With society's values in flux over the definition of life, we delve into the ethical quandaries of abortion, the intrinsic worth of human life, and the intersection with rapidly advancing science and technology. Join us for a discussion through theological insights and the real-world implications of devaluing the sanctity of human life. This episode promises to enlighten, provoke thought, and inspire a deeper appreciation for life's true value.
With society's values in flux over the definition of life, we delve into the ethical quandaries of abortion, the intrinsic worth of human life, and the intersection with rapidly advancing science and technology. Join us for a discussion through theological insights and the real-world implications of devaluing the sanctity of human life. This episode promises to enlighten, provoke thought, and inspire a deeper appreciation for life's true value.
On today's episode… and because it's hostile to God. Their view of life is that we've got to make it better in this world. We've got to make heaven on earth, We've got to make things nicer, grander. And why? Because this is all the life they know.
Paul Snamiska:Welcome to the Life Challenges podcast from Christian Life Resources. People today face many opportunities and struggles when it comes to issues of life and death, marriage and family, health and science. We're here to bring a fresh biblical perspective to these issues and more. Join us now for Life Challenges.
Christa Potratz:Hi and welcome back. I'm Christa Potratz and I'm here today with pastors Bob Fleischmann and Jeff Samelson, and today we're going to talk about life, more specifically, this idea of defining life, and talking about, maybe, the differences in what is considered alive and what isn't, and different types of life too. What really is maybe the value of this discussion today, of just kind of talking about this topic of life?
Jeff Samelson:Well, I think the average person is not going to see a whole lot of relevance because it's like, well, I think a thing's alive or it isn't. It's really only kind of at the edges and the extremes where the question of a value comes in, this thing that was not alive, or a separate life. At what point is it alive? And therefore something that we need to give value to and take into consideration and respect? And, on the other end, this thing, this person that was alive, is alive now, or is it not? Because it's heading towards death. But at what point can we say that it is no longer alive? And that is something that's very, very important for us with so many of the issues that are current today. But the irony, of course, is that the people who are wanting to push the edges on these things, they don't want people to be thinking about it, but that's actually what is going on there.
Bob Fleischmann:One of the crazy things about this topic is when you first assigned this, when you sent out the email on this topic. I'm looking at it and I'm going, okay, yeah, all right, we're talking human life, but the reality is, what has been happening in the trends is that, while we always had venerated that venerated view of human life, society really has been trying to adopt a kind of a universal standard for what is life and what is not life, but in particular, what is life worth valuing, and they're using the same standard for not only animal life, plant life and human life, but even artificial life. Now they're beginning to talk about the defining elements are becoming extremely utilitarian. There's life as long as I value it.
Bob Fleischmann:There was just a story yesterday I read that Bill Mayer at that HBO or Max television show, just basically acknowledged that in abortion a life is lost. But hey, millions of people die all the time. It's kind of that approach. It's no longer a valued life. It lacks an objective value. So, until I want it, which is the way the laws are structured, by the way, a woman has the right to abort her child, but if she doesn't want to abort her child and you force her to lose her child, like in an accident, you become liable, right, because it was a wanted life.
Christa Potratz:Yeah no, in an accident, you become liable, right, because it was a wanted life. Yeah, no, I mean, there's really just seems to be a lot of implications in this discussion today too. So I think a place to start, then is really what is the difference, then, between something that is not alive versus something that is?
Jeff Samelson:And again, that sounds like it should be simple to answer, but really when you try to think okay well, how do you define that? As Christians we want to go? Okay, well, what does scripture tell us? And while it gives us kind of some description, descriptive kind of stuff, it talks about certain creatures having the breath of life, for instance. But that's just a descriptive, it's not really a definition of anything, because of course that wouldn't include things like plant life, which obviously is alive and which scripture refers to as alive. But ultimately, to define life in distinction to non-life, we have to use a kind of a tautological formulation A what Thank you for making me say that again, it's a tautology.
Jeff Samelson:A thing is alive if it is actively doing what living things do. It's like. Well, what exactly is that? And you'll see various definitions out there and it's kind of more is somebody approaching this more from the philosophical end or the scientific end, but that they're able to take in and metabolize nutrients from from the environment around it? There it is able to grow and to heal, able to reproduce, that it has some function that it's able to fulfill independently, you know, on its own, and usually there's some sense that there's continuous change until death. Those things aren't always going to manifest in the same way, into the same extent, you know, among all living things. But those are the general kind of contours of how you end up defining the distinction. There Bob might have more insight than I.
Bob Fleischmann:Well, you know, one of the problems is that the game book has changed over the years. You would think that the standard by which we judge all truth, the Bible, would declare this super clear definition. That's irrefutable, that kind of stuff, and I'm going to suggest that it does. But what we've done as a society is we've stepped away from God and the way God does things to the way we want to do things. And then we quick point out to God you didn't define it, so we have liberty here. And it's amazing how that works, because it runs that way just up and down the ladder. It works that way on a wide assortment of moral issues about what's right, what's wrong, what's good, what's bad. And the very first step that humans do is they try to step outside of God's framework and decide for themselves. You see that in the fall into sin, just leave the tree alone, everything's going to be fine. All of a sudden we step outside of that framework and then a cascade of problems occur. And that's what's happening here, because there were times early on, you know, when I've written on birth control and stuff like that.
Bob Fleischmann:When does life begin? You know, conception, implantation, some place in the middle, all those kinds of things and I kept asking myself well, how come God doesn't answer this? I mean, it's omniscient God, he knows the direction we're going, but the problem is is he actually does answer it? We've just chosen to reject it. I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. Psalm 51.5. Well, that's pretty clear by most definitions. That's a clear statement and of course, those who want to challenge it first of all say well, are you talking about the blastocyst stage? Are you talking about that moment of fertilization? Are you talking about the combining of the nucleus and so forth?
Bob Fleischmann:It occurred to me once, when I was reading somebody who was trying to slam the Christian view of life was that all they were really doing is that they were looking for a way to basically one-up God. You know God failed to provide the intellectual insight that now I can bring to the conversation. That's kind of the attitude that you read when you see it and to show you what the true colors are now is like right now, as of this recording, the big debate is in Arizona. Arizona has now passed what, if you listen to the media? The most restrictive pro-life laws against abortion in the nation. And, of course, when you're listening to liberal media, they're always talking about Civil War-era legislation, like that's supposed to tell you something. Well, civil War era legislation also included things like don't steal, don't beat up people. I mean there's all sorts of legislation that occurred in Civil War times, like the.
Jeff Samelson:Emancipation Proclamation.
Bob Fleischmann:Yes, that is just so outdated. But see, if you use their logic, it defeats them. But the thing is is they don't think that way and because they don't think that way, all they want to do is try to slant you into believing that we do evolve in our way of thinking about things, which is why, today, most pro-abortion people worth their salt are honest enough to say it is a life. We just don't believe it has rights. And because it doesn't have rights, you can terminate it. And that's really where the conversation has gone.
Bob Fleischmann:And only people who don't study history think that there's nothing wrong with that. But when you study history, you find the thread that keeps allowing you to build on it. And we're seeing it at the end of life as well. Well, you know, they got cancer, their life is miserable, they're messing in bed. All these things are going wrong. Maybe we should just let them get the doctor's help and terminate their life. Okay, but then pretty soon you see these countries now and states trying to expand the criteria to I've got autism, I've got depression, my girlfriend broke up with me. I mean, you've got all of these other things going on. I think what Christians really ought to be doing is doing a really deep-in study to find out how the devil works his magic, because he doesn't come right out and say I think you should kill your unborn children.
Christa Potratz:No, I think you're right on that too, because it is something that just seems to kind of slowly seep in too. The next question that I wanted to ask, too, was what makes life human and what makes it different from a plant or an animal, and I've seen that kind of play out in abortion discussions too. Oh well, if you're okay with killing a cockroach or something and equating that to a fetus, and then you're just sitting there like, well, wait a minute. No, there is a difference between human life and stepping on a bug. There's just a difference there. And so what kind of is that difference? Or how can we articulate that difference to people that maybe are just trying to say we're all the same?
Jeff Samelson:Again, this is the kind of thing that, if you know, go back not too long in our society, even people who weren't Christians would have no problem with the idea that human life is different from all other life, it's at a higher level and not just more evolved, but that there's value to it. That isn't the same with whether it's a cockroach or a chicken or whatever it might be, but within our Christian context, I mean it's answered for us right at the very beginning of the Bible and the beginning of time, with Genesis, with the creation of man, in Genesis 2,. It's answered for us right at the very beginning of the Bible and beginning of time with Genesis, with the creation of man. In Genesis 2, it says the Lord, god, formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living being, wasn't alive, and then God did something and it was alive. God did something and it was alive.
Jeff Samelson:And all the rest of the creation history there, going back into chapter one, going further into chapter two, just underscores the uniqueness of mankind, you know, not just Adam as an individual man, but of humanity. With the breath of life, man got a soul. That's something that no other creature has. That's something that no other creature has. Man was given the image of God, given dominion over the rest of creation, given specific commands and roles that distinguish humans from all other living things. So human life has a value, has a purpose, has a destiny that no other form of life does. Form of life does, and even though we know that from scripture, that doesn't mean that it's impossible, from philosophy or science or whatever, to make the argument just in society generally, that human life has value that others do not.
Bob Fleischmann:It's amazing. You know there's always this ongoing debate about nature or nurture, and I think a lot of times you learn to have a higher value for animal life or a higher value for plant life. It's something you learn, it's an impactful lesson that occurred in your childhood and so forth. You're just impacted by it and I've often wondered if we went back to truly a house centered on the Word of God that talked about everything God has written or had caused to be written about his value for life, including the story of the sacrifice of Christ for life. That when you begin with that standard, it's very apparent the special place that God has for human life and he establishes the standards.
Bob Fleischmann:Now we spend all of our time as modern day students of science.
Bob Fleischmann:You know we'll spend all of our time trying to understand the mechanism of it and a lot of times you know we do it with good intention.
Bob Fleischmann:If I could better understand how the heart works and how the lungs work and the kidneys, and I better understand all that, if you get sick I can help you. But then we begin to say, oh, we're learning new things, and I think we get absorbed into a culture that basically has made God obsolete and if you obsolesce God, it has to be filled. There has to be a void that has to be filled, and the void that we fill is we're intrigued by—we get all excited. Almost every day I get a news article about some discovery about the way DNA works and the way something is blocked or the way something is triggered in the human body, and I mean it is, it's amazing and so forth. But we've kind of lost track of the fact that somebody was behind all that and that someone was God, and the fact that we're just uncovering it now but then, being evilly inclined people as we are, we're going to find a way to use it against God rather than in his service.
Jeff Samelson:So circling back a little bit, what you're talking about, people today pushing God out of the picture, so we don't want to bring that stuff into these discussions at all. I don't know if ironic is the word, if nothing else, it's interesting that you've also got kind of a similar result happening from the opposite thing, in that there are people today who are pushing for nature rights to the point that they're saying this river is alive, the ocean is a living thing and similar kinds of things like that. So these things that no one ever except, well, no one in, I'll just say, western civilization, ever said well, that's a living thing, unless they were speaking just kind of metaphorically. But interesting, they start going to the animistic religions of this aboriginal culture and that one there or whatever, and they start saying see here's authority for thinking of this this way. And they have their, their, their big international gatherings and they have some special prayer offered by the shaman from this, this religion or that religion or whatever. You know.
Jeff Samelson:And you know there are actually legal efforts now in various places around the world, even in the United States, to to uh enshrine Lake Erie with the same rights as human beings have. And the only reason I bring this up is because it goes back to this thing about the uniqueness of human life. It's going the other direction, saying well, yeah, human life has, has rights or whatever, but so do all these other things, and we got to treat them all the same way, which of course has the result of diminishing the value and the specialness of human life, because it's just put on the same level as everything else. So you end up with the same result, though you're approaching it from a different direction.
Christa Potratz:Yeah, no, it's really interesting. You know, we've talked a lot too about just like the scripture and just the biblical definition of life and everything too. Are there differences between when we talk about the philosophical definition and biblical and scientific?
Bob Fleischmann:Or for us do they all seem to just line up? Well, I think there's clearly differences, because I think when I appeal to the biblical definition of life, I appeal to it even though I'm not always in favor of it, if you know what I mean, and I don't mean that in a negative sense. I just mean my evil inclination is sometimes thinking well, there's some human life that's really not that likable.
Bob Fleischmann:I mean it's you know, I always when you get frustrated, a good person dies and you're going. There's so many jerks in the world, why did a good person die? You know you're left to yourself, you become very subjective, and so surrendering ourselves basically to a biblical view of life is kind of contrary to our nature. If it weren't for being regenerated through the Holy Spirit, we wouldn't do that. Now, philosophically, when I look at the philosophical reasons for life, the scientific reasons for life, they're strongly utilitarian. In other words, we're going to look at it. It's funny when you look at the arguments for personhood and how they developed since 1973 or a little bit before that, when abortion became legal. There were hearings in 1974 before the House of Representatives in which even advocates of abortion were saying well, of course, if we understand that it's a human life, we would have no leg to stand on. You know when they were arguing for a human life amendment to the Constitution. And of course, over the years they began to start saying, well, okay, it is a life, but it lacks personhood. And then they began to start creating this classification about not just life, but then you can have life but you don't have personhood, and that's a utilitarian approach to interpreting life. So that's what seems to be going on.
Bob Fleischmann:I find it—well, we've said this before—we really like God, as long as he agrees with us. And on occasion, when you're starting to look at God's definition of life and the things that God values compared to the things you and I have been trained or brought up to value, once in a while we disagree. And so how many times have you read the Bible? And you're going I wish he wouldn't have said it that way. I could have done it a little bit differently, you know, and so forth. Well, that's the battle. But I also think that that lends credibility in a very logical way, lends credibility to the merits of Scripture's definition of life, because normally it's just completely crazy when you look at it, except for the fact that if you're not willing to surrender to a higher authority defining life, then you become the high authority. So we're protecting your rights and that's how that whole thing is played out.
Jeff Samelson:Yeah, the difference between scientific, philosophical or spiritual approaches to this. It really just comes down to everything that Bob was just laying out. It's like questions of value, of responsibility, of consciousness, even. How are you defining these things? We've laid out pretty well what the spiritual, the theological, the scriptural understanding is. But when you just take this philosophical view, or strictly utilitarian, scientific and Bob was relating the development of things here in the United States but correct me if I'm wrong on this, but it was the Nazis who put forward this idea of life worthy of life, which basically meant that they were judging that there were lives that were not worthy of life and those were the ones that they eliminated were not worthy of life and those were the ones that they eliminated. Really not that different from what we're seeing today. It's just people don't like to see the historical connection to all that.
Christa Potratz:Yeah, I think I mean, especially too if we're talking about the abortion too, there is this whole idea even just of personhood too is one of the things kind of thrown out and I think, okay, probably science does agree on life beginning at conception, if we're talking about like when life really begins. But you know, you have so many people on the pro-abortion side that will just they just want to always refer to the unborn child as a fetus, right, or fetus, fetus, fetus. And then you ask them, well, is the fetus human? Well, yes, you know, and they will a lot of times agree to that, but they just then will say, well, it's not really a person yet, or that type of thing. So, you know, just kind of thinking about that, you know, in terms of our discussion, how can we talk to somebody that maybe is just so bent on this idea of personhood and that that is somehow different from the start of human life too?
Bob Fleischmann:different from the start of human life too. Well, you know, it's a difficult question, because or a difficult answer, really, because I've talked with people who've tried to paint it in such a way that if you follow that line of reasoning, your own life becomes of questionable value. And of course they'll come back and say when I get to that stage too, I hope somebody kills me. I mean, all of a sudden it's this complete callous regard for life, one of the things I've kind of settled on and talk to me tomorrow and I'll probably settle on a little different approach. But the thing that's kind of settled on now is if the Word of God accomplishes what God intends for it to accomplish. I try to get into a conversation where I can simply present God's Word. Give up on this idea that I'm going to convince you. Instead, I'm going to be the farmer who's planting. I'm going to plant, I'll leave it up to God and the Holy Spirit to make it grow, and I'm going to appeal to an authority that's outside of us. An authority that's outside of us. The real problem, I find, is very few people think past a thimbleful depth of their position on it. They'll argue for abortion rights or they'll argue for—give you a prime example is what took place with the whole IVF thing in Alabama. So the Supreme Court rules that if somebody, if a clinic, irresponsibly deals with embryos and they're destroyed, it's seen as a loss of life, not a loss of property. Okay, first of all, it's a very biblically defensible position. Scientifically it can be defensible.
Bob Fleischmann:According to the current way of thinking. Of course people have trouble. Well then, immediately, even pro-life people are saying, well, they went too far. So how do you go too far? You mean, embryonic life is only valuable when you want it. Well, that's really a pro-abortion position, that's not a pro-life position. And that's the kind of stuff that happens. And people don't think through their whole position all the way through and that's a frustration. And that's oftentimes why you find yourself needing to build a bridge for an ongoing relationship, for a conversation, and I just learned a long time ago that whatever hot-button issue that fostered the relationship is probably not going to be the issue you're going to use to win them over. If they've got an issue about when life begins, then maybe we'll just talk about a side issue, like evolution or some other controversial issue, but one that doesn't have so many flames around it.
Jeff Samelson:Yeah, not disagreeing in any sense with anything that Bob has said, just some of the things that you could bring up in response to a question like that. Well, I guess you know. Point out that you know this whole idea of personhood is something of a construct. I wouldn't be surprised if you found out that the word personhood only has existed for 40 years or something like that. Just you know, maybe it goes back longer than that, but it just just the whole idea, you know. Think about it. Ask somebody, do you? Is that really the way you think that there is a point where someone is a person and some point where he is not? Do you really think that? Or are you thinking that only for purposes of this argument, which is to rationalize the position that you already want to hold and just point out things like people who want their babies, keep them, carry them through full pregnancy? You've certainly heard comments about people talking about yes, this is my baby, this is that's within me. They speak about it as a real living human person. But then they'll even talk about oh yeah, I, I knew Johnny was going to be a be be trouble from the time I was three months pregnant, cause you know just the way he talks about him having personality within the womb that the mother was able to recognize. So are you saying that that's just nonsense? No, everybody recognizes the truth in that. You are the one who's trying to deny what everyone knows from experience. You're just trying to find a way around it to rationalize again the position that you already have.
Jeff Samelson:I listened to a podcast from a, I'll just say, generally socially conservative guy who says he's basically pro-life and he's not a Christian. But he says you know, I understand that when you're fairly far along in the pregnancy, yeah, that's not something. But you know, right there, at those beginning stages, those first weeks, I just don't know. I'm not so comfortable with that. And he admits that he doesn't really have an argument there.
Jeff Samelson:But he's going back kind of as Bob was talking about that. This is just what I feel. You know, I'm more comfortable with this and we're seeing this. You know, throughout the United States right now, with all the various laws and cases and referenda and things like that on abortion, that people are realizing that lots of people were okay with the idea of Roe v Wade being overturned and putting some limits on abortion, are in favor of the total ban on it, because they're more comfortable with the idea of, well, maybe through six weeks, maybe through 15 weeks or something like that, because they don't really want to close that door entirely, because they kind of might need it sometime, or they don't want to feel bad about their daughter or their sister who had the abortion at six weeks, or et cetera, et cetera.
Christa Potratz:Yeah, no, I think that's such a good point with just the feelings, because I do think that that is so true and we also see that a lot too. I think at the end of life type of things too. And I did just want to touch on the end of life too because I feel like that is okay, we define, you know, when something's living, what about when something dies? I mean like that is okay, we define, you know, when something's living, what about when something dies? I mean, how is that really defined?
Bob Fleischmann:And you know why is that kind of also important in this discussion too? Well, there is kind of a reverse to the process that Jeff described early on about taking in nutrients and so forth. Death immediately results in various forms of decomposition. Everyone's always kind of aware of the Edgar Allan Poe stories of being buried alive and all those kinds of things. First of all, I just want to remind people that you wouldn't believe how much stuff is happening today. Based upon exceptions to the rule type instances you know, were people thought to be dead and buried and they weren't dead. Yes, every once in a while you read the story of the body in the funeral home and all of a sudden the funeral director sees a tear come to the eye, those creep me out.
Christa Potratz:Yeah, see, that's what I mean they creep you out and everything like that.
Bob Fleischmann:First of all, the millions and millions of deaths that occur. We're talking a small fraction and usually there's something along the process there that somebody wasn't paying good attention. Generally speaking, I have been at the bedside of many people who have died. In a role as a pastor, we have ministered to people, we have been in the room when there's just a corpse. You know the death that occurred before we arrived there, and so forth. I've never had any doubt. I mean, it was always crystal clear when death had occurred. But it is really. It's a cessation or almost a reversal of everything that Jeff described about when life begins. The body is no longer processing nutrients, everything is beginning to break down and it's very clear.
Bob Fleischmann:Now there is a movement underway trying to redefine the determination of death. The movement is prompted in part by the desire to harvest organs, and we can talk about that again when we tackle organ transplantation. But people will want to redefine death so that we can kind of keep the body moving, keep it going, so that we can harvest organs in their healthiest possible condition. But generally, even the neurologists and we get to deal with neurologists now there doesn't seem to be any real debate with them about are they alive or are they dead. They seem to know exactly what's happening. So remember, a lot of this is—we face this too at CLR when people have come to us wanting to fill out medical directives, advanced medical directives, assigning the health care agent and so forth Because we do talk about, you know, when it seems a death is coming and so forth and they become why? Because they're thinking of the Edgar Allan Poe stories. They're thinking of those newsworthy stories.
Bob Fleischmann:I want to make sure I'm really dead. I had a. Scripture simply says that first of all, a death. There isn't like a debate in Scripture about somebody said well, you know that he died and they're not all standing around going. You know, you don't see that in Scripture, but what you do see is the definition that God calls the soul home. We have no way of measuring that, but people recognize death and the old determinations of death used to be lack of respiratory, lack of blood circulation and so forth. And so they've added today lack of brainwaves and so forth, and brainwaves in the cerebral cortex and brainwaves coming out of the brainstem. Trust me, when you have no activity in either of those areas, you have death. The body has stopped functioning.
Christa Potratz:That's death has stopped functioning. That's death. Yeah, I mean, our society does really seem to push on both sides Okay, what is life? And then also with death too. I mean it just it feels like it's a newer type of thing to be pushing on both sides of these, but I don't know if that's really the case.
Jeff Samelson:What makes it feel newer is technology and medicine and things like that. You know, we can do more and detect more than we could in the past 150 years ago. If somebody was dying, they were dying that was it.
Jeff Samelson:Today we can measure brainwaves, we can get down deep into some of the cellular processes and things like that that we couldn't have in the past, and we can also sustain life or sustain organs separate from the body and things like that and such, and so it just makes it a little harder. And, if you want the slightly less serious explanation, the proliferation of zombie movies and things like that- are confusing people a lot too, I think yeah.
Bob Fleischmann:If you don't fear death, all of a sudden a lot of that messing around at the end of life kind of disappears a little bit. You know the concern about dying before your time and having somebody you know. I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far, but then Paul says it's more necessary that I remain with you by far, but then Paul says it's more necessary that I remain with you. When people are afraid to die, they become all obsessed with all of these other things. And the reality is, when you take away the fear element out of death, it changes the way you approach it. You're just not paranoid about it.
Christa Potratz:Anything else in closing that we just want to mention on this topic?
Bob Fleischmann:The purpose of life centers on God, and so a lot of times our preoccupation with it centers on us. And when you shift it over and you center it on God, it does paint a different picture than the one the world wants to give you. Why? Because the world rejects God. It's hostile to God. And because it's hostile to God, their view of life is that we've got to make it better in this world, we've got to make heaven on earth, we've got to make things nicer, grander. Longevity I mean the science of longevity is fascinating, all the things they're trying to do to extend life. And why? Because this is all the life they know.
Christa Potratz:All right. Well, thank you so much, and thank you to all of our listeners too. We enjoyed having you with us today and we look forward to having you back next time.
Paul Snamiska:Thanks a lot. Bye it with friends. We're sure you have questions on today's topic or other life issues. Our goal is to help you through these tough topics and we want you to know we're here to help. You can submit your questions, as well as comments or suggestions for future episodes, at lifechallengesus or email us at podcast at christianliferesourcescom. Email us at podcast at christianliferesourcescom. In addition to the podcasts, we include other valuable information at lifechallengesus, so be sure to check it out. For more about our parent organization, please visit christianliferesourcescom. May God give you wisdom, love, strength and peace in Christ for every life challenge.