Monday, March 5, 2012
A Human is a Human
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Ironic that you would pull a "Science is very clear..." only a couple of posts after complaining about atheists saying "Science tells us...". If you are going to invoke scientific consensus this way, you should provide references. That's how it's done. The problem is that when you do a search on "when does human life begin according to science", you get pages and pages of so-called pro-life sites but very little actual science. That's a smell.
ReplyDeleteIt is in fact more difficult than you paint it to define what makes us human, and thus what a human being is.
Going for human life doesn't work: a toenail is human life. Having a distinct human genome doesn't work either, because cancer then qualifies. Autonomy would kind of work if you are not after a clear-cut delimitation, but it won't fit your conclusions. And so on. So you need to go for much fuzzier words such as "being", which imply something more, akin to self-awareness or a soul. So according to such a definition, a human being would either begin much later than conception, or would require religious dogma. Some religions more ancient than yours for example state that the breath of life is given by God at birth. I'm fine with your using religion to come up with your own ideas on this, so long as they're not imposed on the rest of us and you don't try to pass it for science.
My own take on it is that a cell is not the same thing as an embryo, which is not the same thing as a foetus, which is not the same thing as a baby. There's a continuum. So is the acceptable limit on abortion fuzzy and arbitrary? You bet. Many things are. I also think that potential is not the same thing as actuality (otherwise we would punish murderers like genociders), so a potential human being is not the same thing as an actual grown human being.
"a human is a human" sound really vacuous to me, and that's too bad because the question really is: "what is a human being"?
Bertrand, you seem to misconstrue my objection to science being the only valid source for knowledge to mean I object to using science in argumentation. I don't object to science at all; it just has its place and limits.
ReplyDeleteI'm not writing a scientific article in a journal. I'm writing a blog post. There is no "how it's done" for blogging other than I can write whatever the heck I want to. ;) Here's an interesting article, from a pro-life atheist: http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/confessions-of-a-pro-life-atheist-what-gives-me-the-passion-to-actively-opp
It doesn't require advanced biology degrees; I included a picture of a zygote intentionally. But we do have plenty of folks on the pro-life side with advanced biology degrees who are bioethicists. I'll defer to them because, hey, I consider them a scientific authority. ;)
But let's assume we can agree that a zygote forms a distinct human that will, under normal circumstances, without unnatural intervention, grow into an adult. It seems pretty clear to me that at that moment it is its own human life, worth every protection that we afford to humans who just happen to be later own down the development cycle. To do otherwise, as I said, is purely arbitrary, and human life is too important to be gambling with. Again, it doesn't take an advanced degree in biology to recognize this.
I don't need to employ religious reasoning to come to this conclusion. In fact, there is nothing in, for instance, the Christian Bible that explicitly defines when life begins. There is no Bob Chapter 3 Verse 1 that says: "Human life begins at conception and must continue to its natural end." I'm not asking anyone to base protecting human life on any religious text or religiously derived pretense.
I'm very clear about what is revealed truth and what can be known from reason and science. That those who disagree with my conclusions can't argue with me but just impugn my motives and try to poison the well with negative associations from those who do otherwise is, well, just dishonest and fallacious reasoning.
You did not answer my objections, you just repeated your argument. Do I need to repeat them or can you just re-read what I already wrote?
ReplyDelete(and yes, you are free to write unsubstantiated stuff in your blog, but I am also free to call you out on it. Quoting sources is good practice. Just saying)