A Response

In the post below
Andy of Word Wide Rant commented:

"Under the law that claims that life begins at fertilization,
will they be able to prosecute God for the significant number of fertilized
eggs that spontaneously
abort or fail to attach to the uterus?"

Andy had also posed this question in my previous weblog, and
I will attempt to answer that question. I am no theologian, and I use to think
that philosophy was about people talking endlessly about trees
falling with no one to hear the sound. But after all I have a weblog so I am
unafraid of talking about things when I don’t have all the answers.

Since the format of the question already assumes the existence
of a creator God I will start from there. God has set up the universe that
is both finite and understandable by human reason. We can come to understand
more fully the constants and laws that govern our universe through scientific
methodologies. This question I believe falls into the category of a mystery
(No Andy I am not just going to say "it’s Gods will, or that if is just a mystery).
A mystery in this case is where we can not know every nuance and reason
behind what the question asks but can delve more deeply and come
to
a fuller
understanding and knowledge
about
it.

As I posted earlier St. Irenaeus’ quote "In
Proportion to God’s need of nothing is
man’s need for
communion with God." There is nothing that compelled God to create the universe
and life. God is lacking in nothing and any created thing can not fulfill him
or add to his infinite nature. Existence is pure gift, any existence is a good
compared to non-existence. Whether our physical life span is but minutes or
a hundred years it is still a good. The normative process for eventual union
with God in eternal life is through us living a relatively normal life span
and through exercise of our free will choosing that good which is eternal life
with him. The worst thing in the world in not death but it is not fulfilling
the purpose for which we are created. All of us will die at some point; as
George Carlin once said "I don’t understand people’s faith in God’s track
record,
after
all everything he has created has died." Physical aspects of life depend on
understandable processes that by their nature can fail. Thus someone may die
in the very earliest stages by failing to attach to the uterus, by disease,
or by failure of bodily systems brought on by old age.

The parallel drawn in the question is between God allowing a
human being to not advance longer in life toward birth and comparing that to
the purposeful destruction of that life throught human agency. The analogy
that I
will
use is not perfect in any way (which applies to any analogy between human action
and God) ) but it may help to draw the distinction. An artist who creates a
work of art in
a
statue
and
then
after
completing it
takes
a
hammer to it is not doing anything wrong in the view of human reason. The artist
created it and has every right to do with it as he wills. Others may decry
the destruction of the work of art, but they have no true say in the matter.
If someone without permission of the Artist takes a hammer to that statue than
our reason condemns that act, they had no right to act without permission of
the artist who created the work. Just as we are given permission to kill when
it is in an act of self defense, it becomes murder when it is not within those
circumstances. Murder is the unjust taking of a life. Abortion is also murder
since it is also the unjust taking of a life. With abortion we are not acting
within the area of self defense (no matter what the pro-aborts might argue),
but are destroying the physicial life of someone created by God. My analogy
breaks down in the fact that the statue after destruction does not live on
in any
way,
whereas the soul of that preborn human being does live on.