I’m just a hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalist, amen!
“During the next 35 years, the traditional view of the sanctity of human life will collapse under pressure from scientific, technological, and demographic developments. By 2040, it may be that only a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists will defend the view that every human life, from conception to death, is sacrosanct.” So says Peter Singer.
Peter Singer, in case you don’t already know the name, is not a “hard-core, know-nothing” athiest fundamentalist. In fact, he is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values of Princeton University. Now only part-time, according to his CV, because he is also part-time Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. And he is not just advocating early abortion, stem cell research, or removing feeding tubes. He has also proposed that we should consider newborns non-persons, subject to being killed if not up to society’s (or philosophers?) criteria for becoming a person.
Nor did this quote appear in an obscure philosophical journal. It is found in the current issue of Foreign Policy in an article titled “The Sanctity of Life: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow.”
I haven’t read any of Singer’s books myself but his views are not hidden or subtle. He’s a plain talker. He says in his autobiographical entry in The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy,
In Germany, my advocacy of active euthanasia for severely disabled newborn infants has generated heated controversy. I first discussed this in Practical Ethics; later, as co-author, with Helga Kuhse, in Should the Baby Live?, 1985; and most recently in Rethinking Life and Death, 1995. Perhaps it is only to be expected, though, that there should be heated opposition to an ethic that challenges the hitherto generally accepted ethical superiority of human beings, and the traditional view of the sanctity of human life.
Scott Klusendorf writes, (see link)
In 1993, ethicist Peter Singer shocked many Americans by suggesting that no newborn should be considered a person until 30 days after birth and that the attending physician should kill some disabled babies on the spot. … In 1979 he wrote, “Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons”; therefore, “the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.” [This is cited from Singer's Practical Ethics, 1979]
I think that we in the church are mostly unaware of the bioethical revolution that is going on around us. I for one have kept telling myself that things couldn’t be as bad as all that, not as bad as the extreme views we hear, because most people have a solid grounding in Western Judeo-Christian values even if they no longer believe in God. Of course writers such as C. S. Lewis have long pointed out that such an odd situation cannot continue for long. If the fundamental principles erode and disappear, then eventually the whole ethical superstructure will collapse. If we really take seriously materialsm then most of our ethics don’t have a leg to stand on.
I am not talking about Peter Singer because I oppose or disagree with him in particular, but rather just as an example of how fast we (Westerners) are losing values we take for granted. We need to take up the challenge to re-assert these values, not because we are “know-nothings” but because in truth we are “fundamentalists” in the sense of a people who believe in certain fundamentals (such as man being made in the image of a loving and just God) from which these values naturally spring.
September 27th, 2005 at 4:19 pm
The question is how to articulate, advocate and embody Kingdom ethics in a manner that takes the culture forward in the light of these developments, instead of backwards in denial of them as if they had never happened. There is no going back.
Thanks for the information, Mike.
September 27th, 2005 at 10:05 pm
Hmm. What developments do you mean, the change in values etc? What would it mean to deny them “as if they had never happened,” and what would it mean to “takes the culture forward in the light of these developments?” Can you elaborate? At least on the surface, any kind of reaction from accomodation to isolationism to reactionary extremism is some kind of action “in the light of these developments” and not a denial of them.
September 29th, 2005 at 3:57 pm
Yes, but how constructive really are some of these “actions”?
Who is shaping the agenda in these conversations? Seldom those with an allegiance to the awkward Nazarene.
I’m personally weary of the largely reaction-ary approach to the culture coming from much of evangelical leadership.
Who is proactively articulating and building a positive, creative vision of what the kingdom might look like in today and tomorrow’s worlds. Worlds where possibilities and horrors are of a nature (such as the one you posed in your blog) and of a magnitude that (I believe) the propositional formulations of the latter half of the 20th century will not be able to help us.