On the Soul

By Mark Goldblatt

“The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought, and a definite molecular action in the brain, occur simultaneously, we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass by a process of reasoning from the one phenomenon to the other.”

– John Tyndall, 1868 

The nature of the human soul has been the subject of religious belief and scientific investigation for millennia. We feel as though definitive answers should be at hand since each of us seems to have relevant experiential insights. But certainty remains elusive. The proposition that the soul does not exist, that what’s called the soul is actually no more than a neurological phenomenon, a trick the brain plays on its owner, is altogether plausible. But so too is the converse — the proposition that the soul is indeed an immaterial essence which somehow animates human beings. 

We must begin, however, by clarifying the term. The word “soul” can refer to a number of different things. Many of us intuitively think of the voice inside our head as our soul — a definition that is consistent with a strict materialist explanation. That is, if the soul is in fact merely a neurological phenomenon, merely an activity of the brain, then the voice-inside-our-head definition, perhaps enlarged to include the impulses and sensations which coalesce around the voice, would work. Consciousness, in that case, equals soul. Which is another way of saying that the soul is to the brain what digestion is to the stomach. It’s what the brain does.

If, on the other hand, the soul is an immaterial essence, rather than the outcome of a material process, then the definition becomes more complicated because neurological science has demonstrated that the voice inside our head has a material component. That much is certain. We now know, for instance, that if the brain is grievously injured, the voice inside our head is often irreparably altered. Brain trauma can affect memory formation, language skills, even mood swings. So it must be the case that the brain itself is directly involved in consciousness. What used to be called the mind-body problem has been solved, at least to that extent. Consciousness, as the word is traditionally understood, cannot be wholly severed from brain activity.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s no such thing as an immaterial soul. What it means is that the incidentals that make up our inner lives are rooted in the workings of our brains. If you whack me across the skull hard enough to rattle my brain, but not kill me outright, you might well alter what I remember about my life, which friends I’m able to recognize, what words I’m able to form, whether I’m able to count to ten, what food I like to eat, what juice I like to drink, what position I like to play in softball — in sum, the very characteristics that come to mind when I think of myself.

It’s tempting to conclude that, minus those characteristics, I would no longer be me. But in truth, that’s all I would be. The human soul, if it exists in an immaterial form, must be the me-ness of me, the sense of first personhood on which the rest of my conscious experiences hang. It’s the rooting interest each one of us has in himself, in his own existence, stripped of language and memory, stripped of thought and disposition; it’s the unified presence by which I differentiate myself from whatever I encounter. I am not the thing I encounter; I am the thing doing the encountering.

The soul, in other words, is not your consciousness — unless you hold to a strict materialist perspective. If you are not a strict materialist, however, the soul is what’s underneath your consciousness, the platform upon which your consciousness is constructed. The distinction is critical. Consciousness is the thing that emerges from sense data, the thing that comes to consist of memory and language. But sense data, memory and language have material components; they’re rooted in the workings of brain. The last half century of neuroscience has established that beyond a reasonable doubt. The stuff of consciousness is definitively brain-based. It relies on physical matter. So if the soul is indeed immaterial, it must be more basic than consciousness. The word “self” gets closer to the point — though I think “me-ness” gets still closer. It’s the gathering principle of sensation, memory and language, the immeasurable, imperceptible, inexplicable filament that draws together sensation, memory and language into consciousness.

Think of consciousness as cotton candy. The soul, in that case, is the cone around which the cotton candy is wound — except, of course, and here the metaphor breaks down, it’s an immaterial cone.

If the soul is indeed immaterial, then it must consist of the me-ness of me, the thing that encounters other things. But the word “encounter” also requires clarification. For example, I’ve got a robotic vacuum cleaner in my apartment that seems to encounter other things. It even adjusts to them. It goes around things that get in its way. Does the vacuum cleaner therefore possess a soul?

Clearly not.

It’s thus necessary to differentiate between encountering something and responding to something. Even a run-of-the-mill computer nowadays, like the one found in a robotic vacuum cleaner, can be programmed to respond to things. But it cannot be programmed to encounter them. My vacuum cleaner doesn’t differentiate between itself and, say, the edge of my sofa — which would be the essence of an “encounter.” It strikes the edge of my sofa and cannot move forward; its sensors detect an inability to move forward and send a signal to the processor inside to reverse direction. It has no interest in reversing direction. If its program were altered, it would keep careening into the edge of my sofa until its battery ran down. 

So, too, with computers that play chess — even the ones that play at grandmaster level. Such a computer can be programmed to read the situation of a chess board, run through the billions of possible scenarios that might follow from the next move and calculate which scenario yields the highest numerical probability of taking the adversary’s king. But it cannot be programmed to care whether it wins or loses the game. It has no first-person interest in the outcome of the game. The software that underlies artificial intelligence cannot, for the time being, give rise to that sense of me-ness that is the foundation of human consciousness. I suspect (though of course don’t know for sure) that it will never be able to do so, regardless of how powerful the hardware, or how much more sophisticated the programming.

Here’s a thought experiment: Suppose two rival software companies designed chess programs to compete against one another. Suppose, further, that each program contained instructions that, in the event of its defeat, would slightly jigger the probabilities on which it based its moves, then erase the old scheme under which it had previously operated. Each game between the two rivals would take mere moments to complete since the moves would be almost instantaneous. The winner of each game would then have to wait several seconds for the loser to tweak its algorithms, and then the next game would commence.

It would be a deadly dull sport to watch. The point, however, is that the two systems are evolving, in a sense, under conditions that resemble survival-of-the-fittest. Each winner continues on to the next game intact; each loser perishes and leaves behind an offspring to try its own hand at chess survival.

Now the critical question: At what point would either system develop a rooting interest in whether it wins or loses? At what point would either system care, in even the most rudimentary way, about the outcome of a game?

To be sure, the case of chess-playing computers leaves out the crucial evolutionary element of bio-feedback. What if the software programs making the chess moves were also picking up sense data, encountering sights and sounds as they were playing? Except encountering presupposes a me-ness capable of doing the encountering. In other words, it presupposes a rooting interest. Sights and sounds, in themselves, would surely produce more data than the mere playing out of chess games would — data which could then be stored in the form of binary codes within the memory of each operating system. But the accumulation of data does not address the problem. What interaction of circuit board and binary codes will ever give rise to a self? How does information become will? How does me-ness enter into the system?

Thinking about the peculiarity of consciousness arising in a contraption of electronic circuitry and binary codes puts the problem in especially stark relief. But even if the system consists of flesh and blood, the problem remains unchanged. Sensations like sights and sounds are just electrochemical surges. There’s nothing mystical about them. They course through the body, carrying charges to and from the neuromagnetic cluster that operates in the brain, adding more and more data to the system. So you’ve got electrical signals. You’ve got magnetic fields. You’ve got living matter, organic cells in which the electrical signals and magnetic fields gather. Below that, you’ve got carbon atoms. You’ve got water molecules. In other words, you’ve got goop and soup, stimuli and response. That’s the totality of it, from the materialist perspective.

I ask again: How does this add up to me-ness?

The origin of me-ness is the great mystery of the human condition. Let me confess, therefore, that I have no clue how me-ness can emerge, or even be accounted for, by materialism. That doesn’t mean the explanation doesn’t exist. Only that I cannot imagine it.

If, on the other hand, the materialist perspective is rejected, then at least two possible explanations present themselves. (These are no more than guesses, however. That should be borne in mind.) The first is that me-ness is a kind of transmission, something akin to a radio signal, that emanates from a Source and is picked up by the circuitry of the brain. If the brain circuitry is in good working order, then the transmission is stable enough to form the basis of a continuous, recognizable consciousness. But if the brain is damaged, if the circuitry breaks down, the signal becomes scrambled. The signal is still being picked up, but the circuitry cannot do with it what it’s designed to do. That’s how the incidentals of memory and language are lost. But of course all of what I’ve just described is only a metaphor. To think of me-ness as a radio signal is to think of it as a wave — which is a measurable thing. If me-ness is measurable, then it’s no longer immaterial.

The radio-signal metaphor is a Platonic down-from-on-high explanation. So the alternative would be a more Aristotelian ground-upwards account in which me-ness becomes the end to which matter is directed. Me-ness isn’t something the brain happens to produce; it’s what the brain is designed to do, its formal cause, the reason it exists in the first place — and the brain, in turn, is what the human being is designed to sustain. The flesh and blood of man evolved, in other words, as a means to generate the soul . . . and the material world itself as a means to generate the flesh and blood of man. Me-ness is the immaterial potential that justifies the existence of matter, the Little Bang insinuated into the Big Bang, the why of the what. But, again, all of this is mere speculation. What’s not speculation is that the most dramatic moment in all of our lives is one that none of us can recall, the moment in the womb when the self awakens, without language, without thoughts, when the light switches on, when that sense of me-ness dawns. Regardless of where it comes from, regardless of who or what turns the switch, the miracle of that moment is undeniable.

Again, however, I’m not arguing that the soul must be immaterial, that it cannot be accounted for by the accidental functioning of the brain. My gut instinct tells me that the soul is not a material phenomenon. But I acknowledge that the reverse is possible—that the soul is what the brain does and nothing more. The fact that I cannot imagine how me-ness would ever accidentally and spontaneously arise out of organic matter and physical processes doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.

Forty Years After Roe, How Should We Think About Abortion?

By Scott Rae
Biola Magazine

This January marks the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, one of the most polarizing rulings in U.S. Supreme Court history. Handed down on Jan. 22, 1973, the 7-2 decision effectively made abortion legal across the United States, deeming it to be a private decision protected under the constitutional right to due process. In the four decades since the ruling, an estimated 55 million abortions have been performed nationwide, all while the fight over the legality and morality of abortion has continued to rage on.

Biola Magazine recently sat down with professor Scott Rae to discuss the impact of the ruling, the ethics of abortion and the biblical perspective on life. Rae has served as an ethics consultant for several hospitals over the past two decades and has written extensively on beginning-of-life issues and bioethics, including in his books Moral Choices and Outside the Womb: Moral Guidance for Assisted Reproduction.

Scott, Jan. 22 marks the 40th anniversary of the roe v. Wade ruling. What made this case so significant?

Actually, it was Roe v. Wade in conjunction with its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, that together essentially legalized abortion on demand at any point in pregnancy. Roe v. Wade divided pregnancy into three trimesters, somewhat arbitrarily, because nine is divisible by three. In the first trimester, it basically said abortion on demand is no problem. In the second trimester, it said the state could put some restrictions on the practice for the sake of safety for women. In the third trimester, they argued that the state has a compelling interest in the protection of life unless the mother’s life or health is threatened.

The Doe v. Bolton decision clarified what is meant by the threat to the mother’s health, and so broadened it that virtually anything qualifies, whether it is a threat to her physical, emotional, psychological or familial health — to be decided only by her and her physician. Essentially, it opened the door to abortion on demand for all nine months of pregnancy. People tend to include both of these cases under the same umbrella, but the impact of the Doe decision was just as great, if not more so.

How would you describe the long-term cultural impact of these rulings over the past four decades?

Well, the law has a significant educational value. And this one, no doubt, has brought more acceptability to the idea of abortion. At the time, the argument was that if abortion was not legalized, it would just take place in back alleys with unqualified people. But that was a red herring. The reality is that not much of that happened prior to 1973. So, the educational value of the law has been really substantial in making abortion more acceptable. In the last 10 years, it’s been countered by the educational value of technology — with the resolution and the sophistication of ultrasound. It’s becoming harder for the average person to look at an ultrasound and say, “It’s just a clump of cells” or “It’s just a blob of tissue.”

Abortion has had an impact on how we view the end of life, too. It came full circle in the late ’90s, when the Supreme Court heard two different challenges to laws prohibiting assisted suicide. The challengers basically made the autonomy argument from abortion — “my body, my choice” — and applied that to assisted suicide. Thankfully, the Supreme Court rejected that analogy. But that analogy — that the beginning of life and the end of life are both subject to the same sort of autonomy argument — was affirmed by three different appeals courts before the Supreme Court struck it down.

Biola’s official doctrinal position is that life begins at conception. What’s the biblical basis for this?

The clearest biblical texts tell us that the unborn child growing in the womb is the object of God’s creative, initiative, loving, caring handiwork. Abortion stops the handiwork of God in the womb. The parts of Scripture that speak to this are the passages that basically treat birth and conception interchangeably — a poetic synonymous parallel. (For example, Job 3:3, Jeremiah 1:5, Isaiah 49:1, Psalm 51:5 and Psalm 139:13-16.) And the account of the Incarnation speaks to the fact that you have an image-of-God-bearing person from the very, very earliest points of pregnancy — well before most women are even aware that they’re pregnant.

Beyond the biblical case, what philosophical case can be made that personhood begins at conception?

One is our common-sense idea of who we are as a person. We see ourselves as what philosophers call a substance, which is an entity with an immaterial essence that defines and governs its physical development. A person is a substance. And the way we view things like moral responsibility and criminal justice strongly suggest that we view a person as having a continuity of identity all the way through life. If that’s true, then obviously that continuity starts at conception. There’s really no place along that continuum from conception until birth that you have any non-ad hoc way of drawing any lines.

Some people would say that you are a person when you’re able to perform a certain set of baseline functions like self-awareness or self-consciousness. But if that’s the standard, then it doesn’t make any sense that we would view people in reversible comas or under general anesthesia as persons, which we obviously do. A person is something you are, not something you do. If being a person is something that you do, then it’s by definition degreed, which means it’s a more-or-less category, not an all-or-nothing category.

How would you convince someone who argues that personhood begins at some other point — such as implantation, or when there is a heartbeat or brain activity, or when the baby is viable to live outside the womb?

With each of those points, there is no morally relevant difference between the day before that point and the day after that point. Birth is just a change of location. So is implantation. The rest of those really have nothing to do with the essence of the person.

What I’ve found most effective in convincing people about the personhood of the unborn, though, is (1) somebody who cares about the woman giving her support and advice, and (2) something that gives visual effect to her intuitions. Hearing the heartbeat or seeing the ultrasound makes it a lot tougher to say this is just a piece of tissue, sort of like my liver. If we could get most women with unwanted pregnancies to just visit the doctor once, the instances of abortion would go down dramatically.

If personhood begins at conception, is there any circumstance under which abortion is morally acceptable?

I would say that it’s only acceptable when the life of the mother is at stake. In most cases — not all — if you lose the mother, you’re going to lose the baby also. And so it’s appropriate in those cases to treat the mother and let the chips fall where they will with the baby. If she has an aggressive form of cervical cancer, for example, you do the chemo, pray hard, hope for the best, but let the chips fall where they will. I don’t see anything wrong with that, because if the mother dies, the baby is going to die.

Some people accept the position that life begins at conception, but say they are not willing to impose that view on others through the political process. is that a valid distinction?

When fundamental human rights are involved, I don’t think that distinction holds. It’s almost like saying, “If you don’t like slavery, don’t own slaves.” Or “I don’t believe slavery is right, but I’m not going to impose my views on other people.” The reason we impose those views is because fundamental civil rights are at stake, which I think is true here.

The question of when personhood begins doesn’t just affect the abortion debate. it’s also central to the area of embryonic stem cell research and reproductive technologies. in your writings about reproductive technology, you’ve expressed significant ethical concerns about in vitro fertilization (IVF). in your view, what should couples know before considering IVF?

Two things: With IVF, there is a risk of embryos being left over. Unless IVF is a total failure, the likelihood is high that you’ll have embryos left over, frozen in the lab. I would argue that whether they are in the lab or in the body is irrelevant — it’s just a difference of location, and it’s irrelevant to their status. The other thing that you have to be aware of is that the process can be too successful, and you can end up with major multiples. You can end up with a litter of children in the womb. So that runs the risk of selective abortion.

Both of those — throwing away embryos and selectively aborting fetuses — are morally the same thing. So I would tell the couple: First, don’t implant more embryos than you can safely carry. Second, commit that every embryo you create in a lab gets to be implanted— preferably with you, but putting them up for adoption is also an appropriate thing to do. Couples who adopt these embryos get the benefit of adopting, but they also get the experience of pregnancy and childbirth, which is very important to lots of women.

To many, being “pro-life” tends to be synonymous with voting a certain way. But beyond advocating for political changes, how can churches be more active in caring for the cause of the unborn?

One is to acknowledge Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. [This year it’s Jan. 20, 2013.] Acknowledge and recognize that there are women in our churches who have had abortions, which for them can be very painful, but it’s also part of being healing and redemptive. If it’s not too painful, have a woman who has had an abortion tell her story. Or a woman who was tempted to go down that road and decided not to. That’s just as powerful — especially if she’s standing there holding the hand of her 6-year-old daughter.

Second, pastors should talk about this every once in a while. You could go to a lot of churches for a long time and never know that there’s anything morally problematic about abortion. It’s not that you have to preach on the specific subject of abortion — but there are regular topics where it can be mentioned. Plant seeds when you can.

Third, have a crisis pregnancy center in your phone where you can refer women with unwanted pregnancies. Better yet would be to have a handful of women who could serve as counselors and support for women with unwanted pregnancies. That’s a start.

What Exodus 21:22 Says about Abortion

By Greg Koukl
Stand To Reason Blog

The Torah's teaching about accidental "miscarriage"; has been hotly contested concerning the value of the unborn. Is it pro-life or pro-abortion? Here are the facts. You decide.

Most attempts to argue against abortion from biblical texts are misdirected. In the absence of specific prohibitions of abortion in the Scripture, Christian pro-lifers quote equivocal passages.

Some citations use personal pronouns to describe the unborn, but many of these are in poetry texts, so the conclusion is not entirely convincing. God’s personal acquaintance with the unborn can be explained by His omniscience. After all, some texts make it clear that God “knows” us even before we’re conceived.

One text, however, is strong. Exodus 21:22-25 is usually used to argue that the Bible assigns a lower value to the unborn than to other humans. Rabbis and Jewish thinkers I’ve discussed this point with on the radio have been especially adamant--even irate. I think the evidence shows, though, that Moses taught just the opposite. If I’m right, we have a powerful argument for the value Scripture puts on the life of the unborn.

Dead or Alive?

The New American Standard Bible (NASB) renders Exodus 21:22-25 this way:

And if men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she has a miscarriage, yet there is no [further] injury, he shall surely be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him; and he shall pay as the judges decide. But if there is any [further] injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.[1]

This translation suggests that if a miscarriage takes place and the child is lost, the antagonists are simply fined, but if the mother dies in the scuffle, then the penalty is “life for life.” In the Torah, it seems, the unborn is not considered fully human.

Theologian Millard Erickson notes that in this view, “the lex talionis [life for life] is applied only if the mother is harmed. On this basis it is concluded that the fetus was not considered a soul or a person, and thus is not to be thought of as fully human.”[2]
 
At issue is the phrase translated “she has a miscarriage.” There is an assumption made about this word that is crucial. In English, the word “miscarriage” implies the death of the child. Webster’s New World Dictionary defines miscarriage as, “The expulsion of the fetus from the womb before it is sufficiently developed to survive.”[3] In the struggle, the child is aborted, and so a fine is levied.

Here’s the crux of the issue: Does the Hebrew word carry the same meaning? Is it correct to presume that the miscarriage of Exodus 21:22 produces a dead child, just like an abortion? This is the single most important question that needs to be answered here. If it does, the English word “miscarriage” is the right choice. If it does not, then the picture changes dramatically.

Are we justified in assuming that the child is dead? The answer is in the original language. There’s a history of how these words are used in the Hebrew Bible, and that history is important. Let’s look at it.

Yeled and Yasa

A word’s meaning in any language is determined in two steps. We learn a word’s range of meaning--its possible definitions--inductively by examining its general usage. We learn its specific meaning within that range by the immediate context.

The relevant phrase in the passage, “...she has a miscarriage...,” reads w˚yase û ye ladêhâ in the Hebrew. It’s a combination of a Hebrew noun--yeled--and a verb--yasa--and literally means “the child comes forth.” The NASB makes note of this literal rendering in the margin.

The Hebrew noun translated “child” in this passage is yeled[4] (yeladim in the plural), and means “child, son, boy, or youth.”[5] It comes from the primary root word yalad,[6] meaning “to bear, bring forth, or beget.” In the NASB yalad is translated “childbirth” 10 times, some form of “gave birth” over 50 times, and either “bore,” “born,” or “borne” 180 times.

The verb yasa[7] is a primary, primitive root that means “to go or come out.” It is used over a thousand times in the Hebrew Scriptures and has been translated 165 different ways in the NASB--escape, exported, go forth, proceed, take out, to name a few. This gives us a rich source for exegetical comparison. It’s translated with some form of “coming out” (e.g., “comes out,” “came out,” etc.) 103 times, and some form of “going” 445 times.

What’s most interesting is to see how frequently yasa refers to the emergence of a living thing:

Genesis 1:24 “Then God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind’; and it was so.” 

Genesis 8:17 [to Noah] “Bring out with you every living thing of all flesh that is with you, birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth....”

Genesis 15:4 “This man will not be your heir; but one who shall come forth from your own body....”

Genesis 25:25-26 “Now the first came forth red, all over like a hairy garment; and they named him Esau. And afterward his brother came forth with his hand holding on to Esau’s heel, so his name was called Jacob.”

1 Kings 8:19 “Nevertheless you shall not build the house, but your son who shall be born to you, he shall build the house for My name.”

Jeremiah 1:5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I have appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

2 Kings 20:18 “And some of your sons who shall issue from you, whom you shall beget, shall be taken away; and they shall become officials in the palace of the king of Babylon.”

As you can see, it’s common for yasa to describe the “coming forth” of something living, frequently a child. There is only one time yasa is clearly used for a dead child. Numbers 12:12 says, “Oh, do not let her be like one dead, whose flesh is half eaten away when he comes from his mother’s womb!”

Note here, that we don’t infer the child’s death from the word yasa, but from explicit statements in the context. This is a still-birth, not a miscarriage. The child is dead before the birth (“whose flesh is half eaten away”), and doesn’t die as a result of the untimely delivery, as in a miscarriage.

Yasa is used 1,061 times in the Hebrew Bible. It is never translated “miscarriage” in any other case. Why should the Exodus passage be any different?

Clues from the Context

This inductive analysis shows us something important: Nothing about the word yasa implies the death of the child. The context may give us this information, as in Numbers 12:12, but the word itself does not.

This leads us to our next question: What in the context justifies our assumption that the child that “comes forth” is dead? The answer is, nothing does. There is no indication anywhere in the verse that a fine is assessed for a miscarriage and a more severe penalty is assessed for harming the mother.

This becomes immediately clear when the Hebrew words are translated in their normal, conventional way (the word “further” in the NASB is not in the original):

“And if men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that the child comes forth, yet there is no injury, he shall surely be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him; and he shall pay as the judges decide. But if there is any injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life....”

The text seems to require a fine for the premature birth, but injury to either of the parties involved incurs a more severe punishment.[8] Millard Erickson notes that “there is no specification as to who must be harmed for the lex talionis [life for life] to come into effect. Whether the mother or the child, the principle applies.”[9]
 
Gleason Archer, Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, concludes:

“There is no ambiguity here, whatever. What is required is that if there should be an injury either to the mother or to her children, the injury shall be avenged by a like injury to the assailant. If it involves the life (nepes) of the premature baby, then the assailant shall pay for it with his life. There is no second-class status attached to the fetus under this rule; he is avenged just as if he were a normally delivered child or an older person: life for life. Or if the injury is less, but not serious enough to involve inflicting a like injury on the offender, then he may offer compensation in monetary damages...”[10]

Two Rejoinders

Two further objections need to be dealt with. First, if this is a premature birth and not a miscarriage, why the fine?

Babies born prematurely require special care. Because their prenatal development has been interrupted, they are especially prone to difficulty. Pre-term babies often can’t breast feed, and there can be respiratory problems leading to permanent brain damage. The fine represents reimbursement for the expense of an untimely birth, and punitive damages for the serious trauma.

Anyway, even if the fine was for the miscarriage, this wouldn’t prove the child was less than human. A few verses later (v. 32), Moses imposes a fine for the death of a slave, but this doesn’t mean the slave is sub-human.

Second, was this the only word that could be used to indicate a miscarriage? No. Two other words were available to convey this particular meaning, if that’s what the writer had in mind: nepel and sakal. These are used seven times in the Hebrew text.

The noun nepel[11] means “miscarriage” or “abortion,” and is used three times:

Job 3:16 “Or like a miscarriage which is discarded, I would not be, as infants that never saw light.” 

Eccl. 6:3-4 “If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, however many they be, but his soul is not satisfied with good things, and he does not even have a proper burial, then I say, ‘Better the miscarriage than he, for it comes in futility and goes into obscurity.’”

Psalms 58:8 “Let them be as a snail which melts away as it goes along, like the miscarriages of a woman which never see the sun.”

The verb sakal[12] means “to be bereaved” and is used four times, including one time when it’s actually translated “abort:”

Genesis 31:38 “These twenty years I have been with you; your ewes and your female goats have not miscarried, nor have I eaten the rams of your flocks.” 

Exodus 23:26 “There shall be no one miscarrying or barren in your land; I will fulfill the number of your days.”

Hosea 9:14 “Give them, O Lord-- what wilt Thou give? Give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts.”

Job 21:10 “His ox mates without fail; his cow calves and does not abort.

Moses had words in his vocabulary that literally meant abortion or miscarriage, but he didn’t use them in Exodus 21:22. Instead, he chose the same word he used in many other places to signify a living child being brought forth.

Yasa doesn’t mean miscarriage in the sense we think of that word. Instead, the combination of yeled with yasa suggests a living child coming forth from the womb. Nowhere else is this word ever translated “miscarriage.” Why? Because the word doesn’t mean the baby is still-born. It simply means the child comes out.

Three Questions

When someone raises this issue with you, ask these three questions.

First, why presume the child is dead? Though the English word “miscarriage” entails this notion, nothing in the Hebrew wording suggests it. Yasa doesn’t mean miscarriage; it means “to come forth.” The word itself never suggests death.[13] In fact, the word generally implies the opposite: live birth. If it’s never translated elsewhere as miscarriage, why translate it that way here?

Second, what in the context itself implies the death of the child? There’s nothing that does, nothing at all. The fine does not necessarily mean the child is dead, and even if it did this wouldn’t indicate that the child wasn’t fully human (as in the case of the slave in v. 32).

Third, ancient Hebrew had a specific word for miscarriage. It was used in other passages. Why not here? Because Moses didn’t mean miscarriage. When his words are simply taken at face value, there is no confusion at all. The verse is clear and straight-forward. Everything falls into place.

Regardless of the translation, it’s clear that killing the child--and the text does refer to the unborn as a child--is a criminal act. There is no justification for abortion-on-demand from the Torah. Instead, we have a reasonable--even powerful--argument that God views the unborn as valuable as any other human being.

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[1] The 1995 updated version of the NASB now renders this verse, “If men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she gives birth prematurely, yet there is no injury, he shall surely be fined...” etc. [2] Millard Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1985), p. 555.
[3] Webster’s New World Dictionary, Second College Edition (New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1984).
[4] Strong’s Index word #3206.
[5] Definitions come from the New American Standard Exhaustive Concordance. For further documentation, see the Hebrew/English Lexicon of the Old Testament, by Brown, Driver and Briggs, the standard lexicon of ancient Hebrew.
[6] Strong’s Index word #3205.
[7] Strong’s Index word #3318.
[8] The New International Version is correct in rendering this passage, “If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life.”
[9] Millard Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1985), p. 556.
[10] Gleason Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982), p. 248.
[11] Strong’s Index word #5309.
[12] Strong’s Index word #7921.
[13] Again, in the Numbers passage the context indicates the death, not the word yasa itself.

 

For Christians, First Principles in the Gun Debate

By John Mark Reynolds
Philosophical Fragments

If government were good, only God would have guns. Yet humans abuse God’s gift of human freedom, and so guns abound. What can we do about it?

Christians want peace, but perfect peace is not possible in our present condition without tyranny. We must tolerate law — a thing that does violence to our liberty — while remembering no law is good in itself. Liberty is good in itself, while law is the compromise we make with our inability to be good and free, and the law is only good when it maximizes liberty and minimizes vice.

Nothing is so good that humans cannot mess it up, and nothing is so bad that God cannot redeem it. If we do not start with this simple truth when it comes to guns, then our discussion will go no place. Guns can easily kill, though they need not be used to kill. Killing can be murder and murder is immoral. Guns, therefore, like cars, require thoughtful regulation in a fallen world. This is why both guns and cars are already regulated.

No gun control the President can suggest will deserve moral condemnation or praise, because there is no fundamental human right to own a gun as there is a fundamental right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Before guns existed, men were free and if all guns vanished men would still be free.

If men were angels, then every man could own a gun. If men were devils, no man should own a gun. Since no person is either an angel or a demon, and since guns are so easy to abuse, we must measure what to do about them.

Of course, gun regulations, which Americans already have, limit our liberty, but a limit on liberty need not make me a slave.  As a conservative, I recognize that this is a pragmatic decision between liberty and law. Regulation reduces what it regulates, but it also infringes on my liberty. There is also the pragmatic question of whether more gun control will prevent any of the events such as the Newtown horror.

Sociology and science can help us answer those questions, but science cannot tell us what society Americans want. Turning to another easily abused good, media, makes this obvious. The scientific consensus is that consuming violent media increases the tendency to violence, but that agreement doesn’t tell us anything about we should do. Christianity warns that Utopia isn’t coming with direct divine rule, so no solution will be perfect. The awesome liberty to play Halo means that unstable people can easily play Halo. Most Americans think the censorship of such media will not lead to a sufficiently significant decrease in violence to be worth our loss of liberty. Christians know that giving the government power is necessary, but also understand that all such power will be abused.

Increasing government power over anything is always dangerous, though increasing my liberty is also dangerous! It is impossible to know when “tipping points” are reached, when liberty devolves into licentiousness or the law into legalism.

This means there an be no single Christian position on gun control. Christians can live peacefully in societies where there is no right to bear arms and in societies, such as ours, where there is such a civil right. We believe in liberty, morality, and law, but don’t know how to balance those goods.

That is the downside of God’s gift of free will.

Pragmatically, as a citizen, I believe that an armed citizenry is worth any increase in violence that may result. I also believe that we have sufficient regulations in place and no new regulations, given the number of guns in the society already, are likely to prevent another Newtown. There has been no increase in such violence, and it seems unwise to pass laws only so that we can have the satisfaction of having done something.

If the Federal government decides further to limit magazine sizes in an act of therapeutic regulation, however, I think the Republic will no more be in imminent peril, than if it decided to ban certain kinds of violent video games. We were free before Grand Theft Auto and could be free without it.

I hope we do neither, but only because I believe too much liberty and privacy has been lost already.