Drive Carefully!
Currently Watching Charlotte’s Web (Full Screen Edition) (Cartoon version)
I wrote a post a while back about evolution vs. creation. One point that I brought up was that Christians fear that if we allow for some form of evolution, it drains away the value of humanity and of individual human life. Something like this:
“If I am just the accidental chance result of random natural causes, then my life is meaningless, and there is no moral standard by which I am to be governed.”
In other words, whether a teenager believes that he is evolved or created has a great deal to do with his or her self worth and his or her likelihood to engage in self destructive behavior.
I once saw a really good bumper sticker that said, “Drive carefully, 90% of all people are caused by accidents!” I had to laugh out loud, and I still laugh when I think about it. It calls us to task for the way we talk about things like childbirth. I mean, really, is anyone truly an accident? Car wrecks are an accident, but people having sex is not.
The complete freedom that God has given us over the birth process really does call into question how much whether the first man and woman were evolved or created either 40 million or 10 thousand years ago really matters. I mean, honestly, at this point, any two fertile human beings can come together and make a person.
I read recently about a twenty-four year old woman that was brought into a hospital to give birth. The thing was, she was mentally retarded from birth. She had the mind of a two month old. She could not recognize people, she could not control her own movements, quite frankly, she was barely aware of her own existence! Obviously her pregnancy was the result of abuse by some caregiver, but her pregnancy was not discovered until she was about seven months along, so they had no idea who had done it.
How do you suppose the child of this woman will feel about his or her “creation?” Oh, sure you could make up flowery ideas about how God worked great miracles to bring him about, but honestly, my guess is that at the age of 14, after being bounced from one emotionally abusive foster home to another for all of his or her life, she will look at the circumstances of her birth and life and determine that she was a colossal accident. The result of the chance meeting of a morally bankrupt human being with a mentally failed human being. One failure compounded upon another to produce yet another failure. Origin does not logically, or, just as importantly, emotionally, impute value in this case.
So, quite honestly, I think it is pointless to tie the evolution debate to abortion. Sorry Ken Ham, but however the first man and woman got to be here, ever since then there has been a lot of chance, and even sin involved in the formation of subsequent human beings.
Yes, human life has great value in all forms, like diamonds, but a human life isn’t like a diamond. If you bury a diamond in a pile of manure, and then start hosing it all down, eventually you will find the diamond, pure and sparkling, just as good as new. The manure will not harm the diamond, it is not permeable. Human life is more like wood or paper. We absorb what we are exposed to, and it enhances or degrades us. At some point a human life can become indistinguishable from its surroundings. It cannot be separated from the slime it is encased in, much less cleaned up by human means.
When Christ came to this earth, it was full of ruined people, just like now. Christ gave us a way for people to be made pure again.
You see, the value in a human life really does not rest on its origin, but on its destination. A human life is not valuable because of how it came to be, but because of what it may become. Honestly, practical life really is that way. Money is valuable not because of how much time we spent earning it, but because of what it can be used to buy. So is life. A life is valuable because of Christ. Without Christ, we are without hope.
Whether we were individually created by a loving God for an eternal purpose, or whether we are all just a colossal accident, what make us special is our capacity for Christ. Whether we came from God or not, we can all go to God, and that is something more precious and more durable than diamonds.
Posted 1/21/2007 12:29 PM
1 Comment:
Yeah…but if we weren’t created by God we wouldn’t have His breath of life, and no souls. So even if our existence seems random or pointless, regardless of our worldview, we only have that value (that capacity for Christ) if we were created. That’s where it could be valuable to discuss creation/evolution with regards to abortion.
Posted 1/22/2007 1:42 PM by madhatterb78
