God unsure as to when human life begins

The purpose of religion, we are often told, is not to give us factual information about the world but rather to give us moral guidance. So, for example, science can tell you about the development of the human embryo, but we need religion to tell us when an embryo becomes human.

Of course, religion can’t actually tell us any such thing, and this was painfully obvious in a conference last November (Is the Embryo Sacrosanct? Multi-Faith Perspectives) organized by Progress Educational Trust, a UK charity. The January issue of Nature Medicine carries a report of the conference.

Turns out that believers agree that human life begins when the soul gets attached to the body. That, of course, is the easy bit. The difficult bit is judging when this happens. Here’s Nature:

Most of the religions represented at the conference don’t automatically grant an embryo the same rights as a person. Instead, they generally deem its transformation to personhood to occur at some point during pregnancy, often when the embryo is thought to attain a soul (known as ensoulment). This precise point not only differs between different religions but also between different denominations of the same religion.

Apparently, for Muslims ensoulment occurs sometime between 40 and 120 days (depending on the religious expert you talk to). For the Church of England, it’s either at conception or at Day 14. Catholics simply hold their hand up and admit their god hasn’t told them this rather crucial piece of information (although every sperm is sacred, of course).

Now, a cynic might say that the reason this is difficult is because A) religious books were written before the advent of modern embryology, and B) the soul doesn’t actually exist. It’s a pre-modern attempt to crystallise an abstract concept.

In fact, we now know aspects of the mind that comprise the old-fashioned concept of soul – character, consciousness and self-awareness, for example – develop in a gradual process that starts as the nervous system begins to form, and carries on into early adulthood. There is no such thing as ‘ensoulment’.

What’s more, the idea of embryos having souls is laughable since most embryos don’t make it to term – as John Harris, professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester, pointed out:

John Harris … counters that during natural reproduction embryos are also lost: “the willful creation and sacrifice of embryos is an inescapable and inevitable part of all reproduction.” At the meeting Harris said that “Everybody sitting in this room is here over the dead bodies of between three and five siblings that had to die in order that we could be born.”

If all these embryos have souls, then heaven is full of the souls of unborn foetuses!

What this conference really shows is quite how useless religions are when discussing modern ethical dilemmas. They start from the wrong premise, and so get side-tracked into muddle-headed and pointless debates. We should not pay them any attention, since they have so little of value to contribute.