The Daily Hatch

What is the impact of worldview on our culture and our society?  Are we alarmists to suggest that we are engaged in a war between two worldviews–Christianity and Humanism that may determine the fate of our lives on earth and for many, in their lives to come?  A worldview assumes statements about where we came from, what is wrong with our world, and what needs to be done to fix it, to be true. These two worldviews provide antithetical answers to these questions.  Today, in the United States and in many Western world countries, the humanistic worldview has the upper hand.

Worldview influences our day to day living.  Francis Schaeffer has communicated the point throughout our study that “people function on the basis of their worldview more consistently than even they themselves may realize.  The problem is not outward things.  The problem is having, and then acting upon, the right worldview–the worldview which gives men and women the truth of what is.”   The effects of worldview spread throughout society.  To understand the practical consequences of worldview on our culture and society we will consider its force on the value we place on human life, the family and morality.  In this session we will look at the consequences of worldview on human life.

What is the meaning of life?  What is the meaning of human existence?  What is the value of human life?  These are among some of the most difficult and perplexing questions that our culture struggles to answer.  Consider the key problems of our time that revolve around these questions of the value of human life.  Abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineers, cloning, assisted suicide, are difficulties whose answers will depend on the value one gives to a human life.  These answers will depend on how one answers the question of where we came from.

From the perspective of Christianity and Judaism, life is a miracle, a sacred gift from God.  Man and woman created in the image of God.  If life is a gift from God, then, He, as our creator, establishes the boundaries of when we live and when we die.

Humanism suggests several possible answers to where life came from and none these answers consider God. A chance biological accident, a big bang, millions of years spent evolving from a little germ to become a big germ, or nothing created from nothing  becoming something.   Today, millions accept the Humanist view of where we came from, that man and life, is an accident.

How we understand, the origin of life is crucial in determining what we believe about whom we are, the value of life and the reason for man’s existence.  What we understand about the origin of life has become the “defining debate of our age.”  The Christian’s conviction about the worth of life is driven by the biblical revelation of man’s origins.  Realize that one does not have to be a Christian or a Jew to hold to this belief.  For centuries, those raised in a culture of Judeo-Christian traditions, understood life to have value because all life was made in the image of God.  However, today, we are now living in a culture of death rather than a culture of life.

At the foot of the culture of death is the belief that man is an accident, a machine that has a useful purpose but when he can no longer fill that useful purpose that his life is no longer worthwhile–destroy it.  From the womb with the unborn to the bed of the old, the sick, the dying, the disabled, the weak, and the defenseless, by denying the value of life that has been created in the image of God, we now follow the path of pragmatism and utilitarianism and destroy life when it becomes a practical matter to do so.  How else can one understand how assisted suicide (euthanasia) is a protected constitutional right in one state and paid for occasionally by the state’s Medicaid program?  Infanticide is now being openly advocated and practiced by many doctors around the world.

If man is the judge of all truth and not God, as Rene’ Descartes believed, God is irrelevant and if God is irrelevant, the morality and social order that are based on a belief in God are irrelevant as well.  The “death of God” brings the “death of morality.”  Whether it is the utopia promised by Sigmund Freud when man learned to release his “impulses” or the drug culture of the 60’s, or the absolute freedom from biblical values, the disposing of life has come to have no ethical consequence in our culture.  Schaeffer uses Roe versus Wade (1973) as an example of the results of culture that no longer sees life but “choice” as important.  How else can we explain that the Supreme Court arrived at the conclusion that a “human fetus” is not a person?  The Court had to argue that although the fetus is biologically human, it is not a person.  Does this remind you of the parsing of the word “is” by the prominent linguist “who shall not be named?”

It did not take long to go from the living fetus in the womb to the living baby outside the womb, as we moved from abortion to infanticide.  The following is taken from aNew York Times article published July 10, 2005.

A famous test case occurred in 1982 in Indiana, when an infant known as Baby Doe was born with Down syndrome. Children with Down syndrome typically suffer some retardation and other difficulties; while presenting a great challenge to their parents and families, they often live joyful and relatively independent lives. As it happened, Baby Doe also had an improperly formed esophagus, which meant that food put into his mouth could not reach his stomach. Surgery might have remedied this problem, but his parents and physician decided against it, opting for painkillers instead. Within a few days, Baby Doe starved to death. The Reagan administration responded to the case by drafting the ‘Baby Doe guidelines,’ which mandated life-sustaining care for such handicapped newborns. But the guidelines were opposed by the American Medical Association and were eventually struck down by the Supreme Court.

It appears, in this case, the baby was murdered because it was retarded.

Peter Singer of Princeton University argues that infanticide should be seen as an ethical  option and an essential part of a woman’s reproductive choice. Singer argues that parents may have a responsibility to terminate the life of a child born with serious genetic abnormalities or physical disabilities. According to Singer, human dignity is not inherent in every human, but is achieved when one demonstrates specific human abilities such as the capacity to communicate and to relate to others. In a book coauthored by Singer in 1985, he says:  “We think that some infants with severe disability should be killed.” How, does a professor, who holds one of the most respected chairs in bioethics at one of our leading universities, have such a cavalier attitude about taking the life of a fellow human being?

Yet it is not just a problem in the United States. In 2006 it was reported that the government of the Netherlands is now considering what many think to be unthinkable–the creation of legal standards for pediatric euthanasia.  According to the London Times, a committee will soon be set up to regulate the practice, which doctors have quietly been performing for years in the Netherlands.

The London Times article suggests that the Netherlands would likely issue regulations similar to the Groningen Protocol, a document drawn up in 2004 by the Groningen University Medical Center to establish internal guidelines for its euthanasia program that ended the lives of 22 disabled newborns from 1997 to 2004.

According to Colleen Campbell, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, theGroningen Protocol declared a newborn subject to euthanasia if “his diagnosis and prognosis are certain,” his suffering is “hopeless and unbearable,” and his quality of life is “very poor,” according to the child’s parents and “at least one independent doctor.”  What do we do when the “quality of life” used in considering to let a baby die includes things like race, ethnicity, and family income?

Peter Singer pictured below:

Return for a moment to Professor Singer, who advocates allowing parents to kill disabled babies because they are “nonpersons.”  Professor Singer believes that one is a nonperson until they are rational and self-conscious. Singer does not stop here, he goes on to advocate the killing of any people, of any age, who are deemed incompetent, if their families decide that their lives are not worth living. What do you think will happen to a culture that popularizes such beliefs?

The battle being fought here is not abortion or infanticide or euthanasia, the battle is about worldview.  A worldview that believes in God and the sanctity of life versus a worldview that believes in the autonomy of man, the individual’s right to do as they see fit.  The argument for the autonomy of man is couched in terms like compassion, patients’ rights, and there are few voices willing to stand and defend the defenseless.  We are in a rush to get the defenseless, the unborn, the unproductive, the infirm, the disabled and the aged out of our way so we can get back to living life as it was meant to be lived without all these useless lives being in our way or draining our resources.  Is it not ironic that “a supposedly exalted view of human reason has led to a degraded view of life?”  The Christian worldview remains rooted in the “imago Dei,” the image of God in us.  It is by the biblical doctrine of creation that the Christian understands that life has value, that life has a worth that is not to be traded for convenience.  Life does have meaning and value.

An example, of what our future world might be like, is given us in a strangely prophetic novel written in 1932 by Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (BNW).  Brave New Worldtouches on much that we have spoken of in Francis Schaeffer’s How Should We Then Live?  BNW stresses the State’s control over new and powerful technologies.  The State uses its rigid control over sexual mores and reproductive rights to control society. Reproductive rights are controlled through an authoritarian system which, sterilizes about two-thirds of women, requires the rest to use contraceptives, and surgically removes ovaries when it needs to produce new humans. The act of sex is controlled by a system of social rewards for promiscuity and lack of commitment. The process is to ensure a perfect species capable of living in perfect harmony.  It promotes a society that is free from all the encumbrances of family and child rearing as those are handled by the state.  By using an all-purpose drug and free sex, the State strives to provide an environment where the pursuit of happiness is virtually guaranteed.  Life is perpetual bliss and when life becomes a burden or inconvenient, it is ended.

Today, we live in our own BNW.  Genetic engineering has almost reached the point that we can create people without defects–this is the final expression of man’s autonomy. By developing artificial wombs to house fertilized eggs, we have come perilously close to attaining the moment when our capabilities exceed our moral and ethical reach.  Most of us would support assisted reproduction if it were used to aid in restoring a natural function but what about when it involves something that goes way beyond natural function.  How do we deal with the capability of a woman being impregnated by her son-in-law and gives birth to her daughter’s child?  How should we handle the disposal of fertilized eggs that could become fetuses?  How should we deal with surrogate parenthood?

The future of the world does not lie in the test tube or artificial wombs.  The future of the world does not lie in a government focused on providing complete happiness for its citizens.  The future of the world does not lie in removing the infirm, the aged, the ugly, the disabled, the dying.  The future of mankind lies in the simple truth that mankind was created in the image of God and that life was and is a gift from God–not man.  Life has worth, value, meaning, only because we are created in God’s image.  Woes be on us when the day comes and man is created in his own image.