Roger Nicoll provides a brief history of thought that has led to our current cultural thinking about abortion and euthanasia. It's a helpful analysis because when we can see what ideas are in operation behinds the scenes, we can more effectively challenge and hopefully correct the issues being discussed.
Francis Schaeffer called the shift in thinking Nicoll writes about "the upper story leap." God and values have come to be in the upper story isolated from the real world, the lower story we live in. And whatever religious beliefs we have or the values we choose require a leap of faith since they have no real, objective truth. Moral relativism results, with everyone deciding for themselves what is valuable to them.
Consequently, we come to the current idea that human value is a matter of individual determination. So abortion and euthanasia are matters purely of individual choice. Take a leap-decide for yourself if life is valuable or not. It moves to the realm of the personal and subjective, rather than the public and objective. "Who are you to say?"
From Kant to relativism to Peter Singer and Jack Kervorkian. Ideas have consequences. And bad ideas have bad consequences.
[Kant] had the best of intentions: to rescue what can be known from the radical skepticism of David Hume. But by dividing the universe into its sensible and insensible parts, Immanuel Kant created a Knowledge-Belief split. In this binary framework, “knowledge” was restricted to facts about the material world, with everything else a product of “beliefs” shaped by personal experiences and cultural influences. It was nothing less than a Copernican Turn in thought.
Up until Kant, it was generally accepted that a pre-existent something—Yahweh, the uncaused Cause, the Good, the One, Apeiron, Logos, God—brought the universe into existence with a rational structure that made knowledge possible: knowledge of the physical matrix of the cosmos and the metaphysical questions of life, as well.
According to Kant, the moral law (being law and rational) resided in the category of Knowledge. But Enlightenment agitations with the Church, coupled with the materialistic enthusiasms of the Scientific Revolution, eventually caused moral knowledge to be dislodged from the realm of facts, along with the concepts of God, spirit, soul, and the like.
The effect, over time, was the death of moral absolutes and the popularization of relativism, pragmatism, and utilitarianism.
The ‘sweet mystery of life’
Consider the nation whose rule of law is founded on the declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal: that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…”
Two hundred years later, the highest court in the land upheld a ruling that excluded the unborn from those provisions with this fatuous reasoning: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
Note the Kantian influence. It is the individual that assigns value and meaning to human life, bereft of any extrinsic standard or influence. And while it is true that the individual should be free to hold whatever peculiar beliefs he wants, acting on beliefs untethered to an external standard is another matter; in fact, it is moral chaos. For if the “sweet mystery of life” can be applied to life’s earliest stages, it can be applied to its later stages as well.
Read the rest here.
