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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (38941)

7/14/2013 2:50:41 PM

From: 2MAR$

Respond to of 69300

The Good consists in always doing what God wills at any particular moment.
~Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative (1947)

A very good read:

“Does Morality Depend on Religion?”
by James Rachels
faculty.uca.edu

Church Tradition. (abortion)

Even if there is little scriptural basis for it, the contemporary church’s stand is strongly antiabortion. The typical churchgoer will hear ministers, priests, and bishops denouncing abortion in the strongest terms. It is no wonder, then, that many people feel that their religious commitment binds them to oppose abortion.

But it is worth noting that the church has not always taken this view. In fact, the idea that the fetus is a human being “from the moment of conception” is a relatively new idea, even within the Christian church. St. Thomas Aquinas held that an embryo does not have a soul until several weeks into the pregnancy. Aquinas accepted Aristotle’s view that the soul is the “substantial form” of man. We need not go into this somewhat technical notion, except to note that one implication is that one cannot have a human soul until one’s body has a recognizably human shape. Aquinas knew that a human embryo does not have a human shape “from the moment of conception,” and he drew the indicated conclusion. Aquinas’s view of the matter was officially accepted by the church at the Council of Vienne in 1312, and to this day it has never been officially repudiated.

However, in the 17th century, a curious view of fetal development came to be accepted, and this has unexpected consequences for the church’s view of abortion. Peering through primitive microscopes at fertilized ova, some scientists imagined that they saw tiny, perfectly formed people. They called the little person a “homunculus,” and the idea took hold that from the very beginning the human embryo is a fully formed creature that needs only to get bigger and bigger until it is ready to be born.

If the embryo has a human shape from the moment of conception, then it follows, according to Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s philosophy, that it can have a human soul from the moment of conception. The church drew this conclusion and embraced the conservative view of abortion. The “homunculus,” it said, is clearly a human being, and so it is wrong to kill it.

However, as our understanding of human biology progressed, scientists began to realize that this view of fetal development was wrong. There is no homunculus; that was a mistake. Today we know that Aquinas’s original thought was right - embryos start out as a cluster of cells; “human form” comes later. But when the biological error was corrected, the church’s moral view did not revert to the older position. Having adopted the theory that the fetus is a human being “from the moment of conception,” the church did not let it go and held fast to the conservative view of abortion. The council of Vienne notwithstanding, it has held that view to this day.

Because the church did not traditionally regard abortion as a serious moral issue, Western law (which developed under the church’s influence) did not traditionally treat abortion as a crime. Under the English common law, abortion was tolerated even if performed late in the pregnancy. In the United States, there were no laws prohibiting it until well into the 19th century. Thus when the U.S. Supreme Court declared the absolute prohibition of abortion to be unconstitutional in 1973, the Court was not overturning a long tradition of moral and legal opinion. It was only restoring a legal situation that had always existed until quite recently.

The purpose of reviewing this history is not to suggest that the contemporary church’s position is wrong. For all that has been said here, its view may be right. I only want to make a point about the relation between religious authority and moral judgment. Church tradition, like Scripture, is reinterpreted by every generation to support its favored moral views. Abortion is just an example of this. We could just as easily have used shifting moral and religious views about slavery, or the status of women, or capital punishment, as our example. In each instance, people’s moral convictions are not so much derived from their religion as superimposed on it.

The various arguments in this chapter point to a common conclusion. Right and wrong are not to be defined in terms of God’s will; morality is a matter of reason and conscience, not religious faith; and in any case, religious considerations do not provide definitive solutions to the specific moral problems that confront us. Morality and religion are, in a word, different. Because this conclusion is contrary to conventional wisdom, it may strike some readers as antireligious. Therefore, it should be emphasized that this conclusion has not been reached by questioning the validity of religion. The arguments we have considered do not assume that Christianity or any other theological system is false; these arguments merely show that even if such a system is true, morality remains an independent matter.

meme