> Some people on this thread believe that the 8 celled embryos have a soul and therefore cannot not be destroyed without moral consequence.
Yet I don't see them lining up for implantation.
>> Some people on this thread believe that the 8 celled
>> embryos have a soul and therefore cannot not be
>> destroyed without moral consequence.
> Yet I don't see them lining up for implantation.
I wonder where the notion that the soul is created as soon as an egg is fertilized comes from. An embryo which is only an 8 cell blastosphere still has the potential to split into identical twins. So where does the extra soul come from? Did God place two souls in the single blastosphere knowing that it was going to split later? Or does he add the second soul after the blastosphere splits in two? Or does he not add any souls until later in fetal development? Or maybe identical twins (but not fraternal twins) share a single soul?
Many pregnancies start out with dual embryos, but one of them vanishes very early on. What happens to the vanished twin's soul in that case? Do the vanished twins have a soul that goes to heaven (even if it is unbaptised)? Or does it go to limbo? Or is a vanished twin just a collection of cells waiting to get a soul at a later date?
Since as many as 1 in 8 pregnancies start out with dual embryos, if the vanished embryos all go up to heaven, then as many as 12.5% of souls in heaven would be people who never made is out of the few hundred cell stage. I wonder what it would be like to meet one of these souls in heaven considering their only worldly experiences were a few weeks as a few hundred cells prior to having developed any nervous system.
jas3