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Linusthe2nd
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Because we are Children!!
Excellent. Answers all the questions in this thread.
Peace,
Ed
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Peace,
Ed
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Marc_Anthony
Guest
Come on, you know what I meant. It’s a HUMAN life. Happy now?The doctrine did not change; early theories were floating around and weren’t defined yet.
Saint Thomas’s theory is accepted today not because of its lovely fit with Church doctrine but because it is correct.
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mercytruth
Guest
I want to thank everyone for their contributions to this subject.
I became interested in this subject by thinking about the perspective within Judaism. Within Judaism a fetus is not considered a person until he/she are born. The whole concept of ensoulment might relate to the concept of taking one’s first breath outside the womb. As when God breathed into his (Adam’s) nostrils and he became a living soul
I can understand this reasoning, but I do not necessarily agree with it. I personally, am not sure when ‘ensoulment’ is given to the human embryo or fetus. I could find only one early church writing that speaks on this subject, and it is not considered canonical. It is in the vision of Esdras who is given an explanation of the stages of human development within the womb, and he states that in the sixth month the child receives a soul.
The Jewish site if anyone is interested:
rcrc.org/perspectives/jewish.cfm
God’s peace
micah
I became interested in this subject by thinking about the perspective within Judaism. Within Judaism a fetus is not considered a person until he/she are born. The whole concept of ensoulment might relate to the concept of taking one’s first breath outside the womb. As when God breathed into his (Adam’s) nostrils and he became a living soul
I can understand this reasoning, but I do not necessarily agree with it. I personally, am not sure when ‘ensoulment’ is given to the human embryo or fetus. I could find only one early church writing that speaks on this subject, and it is not considered canonical. It is in the vision of Esdras who is given an explanation of the stages of human development within the womb, and he states that in the sixth month the child receives a soul.
The Jewish site if anyone is interested:
rcrc.org/perspectives/jewish.cfm
God’s peace
micah
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LilyM
Guest
What’s wrong with that? Fraternal twins, who are from two different eggs, may quite possibly be conceived a week apart, and so gain their souls a week apart. If an additional soul is gained when the one egg splits into two, that’s no real problem.
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Marc_Anthony
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Marc_Anthony
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I’m not so sure of that article. My High School Apologetics teacher is probably one of the two smartest people I have ever met (the other being my Uncle). He always taught our class that human life, and thus ensoulment, begins at conception. The claim that a human zygote/embryo does not have a human soul doesn’t sound right to me for a few reasons.
First, by the line of reasoning in the article it completely dismantles any sort of argument we might have with atheists. This last section:
…would mean absolutely nothing to me as an atheist. “Okay, I don’t believe in immortal souls. So I guess I could ignore this part.”
There would be no good constitutional basis for us to oppose Roe v. Wade. I mean, yeah, we want to have the decision appealed and reversed. But now we don’t even have a leg to stand on. If you’re not religious, you might as well accept abortion.
But I disagree with that anyway. St. Thomas’s theory of the soul, hylemorphic dualism, holds that the soul and body are linked. One is not distinct from the other.
Maybe not IMMEDIATELY when a zygote is formed do we KNOW that they are ensouled, but we DO know that this occurs VERY quickly into the process. And for atheists by “ensouled” I mean “when human life begins”. And since we don’t know we should always err on the side of caution anyway.
Anyway, an embryo is a human body that’s not fully developed. Since it’s alive, it has a soul; all living things do. Since it is a human body, it has a human soul. Basic Thomistic metaphysics.
(St. Thomas’s theories of the soul were based on the science of the time, and he would most definitely agree given his philosophy that as soon as a body is biologically human it has a human soul.)
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ThinkingSapien
Guest
I wasn’t questioning the type of soul, but whether or not one would expect there to be a soul in an embryo with a defect that would cause it to never develop a brain. The question was asked in consideration that there’s a range of defects that can cause an embryo to develop into a lump of tissue that bears no resemblance with what we call human. In some cases the outcome is very much like a teratoma (if you don’t know what that is I discourage you from doing an image search on it. Some of them look quite disgusting).They are human therefore they would have a human soul. What other type of soul would they have?
What one ends up with is a lump of flesh genetically differentiated from it’s parents that potentially has no head, arms, or other common members of anatomy. I asked because I was wondering if there was a Catholic view on how such “organisms” are perceived with respect to a soul.
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kompaz
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And we know it… how?
And once we accept your proposition we immediately run into two problems:
- 40% of embryos will either not implant, or quickly and spontaneously abort. If these have God-given souls, why is God wasting souls like that?
- Supposedly, God frowns upon IVF. Yet, IVF succeeds, producing perfectly functioning humans, and, according to you, these humans have souls. So, if God indeed opposes IVF, why does he willingly participate in it, by producing these souls? If God really had to be involved in the act of conception, and God indeed frowned upon IVF, then IVF would not succeed, plain and simple. Heck, if it were so, then the human reproduction scheme would be designed in a way which makes IVF impossible… Looking at the Universe, I’d say that God frowns more on space travel than IVF, since the former is much more difficult than the latter. Curiously though, no religion forbids space travel…
The whole idea that “life begins” is incorrect. It is an attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole.
The whole thing is a leftover from ancient philosophers, who were trying to distinguish between animate and inanimate matter. The idea they came up with was that living matter is inanimate matter must be infused with… something… to make it alive (animate). It’s right in Genesis actually: God made Adam out of inanimate matter (i.e. dirt), and infused him with life (i.e. breathed the soul into him).
To say that “life begins” at fertilization implies that sperm and ovum are inanimate, and only when they join, an animate onject forms. This is blatantly incorrect; the sperm and ovum are both alive. So what you actually have is that you have two living cells which join together to make a new living cell.
At this point, the need for God to infuse life/soul into the embryo goes out of the window. Life does not have to be infused, because life was already there! God is not needed for the act of conception; it is in fact redundant.
Yes, the DNA mixes and you have a new, distinct, unique individual… but there is nothing there which comes ex nihilo. Life does not appear; life has appeared on Earth only once, and it has just been continuing ever since.
This is a part of a wider problem, which is that we don’t even have a good definition of life. What makes life alive? We understand how cells works, and it’ simply chemistry all the way down (and physics at the subatomic scales and below). A complicated chemistry, but still only chemistry, governed by the common laws of the universe. We now hold that DNA-based enitites are alive, but DNA is just a step up from RNA. So, what about RNA-based entities? Are viruses alive? Was the RNA world alive? Because it for sure was not dead.
If all living things have souls, then consider a bacteria. They multiply by cell division; one individual suddenly becomes two. You cannot say which is the parent, and which is the child, because they are identical, and made of the same material. Did one soul suddenly become two?
Speciecism, plain and simple.
What if we cut your head off, and connect it to a machine which pumps it with oxidated blood. Have you maintained your soul?
What if we cut your head off, and put it on someone else’s body. Are you still yourself, your body donor, or a hybrid of the two? Do you have your orginal soul, the body donor’s soul, two souls, a hybrid soul, or no soul at all, because we have technically killed both you and the other person?
What if we cut your head off, and put it on a chimp’s body (handwaving technical problems). Are you a human, or a chimp and why?
What if we cut your head off, scan it at the molecular level, upload into a computer, and run a simulation of you? Have we transferred your soul into the computer, or have we destroyed your soul in the process? What if we run a second copy of you on a second computer – have we copied your soul as well?
What if we program an artificial intelligence from scratch. Will it have a soul?
You can quote Acquinas and Augustine all day, but the ideas these guys had, were based on their understanding how the world works. And we now know that the world operates very differently than they thought…
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pete_29
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Kompaz
I’m only responding to the line in your post stating the term life begins is incorrect.
Would you argue that your individual and specific life did not begin when your father’s sperm united with your mother’s egg?
I’m only responding to the line in your post stating the term life begins is incorrect.
Would you argue that your individual and specific life did not begin when your father’s sperm united with your mother’s egg?
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bzkoss236
Guest
This is a weak attempt made by many atheists. God isn’t wasting souls, even if God ensouled the fertilized egg and it didn’t survive, the soul would still exist away from the body. And even if an embryo will not implant or self-abort, it is different than purposefully killing or destroying it willingly.
False, God doesn’t want us to do a lot of things, yet we can still do them. The argument you make is childish. It is saying, if God doesn’t want us to do it, then we wouldn’t be able to do it. So, if God doesn’t want us to have sex outside of marriage, then why are we able to? This kind of reasoning is stupid because it implies that if God doesn’t want us to disobey then he would just make it so we couldn’t (and obviously he wouldn’t want us to disobey), but he doesn’t control us because forcing someone to love you is not real love (and we obey out of love). People do IVF to get a baby, so God does what he does. The err and sin lies with the people.
The truth is that things have potential. Like potential energy in physics class. Potential energy is not the same as kinetic energy, though both are energy. An object can sit still at the top of a hill, it has potential energy, which can convert into kinetic energy. And the same is for other things we potential. Their potential can also be transformed.
I would disagree at this point. The potential for life was always there, but there was nothing to convert that potential until the egg is fertilized by the sperm.
Even if all living things have a soul, the Church’s view is that only humans have a rational soul with free will made in the image and likeness of God. Just because something is classified as alive doesn’t mean it has the same type of soul as a human.
I would say yes because you still have a consciousness of yourself.
I would say that you would have killed the soul that belonged to the person whose body it was, and that the soul of the head is still intact because that is where his consciousness of self is.
You remain a human with a chimp’s body, just because your head is attached to something non-human doesn’t make it human.
Nope, you’ve killed the body, and then it is just that, a simulation and not an actual person. This does not mean that someone else cannot become attached to the simulation as if it were an actual person.
I would also extend this to say that if you copy the person’s body and print another as if by molecular “teleportation”, then if it does have a soul, it would be a new soul, distinct and individual from the original, even if this created person acts the same and has the same memories.
I would say no, because it is not human.
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Marc_Anthony
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This is trying to force science into metaphysics. It’s an elementary error. That’s not how Aquinas’s metaphysics works. We “know” every human is ensouled because all living things are alive. What keeps things alive are souls-at least, that’s how Saint Thomas uses the term. Embryos are just human bodies that aren’t fully developed. But csince they’re humans, that had souls.
Aquinas’s philosophy was not based on the science of the day, and trying to disprove it using science just shows a complete misunderstanding of what he’s trying to say.
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kompaz
Guest
The difference between illicit sex and conception is that nobody claims that God is actively involved in illicit sex. Marc Anthony does, however, claim, that God is actively involved in conception by ensouling the embryo at the moment of conception.
My point is that, if God is involved in conception, then God is also involved in IVF conception. However, the Catholic doctrine says that IVF is illicit. This leads to a conclusion that in case of IVF, God is involved in illicit act. But such conclusion is obviously nonsense. So either God is not actively involved in conception, or IVF is not evil (i.e. contrary to God’s will).
Let me say this again. You cannot have both ensoulment at conception and IVF being evil, because this leads to conclusion that in case of IVF, God is actively participating in an evil act, by ensouling the resulting zygote. I think I don’t have to explain why this conclusion is unacceptable.
In other words, God will automatically ensoul a fertilized egg. This means that God is not sovereign in his decisions; i.e., he is not god!
By Marc Anthony’s own argument, the IVF procedure cannot succeed unless God participates. So, if God viewed IVF as evil, then he could simply refuse to ensoul the produced zygote, and it would never become alive. Yet the IVF procedure succeeds.
Thus, either God’s cooperation in conception is not needed, or IVF is not evil, or both. Take your pick.
An egg is a potential chicken, but does it mean that egg is chicken?
A larva is a potential butterly, but does it mean that larva is a butterfly?
Okay, so you believe that soul is tied to consciousness. I actually believe the same.
Now - a zygote has no nervous system, so it cannot have consciousness. So why would it have a soul?
This leads me to believe that ensoulment is delayed, at least until some basic central nervous system forms.
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kompaz
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You have just summarized double truth doctrine, which was rejected back in 13th century – inter alia by Acquinas.
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jmcrae
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This is true. If the body is not ensouled, then it will not continue to live. The soul is the life of the body. All living beings have souls, even plants. Human beings have human souls - at every stage of development.
By the time God ensouls the person, the evil act is over. It was evil before anything happened. What God did was give life to the human person who was conceived. God loves all human beings. That IVF child or that child of whatever sinful relationship is not, in and of himself or herself, evil. He or she is good, and has a purpose given by God for his or her life.
Consciousness has nothing to do with it. Plants have souls, but they aren’t conscious.
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kompaz
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Of course not.
I’m countering the idea that I came from inanimate sperm and ovum via a divine intervention.
I came from a living sperm and a living ovum and I don’t see why God would need to intervene in the process.
In fact, I do not like the idea of God intervening in the process at all. Actively participating in creation of a zygote with arlequin ichtyosis would be nothing more than an exercise in pointless sadism. Since such zygotes unfortunately form (thankfully, rarely), the idea that God participated in their creation makes me somewhat uncomfortable.
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kompaz
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But since the very act of IVF conception is supposed to be evil, you are saying that ensoulment in fact happens after the (IVF) conception…
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jmcrae
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Yes. Probably because God has a mission for that person, that only he or she can accomplish - regardless of the circumstances of his or her conception.
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Marc_Anthony
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No, I did not. I don’t think they contradict each other, and never said they did. But you’re trying to disprove metaphysics with science. You can’t do that, and metaphysics can’t disprove science.
Aquinas said there can be no conflict between reason and faith. There isn’t. Reason has proven the metaphysics correct. Science is separate.
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Marc_Anthony
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kompaz
Guest
So conceiving that person via IVF is doing God’s will – thus it cannot be evil, and for sure it cannot be intrinsic evil!
My point still stands – assuming soul at conception and IVF is evil leads to a logical contradiction. At least one of these propositions is untrue.
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