When Is a Human Being Human? |
Gregory Koukl
A simple response to give, next time someone tells you an unborn baby is a “human being but not a person.”
| A baby is fully human from conception. There’s no question about it. Even to say that it’s fully human is missing something. Jot this down. The law of identity: a thing is itself and not something else. What that means is that whatever a thing is it remains what it is for as long as it exists. Things don’t change from one essential thing into another essential thing.People say, what if you became a cat? It’s impossible for you to become a cat because a cat is a different essential substance. If you became a cat, one could ask the question, what is it about the cat that is the same as what you were? There is nothing about a cat that is remotely human, and there is nothing about a human that is remotely cat. Even the soul of a cat is a different kind of soul than a human soul so you could never become a cat. You would be destroyed and some cat created in your place or maybe molded from your physical molecules, but that wouldn’t make you the cat. (more…) |
