I don’t care if I get ridiculed about this. Why should I?
Nor do I spend time arguing about when the soul enters the person. The soul does enter the body at a particular point. That’s a fact, whether we believe it or not.
Just like the fact that if I drive my car into a wall it’s going to get smashed whether I believe it will or not.
I’m not sure to what you are referring, but I can assure you it was a defense I was making, and certainly not an attempt to change anyone’s mind.
There is no science yet, nor is there any forseeable, of when the soul takes its place.
When I assume that it happens, as I do, at the time a person is formed, at fertilization, when DNA is that of a different person, then there is order.
Is there some scientific data to which you can point that causes you to assume that I should believe your assumption that God doesn’t take on should that don’t make it to implantation?
Please don’t lecture me on what God wants, nor on your assumptions on when a person becomes a person. I prefer to ignore those uninformed ideas of people around me who want to tell God how things are.
There are many theologically informed philosophers and Biblical researchers of good will whom I prefer to hear. They never veer away from the assumption that God invented sex, not us, and we are best served by using it according to His will - within a marriage of good intent.
It’s simple. And it is impervious to ridicule, because it doesn’t care about that.
My problem with using religious criteria instead of objectively measurable scientific criteria is that anyone can use religion to justify abortion all the way up to the point of birth.
Not everyone shares your religious background. And there are Christians who *do* use religion to justify abortion at any point of pregnancy.
Choosing an arbitrary point such as fertilization as the point at which life “begins” is just as arbitrary as choosing “quickening” or the first breath of air as that point.
Scientific criteria, on the other hand, are not arbitrary. Anyone can use a sonogram machine to view the heart beating in the third week. Anyone would agree that not seeing a beating heart is evidence that the embryo is dead. Nothing is arbitrary or subject to different interpretation here.
Also, the pro-aborts dismiss pro-lifers as wanting to control women, as only wanting women to be baby-machines, as wanting to force their religious views on them. You’ll never convince an adamantly liberal young woman to reject abortion by telling her that birth control and abortion are the same and she should avoid them. You might be able to swing her around to the pro-life position by discussing the facts of embryonic/fetal development to her and making her understand that a baby at three, four, five weeks is rapidly taking on the characteristics of a baby at birth. By six weeks, every organ is formed—destroying that baby is demonstrably murder!
Some things, like unique DNA, really aren’t all that significant. I can look out the window and see countless living things that all have unique DNA.
If I clone 100 children from my skin cells, they will all have DNA that is almost identical to mine. They will still be 100 separate human beings. Sometimes, two fertilized ova will merge to produce one person. This person has two separate sets of unique DNA, but they are still one person. Sometimes, a fertilized egg starts to split in two, but doesn’t quite make it, so a “Siamese twin” results. This usually results in two people sharing the same body (look up the two-headed girl). In most cases, however, a fertilized egg does not survive for more than a few days.
You are right, there is no science, nor can there be, to demonstrate when the soul appears. And the belief of when that happens is absolutely arbitrary. Circumstantially, there is plenty of evidence that fertilization by itself is not sufficient to draw in a soul. I firmly believe that it is not possible to have a soul without the ability to be aware, which is one reason I point out that nervous system development begins in the third week. It is just plain wrong to subject a feeling baby to the brutality of abortion.
Don’t get me wrong—I have nothing against explaining to a young woman that Jesus loves her *and* her baby—my problem is purely with using arbitrary religious beliefs to try to determine what a baby is.