2 Deep PRO-LIFE Questions from an atheist

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Thank you folks for your comments - I am dealing with a person who aggressively seeks to mock Christianity - about 5,000 people are watching my exchanges with this person. So I am seeking as many pieces of good advice to help rebut this person.
 
Yeah I think your best bet is that the best way to identify a human being as being a distinct human being is by their DNA, and once an egg becomes fertilized by a sperm cell it has distinct DNA.

And I would especially note that this understanding is of when human life begins is based on scientific information. Christianity’s involvement is the promotion of the consistent valuing of human life.
 
These questions actually tacitly admit that the act of abortion is evil. He is trying to create a morally ambivalent question to find out what his limits are. In other words, he admits that it is evil to kill a baby. However, he shifts the question to at what point is it not evil to kill the baby? In other words, he has to find a point at which the baby’s humanity is questionable. If he has to ask that question in the first place, he admits the moral repugnance of killing an unborn baby, and is now trying to draw the distinction of when it is no longer morally repugnant. We would just go back to where both science and scripture agree, it is a human baby, progressing through its development from the moment the egg is fertilized. I would ask him why he has to go through such lengths to strip the humanity of the baby in order to justify killing it if abortion is a moral act?
 
From conception (egg fertilized by sperm) there is life that is holy and deserving of protection.

We are also suppose to not “spill our seed” as this disrespects the fundamental nature of sex. So any sperm or such exposed by itself in a non-procreative way is bad.

Also, your question refers to “not wearing protection”. If he’s asking for a Catholic response, you should ask why he would even brought up protection, of course no protection was used.

You want to really rock the boat? A life is worth protecting when it is conceived, as such, morning-after pills or other contraceptions are wrong because they are infanticides
 
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This atheist that doesn’t recognize a single cell at conception isn’t alive would say a single cell on Mars is alien life! Oh the hypocrisy… did someone call for a Pharisee…
 
Sure, they are human cells excised from a malignant cervix. They are not individual person.
 
These are silly questions.

Obviously, human life begins at conception, and to kill the zygote/fetus at any stage of development is murder.
 
Human life begins at conception. The cells divide, that life is a Zygote. The Zygote impants and becomes an embryo. 8 weeks after implantation, the human embryo becomes a fetus.

When the fetus is born or removed from the womb, it is an infant or a neonate.

After that there are many colloquial terms, baby, toddler, school aged, tween, teen, etc.
 
They’re a cell line taken from a cancerous cervical tumor.

You can isolate a cell culture from the salivary gland or a pharynx, but no matter how much time and care you give it, that salivary gland or pharynx will never become a distinct individual. Neither will a cell line from a cancerous tumor.

But it’s the nature for a sperm and an egg to join together and form a distinct individual, who eventually— after twelve, fifteen, twenty, thirty years-- hopefully grows into an autonomous individual who’s able to be independent enough to manage their own affairs. 😛 But in the process, that individual undergoes many, many, many stages in life where it relies upon others in various ways for its well-being and survival.
 
I haven’t read the replies but will take a stab at it.
“From what point do you consider it a baby?”
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Technically, the phases development follow as such: Zygote, embryo, fetus, and infant, a.k.a. baby.

ALL are phases of the development of a human being. This is not a matter of what a “consider”; rather, it is a matter of embryology, i.e. science.

The pro-life philosophy argues that it is ethically unacceptable to take the life of a defenseless human being during any phase of human development.
> # A doctor takes out an egg from a woman and a single sperm from a man and keeps them in separate containers. He or somebody else then proceeds to insert the sperm into the egg. Not a minute later he or another person comes and puts some liquid on it and kills the cell. Is that an abortion or a murder?
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It all comes down to semantics. It would not be an abortion because that requires aborting a human being from a woman. It would not technically be murder because murder is a legal construct; to murder is to commit an illegal act of killing.

Pro-lifers would argue, however, that it would be an act of unjust killing.
naylordaisy said:
You will realize that something written 2000 years ago by PEOPLE cannot answer these questions.
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Is your atheist friend referring to the Bible? The Bible doesn’t specify each and every method of killing - e.g. stabbing, strangling, abortion, or drive-by shooting. Is simply commands us not to kill.

Whether or not your friend accepts this as a standard of human morality remains to be seen, but that is the Judaeo-Christian ethic.

For further information and answers to his questions, I would encourage your friend to look at organizations like Secular Pro-Life or Pro-Life Humanists.
 
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What simple is this so called deep questions !There is no doubt or dispute about the answers as may be seen from the above replies !Whoever made these questions requires some basic study of science and understanding of the wonders of God!
 
I also don’t see these as deep questions. But they have rather simple answers, and actually strike me as a little sophomoric.
 
As an agnostic myself, I avoid these debates. Many atheists agree that a zygote is a human, of course it is. The problem from my point of view is that they don’t think the zygote or embryo or fetus has value until it is viable on its own. That is a philosophical argument and that is where the religious viewpoint and the atheist viewpoint are in conflict.

Until you can change the value that people have on the zygote, embryo, or fetus, abortion will continue whether it is legal or not. I’m antiabortion because I do value the zygote, embryo, fetus. Many people consider it a clump of cells until viability. This is why I also don’t promote overturning Roe v Wade. We have to change people’s values first… then the law would become moot. BTW, it seems to be slowly happening…more young are becoming antiabortion. It’s just a very slow process.
 
1Lord1Faith said:
I also don’t see these as deep questions. But they have rather simple answers, and actually strike me as a little sophomoric.
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Yeah, I would imagine anyone with even a minor familiarity on the subject would know that the pro-life position is that life begins at conception. If it weren’t for the second question, I would say that they’re more asking when the biological point of conception is, but that’s more testing the person’s understanding of reproduction than whether or not abortion is wrong.
 
Well, every single one of us began our human existence as a zygote and continued to develop until we grew to where we are now. We have been the same person throughout that development. Nobody, fortunately, chose to kill us at some point just because of our stage of development
 
Matt Fradd has made the argument that it doesn’t matter if it’s a baby or if it isn’t. Someone will always argue it’s not a baby until it’s out of the womb. So rather, our argument against abortion must be shifted to a different direction. And his is that this single cell would be considered life if it was found in space so why not live found in the womb? This is a much harder argument to refute and is scientific in nature as opposed to an argument on the humanity of the cell which can be more religiously based
 
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GospelOfMatthew said:
And his is that this single cell would be considered life if it was found in space so why not live found in the womb? This is a much harder argument to refute and is scientific in nature as opposed to an argument on the humanity of the cell which can be more religiously based
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The problem with this argument is that a single cell does not necessarily make for a human being. Every time we scratch our skin we are killing individual cells. Yes, a single cell is alive, but a single cell need not be a human person.

The argument must be grounded in human personhood, not merely cellular life.

That being said, I was ardently pro-life when I was an atheist because I believed (and still believe, now that I’m Catholic) that the foundation of human society is the innate value of the human individual. Since we have no way of fairly marking one stage of human life as “truly human” over other stages (a zygote is as much a human being as a tenured professor, biologically speaking), we can’t arbitrarily say that one stage of life is unworthy of living. Since human nature is rooted in the individual, human society can’t rightly destroy an individual without just cause, and a zygote is innocent.

Unless someone is willing to argue that the human individual is not inherently worthy of life (and if they are not, then how can the mother have rights of her own either), then they can’t argue that the zygote worthy of destruction.
 
The Catholic objection is not to the taking of a precious and unique life. It is to the DIRECT INTENT of taking of such a life. Catholic doctrine is ok with, e.g. the removal of even a late-term fetus along with the fallopian tube in which it is growing if it is an ectopic pregnancy. And it is ok with the collateral deaths of a thousand late-term fetuses as an known but unintended side effect of military action in a ‘just’ war. The Catholic position is philosophical and to do with the belief that ‘the end does not justify the means’. The humanist-atheist position is to do with doing the greatest good possible in the circumstances whatever order things come in.
 
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naylordaisy said:
a doctor somehow can reach to the woman’s egg that has been penetrated by a spermatozoon just now and pulls it out,
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I read this to mean the DNA hasn’t combined yet so it would be contraception rather than abortion.
 
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