Pain and Sentinence are Knowledge Based, and Knowledge is Not Physical
Pain and Sentinence are Knowledge Based, and Knowledge is Not Physical
Granite, I appreciate you talking through this with us, and it has opened the door for me to take the discussion a bit further.
You wrote: "Human life and human personhood, I would submit, are not identical."
If a doctor scrapes cells from a patient’s mouth, and they remain living for a time, we could say that is an example of human life. So, personhood and life are not identical, as you say, in such circumstances, although in normal discussion, we speak of a human life and a person interchangeably, as synonyms.
I don’t know you or the position you hold very well. [Although it grieves me that you describe yourself as a Satanist, since only Jesus Christ can forgive you of your sins.] But it seems that you had been drawing a line for personhood at implantation. But surely, even by the argument you had presented, that is arbitrary, because at the moment of implantation, the embryo, by your standard, still wouldn't resemble your prerequisites for personhood (although in reality it does). You have been pushed down this road of making a distinction where we typically don’t need to make one, between human life and personhood, because you’re wrestling with understanding when does a human being, a person, come into existence, and you had been trying to defend that arbitrary threshold of implantation. That’s why you introduced the distraction of the trophoblast (discarding some cells, like tonsils, is not the same as destroying the entire human, so the fact that the embryo does not incorporate trophoblast cells, which become the placenta, is not relevant to the question of personhood, but is only obfuscation).
Then you wrote, “A blastocyst does not in my book resemble a person in any way, shape, or form," clarifying your earlier claim that he or she has “No sentience, no ability to feel pain, nothing recognizably human.”
I just referred to the blastocyst as he or she because we know that his or her gender and countless other particulars are already set, at fertilization, and only await expression.
Your claims of what the blastocyst cannot do have overreached your understanding. Sentience, i.e. awareness, does not come from our physical existence, but from our soul. How do I know this? Because knowledge is NOT physical. Knowledge, in this case, knowing that I exist, is not material, it is not physical, but something else. We have words for things that are not physical, like spirit, and soul. At the moment of fertilization, a unique, living, human being comes into existence, and it does not need to wait for its brain to be wired to acquire sentience, because no configuration of matter, regardless of how complex, can instill non-material ability to that matter.
Also, pain is not physical. Plants do not have souls (which are non-material), and when you chop down a tree, it does not feel pain (a 60s sci-fi episode not withstanding). Pain is comprehension, it is knowledge, and knowledge is not physical. Granite, you assumed that a blastocyst cannot feel pain because it’s physical configuration has not developed sufficiently to register pain. First, the DNA in our human cells, including in the blastocyst, is the most complex arrangement of matter known in the universe, sufficiently complex to assemble the human brain, which is the second-most complex arrangement of matter in the universe. Thus, the blastocyst is not incapable of feeling pain because it lacks sufficient physical complexity. Secondly, you overlooked the fact that awareness of pain requires awareness, and awareness is knowledge, and not a physical attribute. Whether you reject Scripture or not, Christians have the benefit of its wisdom. And so we know that at the moment of fertilization, the pro-created, unique, living human being is alive to God. I don’t mean alive in that God sees a living cell, as He could do with biopsy cells. Rather, the genetically complete, new human life is itself aware of God. It is alive to God. And by the way, before the embryo implants, even as it is coming down the fallopian tube, it cries out to its mother (actually, physically, with a hormonal cry), saying I’m hungry, asking mom to get ready to feed the little one, so that she can make preparations to feed him, and to receive her baby into his home for the next nine months!
Regarding an inability to feel pain, when a doctor cuts in our brain matter, we do not feel pain from that. It would be wrong to kill an injured person who has passed out, or who we assume just can’t feel pain. Pain is non-physical, it is awareness, which is a state of knowledge. You can program a robot to back up suddenly if it bumps into a wall, and even to yell, “Ouch.” But it hasn’t felt pain, because it is only made of atoms and molecules, and can have no awareness. Because pain is inherently non-physical, pain resulting from non-physical causes is dramatically more hurtful than pain resulting from physical stimuli. A paper cut on the eyeball really hurts. A father who will not look his disowned son in the eye is far more painful. Perhaps if you have been abandoned by your parents, you might be able to know the pain felt by the little one who is purposefully rejected by his mother, intentionally killed, by a chemical weapon, the Morning After Abortion Pill, because she didn’t have the time to love him. She called it Plan B. Her dismissal (and yours), of the little one’s ability to feel pain will do little to alleviate it.
Granite, you wrote, “I don't doubt life begins at conception--at a basic level, who does…”
Yes, life begins at conception. And I know you mean that it begins at that blast of life that we call fertilization. And you are right. The abortionists are wrong. But that’s not only the science, it is the moment of truth, in that twinkling of an eye, where each of us decides, whether to honor God who so wonderfully made us, or to disobey him, and to justify the unthinkable, and to swing open the doors of the slaughterhouse.
-Bob Enyart
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