A recent opinion of the Alabama Supreme Court declared that frozen embryos have a right to life. Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote: “Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.” Many decry this ruling as violating the Establishment Clause because a clear evocation of a religious belief is used to support government restrictions on individual behavior.
But the problem is much deeper than citing God in a court opinion. It goes back to the Reformation and Wars of Religion of the 16th and 17th centuries which influenced our Founders to disallow any establishment of religion in the United States.
Before the Reformation, the Catholic Church dominated what Christians in Europe considered to be an all-important concern, entry into heaven after death. During the Reformation, many Christians broke with the Church and endorsed different views about the requirements for a blessed afterlife.
Because the issues concerned the alternatives of eternal bliss vs. eternal damnation, proponents of each side sought to impose their view on the other side. Catholic kings persecuted Protestants and Protestants persecuted Catholics.
Protestants and Catholics differed about the existence of Purgatory where, according to Catholics, many souls wait while those on earth give the Church money to advance their loved ones towards heaven. Protestants denied the existence of Purgatory. The two sides differed also on the Bible’s meaning. Did it specify that only the Church in Rome should guide human beings? Protestants said “no,” and claimed that their reading of the Bible was correct because it was guided by the Holy Spirit. Another contentious issue concerned transubstantiation. Was the body and blood of Christ really in the wine and bread used in the Eucharist?
Europeans tortured and killed one another over these matters for more than 160 years. Near the end of the 17th century the philosopher John Locke wrote “An Essay on Toleration” which justified an end to the violence by making a distinction between the secular and religious realms. Governments properly had jurisdiction only about secular matters.
As an empiricist, Locke claimed that evidence of the five senses was the key to government decision-making and authority. Governments could decide when and where canals were to be built to foster commerce, how large the navy should be, and whether coal should be used for heating within city limits. The benefits and burdens of such decisions are available to all upon empirical investigation.
Religious issues, by contrast, although more important than secular ones, could not be settled by empirical means. One can’t tell empirically if purgatory exists, if the bread in the Eucharist is really Christ’s body, or whom the Holy Spirit is guiding. Therefore, on these issues, people must simply agree to disagree and leave each free to follow his/her own beliefs, thereby avoiding war.
The Founders of our country incorporated this view in the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. The government cannot determine what is true in religious matters and require the population to act accordingly. Governments have jurisdiction only over secular matters, matters which can be guided by empirical evidence. Religious matters are those about which no empirical evidence can be expected to convince a rational person who disagrees.
This view of religion is built into legislation concerning conscientious objection to the draft.
A person who objects to participating in all wars regardless of empirically available evidence that a given war is advisable may be a conscientious objector (CO). But anyone who grounds his objections to military service on political, social, strategic, or any other beliefs that can be justified or rejected on empirical grounds is not a CO, because his view isn’t based on “religious training and belief.”
The claim that embryos have a right to life, or any rights at all as persons under the Constitution is a religious belief, by the Court’s definition, because no empirical evidence can convince those who disagree.
People who assert such rights on behalf of embryos cite their genetic code, which is uniquely human. The other side emphasizes differences between embryos and people with developed brains. Our brains enable language and abstract thinking, uniquely human characteristics which, in their view, are essential to our right to life. Squirrels lack this kind of brain and therefore lack a right to life. But the distinctly human parts of the human brain don’t start to develop until the second half of gestation, so a human genetic code is insufficient to justify a right to life.
In sum, empirical investigation is unable to decide the issue of embryo personhood and rights. No empirical evidence can show that merely having a human genetic code is or isn’t sufficient for a right to life. This makes it, by the Supreme Court’s understanding of religion, a religious belief, regardless of the presence or absence of any claims about God.
Comments