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In this episode, Trent rebuts a recent TikTok video that claims God isn’t really “pro-life.”
Narrator:
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trend podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers Apologist and speaker Trent Horn. And today I want to give a quick response to a video on TikTok that Thomas, our Social Media Manager at Catholic Answers shared with me because as we talk more about pro-life issues, ever since Dobbs versus Jackson, people have been talking about abortion more than I have ever experienced in my 20 years as a pro-life advocate. I started doing pro-life advocacy when I was 18 years old, I was still in college. I would do fundraisers for the local pregnancy center at my high school. I chose abortion actually as my persuasive speech topic in community college. I remember, actually, that my professor for the speaking class said, “Okay, you can’t,” and I had this lot actually with professors, they would say, you could write a research paper, but you can’t do abortion as a topic, or you can do a public speech, but you can’t do abortion as your speech topic.
I always thought that was fascinating. That was the one particular topic they did not want to hear about. I’m not sure why. I mean, maybe some of them were post-abortive and they just didn’t want to hear about the subject, ’cause I always felt like that served the pro-choice people actually, because if you just don’t talk about abortion, things proceed as usual. But now, after Dobbs versus Jackson, people are talking about it more. And pro-choice activists have tried to get more gotcha moments for pro-life advocates. And it’s important to be aware of those so that we don’t stumble into them, and so that we are ready with a reply.
I want to show you a clip here. I think this is someone who is marching at the March for Life recently, and a guy goes up to him and asks him, the guy who’s marching is pro-life, he has a sign that says God is pro-life, and I’m assuming it’s a pro-choice person goes up to him and says, “What does your sign mean that God is pro-life?” He says, “Well, it means what it means.” And then the guy gives him, the bomb that he drops, the gotcha moment, and the marcher is not prepared to engage it because he’s not going out there to debate a pro-choice person. He just wants to march with this sign, take a listen.
Speaker 1:
I see this sign here. It says, God is pro-life. What does that mean?
Speaker 2:
God is pro-life. Yeah, that’s just what it means. Yes. God created life.
Speaker 1:
Didn’t God kill everybody on earth except for Noah and some farm animals on an arc?
Speaker 2:
I’m sorry.
Speaker 1:
Didn’t God kill everybody on earth?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, once again, I feel bad for this guy. He’s just trying to march with everyone else. He’s not trying to have a debate, and what the person brought up is somewhat intricate. I mean, if you were pressed for time, you could say to that person, that’s a good question. I want to talk to you about it more, come get me when I’m done marching, and then we can talk about it more. But right now, I’m going to finish this march and go in that way. But that’s why I think it can be important. You don’t want to put yourself out there with particular phrases that can lead to a gotcha moment. That’s why, for example, I don’t say things like, life begins a conception because you had people like Carl Sagan, the late atheistic astronomer who said, “Well, life is a chain that has been going back for billions and billions of years.” Or, not even human life begins at conception because human life began tens of thousands of years ago.
And here’s what’s hard, also, you can’t even say the life of every individual human being begins at fertilization because it may begin later in the case of identical twinning. So, that’s why I would say, “For most human beings, for most cases, the life of an individual human being begins at fertilization.” Or, “After every successful fertilization there is an individual living human organism.” You have to learn to qualify these things. So, to say God is pro-life. What does that mean? Say, well, it means God is for life. Now, that is, in one sense, that is true, life is a basic good and God is for that good, but God can also take human life as we’ll. We’ll talk about here shortly. So, it’s not nice to avoid the trap. If you say God is pro-life, what does that mean? You can say, “Well, God wants abortion to be illegal. God wants every human being to be protected under the law.”
So, there, if you just put it that way, that takes you away from saying, “Well, God thinks killing is wrong.” And the person says, “Well, didn’t God kill people?” Well, that’s different because when we say God says X is wrong, that applies to human beings. We are moral agents, we are persons who follow commands. God does not. God is not a person who follows moral rules like we do because there is no morality above God. Now, that does not mean that God is an arbitrary dictator who can do whatever he wants, God because he is perfect and infinite being itself will always naturally act in accord with reason.
In fact, let me bring this up here on the catechism, talking about this when it comes to omnipotence. It says here in paragraph 271 of the catechism, God’s Almighty power is in no way arbitrary. In God, power, essence, will, intellect, wisdom, and justice are all identical. Nothing therefore can be in God’s power, which cannot be in His just will or his wise intellect. So, God is good, not because He satisfies some kind of rule of goodness, but because He just is goodness itself. But God has authority to do things that we are not allowed to do. So, when this comes up, if you’re defending the phrase God is pro-life, you can just say, “Well, yeah, in the political debate about abortion, God’s sides with the pro-life side, abortion should be illegal.” And you can just say that.
And then, I’ve talked about this on my podcast. Go back a few episodes to the one on the Young Turks where they say, “Well, God’s for abortion. In numbers five, he commanded an abortion.” No, he didn’t, that is a jealousy test. In ancient Israel, if a person thought a wife was unfaithful, they could bring her to the temple and if she was unfaithful to her marriage house, if she committed adultery, she would suffer infertility. Numbers five, never mentions pregnancy, never mentions children, never mentions miscarriage. But the fact of the matter is God is the author of human life. Well, before I get to that, let’s just make sure we’re clear here. If you say God is pro-life, it’s not a phrase I’ve used in general anyways, but just say, “Yeah, God thinks abortion should be illegal.” Not, He thinks life is good, not He’s against killing, it sets you up more for the gotcha question.
But even if you say, “Well, God wants abortion to be illegal, He wants every human being protected under the law.” You could still get a gotcha moment. Like this guy says, he could say, “Well, but didn’t your God kill every human being except for Noah and the people on the arc on the flood? So, isn’t your God a murderer? Your God can’t be pro-life, He murdered people.” No. First I would say, “Do you think it’s a fact that God murdered people or is it that just your is that opinion? If it’s just your opinion, why should I care what you think? It’s, that’s just your opinion that it’s wrong what He did, I think it was right. He was within his rights to do that. If it’s just opinions, who cares? But if you think there are moral facts about the way the world ought to be, what makes those moral facts true? Where are they? What is their ultimate foundation?”
And so, you can take this complaint and create a moral argument for the existence of God from it if the person is consistent and if they believe that God violated some kind of objective moral rule. But you can also point out that there are differences here. You can say, “No. God has the authority if He creates human beings from nothing, if He is the ultimate creator of reality, God is not bound to give us a certain number of days of life.” An example I often give is this, imagine you, the listener or viewer, I give you $20 today, then I give you $20 tomorrow, and I give you $20 the next day. And then after that I stopped giving you $20, you have no right to be mad that I stopped giving you $20 because you never had a right to the $20 a day that I first gave you. It was a gift. You have no right for it to continue. I can give that gift to you as much or as little as I want. And the same is true for God and the gift of life.
If God gives me life today and life tomorrow, and He does not give me life the next day, I cannot fault Him ’cause I never had a right to the life He gave me in the first place. God creates us and He decides how many days of earthly life we have, and then we have everlasting existence as immortal souls who be raised up on the last day. So, God hasn’t wronged us. To give another example, because people say, “Well, God says we should be like Him, and if God kills people, then we can kill people.” No, be holy as God is holy. But God, as the scripture says, but God has authority we don’t have.
For example, imagine the principal at your school says, “Students, I want you all to be like me.” And then one student goes to the office, takes the intercom and dismisses school early, he would get in trouble, right? He’ll say, “But principal, I was just being like you, you dismiss us early all the time.” “Yeah, but I have the authority to do that. You do not, okay? So, you do not have the authority to act in that way, even though I want you to imitate my praiseworthy qualities as an adult role model to the rest of the students.” The same way we are to be holy as God is holy. But we do not have authority over life in the same way that God does. So, that’s important to remember when someone brings up and tries to say, “Oh, you’re a hypocrite for being a pro-life Christian because God kills people. God created human beings, created the universe from nothing.
He created us in a radical and unique way, not the same way that human beings create other human beings. We don’t even create, we procreate. We work alongside God to cause new human beings to come into existence. So, we do not have rights over human beings like God does. We have some. To give another example, I have children. I have a seven-year-old, five-year-old, and a two-year-old. My seven-year-old has the right to immediately take away something dangerous from my two-year-old. He can act in that way, but he does not have the right to just punish my two-year-old ’cause he thinks my two-year old’s been bad. I’m always, I’m telling him, “Matthew, that’s my job, not your job. I’m an oldest, so I know how that goes. That’s not your job. That’s not your authority to do that. Even though there’s other things I’ve delegated that you can do.”
So, human beings can kill other human beings under certain circumstances. God has given us permission to do that, like killing in self-defense, for example. But he is not given us absolute authority over human life like he has. Oh, another point that I would raise is that; if someone like this is just really mad that God kills people, he doesn’t have a right to do that. And they’re in an abortion context, they’re arguing the pro-choice position with you, then you might be a little cheeky and say, “What are you getting so mad at about God killing people in the Bible? God’s just being pro-choice, his universe, his choice. Why are you restricting God’s autonomy?” I mean, you have to judge a situation whether it’s a good idea or not.
But you could say, “Look, if you believe a woman has the right to do whatever she wants with her body because a child exists within her body, then under your own view, does God have the right to do what he wants with the universe?” Now, I’m not going to subscribe to that view, but I’m just going to point out from their own perspective, they allow a pregnant woman with the bodily autonomy arguments to basically be this sovereign entity that can decide to do whatever she wants with the unborn, because she has control over where the child lives. So, it’s a bit odd that they would be so self-righteous and condemn the Bible prescribing God killing people in this context, yet have no objection to people killing unborn human being. So, something else to bring up if you have the opportunity.
Finally, some people will say, “God is not pro-life because early embryos have high mortality rates.” They’ll say, “Well, how can you say the early embryo is a human being? When 50% of embryos, they’re miscarried. How can you say they’re human beings? How can you say God is pro-life?” First, we don’t know how many of those embryos are actual fully developed human beings. Some of them might just be developing tissue that never created a full organism, and so it didn’t have an immortal soul. We don’t know. But even if they have high mortality rates, so what? That proves, they’re not human beings?
Throughout most of human history, the mortality rate of children under the age of five, the child mortality rate throughout most of human history and in some parts of the world today was 50%. So, what that means is, that half of all children in most of history did not live to see their fifth birthday. Sad. Did that mean they weren’t human beings? No, they just lived in a very hazardous environment, but we should help them not make it okay to kill the other half that do survive. Much the same way, the unborn may live in a hazardous environment. They may have high mortality rates, but it doesn’t mean that we have the right to kill those who do survive this hazardous environment that we live in.
Once again, God is the author of human life, we are not. And if you make that argument that the embryo, Alan Walter and Thomas Shannon are two authors who have said that the embryo couldn’t be a person because God would be the greatest bungler of all times is what they said. Well, then by that logic you could say, “Oh, there’s a serial killer,” or it’s, let’s say this, in medieval Europe, it’s legal to kill newborns. And you say, “Well, no, it should be illegal. They’re persons.” “How can you say they’re persons? Half of all newborns don’t even make it to the age of five. How could they be persons? Maybe you don’t care about newborns if you don’t solve the child mortality problem before you solve the infanticide problem.” I can say, “Well, the child mortality problem is a lot more complicated than the infanticide problem.” So, I could solve the infanticide problem first by saying, “Make it illegal to kill infants. Then I could work on the child mortality problem.”
The same is true with the unborn. “I can solve the abortion problem much easier than the miscarriage problem.” It’s much more difficult to figure out what causes miscarriage. I was speaking with a representative from Secular Pro-Life at the Pro-Life Summit, and she knows a lot about biology, and she says a lot of miscarriages have genetic factors and developmental factors beyond our ability to treat. So, that’s what I would recommend there if you are engaging people on that, when people try to say that God is not pro-life.
Great. Well, this is a shorter episode today. I hope this is helpful for you guys. Thank you all so much for listening, and I hope you have a very blessed day.
Narrator:
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