
fundamentally different from an instinct in that it actually includes a sense
of what we should do and is often
considered more compelling than instincts such as self-preservation even though
those instincts may have greater emotional strength. This is another argument
from C.S. Lewis, who wrote in his book Mere
Christianity that our sense of moral law encourages different kinds of
behaviors under different circumstances and that it even involves trying to
encourage one instinct and suppress another in many instances. Lewis compared
moral law to a sheet of music, saying that it directs our responses to our
instincts as the sheet directs the pressing of keys on a piano. If morality is
so set above the instincts, he argued, then it itself must be something
different.
The second problem with the evolutionary explanation of
morality is that altruism is in many ways disadvantageous. It is true that a
community or species that practices altruism within its own boundaries is set
at an advantage, but what we actually have is a sense of altruism that is often
extended beyond those boundaries even to other species. It is true that people
often place the interest of the community over such unilateral expressions of
altruism, but that only means that we fail to follow moral law. When we
approach altruism of this kind from an outside perspective, removed from the
temptations of instinct, we almost always approve. This may seem like a small
digression from the interests of evolution, but it was still enough to convince
Francis Collins, the leader of the Human Genome Project and a former atheist,
that evolution alone cannot explain human ethics.
Finally, Naturalism is unable to account for the natural
world. There is far more to be said on this point than can be managed here, but
suffice it to say that both the complexity of the universe and the existence of
the universe at all require a supernatural explanation. When it comes to the
issue of complexity, it has been found that even the tiniest changes in any of
the universal constants (the speed of light, the size of an electron, etc.)
would make life utterly impossible. This is important because neither science
nor philosophy can provide any good reason that these constants should be as
they are by necessity or even that they should by necessity be confined to any
given range, meaning that the number of other possible universes without life
is quite possibly infinite. What’s more, we now know that the universe did not
exist forever, that does in fact have a beginning and will one day have an end
(or at least any life in it will). What this means is that there must have been
something before it that was the cause of its existence, and given the
intricacy of the universe we see before us it is unlikely that something would
have been without thought or will. In fact, the idea that a universe of brute
matter which requires an explanation for its existence should be adequately
explained by an equally brutish force or principle is almost laughable. Once
again, this argument is much more detailed than I can give it credit for
without turning this into an essay about the origin of the universe, but it is
also such that I would be dishonest not to bring it up.
And so it all comes back around to a little bundle of cells
around which circle all these arguments of ethics and metaphysics. But then,
that is not what it is, but only what it is made of. If it is a bundle of
cells, then it remains a bundle of cells for all nine months and then for all
the years to come until is a decaying mass of chemicals. If it is only a bundle
of cells, then so is the thing it is stashed inside, the thing that might deny
it life. Yet there is something more, something that is as apart from matter as
it is from intelligence, righteousness, usefulness, and happiness. Something
that is distinct from them all but also lends meaning to them, illuminates them
and gives them all their places. Because no disability, no popular opinion, no
moral infraction, no mental shortcoming can ever wipe away from that little
life the supernatural image of God.
