Through a Sonogram Darkly

Life. When does it begin? Amid the white noise of political talking points designed to distract us from the question's stark simplicity; under the cackle of learned voices adding syllables to their words as if verbosity equals content - it's fair to say that the Western world "sees through a sonogram darkly."

Like the Apostle Paul's famous saying in I Corinthians 13:12, "For now we see through a glass, darkly," the updated, re-contextualized version will stir up a variety of plausible interpretations.

In one sense, "Now we see through a sonogram darkly" could have been the slogan of the Obama presidential campaign last year, as the pro-abortion Democrat made every effort to avoid hard questions about the status of the unborn (and later, in a speech at Notre Dame, told the graduating class that they can never be certain of the truth of their Christian beliefs and therefore should not impose those beliefs on others). Candidate Obama went so far as to conclude that the mystery of when human life begins is above the "pay grade" of the most powerful public official in the world - though even secular biologists are unanimous in defining an embryo or a fetus as a living human organism in the same way that they define a full-grown man as a living human organism.

The morally vacuous "beyond my pay grade," while a brilliant piece of sophistry, may soon return to haunt us like a satisfied belch from a cannibal's overstuffed belly, in a time when scientists are demanding the right to harvest human embryos for experimentation, the United Kingdom is pushing efforts to create synthetic blood supplies from embryonic stem cells, and feminists are venerating the wholesale slaughter of fetuses as a "sacrament" on par with the Eucharist. Can "beyond my pay grade" ethics prepare us for a future in which parents have the option to clone their children for spare parts, or to select their genetic makeup like ice cream toppings at an all-you-can-eat dessert bar?

The life-as-commodity flesh fest - reminiscent of the ancient demon Moloch feeding on the offspring of his worshipers - is a mutation of the Christian rebirth-through-death theme as could only be concocted in the darkness of the existential placenta where the human being regresses into clusters of randomly firing neurotransmitters and, losing even that, into undifferentiated cells. It is the placenta of the modern mind.

As we drift closer toward incarnating the dystopian nightmares of the darkest sci-fi novels, pro-life activists marvel that their tactics have made minimal headway. How, they wonder, can a rational human being look at the thumb-sucking, foot-kicking, facial-expression-making baby in the sonogram image, or see the hacked up limbs of "terminated pregnancies," or watch a tiny hand reach out of the placenta and grasp a doctor's finger - how can any normal, civilized person with a heart in his chest bear witness to these things and still say a fetus is a cancer?

The jagged twists and turns a mind might follow into the murky neural pathways of the pro-death machine deserve book-length treatment. But first we have to recognize a fundamental problem: that from the beginning of the journey to the gruesome end, the pro-abortionist is watching life "through a sonogram darkly." He might have access to the same pictures, the same research, the same technology the pro-life activist flaunts on the street corner, but he approaches it through a haze.

When I was a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh, my science professor remarked to a lecture hall full of young, impressionable students that a unified human consciousness (i.e., a person) is an illusion created by a chance synchronization of various and sundry electro-chemical activities. This professor knew everything there was to know about the microscopic bits of the human brain, but when it came to the big picture of how the parts fit together and become a human mind, he seemed to have forgotten that a big picture even existed.

While it is true that science affirms the existence of a thing called "human life," modern science defines that life as a strictly physical set of attributes and processes. Worse, when that "life" is wagered at the primordial casino of Darwinian evolution, the life of a man becomes barely distinguishable from an elephant or a daffodil. Hence, Princeton's professor of bioethics, Peter Singer, can simultaneously endorse vegetarianism and infanticide (up to the age of two) without seeing a contradiction. Hence, scholars must invent new criteria, such as "sentience" or "viability" or the power to make rational choices, to distinguish "persons" from mere organisms.

This self-imposed blindness came into fashion in the 19th century, when the chatter of Kant, Hume, and other philosophers spawned a belief in an unbridgeable wall between the physical realm and the supernatural realm. All we can know for sure are the laws of reason (which tell us nothing about the spiritual) and what we can experience with our five senses. Taking their logic to the next step, the philosophers despaired of even trusting our physical senses. So long as we are trapped within ourselves, in the dark room of our finite awareness, the only thing we can know for sure is that we are experiencing something; we cannot reach out to the thing itself.

A thumb-sucking fetus is a hard sell to a pro-abortion activist who has accepted the physical/spiritual wall of separation. He barely believes in his own personhood, let alone that of the fist-sized "parasite" in his wife's body; and if he concedes sacred rights to other full-grown people, it is only to sustain the illusion of what he hopes, but cannot prove, is true of himself. The irony of the secular humanist is that he loses his humanity in the darkness. The irony of the Darwinian naturalist is that the triumph of evolution is the annihilation of its crowning glory. The irony of the materialist is that matter loses meaning, and like bricks without mortar, the meaningless matter collapses upon itself, pulling Babel from heaven to earth and losing the earth itself in the sundering.

So far, I've spoken primarily of atheists and agnostics. But what of the Harvard-educated feminist who says, "I'm a Christian and I believe abortion is murder, but that's a faith issue and I can't impose it on other women's bodies." This person, like the agnostic, sees through a sonogram darkly; the difference is that she thinks she has found a loophole. The sanctity of life and the reality of the spirit realm remain unknowable to her. The wall is still there. But to cope with the unbearable solitude of the existential self, she has taken a shot in the dark. She uses emotions and imagination to leap beyond the placental walls and find rebirth in a self-imposed fiction. She is not prepared to say she "believes" in the sanctity of life in the same way that she "believes" in gravity or the incandescent light bulb, but only in the sense that she appreciates the sentimental value of the idea of sacred life. She embraces religious concepts only to the extent that she can enjoy them and still remain a modernist. In short, this "Christian" is nearly as agnostic as the agnostics.

But what of the devout, charismatic mystic who says, "I'm a Christian and I know in my heart that abortion is murder, but this knowledge can only be received spiritually. That is what separates faith from science, and that is why I can't impose my views." Here, we have a marriage of modern political philosophy and ancient Greek notions of truth. We have withdrawn again into the dark-this time the dark of Plato's cave.

It is to the discredit of the church that, throughout history, we have often interpreted the Bible as if it were a product of Greece, not Judea. When Paul gazed through a glass darkly, we imagined him to be the Greek Plato, trapped in the cave of his physical body and looking at shadows on the wall. The goal of neo-platonist philosphy was to escape the world of flesh and be elevated into the spiritual/intellectual realm. The material world was useless. A husk to be cast off. A veil concealing an inner world that was the sole source of all truth. In contrast to the scientist who looks outward for truth, the philosopher looked inward. The theologian Augustine of Hippo was influenced by the neo-platonic view, but he adapted it to Christianity, instructing the seeker of truth to look inward and then turn upward into the light of God himself. For Augustine and others like him, the glass is dark because it is glass. We will not see God face-to-face until the glass has been broken and our naked minds touch eternity.

If the blindness of the agnostic comes from his disbelief in the spiritual, and the blindness of the Christian Platonist from his disinterest in the physical, is there a third and better way that does not force us to choose one realm or the other?

As it turns out, Christianity and Plato have always been uncomfortable allies. The central event that defines our faith - the death and resurrection of Christ - demands a healthy respect for our physical bodies as much as it demands us to believe in something beyond them. The material realm is not merely a veil - it is a window and a revealer of God's mysteries. Paul himself believed this, which is why he wrote in Romans 1:20, "For since the creation of the world God's invisible attributes - his eternal power and divine nature - have been understood and observed by what he made, so that people are without excuse." When Christ became flesh, he did a new thing, but it was also a very old thing - as old as time and space and matter. Far from an inward turning from the world, the religion of the Hebrews was robustly planted in the world, in burning bushes and bloody altars and a Holy Land. The Gospel the martyrs suffered and died for was not the hope of escape from the flesh, but of flesh that lives forever.

In what sense, then, does our modern world truly see through a sonogram darkly? Why can we not answer the simple question, "When does human life begin?" Why have science and spirituality been severed, why have the body and soul been divorced, until all things have faded to cold, dark, inhuman incoherence?

The full verse of I Corinthians 13:12 reads, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." Paul's words here require context. Throughout the Old Testament, we come across individuals who fear to see God's face, lest it destroy them. Even Moses dared not have a face-to-face encounter with God, but instead looked upon his "hind parts." A full-fledged Platonist might consider such fear to be absurd at a number of levels. But this biblical fear of God does not begin in philosophy. It grows out of history. The God who once walked on the Garden of Eden and spoke face-to-face with his creatures now shields his glory from the people, while they in turn hide from him. When looked at from the standpoint of biblical history, rather than Greek philosophy, the dark glass takes on a very different nuance. The glass is not dark because it is glass; it is dark because it is damaged. Sin has corrupted the flesh, breaking the image of God in man and warping our understanding.

Fast-forwarding to the 21st century, the pro-abortionist "sees through a sonogram darkly" because he is a sinner. It is sin, not religion, that impedes science and human progress, because it blinds us to nature's self-evident truths and destroys the very things we are seeking to study. This blindness is willful, it is stubborn, and it is the antithesis of detached neutrality. The secular naturalist prefers not to talk about "Truth"; he scoffs at any mention of presuppositions and underlying theories of knowledge as irrelevant and quarrelsome metaphysics. Yet, these metaphysical choices have real consequences ... consequences as large as millions of slaughtered born and unborn children.