Does a fertilized egg have a soul?

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=Apos]
I agree. A lot of discussions are like this, and I can’t imagine why anyone would think they can go anywhere.

When no can:

  1. define what a soul even IS (in a positive sense) or DOES
  2. provide evidence that it exists, ever

How can we debate when and where its present and when not? That’s just plain nuts.
[/QUOTE]

But what’s the alternative? Should we simply not discuss it and form two armed camps? :slight_smile:

Although there are lots of fundamentalists who are never going to be swayed, I think there are still even more people caught somewhere in the middle, and who can benefit from a discussion in which all sides have a chance to present their arguments.

22

I agree this can’t be a debate. This can only be a gathering of opinions and ideas, and I’m more interested in those than a debate, personally.

I don’t think a fertilized egg has a soul. Of course I only think what I think, and claim to have no answers for anyone else. I do believe people have, for lack of a better word, a soul, but I don’t think it’s fixed in the body. However, it can not survive for terribly long without a body, nor the body for very long without the soul, absent ventilators.

My daughter was born at 23 weeks - over 4 months early. She had blood, she had “quickened”, but there was no soul there. The only way I can explain it is to think about the way a room feels with a sleeping baby in it vs. a doll. She “felt” like a doll.

Starting around 27 weeks from the start of my pregnancy (so about 4 weeks old), there were glimpses of “somebody home”. Not all the time, and not for long, but sometimes. The way I choose to interpret this is that her soul was darting in and out of her body. Around 3 or 4 months after her due date, she was “there” all the time, even when she was sleeping. My theory, based on lots of other babies, is that a normal baby incarnates slowly over the last 3 months of pregnancy and the first 3 months post-birth.

I’ve been around slowly dying people, and I feel the same thing happening in reverse. “They” go away more and more often until they just don’t come back and the body finally dies.

I’ve never witnessed a sudden death, so I don’t know what happens there.

23

[QUOTE=Colibri]
It is a bit absurd to base religious beliefs, such as when a soul becomes linked to a body, to scientific criteria, such as when an egg is fertilized. As such, this question can’t really be answered. (Nonetheless, many anti-abortion advocates do try to make this connection.)

[/QUOTE]

Actually many religious beliefs seemed to be tied into the state of (pre-scientific) knowledge of the world at the time they were created. The absurdity comes from the mismatch of those old beliefs with our present knowledge.

24

[QUOTE=monavis]
In my beliefs life and soul are the same thing.
[/QUOTE]
So a bacterium has a soul?

Seems to me that when people refer to a “soul” they’re talking about one of two things: a personality that survives the death of the body, for which there is zero evidence and seems extremely unlikely. If this is what you’re talking about, then first provide evidence that there really is this soul thing.

The second meaning is just who the person is (the word “mind” is equivalent), then there is strong evidence that this is just the process of the electrochemical reactions that happen in the physical brain. Since an embryo has no brain, then it has no soul.

25

No. Souls are made up. They are attempts to separate us from the rest of living things large and small, and no such division actually exists. Life is a continuum.
And every flake of dandruff has as much “soul” in it as an egg, fertilized or not.

26

[QUOTE=Paul in Saudi]
It is not known. Some would say since it is not known, in all cases we ought to err on the side of caution.
[/QUOTE]

Caution being not pronouncing or supporting things which we have no proof of? Or caution being since someone in authority says it exists, we should strive to protect it?

27

[QUOTE=John Mace]
But what’s the alternative? Should we simply not discuss it and form two armed camps? :slight_smile:

Although there are lots of fundamentalists who are never going to be swayed, I think there are still even more people caught somewhere in the middle, and who can benefit from a discussion in which all sides have a chance to present their arguments.
[/QUOTE]

But the problem is that all the arguments will be essentially incoherent regardless. It would be like a debate over which mountain has a square circle at the top. It’s not just that we can’t agree, it’s that the discussion itself is missing key elements that give it any purchase in a conceptual realm beyond the words we’re using. We’d just be tossing around words and claims, but the core of the argument isn’t over any consistent unified concept, so it’s just going to be confusion on top of more confusion.

Most of the “meanings” given to the word soul, even setting aside that they never really define anything other than it’s implications rather than what it is, don’t even make sense in the context of embryos. A mind that survives death? What sort of mind experience does an embryo have that survives death? Does a dead embryo dream of mitotic division?

28

The Soul is a purely religious concept, hence my first post asking for what religion the OP was curious about. Once we set on a particular religion, we can agree to terms and discuss.

Alternatively, though, there is another valid non-religious discussion that might be what the OP intended which is: At which point after conception does the concept of human life apply to the gestating life?

Somewhere between “egg and spermatozoa side by side” and “Dad, can I have the car tonight?” a human life starts. When exactly does that happen?

29

[QUOTE=Colibri]
Also, much of the political opposition to both abortion rights and stem cell research is based on the religious belief that a soul is acquired at the moment of fertilization.
[/QUOTE]
Which, as I tried to illustrate with my link, does not exist. At least as a discrete point in time.

30

[QUOTE=Sapo]
Somewhere between “egg and spermatozoa side by side” and “Dad, can I have the car tonight?” a human life starts. When exactly does that happen?
[/QUOTE]

Life is a very graded continuum. Legally there must be a line drawn, but from a scientific standpoint, I’d argue that drawing lines is short-sighted and subjective. Bacteria are clearly alive. Are viruses? Are prions? Is a conceptus a human being? Is a blastocyst? Is a gastrula?

31

[QUOTE=Sapo]
The Soul is a purely religious concept, hence my first post asking for what religion the OP was curious about. Once we set on a particular religion, we can agree to terms and discuss.

Alternatively, though, there is another valid non-religious discussion that might be what the OP intended which is: At which point after conception does the concept of human life apply to the gestating life?

Somewhere between “egg and spermatozoa side by side” and “Dad, can I have the car tonight?” a human life starts. When exactly does that happen?
[/QUOTE]

Good questions. We’ve had this discussion several times before, and if you mean what is the scientific answer, even that can depend.

There are any number of arbtrary goal posts than cen be set up, scientifically:

Fertilization: The unique DNA of an individual has been formed.

Brain function: We recognize brain activity as being crucial to human life, just as we do to human death. Of course, there’s “brain function” and then there’s “brain function”.
**
Transition from embryo to fetus**: The major organs and structures have formed.

Measurable brain waves: See above, brain function.

Viability outside the womb: For obvious reasons.

Birth: Also for obvious reasons.

Those are only a partial list of pre-birth milestones, btw.

Then it gets sticky. A human baby is, compared to other primates, born prematurely. It’s not until we’re several months old that we start to take on characteristics that distinguish us from other primates. And we don’t really recognize ourselves as individuals until we’re about 2 years old.

If we look at it from a scientific and an ethical standpoint, we need to ask ourselves what does science tell us about human development and what does ethics tell us about the kind of society we want to live in. I’d be willing, from a scientific standpoint, to say that a newborn isn’t “really” human, but I think our society would be damaged signficantly if we leaglized infanticide.

I’ve come to the conclusion, personally, that we can allow viability outside the womb (minus a few weeks, to be safe) to be the criteria. Killing a fetus that would almost certainly survive outside the womb isn’t much different, in my mind, from killing a newborn (especially a prematurely born baby). Unless the helath of the mother is compromised, it seems not to be too much to ask that she carry the fetus a few more months to term. Few, if any, women only learn that they are pregnant at that stage, so they’ve had time to consider the options.

32

[QUOTE=Sapo]
Somewhere between “egg and spermatozoa side by side” and “Dad, can I have the car tonight?” a human life starts. When exactly does that happen?
[/QUOTE]

Some would say when you buy your own car. :slight_smile:

33

Purely religious? I’m sure some non-religious people would disagree with that and actually believe people have a soul, maybe not the part of you that survives after your physical body dies, but like in the definitions dictionary.com gives (in my last post) it’s the emotional part of the human being. Not just an eternal part of you.

34

The problem with a discussion like this is that it gives a concession to religious beliefs. As soon as you join into the discussion, you’ve tacitly agreed that a soul exists. In my experience in religious discussions, the religious tend to take a ‘If some of it is true, all of it must be true’ kind of take on things. Once you’ve agreed that soul exists, you hear arguments like ‘If it has a soul then its human and abortion is murder and murder is a sin’ and ‘God put the soul there’ etc. Once you’ve agreed that a soul exists, you have to agree that the soul came from somewhere, that it’s source is god, etc. and that’s what they try to get you with.

By pointing out the non-reality of the soul and not participating in the discussion, you’re taking away the common acceptance of things like this, and forcing religious belief to stand on it’s own merit. Or not.

35

[QUOTE=Paul in Saudi]
It is not known. Some would say since it is not known, in all cases we ought to err on the side of caution.
[/QUOTE]
Which means we should disiss the idea of a soul. There is no evidence for one, or that it is even possible, therefore the “cautious” intellectual position is disbelief. Second, belief in the soul is dangerous because of the beliefs and behaviors it leads to; like declaring that other groups, like racial minorities or women have no souls or inferior souls and can be enslaved or abused or massacred. Belief in the soul in general leads people to ignore the actual, provable consequences of their actions and base their behavior on something that is either unreal, or might as well be. Even on this message board, I see people dismiss the suffering of people in “this world” because of the “eternal paradise” that awaits their souls.

So for intellectual, moral and practical reasons, I consider the cautious position to be disbelief. There’s no rational reason to believe in souls, and belief in one make you dangerous to yourself and others.

36

How about this: There is some quality which a human being has, as a result of which a human has certain rights which must be protected. It is, or can be, moral to kill a fly, or a cow, or a dog, but almost everyone, religious and nonreligious alike, agree that it is not moral to kill a human (at least, not without the human’s consent: Euthenasia is a different debate). There is something about a human which makes the killing of a human immoral. Note, incidentally, that I am not, in any way, saying that this quality persists after death, and you don’t have to use the loaded word “soul” to describe that quality, if you don’t want to. The question then becomes, at what point in development does the organism gain this quality? Here’s where the “err on the side of caution” argument comes in: Killing an entity which has that quality is regarded as a very serious offense, so if one is uncertain as to whether an entity has that quality, one ought not to kill that entity.

I do not, however, think that this can be validly extended all the way to the point of conception. Whatever the quality is which must be respected, it must be some function of our mind, and the mind, to our knowledge, cannot exist without neural activity. An embryo at a sufficiently early stage of development has no nerves, and therefore has nothing which can be remotely considered a brain, and therefore cannot have a mind, as we know it, so I assert that an embryo at that stage is clearly on the “not person” side of the line, and there is no moral issue with killing such an embryo. I don’t know exactly at what stage of development neural tissue starts developing (some help, biology folks?), but it’s clearly after the fertilized egg stage.

37

Stuff it

Incompetent souls have incompetent bodies - otherwise they would not be a problem.

I reckon that we should apply the Turing Test to ‘humanity’

  • if it don’t look like it, sound like it or behave like it - then it is just not a member of society

  • and then, if it is a liability, kill it.

38

[QUOTE=Chronos]
I do not, however, think that this can be validly extended all the way to the point of conception. Whatever the quality is which must be respected, it must be some function of our mind…
[/QUOTE]
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan wrote an excellent essay about this very topic:

http://www.2think.org/abortion.shtml:

39

The problem with this discussion, and others like it, is that the issue of the soul, or when life begins, or what life is in this context is a moral discussion, not a scientific one. John’s milestones, for example, are good data, but none of them say anything about what we ought to do with a fetus/embryo/child at that particular stage of development. If one person believes human life begins at conception, while another believes it starts when there is recognizable brain activity, they can believe this with exactly the same access to and understanding of the scientific information.

The true moral question then becomes, I think, what influence should a person believing in moral principle X have on someone believing in moral principle Y, assuming these principles don’t affect other acknoledged moral actors. Thus believing murder is okay doesn’t cut it.

The difference between schools for this moral principle is whether one school or another feels there is a great decider. Relatively few vegetarians wish to make eating meat illegal. Very few carnivores wish to force vegetarians to eat meat. But those who believe in an absolute moral authority, which they have access to, often believe they can coerce others into following it. And thus we have our stem cell/abortion problem.

40

[QUOTE=Chronos]
I do not, however, think that this can be validly extended all the way to the point of conception. Whatever the quality is which must be respected, it must be some function of our mind, and the mind, to our knowledge, cannot exist without neural activity. An embryo at a sufficiently early stage of development has no nerves, and therefore has nothing which can be remotely considered a brain, and therefore cannot have a mind, as we know it, so I assert that an embryo at that stage is clearly on the “not person” side of the line, and there is no moral issue with killing such an embryo. I don’t know exactly at what stage of development neural tissue starts developing (some help, biology folks?), but it’s clearly after the fertilized egg stage.
[/QUOTE]

But any fetal brain activity is likely to be no more “advanced” than a chimp’s, and would still represent only the potiential for humanness, not humanness itself. I believe there have been brain waves measured in 6-month old fetuses, and that’s about the time when the brain starts to surge in growth. And of course even an embryo has a brain “bud” at some point-- it appears at about 6 weeks or so.

I’m afraid that the “humanness” argument will lead us to consider infanticed, a practice is fairly common in hunger/gatherer societies. A newborn child is recognizably human, in physical form, but not wrt to its brain.

I think we are better starting with the assumption that we will not kill newborns and work our way backwards from there. When does a fetus acquire the (honorary) status of a newborn-- I’d say when it is not viable outside the womb.