Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth for the Colson Center. I'm John Stone Street. The slogan, Trust the Science, has been used for years now to push any number of causes, many of them controversial. from COVID policies to transgender medical practices. used often in substitution for making an actual argument, Trust the science signals one's intellectual credibility without ever having to prove it, preempting debate, shutting down opposition.
After all, how can you argue with science, especially capital S science?
Now at this point it should be obvious to us all that those who most loudly repeat this mantra are also the ones most likely to put ideology before science, not the other way around. For example, consider the policy and corporate profiteering that was enabled by claiming scientific consensus about human-caused global warming.
Now an increasing number of scientists are questioning whether global warming is even happening, much less is human-caused. This, despite all of the ways that federal and state policies were reoriented around cutting carbon emissions. Though scientists certainly do not have consensus about climate change, it turns out that they do mostly agree about when life begins. According to a 2021 survey, 96% of over 5,500 biologists that were surveyed from over 1,000 academic institutions agree. That human life begins at conception.
Now that's the kind of consensus activists on many other issues would love to have, but don't.
So shouldn't our laws and public policies reflect this science also? Wouldn't scientists who agree that life begins at conception also be calling for us all to trust the science and oppose abortion?
Well, no. In this area, when the biology collides with the cultural priorities of sexual freedom, there are two common responses. First, deflection, citing something about women's rights to their own bodies or something like that, ideas about which the science we're supposed to trust has nothing to say. Second, an assertion that the pre-born, while a human life, is not yet a person with moral status or rights.
Now, of course, in this context, the concept of personhood is often utilized with no clear definition. And of course, the science, which tells us when life begins, is of no help telling us when a life becomes a person. What scientifically studyable aspect of a human being makes a person a person?
Now, of course, different worldviews do offer different answers to that question, ranging from birth to self-awareness to feeling of pain or something like that. And yet in the end, it's always Christians who are accused of imposing their religious non-scientific views through law by others who are imposing their own religious non-scientific distinctions between a human being and a person. And the implications of this debate go well beyond abortion. Historically, whenever some humans are defined as non-persons, other humans are quickly defined as non-persons. That's the story of how those with dementia, Down syndrome, or any number of other mental or physical conditions have been treated throughout much of history.
including in much of the world today. Once the powerful assume the right to define which humans qualify as persons, whether by legal means or more broadly across a culture, the list always tends to be reduced down further. That's the slope down which Canada is currently sliding, where assisted suicide has devolved from a rare option for the terminally ill to standard practice justified by almost any reason. The essential question to anyone who proclaims trust the science is what is science. Is it a means, enabled by God's common grace, for human beings to better understand and redeem a fallen world?
Or is it a tool of control? Science tells us, clearly, that human life begins at conception. Both natural law and biblical ethics teach that every human life is valuable.
So the best way forward then is to see every human being as having rights that should be protected from the beginning of life to natural death. That's an area in which we should definitely follow the science. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Dr. Glenn Sunshine.
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