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.

Welcome to The Case for Life show everyone. Great to have you with us today. We’re going to look at some debate clips. But before we do, I want to remind you that our primary sponsor, Life Training Institute, can deliver speakers to make pro-life presentations at your event. See our websites for deal details on that. Also, Summit Ministries, who you’ve heard me talk about a lot on this show, is now open for registration. And if you register your student using the code that we will put on the screen, you can actually get a $500 discount for your student or teens.

So take advantage of that by seeing our sites and learn about how to equip your student to make a case for the pro-life view and the biblical worldview in general. There’s no finer place to do that than Summit Ministries. Again, see our sites for information on that. Okay, we’re going to roll some tape today. First up is Morning Joe. You may know him as the popular MSNBC morning host. He does a news commentary show in the morning. He’s certainly not conservative.

He used to be, I believe, a Republican congressman at one point, but now he is a man of the left. And he decided to go off on pro-life Christians in a recent show. And I want to show you what he said, and then we’re going to dissect it and talk about it. Let’s take a look at Morning Joe.

Jesus never once talked about abortion. Never once. And it was happening back in ancient times. It was happening during his time. Never once mentioned it for people perverting the gospel of Jesus Christ down to one issue. It’s heresy. Okay, you heard him. He said that people making abortion the center of the gospel was heresy. And he went on to say Jesus never mentioned abortion and abortion was happening in his time. Okay, lots here to talk about. You know that in the past on this show, we’ve talked about people who make the bold claim, the rather general claim that because the Bible never mentions abortion, therefore it’s permitted.

And Joe is using that essential argument here, but he’s added one little twist to it. He now makes it all about Jesus. Did Jesus mention abortion? Well, you know what? Jesus didn’t mention a lot of things. He didn’t mention gay bashing. He didn’t me mention denying women the right to vote. He didn’t mention an open border. But Joe would not say, “Oh, well, that means there’s no biblical truth to be known on those matters.” he wouldn’t say that. He only says that with abortion, which kind of leads us to understand how facious his claim is.

This idea that if scripture doesn’t specifically say something, therefore, it’s okay. Now, as we have said many times on this show, you’ve got to look at the totality of scripture. Okay? Jesus didn’t mention abortion, but there are clear teachings in scripture that point to what we should know about abortion that are in the Bible. And the Bible is God’s inspired word. And let’s be clear about something. The God of the New Testament is the God of the Old Testament. Jesus Christ is the same today, yesterday, and forever if we want to quote the book of Hebrews.

So this idea that just because Jesus didn’t mention something in the New Testament means it’s permissible is really quite facious. I mean I could ask Joe this question. Joe, are you saying whatever Jesus did not expressly mention or condemn he allows? Does Jesus, for example, anywhere condemn shooting people on the political left? Well, of course not. But we know it would be wrong for Christians to shoot their political opponents because Jesus told us we’re to love our enemies and we are to do what we can to care for them and we’re to treat them as fellow image bearers.

So this idea that you’ve got to mention something in scripture before you can say it’s prohibited is is not persuasive at all. But Morning Joe is saying something that’s popular. It resonates with people and they want a Jesus that fits their template. And this Jesus they want is not the Jesus that makes any kind of demands on us. It’s a Jesus who just loves and tolerates everybody. And they don’t talk about the Jesus that is going to come one day to judge the living and the dead.

The Jesus who told people, “Depart from me. I never knew you.” I mean, those are frightening words. And yes, Jesus is going to say them to people on judgment day who do not know him. They will be told to depart from him into everlasting darkness. Okay, this idea that Jesus is just tolerant of everything because he never mentioned specific sins is foolish. All right, so we know from the Bible that the Bible clearly condemns the intentional killing of innocent blood or what scripture calls the shedding of innocent blood.

We see this in Exodus 23. We see this in Proverbs 6. We see this in Isaiah 1. We see this elsewhere throughout the Old Testament. And in that in that context of shedding innocent blood, it leaves us with just one question. Are the unborn innocent human beings? If they are human beings, the same commands against the shedding of innocent blood apply to them as they do everybody else. And we know from the science of embryology that from the earliest stages of development, the unborn are distinct, living and whole human beings.

Now, one other thing Morning Joe said that I think we ought to take a moment to talk about. He said that Jesus never condemned abortion or mentioned it even though it was happening at that time. Okay. Well, it was also true that in the Roman world of that day, people were practicing infanicide. That also was happening at the time. Jesus didn’t mention infanicide. Does that mean it’s okay to do it? One of the things people do when they’re sloppy with their biblical interpretation is they tend to just look at things through a very narrow lens that is biased toward their predetermined conclusion.

And here’s what you should know about the context of the day. The environment to which the New Testament documents and the Old Testament documents were written. That environment or genre if you want to put it that way in a more general sense. The biblical literature is not a comprehensive code of ethics we just read systematically through. Rather, the biblical documents are what some theologians refer to as taskoriented theology. And here’s what they mean by that. That a particular book of the Bible take for example a Pauline epistle let’s say the epistle to Romans or the epistle to the church at Ephesus it doesn’t matter for the sake of this illustration pick whatever one you want the theology contained in those letters where Paul writes to believers in those churches is what we call taskoriented theology it is written to address specific issues or topics that were matters at hand in those churches at the time.

So Paul isn’t going to mention everything he thinks about the world. He isn’t going to mention every theological doctrine. He’s not going to mention every ethical principle. He’s going to stick to addressing what was going on in those particular churches. So let’s ask this question. Why then does Paul not mention abortion? Why doesn’t Jesus mention it? Well, let’s start with this. The first Christians were essentially Jewish believers. The large majority of them, okay, starting out later Gentiles were added. But to start off, the first believers in Christianity were essentially converted Jews who held to an essentially Jewish morality.

All right. So, the question is, what was Jewish thinking about abortion at the time? And we can look at sources like the dedicay and other literature that is there that’s extra biblical but still gives us a window into what the earliest Christians thought and it’s clear from this literature that abortion was condemned. The dedicay for example talks about the two ways the way of life and the way of death and it puts abortion in the category of the way of death meaning that if you procure one you’re on the wrong path.

It’s an it’s a fruit of being on the path to death. So the Bible may not mention it specifically, but the literature at the time that Christians were reading makes it clear they thought abortion was not permissible. You can also point out that the earliest Jews in either the New Testament or the Old Testament were not tempted to kill their unborn offspring. This isn’t hard to think about. Think about this for a moment. In the Old Testament Hebrew world, what were children seen as?

Well, number one, they were seen as your inheritance. It was the way your name would live on eternally. It you lived on through your descendants. Number two, Israel is surrounded by hostile nations that want to destroy them and take them over. In that kind of environment, you need a large population to be able to ward off those attacks. Number three, God had given the nation of Israel a very specific theological and historical mandate. And here’s what it was. They were to take the land, possess it.

They were to multiply. And through Israel, God was going to use the Jewish people to bless all peoples of the world. In order to do that, you need a large population. Fourthly, in Hebrew culture, barrenness was a curse. It’s the worst thing a woman could go through. You can think of Samuel’s mother laying at the altar crying her eyes out to God for a child because she was being ridiculed by her peers for not having children. Baroness was a curse, a sign of God’s disfavor on your life if you were a woman.

And therefore, you wanted kids. Now in a culture where you are part of a nation surrounded by hostiles. Secondly, you’re in a culture where barrenness is a curse, not a blessing, not an exercise of choice as our culture thinks of it. And thirdly, you have a mandate from God to be fruitful and multiply so that God can use you to bless all nations of the earth. In that kind of culture, is abortion going to get a foothold? The obvious answer is no.

And that’s why the Old Testament writers don’t mention it specifically. The New Testament writers, as I said a moment ago, understand that their first converts are essentially Jewish con converts with a Jewish morality. They’re not going to be tempted to kill their children either. So the people that Paul was writing to, the believers in the churches were not having abortions. Otherwise, I think he would have addressed it because his own Hebrew or I should say Jewish morality would have informed him to call that out as a moral misgiving.

Yes, surrounding cultures were practicing abortion, but not the people to whom the biblical documents were addressed and those surrounding cultures were also practicing infanicide. So, it doesn’t follow that because scripture nowhere mentions infanicide that it has no view on that. So, Morning Joe’s argument here really does suffer from a lot of things theologically and logically that you shouldn’t fall from, fall for, I should say. Okay, second clip. This is a debate between Llaya Rose and Destiny, who’s a popular YouTube streamer, and they were having a debate about is abortion should abortion be legal?

And of course the preemptive question is or the penultimate question is first of all is abortion moral? And I’m going to let you watch what Destiny says. Destiny is going to try to argue that the unborn are not human. Let’s watch what he has to say and we’ll come back and we will comment on it. We have a clear and unambiguous ending for a thing such as a person’s life. Then why not investigate that ending to see if we can get any hints as to how it begins?

Let’s ask ourselves when do we consider a human person no longer a human person but just a human body. Is it after a after their corpse fully decompos decomposes? Is it when their heart stops beating? Is it when they lose a limb? Of course, we all know the answer to this question. It’s when their brain loses the ability to host the mind. We could consider is it truly the brain that’s so special? But of course it is. There could be no other answer.

If I replace your arm with a bionic prosthetic, are you still a person? What about both arms? What about your heart? Or how about your eyes and ears? If you awoke in a mad scientist laboratory and he was going to separate your head from your body, but he only had the technology to keep one of these two things alive, would you choose your body or your head? All right, let’s get back to what he began with because that’s the point I want to focus on for now.

He made the point that if we know when life ends, meaning the cessation of brain activity, then it shouldn’t be hard to figure out when life begins. His argument is if life ends at the ending of brain activity then it doesn’t begin until there is brain activity. And he’ll go on to argue not just brain activity but principally consciousness is when we have value and a right to life. Okay, let’s stop for a moment and look at this. Is there any symmetry between a braindead individual and a human embryo?

And the answer is no. And here’s why. In the brain deadad person, you have somebody who is clinically dead. Their body has ceased functioning as a coordinated hole and there’s begun a decomposition process unless that is interrupted by medical technology to keep the corpse from decomposing, which sometimes happens because families have reasons for wanting a death date to be different maybe than actually happened. I don’t know. But there are clearly cases where those that are clinically dead are not declared dead yet because there is there are medical devices keeping them alive.

Okay, let’s think now about the brain dead person. That person I just described for you where their body has ceased to function as a coordinated hole. That’s the clinical definition of death. It’s not just that they’ve their heart is stopped or their brain is temporarily stopped. Rather, there’s been an irreversible cessation of the human body’s ability to function as a coordinated hole. It must be irreversible and it must have ceased. Okay, those are the factors. So, let’s look at the embryo versus that braindead person.

In that brain deadad person, we have an irreversible loss of the body’s ability to function as a coordinated whole. In the embryo, we do not have that. First of all, the embryo doesn’t need a brain to live. Something else is coordinating its bod bodily system so it can function as a whole being. But secondly, in the embryo, the embryo is not in the category of no more, which is the category of the brain dead person. No more able to function as a coordinated living entity.

Rather, the embryo is in the category of not yet, meaning not yet needing a brain to function as a coordinated entity. So, there’s no parallel there. His argument really suffers from not having a symmetry that he wants it to have. Now he goes on to make another argument that that we won’t go to the clip just because it will be difficult to find but later he makes this argument. We don’t even know the precise moment in the conception process that the embryo comes to be.

So how can you claim to know that conception is when life begins for a human being? That’s his argument. We don’t know whether for example the embryo comes to be at the beginning of the conception process he argues or at the end or in the middle somewhere and therefore because we don’t know the precise moment the embryo comes to be we can’t know if the embryo is a human being. All right this is a very bad argument. How does it follow that because people might disagree on the exact moment the embryo comes to be and embryologists do disagree on this.

How does it follow we can’t know that an individual embryo X is a living reality? I can give you I think what will be a helpful example here. Last night at around 1:30 in the morning there was an explosion near our subdivision. There was a construction site that had some gas containers and somehow they exploded and it ended up blowing up some vehicles and some other things on the construction site. I didn’t hear the blast, but a lot of my neighbors did.

And I got up around 1:30 for another reason. I got up to check on a family member, but I didn’t hear the blast. Apparently, I slept through it. But it was interesting to read what neighbors were saying on the Facebook page for our neighborhood. They were saying, “Oh, did you hear that?” “Oh, yeah.” There were some neighbors that thought it happened closer to 1:15. There were other neighbors that thought it happened somewhere around 1:30 in the morning, maybe. Now, they differed in their take on when the exact moment was the blast happened.

But did it follow because they disagreed on the timing of the blast? That there was no blast to begin with, that we couldn’t know if there was a blast? I mean, that’s silly. Obviously, the fact that people might disagree on the details of the timing did not mean we can’t know that an actual explosion happened. And indeed, we do know because this morning there was plenty of news coverage about it in the local newspaper in my town. All right, so let’s apply that here.

The fact that embryologists may not know the exact second or moment in time that an embryo comes to be does not mean we can’t say look here’s embryo X over here we can’t know it’s a human being. Yes we can. Another way to think of this I suppose is to point out what I think destiny is doing here is committing the fallacy of the beard. The fallacy of the beard goes like this. Somebody says, “Well, you know, because we can’t know the exact moment a clean face becomes a bearded face, we can’t make a judgment at all about one whether one has a bearded face or a shaven face.” Well, that’s crazy.

Just because you may not know the exact moment the face transitions from a clean shaven face to a bearded one does not mean you can’t say, “Man A over here is either bearded or clean shaven.” And that’s kind of what destiny is doing here. But there’s another more fundamental problem with his claim here. He claims that the beginning of human life, meaningful human life, is when you have consciousness, when you have rationality, a sense of self where, you know, and this is very typical.

People like Peter Singer are going to argue this, Michael Tulie, Jubelini Manurva, a lot of other people, okay, who support abortion. Here’s the problem. Does he know the exact moment in the pregnancy when the fetus becomes rational and self-aware? And the answer is he does not. He arbitrarily says, “Look, it’s probably 24 weeks.” Okay. But if it if the pro-lifer’s position is refuted because we don’t know the exact moment in the conception process when the embryo becomes a human being then his own position that it happens when the fetus is self-aware or conscious is also refuted because he doesn’t know the exact moment in the pregnancy when that happens.

So this is going to work against his position and undermine it if he’s going to use that. In other words, the sword is going to cut both ways. Now, he also threw out something in his debate with Laya here, and by the way, Laya did a great job. Again, I’m not commenting on her replies. I’m commenting on him. He goes on to also make this argument that a potential human life is not an actual one. And you can’t attribute value to a potential human being just because in the future it will function as you and I do.

Okay. This is a misuse of the term potential. We’re going to take a break and when we come back I’m going to tell you why this is a misuse of the term potential and we’ll unpack how that plays out so you can get a sense of it. Remember, we are very much excited to be partnering with Summit Ministries. I hope you will see our websites for information on that where you can find a discount code for your student to go to Summit.

I hope you’ll take advantage of that. I’ll come back after the break and we’ll finish out talking about why this argument from potential does not work.

Good to see you everyone. Welcome back from the break. We were talking about potentiality before we took our break and Destiny’s argument that just because the embryo has the potential to be conscious and self-aware doesn’t mean we should attribute the value to the embryo we do to someone who’s more mature and clearly functions with consciousness. Okay, there’s a couple of problems with this. First of all, a potential X must be an actual Y. If the unborn is not human and it is only potentially, so what is it actually?

You can’t just say something’s a potential, you got to then say, okay, instead of it being this, it’s actually that. So, how would he explain two human parents creating offspring that isn’t human that later becomes so? That’s the first problem he faces. But the second one is this. One could say, for example, that sex organs are potential sex organs unless they’re being used that way. But that wouldn’t be an accurate way to look at it. If somebody has sex organs, those are actual sex organs.

Whether they are currently being used that way or function that way or not. They are sex organs in virtue of the kind of thing they are. They’re not potential sex organs. We don’t say that a 2-year-old only has potential sex organs because they’re not using them at this point of their development. No, those are actual sex organs. I think too that there’s a tendency to confuse active potentuality with passive potentuality. Okay, this book that I’m holding right now is not conscious.

It is not selfaware. And I think you know why it’s not in a book’s nature to be self-aware. However, is the embryo like this book? Is the embryo something that you must act on externally to make it self-aware? No. The embryo is already a rational being by nature. It is in its nature to be rational. This book, it’s not in its nature to be self-aware, conscious. Hopefully, it’s rational because I wrote it. But you don’t think of an embryo the way you think of a rock or a book or an inanimate object that is not self-aware or conscience or conscious.

The reason why the book is not self-aware is because it’s not in its nature to be self-aware. Neither is the bookcase I’m looking at right now or the desk I’m sitting at or this phone. It’s not in their natures to be self-aware, to have a rational nature. But it is in the nature of the human embryo to be rational. The only difference is he is not yet old enough to exercise it. The rational nature is there all along from the beginning needing only to develop and unfold.

While something like this book, you would have to radically rework it, make it a living being. And then you would have to somehow make it rational. You would have to change what the book is to make it rational. You don’t need to change the nature of the unborn to make them self-aware, rational, or have consciousness. They will have it. They just have not developed to the point where they’re immediately exercising it. And that’s the point Destiny, I think, misses and airs on quite poorly.

But this debate, I commend it to your watching. Laya does a very good job defending the pro-life view. And I think debates like this are important because and it’s why I do them from time to time. Debates convey number one that the abortion issue is not settled. I think there were for decades there was for decades rather on the pro-abortion side this mindset of we’re not going to do debates because we don’t even want to legitimize the other side by showing up on a stage with them.

So they would shun debates. I think now they know they got to argue for their position because there’s too many informed and educated pro-lifers out there making a solid case for what they believe. So I think debates are important for that reason. But secondly, I think they’re important because they give pro-lifers a good dose of confidence and we all need that and I hope that you will pursue that confidence for yourself. That’s why we do this show and I thank you for joining us today.

I look forward to seeing you the next time.