This transcript was generated from the episode’s YouTube captions and lightly edited for readability: filler words and the mid-show announcements have been removed. It may still contain transcription errors.

Hello friends, welcome to The Case for Life program. We’re glad to have you today. I want to start off today by reminding you about our two biggest sponsors, Life Training Institute and Summit Ministries. You know, you’ve heard me talk about Summit Ministries on this program before. I cannot think of a finer place to send your kids to equip them with a biblical worldview. You know, I think it’s very easy for us to think that Christian kids have a biblical worldview because they’re going to church, they’re going to their youth groups, they’re maybe at a Christian school.

But don’t assume that. Don’t assume that just because your kids act nice, they have absorbed a biblical worldview. This was brought home to me a number of times in recent year when I would go to a Christian high school to do a presentation on pro-life and the principal or maybe the priest in charge of the Catholic school there would say to me, “Boy, we have great students. You’re going to love them. They are really, really good.” And I would ask a clarifying question.

What do you mean by good? Well, they just really are engaged and they interact well. They treat their teachers with respect and by the way, that’s a good thing. I’m glad to hear these schools are instilling respect for faculty and people in authority. That’s a good thing. But then I’d ask a clarifying question. Tell me what you mean by good. Are these students that adhere to church teaching? If it’s a Catholic institution, how many of your students are committed Catholics who go to mass regularly, who articulate Catholic teaching on things like the sanctity of human life, and then the clarity comes, oh well, maybe about 10 to 12%.

And yet a lot of these students at so-called Christian schools are being taught by people that think the kids are okay simply because they’re nice. Well, being nice isn’t enough. We need to equip our students. And that’s why I love what Summit Ministries does. You get faculty like people like Shawn McDow, John Ston Street of the Coulson Center, Dr. Jeff Meyers. I teach the pro-life stuff there. You get other people like my buddy Brett Kungl at Maven, Alan Schlean at Stand to Reason, and the list just goes on and on of qualified teachers to equip your students with a biblical Christian worldview.

I cannot stress a m how I cannot stress enough how important that is. And to give you an example of this, I had a discussion with someone online recently that was challenging the scientific basis for the pro-life view. His comment was, “Science doesn’t tell us anything about whether the unborn are human.” And here was his argument. And by the way, this is stuff I teach students at Summit and give them the tools they need to engage objections like the one I’m about to give you.

This particular person wrote me and said the following. An acorn is not an oak tree. Therefore, a fetus is not a human being. Okay, let’s take a moment and look at this. Is it true that an acorn is not an oak tree? Why yes, it is true. That’s obvious. In the same way that a newborn is not a teenager or a teenager is not an adult. All we’re talking about here are different stages of the same kind of being that’s in question here.

The acorn is not an oak tree, but it is an oak from the very beginning. The embryo, the fetus, is not yet a baby, we could say, or a teenager or an adult. That’s true. But it is a human being. It’s the same kind of being through all the stages of development and that is borne out in the embryology research we cite often in our books and lectures. Now another variation of this that came out after I pointed that point out to this guy.

He responded by saying well a caterpillar is not a butterfly. You clearly have an evolution here. The caterpillar changes from a caterpillar to a butterfly. Actually, that’s not correct. The caterpillar and the butterfly are the same species, the same kind of being, but their outward form changes as they grow and develop. The same way an early embryo might look like a fish a few days after conception, but later takes the form of a baby, a teenager, and an adult. The form changes, but the kind of thing the entity is remains the same.

And a lot of people think that just because something doesn’t look the way it did at one point that it was somehow a different kind of thing back then. And that’s simply a bad way to argue. I mean, think about this. Historically, we are a nation where 160 years ago, a lot of people thought that black men didn’t look like white men. Therefore, the black man wasn’t human, shouldn’t have the same rights we do. Why? Because he doesn’t look like us.

In fact, as early, or I should say as late as 1906 at the Bronx Zoological Gardens, followers of Charles Darwin who were immersed in Darwinism and naturalistic thinking put an orangutang in a cage with an African pygmy man. And they argued, they put a big banner on the top of the cage that said the missing link. And that black man known as Otabanga was so distressed by what had happened to him throughout the course of his life. That one event haunted him for years, he tried to get away.

He moved to Lynchburg, Virginia, tried to get away from that whole labeling. And yet he committed suicide because he was so distraught by the way he had been labeled as a mere animal simply because some people thought he looked like one. It’s very dangerous to judge something by appearance. Mannequins can look very real in a store window but aren’t remotely so. While some people will take somebody like the elephant man and say, “Hey, that’s not a human being.” And you may remember that amazing scene from the original Black and White movie where hostile people corner him in an alley and he’s yelling out to them at the last moment, I am a man.

And they of course can’t see it because all they’re judging by is appearance. But appearance can be deceptive. And that certainly is the case when it comes to the pro-life issue. People might want to say, “Well, that embryo doesn’t look like us, therefore it’s not one of us.” But we got to take a deeper look than mere surface appearance. The caterpillar and the butterfly don’t look the same, but they are the same. The acorn and the oak tree don’t look the same, but they’re the same kind of species, same kind of living thing through all stages of development.

That is the clear science of embryology. Now, of course, we’re going to get people pushing back on this. They’re going to try to tell us that, oh, you know, you’re actually trying to make the claim that the unborn are human, but you don’t have scientific proof for that. Actually, we do. And what typically happens, and I get this in debates, whether it’s a formal debate at a university or online, people will bring up a handful of objections, and you can almost write them out in advance and just check them off as they come along because they’re so predictable.

Here are the five predictable objections you’ll get to the pro-life view from those who think they know their science better than you do. The first one you’ll get is twinning. And the objection goes like this. Well, you know that early embryo can split into two up to 21 days after fertilization. So, how can you claim that every time we put sperm and egg together, you’ve got a living human being when that embryo can split into two? It’s the twinning objection. All right.

Yeah, they’re right. That can happen. I’m not disputing that. But how does it follow that because a living entity may split that it wasn’t a whole living entity prior to the split? Some of you maybe in your kid days when you were growing up sliced flatworms in half. If you slice a flatworm in half, what do you get? You get two flatworms. Does it follow there was no flatworm prior to the split? I mean, clearly not. It’s the same flatworm, but now you have two.

That’s the reality of twinning. It’s not that somehow the embryo was never human to begin with because it can split. It just means that the entity does in fact split. I get it. Twinning’s rare, but this is the objection you’ll get. The other one which is similar to it is what we call molar pregnancies. A molar pregnancy is where sperm and egg come together, but you don’t get a complete conception. You get an incomplete fertilization process that doesn’t lead to a living human embryo.

Rather, what you get is genetic material that almost seems like it’s a tumor. You might get pieces of bone fragments, teeth, hair, but you do not have a living human embryo or fetus. And people say, “See, if we can get a molar pregnancy, it doesn’t follow that every time you put sperm and egg together, you get a living human being.” Now, there’s a halftruth in what they’re saying here. The pro-life argument is not that every time you put sperm and egg together, you get a living human being.

Our argument is that if you are living today, that’s how you began. Sperm and egg were put together, either through the normal natural way or perhaps an in vitro fertilization process. But either way, you have sperm and egg coming together and that’s how you began. We’re not saying though that every time you put sperm and egg together, you’re going to end up with a living human being because as is being pointed out here, you could have a molar pregnancy that is an imperfect fertilization process.

Something goes ary in the process of sperm and egg coming together and therefore you don’t have an embryo. You don’t have a distinct living human being at the beginning, the earliest stages of its existence. You have something else. Now, the way to respond to this is to point out that molar pregnancies do not morph from embryos to tumors. That’s kind of what our critics are asserting. They’re trying to make us believe that this starts off as one thing, an embryo, and then morphs into a tumor that we can clearly say is not a living human being.

That’s not how it works. As I said a moment ago with molar pregnancies, the molar pregnancy was there from the beginning. From the beginning, it was an incomplete fertilization process. You did not have a living human organism at that point. You never had one. So, a way to illustrate this, I think, is to borrow an example from a colleague of mine, Dr. Maren Condic. She’s a geneticist and neurologist at the University of Utah and she writes that the way to think about this is that embryos start off as embryos and remain so.

Molar pregnancies start off as molar pregnancies and remain so. And she gives this great example. She says, “Imagine two songs that we all knew from our childhood. Twinkle, little star and the alphabet song.” Now guys, you’re thinking, “I’m not going to admit that I know Twinkle, Little Star. I’d have to surrender my man card.” Well, play along for a moment. We all know these songs. They sound the same in the first several measures, don’t they? But they are actually different songs from the beginning.

Here’s another example. Americans have a patriotic song called My Country Tis. The British national anthem, the United Kingdom’s national anthem is God Save the King or God Save the Queen. In this case right now, God Save the King. Well, the sound of the songs, the melody is very similar. I mean, it would be hard to distinguish them if you’re just hearing them played instrumentally, but they are clearly different songs from the beginning. Different lyrical content. Sometimes different emphasis placed on certain measures of the songs.

They are different. They don’t start off as one thing and morph into the other. They were different songs from the beginning. In the same way, a molar pregnancy starts off as a molar pregnancy and remains so throughout its existence until it’s miscarried. And an embryo remains a human being until it is delivered naturally or killed through abortion. That’s the science of embryology. Now, another related example from the science side of this is people who say, “Well, these are not human beings.” Think about the high rate of miscarriage.

And they’re right. It appears from what we can determine from the scientific literature that many women suffer miscarriages where they might not even know they’re pregnant and they misarry the developing human. And the objection goes like this. See, even nature doesn’t acknowledge the humanity of these children. And if nature isn’t concerned about their loss, why are we concerned about their loss through elective abortion? There’s a lot of problems with this, but let me give you the big one. How does it follow that because nature spontaneously triggers a miscarriage that a the embryos in question are not human or b we may intentionally kill them?

I mean, this is a complete nonsequittor. You can’t get from nature does something spontaneously or if you will randomly or accidentally that that becomes now normative for us to do it that we have a green light to do it intentionally. I mean think about this earthquakes happen in third world countries and sometimes kill several thousand people in some cases up to a hundred thousand people. That is often due to the fact that the building codes are not up to scale, that people are just not prepared for natural disasters the way they are in western democracies.

Okay. Does it follow that because nature spontaneously kills people through earthquakes or typhoons or hurricanes, cyclones, pick whatever natural disaster you want, that mass murder is therefore justified. I mean, clearly this doesn’t follow at all. And so people are trying to use something that happens in nature as an excuse for us to do it intentionally. This won’t work. This is a total nonsequittor. It’s what philosophers referred to refer to as the is ought fallacy. And the is ought fallacy goes like this.

You say because something is the case in nature, we ought to be able to do it normatively. Meaning in a moral capacity. Now we get moral permission from what nature does to do what we want to do intentionally and that doesn’t follow at all. Now a variation of the miscarriage argument is the fourth one we’ll look at here and that is the idea that women don’t grieve miscarriages the way they grieve the death of an older child, say a newborn or maybe a toddler or maybe a teenager.

Okay, let’s go ahead and grant that’s true. Though of course all of us could say well we know people who had miscarriage and some of you watching have suffered the pain of miscarriage and you might beg to differ and say let me tell you something we grieved that terribly. In fact I know couples that grieve the pain of infertility very very deeply. But I want to set that aside for a moment because that’s really not the main point we want to get at.

Here’s the main question we need to ask. How do my how does my alleged feeling for something change what it is? To give you an example, suppose we had a serial killer who cares nothing about his victims. He locks them in a closet somewhere until he gets around to killing them. He feels absolutely nothing for their humanity, their innocence. He just lets them rot there until he gets around to killing them and maybe perhaps cannibalizing them. We can make this dude really bad if we want to.

How does his feelings about something determine what it is, though? Obviously, his victims are human beings, whether he feels for them or not. I mean, there are cases of parents, I’m sad to say, who terribly abuse their children. They may lock them up. They may fail to give them the nutrition they need. May fail to send them to school so they can flourish intellectually and psychologically. May fail to provide the basic care the child needs. They feel nothing or little for that child.

And yet it doesn’t follow that the child is less than human simply because the parent doesn’t feel what normal parents would feel. That’s a flaw in the parent. It tells us nothing about the status of the victim. Right? Well, the same thing is going on here. Even if women did not grieve miscarriages, it wouldn’t follow that those miscarriages do not involve human beings. You can’t get from how I feel to what something is ontologically. But that’s what proabortionists want us to believe.

And it’s simply a facious way to argue. We’re going to take a break, but before we do, let me remind you of something else. Our primary sponsor, Life Training Institute, can send a speaker to your event and can give a speaker who can give a very persuasive pro-life talk to your group at your church, maybe your school, equipping them with the arguments needed to make a case for the pro-life view in a culture that thinks truth can’t be known on the issue.

We can help you with that. So, see our websites for information on Life Training Institute, again, who’s one of our primary sponsors. All right. We’ll take a break and when we come back we’ll pick up that fifth objection. I’ll see you on the other side.

Welcome back everyone. So glad to have you with us. I know you’ve heard me talk about this before, but let me say something very quickly here. We have a 7-day course. That’s right. In just 7 days, you can master the arguments in favor of the pro-life view and handle objections like we’re dealing with here today. I encourage you to see our sites and get the information on that course. We call it Prolife 101 because it’s a basic entry course. It’s designed to get you on the on-ramp to mastering and being proficient on the pro-life view.

I hope you’ll take advantage of that. Okay. I mentioned before the break that we’d talk about a fifth objection we get from people who try to use science. And what’s interesting about this fifth objection to the pro-life view when we’re talking about science is that this next objection isn’t science at all. But people try to disguise what they’re arguing. Or better yet dismiss the pro-life view with a an appeal to science that actually has nothing to do with science. And here’s how it goes.

Religion can’t tell us when life begins. You know what? I agree. Religion doesn’t answer the empirical question of when an individual living thing comes to be. That is an empirical question. And what’s going on with this objection is the person you’re talking to, probably because you’ve done a good job refuting all their other scientific nonsense, now decides that their only card they can play, is to try to dismiss your view by changing categories on you. You’ve been talking the empirical category of the science of embryology.

They now want to switch the game and punt to religion. Which, by the way, in their mind, religion does not count as real knowledge. Rather, religion is subjective. It’s something that you feel. It might be a passion of yours, but don’t claim it’s true with a capital T. And if you want some good resources on people who have done this, who have tried to dismiss the pro-life view, and you’re thinking, “Hey, what are some good resources that will help me bring them back in line when they try to dismiss my claim as being merely subjective, religious?” Well, I can recommend some good books like Nancy Piery’s book, Total Truth, Greg Kokal and Frank Beck’s book, Relativism.

Those are a couple of titles you may want to look at that will equip you to call people out who try to change the rules on you here. Here’s the problem with the claim that religion can’t tell us when life begins. Arguments, as we have talked about on this show many times, are either sound or unound, valid or invalid. You cannot dismiss an argument by calling it a name. In this case, religious. It just doesn’t work. Now, you know the pro-life argument because we talk about it a lot here.

And I’m sorry, we’re going to give it to you again because you can’t say it and repeat it enough. Premise one, it’s wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. Premise two, abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being. Conclusion, therefore, abortion is wrong. It’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings. Abortion does that. Therefore, it’s wrong. Now, is it possible that argument’s mistaken? Yes. If you can show that the conclusion does not follow logically from the premises, or if you can show that one or more of the statements in the argument is false, you can then demonstrate the argument is unsound.

But outside of those two ways, the argument stands. And what somebody is trying to do here is change the rules of the game. Oh well, instead of talking about science, let’s talk religion. This is not a religious question. The question of when an individual life comes to be is something we investigate using the empirical tools of the science of embryology. It’s not something we go to our Bibles or church teaching to answer. Now, scripture certainly plays a role in answering the question of what makes humans valuable in that we’re valuable in that we bear the image of God.

But in terms of determining what a living thing is, what type of thing it is and when it begins to exist, that is an empirical question that we turn to an empirical source. The science of embryology. And as we’ve talked about here, the science is clear here. From the earliest stages of development, the unborn are distinct, living, and whole human beings. Calling that argument religious does not refute the science that the pro-lifer is pointing to here. All it does is call the argument a name and it’s really nothing more than a dismissal rather than a reputation.

But you will catch people doing this all the time, trying to make the claim that somehow this has nothing to do with science. It’s really just a religious article of faith. By which they mean belief in spite of evidence, not trust based on evidence. And you should not fall for it. You are making an empirical claim. Now, you will get another one that I wasn’t going to talk about, but I’ll go ahead and talk about it. You’ll get people who will say, you know, there’s no no specific difference between these cells on the back of my hand that I’m pinching right now that are living and an embryo that is living.

Both are living. How come then if you’re not worried about the cells suffering demise? If I pinch the back of my hand, why are you worried about an embryo suffering demise? Both are living, but neither is a human being yet. They’re too small. They’re they aren’t thinking beings yet. They don’t feel anything. They don’t have thoughts. That’s just a living biological cell just like the embryo is. Well, here’s the problem with that. That objection confuses parts with holes. These cells on the back of my hand are merely part of a larger human being.

In this case, me. They are not distinct whole living beings. The way what the way I was at the embryionic stage, the way you were at the embryionic stage. One way to look at it this would be to consider this. If we take what’s called a sematic cell, you know, off the back of my hand, let’s say I pinch myself and we were able to collect a sematic cell that I’ve just sent off the back of my hand to its demise.

If you were to take that living sematic cell and put it in the fallopian tube of a prospective mother, what’s going to happen to that cell? And the answer is absolutely nothing. It will not develop into an embryo, a fetus, a newborn, a toddler, a teenager. Not going to happen. But an embryo if left inside the mother’s body and if given proper nutrition and a safe environment will grow into those things and will reach each of those stages intrinsically internally. The embryo will develop its own self from within.

It will be driving its own internal development. A mere skin cell does nothing of the sort. A corpse has a lot of living cells on it, but we don’t think the corpse is alive. Why? Because the cells are no longer talking to each other. The sematic cells on the corpse have suffered an irreversible ability to interact with each other and promote the health of the larger organization. The embryo from the beginning is driving its own development as a coordinated whole. That’s what science teaches.

Let’s make sure people stick to the facts and don’t change terms on us. Thanks for joining us. I look forward to our next show.