Sex, Abortion, and Infanticide: The Gulf between the Secular and the Divine

I. TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY AND SECULAR ATHEISM: CONTRASTING BIOETHICS

Traditional Christian bioethics frames the proper use of medicine and permissible development of the biomedical sciences within the authentic experience of a fully Christian life. Contemporary bioethics, in contrast, functions as an academic, moral, social, and political endeavor seeking to secularize medical practice and scientific research. Where Christianity brings a content-full appreciation of the demands of God to communicate the why and wherefore of existence, appropriately to evaluate and guide technological, social, and moral choice, secular bioethics emphasizes health care welfare entitlements and individual liberty conceptualized as personal autonomy, to the detriment and marginalization of traditional forms of moral authority. The established bioethics seeks ever further to secularize society, medicine, and permissible moral judgment. Christian bioethics is thus set against and acts as a religious counterpoint to the dominant secular bioethical establishment, and its general understanding that moral debates be conducted in terms of claims and reasons that are fundamentally secular.

This paper critically explores key aspects of the gulf between traditional Christian bioethics and the secular moral reflections that dominate contemporary bioethics. For example, where traditional Christianity affirms all sexual activity as properly located within the marriage of husband and wife, secular bioethics encourages sexual experimentation, homosexual activity, and the personal search for self-satisfaction.1 Similarly, where Christianity recognizes the family as hierarchical and patriarchal, with minor children appreciated as within the authority of their parents, and all members united in love and oriented towards God, secular bioethics seeks to separate children from the authority of their parents, placing children themselves in authority to make their own judgments about appropriate lifestyle choices, including sexual behaviors. Christian families direct significant energy to nurturing children within the illiberal religious understandings of Traditional Christianity; affirming the importance of salvation over individual liberty, self-satisfaction and sexual freedom, teaching children the essential roles of submission to God, Christian asceticism, daily prayer, and charity, rather than the pursuit of ever greater standards of living. Traditional Christian families also recognize the importance of teaching children to appreciate the profound sinfulness of abortion and infanticide. The established secular bioethics, in contrast, affirms liberty rights for children to develop their own sexual identity and accents entitlements to medical choices that are judged integral to the realization of important life projects, such as adolescent access to contraception without parental permission, or to control over one's personal liberty, such as the ready availability of abortion and infanticide. As this paper argues, the gulf between Christian bioethics and secular bioethics is significant indeed.

II. SECULAR ATHEISM AS A FOUNDATIONAL ASSUMPTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

To borrow an observation from Jürgen Habermas, as a field of inquiry bioethics inevitably begins epistemic and moral analysis from the perspective of methodological atheism; that is, with the implicit foundational assumption that there is no God.2 In its rejection of traditional Christianity, contemporary biomedical ethics places persons, rather than God, in authority to define the right, the good, and the virtuous. Thereby severed from any transcendent account of moral truth, human flourishing is not to be found in submitting to God or living within a richly textured traditional religious culture; cardinal moral value is instead assigned to individual liberty conceptualized as autonomous self-determination. Persons as secular moral beings are to free themselves from the supposedly irrational superstitions of traditional religion, choosing instead to be autonomous and self-determining individuals, who shape their moral values and perceptions of the good life for themselves. Having marginalized traditional religious concerns, personal autonomy is highlighted as integral to human good and human flourishing, with individuals choosing life values, private perceptions of virtue, and moral content for themselves.3

Sexual Experimentation and Sexual Gratification

As a matter of contemporary mores and social demographics, it has become typical for individuals openly to cohabitate and to lead active sex lives outside of traditional married life. In the United States and Western Europe, for example, the demographic shift is toward living with a sexual partner without the benefit of marriage.4 In Europe, the social demographic picture reveals dramatic shifts away from traditional marriage and family, toward either nonmarried cohabitation or permanent single status. Between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, while the marriage rate dropped, nonmarried cohabitation rates “… climbed 23 percent in Italy and Australia, 53 percent in the United Kingdom, and 49 percent in the United States” (Popenoe, 2007, 8). In both the United States and Europe, significant percentages of children are born outside of marriage, with the nonmarital birthrate increasing 24 percent in the United States, from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, 48 percent in the United Kingdom, 96 percent in Italy, and 144 percent in Spain (Popenoe, 2007, 8). Sexual relationships are to be based on personal attraction, with the pursuit of pleasure and self-satisfaction ideally separated from biological norms of reproduction.

As a key biomedical development, the invention of reliable artificial means of birth control, especially the contraceptive pill, meant that women could have sex where, when, and with whom they wished, without fear of pregnancy.5 Although extramarital sex is by no means the invention of the current generation, the openness with which it is practiced and culturally embraced (frequently celebrated) is revealing of a shift in social sensitivities, mores, and taken-for-granted moral assumptions.6 The secular world encourages sexual experimentation, including homosexual activity, so as to determine one's own individual preferences. The distinction between permissible and impermissible sex acts is drawn on the basis of consent. Indeed, from this bioethical perspective, provided that the couple avoids the possible genetic harms, were they to conceive a child, there no longer remains any real reason morally to forbid consensual incest among individuals deemed to be of age to consent to sexual activity.

Here marriage is not appreciated as the union of husband and wife, bound through God in Holy Matrimony, but rather as essentially a contractual relationship among consenting persons, who are presumably bonded by love and affection; it is a formal legal arrangement regarding the rights and duties of communal living, community property, health insurance, inheritance rights, and so forth. Proponents of same-gender marriage, for example, assert the existence of liberty-based rights for homosexual couples to publicly celebrated marriages, with all of the same legal and social entitlements as heterosexual marriages.7 Freedoms publicly to identify oneself as a homosexual, to engage in same gender sex without fear of legal prosecution or moral disapprobation, and openly to cohabitat with and express one's love publicly for a same sex partner are perceived as central to moral and political equality. Consequently, a wide variety of “family types,” including homosexual unions, nonmarital cohabitation, single parents, group living arrangements with open sexual practices, and so forth, are each affirmed as at least permissible, perhaps even equally potentially good, provided that the relationship is consensual.8

In its presumption of the permissibility of sexual freedom and experimentation in the pursuit of personal gratification, bioethics straightforwardly reflects the permissive background worldview of Western culture. Regarding their sexual lives and lifestyle choices, for example, the established secular bioethics seeks to liberate children from their parents even prior to children having necessarily achieved proper maturity. Parental consent to access birth control measures, abortion, or education on sexual activities is not appreciated as necessary to protect the best interests of children (Cook, Erdman, & Dickens, 2007). “Sufficiently mature” minors are to be permitted to decide on their own behalf regarding contraception, acceptable sexual practices with consenting others, treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and abortion. In Europe, claims to such rights for children have been successfully used to lower the age of consent for homosexual acts to 16 years of age and to prescribe contraceptives to girls under the age of 16 years.9 Age thresholds have usually functioned as an established, if somewhat conventional, criterion for the capacity to make competent, mature, and responsible decisions. With regard to sexual activity and its consequences (e.g., sexually transmitted disease and unwanted pregnancies), the focus has shifted away from any particular minimum age threshold to a medical professional's personal judgment regarding the child's “sufficient maturity.”10 Rather than being appreciated as within the authority of their parents, or other biologically related family members, minor children are anticipated as moving as quickly as feasible from giving assent to medical treatment, to giving independent consent and as having moral and legal standing over against their parents.11 Liberty rights for adolescents are perceived as entailing rights to sexual pleasure, generally restricted only by the consent of the parties involved.12

It is worth noting, however, that sex outside of the traditional marriage of husband and wife significantly raises the background risks for numerous diseases, with potential short-term and long-term harm to the adolescents themselves as well as to third parties. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), adolescent girls, ages 15 to 19 have the largest number of chlamydia and gonorrhea cases in the United States, followed closely by women in the 20–24 age group. Adolescent males have a similarly high incidence of sexually transmitted diseases. If chlamydia and gonorrhea are left untreated, they are easily spread to others through sexual contact. The CDC estimates that for women, some 10–20 percent of chlamydia and gonorrhea infections can result in pelvic inflammatory disease, which can also lead to long-term complications such as chronic pelvic pain, ectopic pregnancy, and infertility. They estimate that in the United States untreated sexually transmitted diseases cause more than 24,000 women each year to become infertile (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2009).

Many common homosexual sex practices carry more significant health risks, relative to heterosexual sex. Unprotected anal sex, for example, is among the most risky of sexual behaviors. While anal intercourse is not exclusive to men who have sex with other men, as a sexual practice it is significantly more common within the homosexual population. The Gay and Lesbian Medical Association notes that a “significant percentage of MSM [men who have sex with men]—as many as one in three—have some incidence of unprotected anal sex” (Dean et al., 2000, 114; see generally, ElHage, 2007). A 2000–2 Centers for Disease Control survey of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-positive homosexual men indicated that some 30 percent of the men who participated in the survey engaged exclusively in oral sex in their last sexual encounter, 13 percent engaged exclusively in anal sex in their last sexual encounter, and 55 percent engaged in both (2004). In 2003, the EXPLORE study found that some 48 percent of the homosexual men surveyed reported having unprotected receptive anal sex with 54.9 percent reported having unprotected insertive anal sex (Koblin et al., 2003).13 The risks of anal intercourse are decidedly greater for sexually transmitted disease, as compared to vaginal intercourse, including HIV, as well as the risk of physical damage to the rectum itself. The Foundation for AIDS Research notes that “compared to the vagina, rectal tissue is much more vulnerable to tearing during intercourse and the larger surface area of the rectum/colon provides more opportunity for viral penetration and infection” (2006, 2). Physical injuries include lacerations and perforations of the rectum and to the anal sphincter muscles, bleeding, open sores, hemorrhoids, and anal warts.

The American Cancer Society includes anal intercourse on its list of risk factors for anal cancer, with epidemiological data indicating the greater risk for homosexual men (Dean et al., 2000, 111; Lindsey, DeCristofaro, & James, 2009; Abbas, Yang, & Fakih, 2010; American Cancer Society, 2010). The Gay and Lesbian Medical Association notes that there is an increased risk for homosexual men, as compared to heterosexual men, for contracting “urethritis, proctitis, pharyngitis, prostatitis, hepatitis A and B, syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, herpes, genital warts, and HIV infection” (Dean et al., 2000, 120; see also Palefsky, 2010; Woods, 2010). Anal intercourse can also lead to other damage to the bowel:

The rectal mucosa (lining cells) is thin and subject to trauma. Fissures and tears may result from trauma during sex. STD pathogens such as herpes simplex can cause rectal pain or bleeding. For the insertive partner in anal intercourse, there is a risk of urinary tract infection and prostatitis which can become chronic (Macphail, 1996, 33).14

The CDC estimates that in 2006 there were approximately 56,300 new HIV infections in the United States, which is close to 40 percent higher than its previous estimations of approximately 40,000 new HIV infections each year. Of this number, 53 percent of new infections are caused through men who have sex with men, 31 percent through high-risk heterosexual contact (e.g., sex with a person who is either HIV positive or otherwise in a high risk category, such as someone who also has sex with other men), 12 percent through injection drug use, and 4 percent with infection exposure through both male-to-male sexual contact and injected drug use.16 At the end of 2006, the CDC estimated that some 1,106,400 persons in the United States were living with HIV, and in 2007, the estimated number of deaths among persons with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) as 14,561.17 The data are often much worse outside of the United States.18

Rather than adequately addressing the underlying risks of various sexual activities, bioethics directs its critical gaze to shoring up entitlements to health care for sexually transmitted disease. This focus appears rather arbitrary. For example, despite the real health risks of adolescent sexual activity, in many countries the age of consent to high risk sexual activities is now lower than the age at which tobacco products may be purchased.19 Curbing teenage smoking is routinely judged an essential goal of public health measures (Austin and Gortmaker, 2001; Hamilton et al., 2003; Friend and Colby, 2006; van Lenthe et al., 2009). Significant efforts are focused on reducing any trends toward adolescent smoking. The World Health Organization, for example, adopted an international treaty for tobacco control in 2003, which requires the 192 members of the World Health Organization to implement antismoking advertising campaigns (World Health Organization, 2003; see also Miller, Foubert, Reardon, & Vida, 2007). Regarding sexual behavior (unlike smoking), there is a liberal presumption that children have a basic liberty right to develop their own sense of sexual identity, including judgments regarding appropriate sexual practices and personal pleasures, as well as high risk sexual activities. Extramarital sex acts among consenting persons, including adolescents, whether heterosexual or homosexual, are judged at least morally permissible.

Secular bioethics, affirms neither heterosexual normativity nor the existence of any natural dividing line between appropriate and inappropriate sexual activities, provided only that the individuals involved find such activities pleasurable and consent to participate. Experimentation to determine one's own sexual preferences and the pursuit of sexual gratification is encouraged, while attempts to curb sexual pleasure and sexual liberties are judged morally repressive and as potentially psychologically harmful. It is assumed that homosexuality ought to be socially treated in a positive fashion so as to avoid potential psychological harms for those who are sexually attracted to members of the same sex. Advocates argue, for example, that homosexuality ought to be portrayed positively even within the adolescent school setting because “even before discovering their homosexuality, students must form positive images if they are to eventually deal with this difference in themselves in a positive manner” (Marinoble, 1998). Traditional Christian heterosexuality and sex-behavior norms, are denounced as “heteropatriarchal views of sexuality” and condemned as “promoting binary ideals of masculinity and femininity, normalised heterosexuality, and determined social roles by biological sex” (Jones, 2008, 397; see also Lominé, 2006). With its rejection of Christianity, secular bioethics accents ever fuller expression of liberty-based rights to sexual experimentation and gratification. In terms of general experience and moral intuition, it has become fully plausible for large segments of society to think primarily in terms of “meaningful committed relationships” among heterosexual or homosexual partnerships, as well as casual recreational sexual activity. The underlying cultural ethos, and its reflection in the established secular bioethics, no longer nurtures children and adults to regard sexual activity as properly restricted to the marriage of man and woman.

Abortion and Infanticide

Abortion clinics don’t conjure up the adjective “happy” for many people. Yet I was happy doing this work, sometimes ecstatically happy, because I was providing excellent medical care with a wonderful mentor and staff, and because every week I saw transformative joy in the women I cared for. Passing through the gauntlet of nasty protestors, many women walked into the clinic scared and desperate. Some walked out sad, some walked out relieved, and some walked out radiantly joyful (Sella, 2010, 1).

Nearly unfettered access to abortion is perceived as essential to securing the reproductive liberty, equality, and health goals of women.20 The United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, for example, prohibits policies that “… require women seeking health services to obtain authorization from their husbands, or that criminalize medical procedures that only women need, such as abortion” (1979).21 Catholic hospitals are routinely criticized for restricting access to abortion services (see, e.g., Gallagher, 1997; Miller, 2000; Freedman, Landy, & Steinauer, 2008) or for refusing to refer for abortion and emergency contraption.22 Legal limits are urged on the ability of physicians and nurses to refuse to participate in such services. Julie D. Cantor, for example, argues that physicians who conscientiously refuse to participate in abortion services behave unprofessionally. Legally and morally, she argues, protections for conscientious objections to medical treatments should be starkly limited so as to enhance the liberty interests of female patients: “Conscientious objection … is worrisome when professionals who freely choose their field parse care and withhold information that patients need. … Conscience is a burden that belongs to the individual professional; patients should not have to shoulder it” (2009, 1484–5). The personal moral concerns of physicians not to be involved in what they judge to be murder is cast as less important than the liberty interests of women, who might wish to terminate a pregnancy. Appeals to conscience should have no bearing on medical options offered to patients; all options, including abortion, it is claimed, should be honestly presented, so that women can autonomously choose for themselves.23 Bernard Dickens, for example, asserts that conscientious objection is unethical because it treats patients as a means to achieve personal spiritual ends (Cook and Dickens, 2009; Dickens, 2009). The purported liberty rights of patients to at-will abortion services, it is urged, ought to trump the forbearance rights of physicians not to be used in ways to which they deeply morally object. What is lost here, however, is any adequate acknowledgment of the ways in which physicians are being reduced to mere technical functionaries, who serve the autonomous ends of their patients.24

Hilde Lindemann and Marian Verkerk specifically refer to the burden of childcare on the liberty interests of women in their defense of infanticide (2008). The Groningen Protocol, which authorized medical infanticide in the Netherlands, sets out procedures for physicians to end the lives of infants (1) “with no chance of survival despite life support”, (2) “minimal chance of survival without life support and very poor quality of life if they survive,” and (3) “infants who are not dependent on life support but for whom a very poor quality of life is anticipated” (Catlin and Novakovich, 2008, 98; see also Verhagen and Saucer, 2005). Lindemann and Verkerk argue that the current unjust social context, which they regard as imposing inappropriate and unfair childcare burdens on women, requires the permissibility of euthanasia of certain classes of disabled children. Lindemann and Verkerk conclude that critics of the protocol are often men, whose criticisms they regard as suspicious, precisely because men do not provide the majority of childcare (2008, 49).25

Despite its assault on human life, safe abortion is pronounced a medical triumph.26 As Shelley Sella announces: abortion, even third trimester abortion, ought to be understood only in terms of what she judges to be its positive contribution to the health of women:

I believe that focusing on the women—their stories and their needs—is paramount. That's what makes it possible for me to provide abortion care in all trimesters without hesitation. From my first week at WHCS I admired the young women we cared for. I admired their bravery, their goals, and their dreams for the future. A teenager once said to me, “I see girls at my school being pregnant and they have a baby and quit school and they say they will be back but they don’t come back and they end up working at grocery stores and I don’t want to be one of those girls” (Sella, 2010, 3).

The seven years that I worked with Dr. George Tiller at Women's Health Care Services in Wichita, Kansas providing first, second, and third trimester abortion care were the happiest professional years of my life to date … (Sella, 2010, 1).

III. ABORTION, INFANTICIDE, AND THE DEVALUATION OF WOMEN

It is a deeply unfortunate irony that in the name of protecting women, their health and liberty, the ready availability of abortion on demand has also decidedly enabled the devaluing of women. In many parts of the world, it is female children who are predominantly the victims of abortion, directly impacting the sex imbalance between the numbers of men and women. In countries, such as China, abortion of girl babies has significantly contributed to a growing imbalance among the numbers of men and women:

In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don’t count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women—a figure unprecedented in a country at peace. The number is based on the sexual discrepancy among people aged 19 and below. … China in 2020 will have 30m-40m more men of this age than young women (The worldwide war on baby girls, 2010, 77).

Until the 1980s, people in poor countries could do little about this preference: before birth, nature took its course. But in that decade, ultrasound scanning and other methods of detecting the sex of a child before birth began to make their appearance. These technologies changed everything. … Parents who wanted a son, but balked at killing baby daughters chose abortion in the millions. The use of sex-selective abortion was banned in India in 1994 and in China in 1995. It is illegal in most countries (though Sweden legalised the practice in 2009). But since it is almost impossible to prove that an abortion has been carried out for reasons of sex selection, the practice remains widespread. An ultrasound scan costs about $12, which is within the scope of many—perhaps most—Chinese and Indian families (The worldwide war on baby girls, 79).

Just as sexual activity outside of the marriage of one man and one woman is not new, abortion and infanticide are not new solutions to the challenges of unwanted children. Both Plato and Aristotle each recommend forms of infanticide and abortion as official policy.27 Infanticide was utilized to kill deformed, weak, or otherwise unwanted infants, as well as for gender selection. Female children were killed at a much higher rate than male children. According to Rodney Stark: “A study of inscriptions at Delphi made it possible to reconstruct six hundred families. Of these, only six had raised more than one daughter” (1996, 97).28 As Stark documents:

In his classic work on ancient and medieval populations, J.C. Russell (1958) estimated that there were 131 males per 100 females in the city of Rome, and 140 males per 100 females in Italy, Asia Minor, and North Africa. Russell noted in passing that sex ratios this extreme can occur only when there is “some tampering with human life” … And tampering there was. Exposure of unwanted female infants and deformed male infants was legal, morally accepted, and widely practiced by all social classes in the Greco-Roman world. Lindsay reported that even in large families “more than one daughter was practically never reared” … (1996, 97).29

Confronted with this assault on women and children, Christianity condemned infanticide and abortion from its very beginning. As the Epistle of Barnabus, dated to the first or second century AD states: “Do not murder a child by abortion, nor, again, destroy that which is born” (Sparks, 1978, 298). Over the ages, this moral and spiritual judgment was confirmed. The Quinesext Council (AD 691) states, for example: “Those who give drugs for procuring abortion, and those who receive poisons to kill the fetus, are subjected to the penalty of murder” (Canon 91, 1995, 404). As St. Basil makes clear, even early embryocide possesses the same spiritual implications as murder: “The woman who purposely destroys her unborn child is guilty of murder. With us there is no nice inquiry as its being formed or unformed” (Letter CLXXXVIII, 225). Even the prayers during the Liturgy of St. Basil indicate the basis for forbidding abortion and infanticide: “O God, who knowest the age and the name of each, and knowest every man from his mother's womb” (Hapgood, 1996, 109). Christianity recognized the deep evil of the practice of abortion and infanticide, their assault on human life, and impact on the struggle for salvation of the parties involved. Persons must be acknowledged as such from their mother's wombs. Consequently, even in the ancient world, among Christians, neither male nor female children were the routine victims of infanticide and women did not die during abortion procedures. Rather than celebrating abortion and infanticide as liberation from the tyranny of biological forces, through its experience and worship of God, Christianity recognizes in abortion and infanticide a further enslavement to the passions. Such actions are deeply wrong because they lead persons away from union with God. Abortion and infanticide represent not liberation, but roads to damnation.

IV. CONCLUSIONS: GOD IS NEEDED TO SECURE MORALITY

As illustrated, the underlying methodological atheism of much of contemporary Western bioethics modifies the ways in which one approaches and interprets the project of morality. What is lacking in secular bioethics is the articulation of an authoritative canonical moral anthropology—the nature and content of the basic goods central to human flourishing, such that one could define liberty-based entitlements to sexual exploration and gratification, or to abortion and infanticide, without simply begging the question. As a matter of empirical reality, instead of unity one finds a considerable plurality of contradictory and incommensurable, religious, and secular accounts of the basic goods central to human flourishing. One finds as well significantly diverse theories for rationally debating the merits of these divergent understandings of human nature. There appear to be at least as many competing moral anthropologies, with attendant accounts of the basic human goods, as there are major world religions and secular worldviews. Which account of human nature, with whose view of human flourishing and basic goods, should be appreciated as morally normative for properly defining human liberty? Which consequences ought to be avoided, which virtues inculcated and values embraced, and at what costs? One must first specify the normative criteria for appropriately ranking human goods, balancing costs and benefits, or other cardinal moral concerns. Without God to secure the foundations of reality and human good, there ceases to be a uniquely true position from which to know reality and thereby to secure a uniquely true morality (see, Engelhardt, 2000). For example, having affirmed the goodness and permissibility of abortion and infanticide, and the centrality of such practices to the liberty interests of women, secular bioethics cannot even definitively demonstrate why it would be morally wrong, even if imprudent, to kill more girls than boys, or otherwise to engage in various forms of eugenics. Severed from any transcendent anchor, morality is fully relocated within the realm of the finite and immanent and all claims to moral rationality, content, or obligations become inherently ambiguous.31

Even if significant and convincing secular moral insights exist, it is decidedly unclear why one ought to be moral, especially under circumstances in which the purported moral duty conflicts with prudential judgment regarding one's own self interest. Immanuel Kant argued, for example, that if reality does not come from God, as its ultimate author, Who also acts as the guarantor in eternity that the virtuous are rewarded and the vicious punished, it is unclear why one ought to act in accordance with an impartial morality once it no longer serves one's prudential interests.32 Despite the fact that Kant was likely an atheist,33 he accepted that “Without a God and without a world invisible to us now but hoped for, the glorious ideas of morality are indeed objects of approval and admiration, but not springs of purpose and action” (1964, 640, A813=B841). As Kant recognized, without God the tension between the right and the good is, in principle, irresolvable. God as a guarantor of the harmony between right doing and well-being is necessary to resolve the tension between the right and the good. As G.E.M. Anscombe (1919–2001) famously observed, with a variation on Kant's insight, once God is removed from the understanding of morality, it is doubtful that moral claims will be compelling: it is “as if the notion ‘criminal’ were to remain when criminal law and criminal courts had been abolished and forgotten” (1958, 6). Or, as Jürgen Habermas critiqued: “… it is altogether a different matter to provide a motivating response to the question of why we should follow our moral insights or why we should be moral at all” (2002, 108). Secular philosophy and secular bioethicists may offer their own moral insights, intuitions, and perspectives, but they cannot secure universal and unconditioned moral truth, much less unconditioned and unconditional reasons to act morally.

Without God, morality is no more than what humans make of it; its content and theoretical construction are contingent and sociohistorically conditioned. Without God, and His uniquely objective understanding of reality, moral truth, human flourishing, and even the deep moral intuitions of bioethicists are no more than particular human creations. As Gianni Vattimo expresses the nature of our postmodern predicament, cut off from God and His uniquely True perspective on reality:

In a beautiful passage from The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche tells us how the real world has become a dream. It was the Platonic world of ideas that gave us the idea of the real world in the first place. Later, the real world was construed as the promised world after death (at least for the righteous). Still later, in the mind of Descartes, the thought of the real world was evidence of clear and distinct ideas (but only in mind). With positivism the real world became the world of experimental verified truths and then a product of the experimental scientist … At this point, the so-called real world has become a story that we tell each other (2007, 39)

Without appeal to God, and His unique perspective on reality, morality and bioethics are trapped in immanence. Absent God, there exists no standpoint outside of particular cultural sociohistorically conditioned perspectives from which to communicate any deeper perspective of reality or of the bioethics that such a perspective on reality would secure. Consequently, the field of bioethics is unable to extricate itself from the substantive disagreements that define the contemporary cultural milieu (e.g., what is morally at stake in sexuality, the procreation of children, suffering and abortion). Despite repeated and impassioned claims of consensus, moral disagreement defines the field of bioethics. Such significant dissonance, however, is precisely what one ought to expect once moral truth, and the coherence of the moral project is secularized and cut off from God as its metaphysical anchor. Rather than discerning actual moral truth, secular bioethics merely affirms its own particular cultural sociohistorically conditioned ideological perspective.

Unlike secular bioethics, Christian bioethical moral discussion begins from the fundamental standpoint that there exists a deep metaphysical foundation for reality, grounding empirical knowledge and the coherence of the moral life. Christians know that unconditioned moral truth can in principle be secured. This is the perspective of God; reality as God knows it to be:

It is here that the puzzle is solved and the door found in the horizon of immanence: Christianity's disclosure of an immediate experience of the uncreated energies of a radically transcendent, personal God. Here philosophical solutions and theological truths coincide: the truth is a Who. Such a theology is pursued ascetically through prayer bound to repentance expressed in worship. Within such a theology, bioethics is a way of life. It can only be introduced via an invitation to enter. To the question of “How can I know the truth?” one receives first and foremost instruction in ascetic transformation. It is the “pure of heart who shall see God” (Matt 5:8) (Engelhardt, 2000, xiii).

Properly framed medical decision making requires recognizing that all persons are in a relationship with God. This core relationship exists regardless of whether particular individuals choose to recognize this fact of the matter. As John Romanides notes, everyone is destined to see the glory of God; the question is whether they are properly prepared so as experience it as an exceedingly sweet light or are they destined to experience it as a devouring fire:

… everyone throughout the world will finish their earthly course in the same way, regardless of whether they are Orthodox, Buddhist, Hindu, agnostic, atheist, or anything else. Everyone on earth is destined to see the glory of God. … And since all people will see God's glory, they will all meet the same end. Truly, all will see the glory of God, but not in the same way – for some, the glory of God will be an exceedingly sweet Light that never sets; for others, the same glory of God will be like a “devouring fire” that will consume them. We expect this vision of God's glory to occur as a real event. This vision of God—of His Glory and His Light—is something that will take place whether we want it to happen or not. But the experience of that Light will be different for both groups (Romanides, 2008, 47).

References