The Human Embryo and Dignity

When are human beings protected under the Right of Human Dignity?
When do they have a right to live?

Those are important questions that face everyone of us as soon as we come to the question of embryonic stem cell research. In yesterdays program Albert Mohler and his guest Prof. Robert George pointed out that they see the human being fully protect worthy from conception until death.

I disagree with Dr. Mohler and Prof. George on the beginning on the worthiness of protection. And to point out why I will turn out to the end when a human being is considered especially worthy of protect: Death.
The whole western world considers a person to be dead as soon as all brain activity cedes. With the death of the brain, the human mind is (from a secular point) irreversibly destroyed. Apart from this point there is no consciousness, no feelings anymore, no thought. The individual has ended his or her existence [in this world if you are religious]. One thing about this death is that while the mind is dead, the body needn't necessarily be.
Did you ever wonder how it is possible to use the organs of a dead person?
Actually dead organs couldn't be used to transplant. The still living body of the brain-dead person is kept alive by artificial respiration and heart stimulation until the needed organs could be extracted. Just when the live maintaining machines that were needed for this procedure are switched off the body will die as well.
This example shows something: The right of human dignity and the right to life are dependent on the unity of the human being. The human being itself is made up from the unity of human mind and body. The human body itself has no special dignity once the mind ceased to exist. Otherwise the apparent use as a mean by harvesting the bodies organs to an end would debase its dignity.

Returning to the human embryo we can ascertain beyond doubt that it is a human body in it's earliest stages. Like Albert Mohlers guest pointed out: The is no serious scientific discussion about that. But as I pointed before: The body itself doesn't have dignity, even if alive. Dignity and the Right to Life is granted to the human being, which itself is defined by it's unity of mind and body.
If I look from that standpoint to the embryo in its earliest stages I simply stand to say it has not a single braincell. It is therefor most certainly and most positively brain-dead. The embryo is therefor in no ethical way different from the still living body from the person who was just found brain-dead.

Dr. Mohler, a question at this point, do you want to take your atheist listeners for fools by claiming that the full unity of the human being in the embryo could be argued from any other than a religious standpoint? You necessarily need this obscure concept of some ominous soul to argue a difference between the living body of a brain-dead person and an embryo.
If you argue that the soul leaves the body with the death of the brain and enters it upon conception, there is a theological argument to make that there is a difference between the still living body and the embryo.
On the other hand: What verse actually describes when the soul enters and leaves the human body?

Another secular difference between the embryo and the "undead" body is that the embryo still has full potency for life while the only potency the "undead" body has is for death. But there is one important necessity for an embryo to grow into a human being: That gets implanted in a womb. It is medically impossible at the moment and will stay medically impossible for a very long time for a human embryo to grow into a human being in any other place than the womb of a woman. Outside the womb the embryo has the potency of growing into specialized clumps of cells, but never into a human being.
The act in which the mother allows an embryo to nest in her womb starts the growing of an embryo into a human being. That is also the point from which on the mother gives the right chemical environment and nutrition to the embryo to fully grow into a human being. In other words the point from which on the embryo is really given life from its mum. The implantation is the moment when a promise between the mother and the embryo takes place in which she in or without awareness of the act ensures the embryo to it grow into a human being.
At this point the pregnancy starts and any interference with that would be an abortion. With the developing mind there are rights of the embryo and fetus to be protected. I will tackle that in a later article.

AMP: Environmentalism and Human Dignity

When reading an article of Dr. Mohler I often find myself agreeing on the issue but not on the reasoning. Just like in his latest blog on Plant Rights, Screaming Vegetation, and a "Biocentric" Worldview. This article of him is also quite good to explain my worldview on human dignity. It's close to the Christian one but not quite the same.

As a social-democrat human dignity is central to my worldview. It doesn't need to be received by the appreciation as the creation of some God. It's simply axiomatically there. Just like the axioms of Newtonian physics the axiom of of human dignity is set and perceived by experience. After 8000 years of recorded human history we have enough experience what happens if a society ignores the dignity of human beings or makes it somehow conditional on religious dogma.
If you condition human dignity on race (like the Nazis did) or condition it on worldview (like the communists did) you will very soon end up with concentration camps or Gulags.
But to heavily disagree with Dr. Mohler it is anything but safe to reason for human dignity on religious grounds. First of all: Human Dignity on itself is something that is alien to the Christian worldview. The Christian worldview, especially the one of conservative Christians, teachers that humans have no value on dignity on their own, but are on the contrary despicable, evil sinners. If there is an intrinsic dignity of the human being in the Christian worldview it just comes from an transaction of God's dignity onto the human being.
To point this difference, the difference between an intrinsic human dignity and a transacted human dignity, out is not nitpicking. Once you base human dignity on an act of transferal from a divine entity you open the possibility to argue whether this deity give human dignity to any human.
This is not just a theoretical consideration. The believe that Atheists by their rejection of God also rejected the dignity that God assigns to every human being allowed Christians and other religions to persecute Atheists for centuries.

This centrality of human dignity also comes to play when I consider the environment. In a truly humanist worldview you protect nature for the sake of human civilization. Any society benefits largely from living in an eco-system that's intact. To preserve this natural environment doesn't serve foremost nature but mankind.  It also means that human societies are allowed to cut down nature of to reduce it in certain areas if it serves a greater good and doesn't cause more harm than it does good. Unfortunately this sane position has been hijacked by some neo-pagans who in worship of mother nature want to protect nature for natures sake and make humans subservient to that worship.

Dr. Mohler is right that putting the nutrition of people at risk for the sake of some zany new-age religion is at it's base inhuman. To see him than argue on the other hand that it's wrong to protect nature for nature's sake but that you should instead protect nature for God's sake seems somewhat strange to me. But it reminds that Social-Democrats and Christians quite often agree on the issue but also disagree quite often on the reasoning.