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.

What in the world is going to happen on November 5th with our national election. I’ll tell you what I think the results will be in just a moment. Welcome to The Case for Life podcast. Friends, great to have you with us. I want to remind you, if you’ve not done so already, please visit us on social media and like our pages. And if you’ve not already gotten a copy of the second edition of the case for Life Book, I commend it to your reading.

You can get it there at scottus andorf the book there and I believe you might even get an autograph copy if you do it. So, please do that if you haven’t already. So what do I think is going to happen on November the 5th? Well, if you had asked me a month ago, my position was this: Republicans are going to get creamed, and I was convinced at that time and I’m still and I’m still mostly convinced this could be the case.

But I was convinced at that time that this would largely be a worldview election, meaning that people are not voting their pocketbooks, they’re not voting their own welfare, they’re voting what they actually believe about the nature of reality. And I still think that could be the case. And people say, oh, the economy is so bad, it’s about the economy, stupid. But wait a minute. The economy was bad in 2022 and all the polling data suggested a huge Red Wave. What happened?

We didn’t get one. In fact, Democrats managed to hold on to the Senate just fine. They even picked up a seat and they barely lost the house. The polling data right now, as I’m looking at the real clear politics averages and a bunch of other polling sites has Donald Trump with a momentum and a slight advantage in Battleground States, but I don’t think that means you can take it to the bank that he’s going to win this election. There could be a silent majority out there that isn’t very vocal, but their worldview does not match ours.

Now, this is interesting because conservatives love to say: oh, there’s a sleeping giant out there that agrees with us. If we could just get them to the polls. I don’t believe there is a sleeping giant out there. I think the majority of Americans are pro-abortion. They don’t have a biblical worldview on ethics, anthropology, economics or any of the other major worldview areas and, as a result, they vote accordingly. You would not give up your principles just so you could have more money in your pocketbook.

Neither will they. So what I think could happen on Tuesday, November 5th is you could see Donald Trump going into the election with the advantage, and he could still lose, and the Republicans could still lose seats in the Senate, because a large number of Americans do not agree with us at the world view level. Now, let’s suppose Donald Trump wins. I’m more confident now that he might than I was a month ago, but I still think there’s a very distinct possibility he does not pull this out based on worldview considerations I’ve just mentioned.

But let’s say he wins. Does that mean the public is now prif? Most assuredly it does not, and here’s why we know. Look at the various ballot initiatives that have been proposed in red States like Ohio, Kentucky, elsewhere, Montana they’ve all gone down in flames. We’re 0 for8 every time the abortion issue is put to the public for a vote, even in red States. Now upcoming, we’ve got Florida. Florida has a ballot initiative coming up, so does Missouri, so does South Dakota and in other states that I’m not mentioning.

Now. In Florida we have the best chance of winning for a couple of reasons. Number one: it requires a 60% threshold to pass a state Constitutional Amendment accepting abortion as a constitutional right, so we have a built-in advantage there. And the last polling data I’ve seen on this in fact, I’ll just take a quick look as of right now. What I’m seeing is that the no side comes in at about 43%. The yes side comes in at 56 now at 56.

That’s not enough for them to overcome the 60% threshold. However, note that if it were just a straightup vote, we would lose in Florida, which is more and more a red state. So what does this mean for us as pro- lifers? Well, I’m viewing this election as follows: I’m going to cross my fingers, pray very hard. Maybe those two mutually exclude each other, I don’t know but I’m going to pray very hard that we get a stay of execution, in this sense that we’re able to limit the evil that would be on us if the wrong people win this election and by wrong people I mean Democrats, because that is the party sworn to uphold evil.

The Democrat Party is not merely one political opinion among many. It is a party pledged to promote evil wholesale everything from a abortion to transgender surgeries on children, to redefining marriage, to taking from people what they have earned and giving it to other people what I call government theft just down the line. It’s an evil party what it stands for in principle, so I don’t want that party to succeed. However, I’m under no fantasy that if the other party wins, namely the Republicans, that we now have a Utopia.

No, we won’t. In fact, what tends to happen is prol lifers. When there’s a GOP Victory, prol lifers tend to go back into the woodwork and they don’t support their pregnancy centers sacrificially. They don’t go out and do pro-life apologetics. They rest on their political Laurels. I’m here to tell you have no Laurels if you’re pro-life. This culture does not agree with us. We may very well stop Harris, and I hope and pray to God we do. However, even if we get that, all we’re getting is a stay of execution or, to use a historical If you’ll allow a historical parallel, this is Dunkirk, not D-Day.

It would be a successful stopping of an annihilating Wipeout, but it would not mean we’ve won anything. We haven’t won anything. The culture is getting worse and worse by the day, which is why you, as a pro-lifer, have to be equipped to defend what you believe. Ultimate Victory is not going to come on this issue by here and there getting a stay of execution, where we stop the really bad people from getting total control of our government. And yes, they are bad people, but this issue we’re facing on pro-life is only going to be one when we have large numbers of Christians marshaled and equipped to go into the Public Square and make a case for what they believe.

So that’s why this program exists, that’s why we’re here for you, those of you that are pro-life and watch this well. With that in mind, I thought I’d go to the mailbag, because I’ve gotten some responses from some people along worldview lines, and remember, I told you a moment ago that there wasn’t a sleeping giant out there, that supp that supported the pro- lifee view, and if we could only get to them, get them to the polls. I actually think the opposite is true.

The sleeping giant is on the other side, and it’s also true that large numbers of Christians remain confused about this issue. So I got a Facebook message earlier this week from a guy who once pastored and he brought up this objection. He said: surely you will admit that there’s been no consensus on when the soul enters the embryo. So therefore, anything you put forward is to when life begins is going to be a mere guess, only a guess, nothing more. Well, I couldn’t disagree with that assertion more, and let me give you a few reasons why.

First of all, notice the fundamental mistake that the viewer makes. How does it follow that, because people disagree, nobody is right. People once disagreed, as we’ve pointed out, that the earth was flat around it didn’t mean there wasn’t a right answer. They once disagreed on slavery. They once disagreed on women voting. They once disagreed on racial segregation. It did not follow. There were no right answers to those pressing moral questions. And so we’ve got to dig deeper than simply say: well, people disagree, therefore nobody’s right.

That’s an utterly fallacious way to begin. An objection to the pro-e view. But I want to go a step further. How does the soul even enter into answering these two questions? When does an individual come to be? And, number two, how can we argue that two human parents can create offspring that isn’t human but later becomes so? Both of those questions need to be answered, and bringing the soul into it doesn’t help us. I would add a third question here, and that is this: how does it follow that we need to answer the question of the soul before we answer, if it’s okay to intentionally kill someone.

For example, the law takes no position on whether 35y olds have souls, but it still forbids intentionally killing them. So the we don’t need to posit a soul to say a the embryos are human or B it’s wrong to intentionally kill them. The soul is a philosophical question and the reader is right in one respect when he later says science can’t tell us if embryos have souls, that’s right, it can’t. But science can tell us and does tell us def definitively, when an individual comes to be you and I did not come to be when we got Souls, we came to be when you had the combination of sperm and egg into a new concrete individual.

Sperm and eggs cease to be. They surrender their constituents into the makeup of a new living individual and we have cited on this podcast many times the scientific sources that make that claim and you can see that going to our website, looking at some of the blog posts. You can find that evidence there. We are not relying on religious conviction or emotional conviction when we say an individual comes to be at the one cell stage, when sperm and egg come together, die in surrendering their constituents into the makeup of a new ontological individual, the human zygo or embryo.

That is a. That is an empirical truth that we don’t get from scripture, we don’t get it from philosophy. We get it by looking at the science of embryology. So we know when an individual comes to be and we don’t need to posit a soul, a philosophical concept, to argue when individual human life begins. So that’s a mistake in this reader’s objection here. I also think it’s a mistake because, as I mentioned a moment ago, the law does not say you can kill people who don’t have souls.

It says you can’t kill human beings KS without justification. So really, the issue here is what’s the justification for intentionally killing an innocent human being? So when I hear Christians say we can’t get it truth because people disagree, this is a very, very troubling Trend that I think is a big warning flag that we often miss. We often think, oh, if people just get the right answers, we’re okay, or if they have the wrong answers, we just need to correct their facts.

We also need to look at how people are viewing knowledge. What’s their underlying world view of knowledge? What kind of worldview says that there’s no truth unless people agree? And the answer is a relativistic worldview, not a Christian worldview. So when I have Christians saying to me: well, you know, Christians have debated for years whether the embryo has a soul. They are basically buying into a secular worldview that says truth is determined by consensus, not an objective investigation of the evidence.

We need to look at the evidence. It’s arguments that matter, not consensus. People can be wrong. Now, it is okay to appeal to consensus, provided it’s backed up by argument. For example, there’s nothing wrong with saying the overwhelming majority of embryologists say that individual human life begins at con ception. That is true. But notice, these embryologists don’t just assert that. They present their evidence for it in peer reviewed medical journals. So when you combine evidence good evidence with peer acceptance meaning a majority of experts in that field accept what the evidence is saying and that evidence points clearly one Direction there’s nothing wrong with appealing to majority opinion.

But it doesn’t follow from that that if there’s disagreement, nobody’s right. By the way, if disagreement means nobody’s right, then the relativist is mistaken, because lots of people disagree with him, including non- relativists like me. So that’s not going to get us where we need to go. We need to investigate questions as to the humanity of The Unborn one way, and one way only, and that is by looking at the best empirical scientific evidence for when an individual comes to be.

There’s a reason why Christians disagreed on when life began years ago. They did not have the scientific tools we have today to investigate the question. Now here’s what they agreed on. They all agreed, or at least the majority did. They agreed that you had life the moment we could know it’s there. So they did believe ontologically that human life began sometime before birth. Their problem was this: they didn’t know when it began. They were not able to investigate the science of conception, and so their problem was not ontology.

In other words, their problem wasn’t: is The Unborn human? Their problem was: can we know if The Unborn are one of us? Because they didn’t even know for sure when life began. I mean, think about the tools they had available prior to the midpoint of the 19th century. The only way they knew for sure that a woman was pregnant is when you had quickening, when she felt the child move within her and at that point they could identify: okay, she’s pregnant with child.

They weren’t saying that there couldn’t be any life prior to quickening. It’s just they didn’t know it. They had no way to measure it or investigate it like we do now. I mean, we can know a woman is pregnant within a few weeks after her having sex, but that is not what was available to them. So their issue was not ontology: is The Unborn human? Their issue was: when can we know that there’s a life in that pregnant womb? And the answer is: they didn’t know until quickening.

So I don’t think we should say, just because people in the past disagreed on whether or not the embryos were alive or whether or not they had Souls, that means that today our skepticism is warranted. It most certainly is not. What I think is going on is this? Christians, and especially those of the progressive stripe and I’m reluctant to use those two terms in the same sentence, progressive and Christian, but bear with me. Christians who say, I believe in the basics of the faith but I hold to very liberal views on abortion generally do not do so because they’ve proven or even believe the science supports their view.

What I have found most of the time is They Don’t believe The unborn have value, that they’re not image bearers, that somehow they’re not fully human in the way you and I are, and they embrace a secular, functionalist view of human value that says our value is derived not from what we are by nature, but what we can do functionally, primarily what we can do cognitively. That’s their real issue. But they don’t present any argument for why things like self-awareness matter, or why the ability to pain matters, or maybe why, interacting with one’s environment matters.

They got to present arguments for why those things are value giving and they almost never do so. When you encounter Christians who try to convince you that we can’t know when an individual comes to be because Christianity by tradition has never quite agreed on the question of when insultan happens, this is really a question that I find beside the point. We can know when an individual comes to be and we can know that it’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings.

And the law, for example, doesn’t take a position on when insultan happens. It simply says you can’t intentionally kill innocent human beings, and that’s good enough for me and it ought to be good enough for our critics. And it certainly doesn’t follow that because people disagree, there are no right answers. Don’t let people Hoodwink you with a lack of consensus. They got to do better than that. They need to present arguments for why they believe their position is true. You cannot doubt position a without, at some level, holding to position B.

They need to defend position B, their position that The Unborn are not fully one of us, and they need to do it by presenting reasons, not appealing to a lack of consensus. Thanks for joining us today. Good to have you with us. We’ll come back after the election and unpack what happens. We’ll see if I’m right. As it stands right now, as I said, it looks like the momentum is in the gop’s favor, but we thought that in 2022 and we were mistaken, so I think it’s still too close to call.

I know this much. I’m going to owe a few friends of mine a state dinner if I’m wrong and they’re right. They are convinced that the GOP, and Donald Trump in particular, are going to Triumph big on November 5th. I’m the skeptical one here and I may be the one buying supper for all of them. We’ll have to see. I will admit it if I’m wrong and, by the way, I hope I am. Look forward to seeing you next time on this podcast.

Thank you for joining us.