Last month God and China got pissed off at the committee that awards the Nobel Prize. China because the Peace Prize went to someone they threw in prison for advocating democracy. And God? Well, Robert Edwards won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his contribution to the development of In-vitro Fertilization (IVF) in the 1960′s. The award promptly raised the ire of the Vatican, whose position is that Edwards is not a hero but rather someone who has contributed to evil in the world. Since the development of IVF, about 4 million “test tube babies” have been born. The Church—and presumably God—is not happy about it.
Why wouldn’t God be happy about a procedure that has allowed millions of couples to have babies who otherwise weren’t able to? Well, it appears he didn’t intend for these couples to have babies, and what happened? They did an end-around with this IVF malarky.
Look at it from God’s point of view. Traditionally he’s been in full control of the creation of new beings—and each new being means a new soul must be created. The production and punishment of souls is God’s primary business. Heretofore, he’s been the one to decide not only when but if a new soul will be united with a physical body and brought into life. Now, science has taken that away from him.
Wouldn’t you be pissed?
Christians, especially those unmarried men at the Vatican, think God is very upset. God is so pissed about IVF that Cathy Lynn Grossman, author of the USA Today religion blog Faith & Reason, decided ask her readers if they thought God considered IVF children to be real children? Do they even have souls?
Now I’m sure no one, regardless of their religion, denies that IVF babies are real babies with human souls.
But here’s the rub. Christians adamantly reject the notion that the soul is a product of biology. They disagree with scientists who see consciousness (and the ability to make moral choices about how to behave) as something gradually developing in the womb and after birth as a baby grows. It’s not that Christians deny that our bodies are biological entities. But Christians insist that our soul—our consciousness and free will—does not have a biological source. The soul, they maintain, is a spiritual entity which comes from God.
If soul is to be a separate entity of its own, not just something that results from biological development, then it has to join the body all at once, in a unitary moment. The soul can’t be something that gradually comes into existence over months or years. Furthermore, the magical fusion of body with soul must be God’s doing.
This last point is important because it gets to the heart of God’s role in the whole life business. According to Christianity, God assigns our soul to a body at the beginning of our life, and then at the end God decides whether or not we are deserving of going to heaven. This joining of soul with body therefore has a divine purpose—to judge the soul’s fitness for eternity at God’s side. The cruel act of saddling the soul with a temporal, flawed body is all a part of God’s rather elaborate testing operation.
In short, God creates souls and then tests us—these souls—for fitness by combining us with biologically limited bodies and placing us into trying circumstances. And the reason is to find out which of us are good enough to be trusted for eternity in heaven. Not all Christians see it exactly this way. Some denominations believe our souls will not be judged for how we behave but only for whether or not we accept the redeemer, Jesus Christ, into our hearts. A test of a different sort, in other words, but still a test which we either pass or fail.
The difficulty is how to reconcile all of this with in-vitro fertilization.
God is supposed to be in charge of the creation of souls. He is supposed to be in charge of deciding when and if a soul will be combined with a body and therefore a new test of a soul will be done. But IVF makes it look for all the world as if God is not in control of the creation of souls at all, much less his whole soul-testing experiment.
When babies are the result of the rather uncertain hit or miss of sexual intercourse, it is easy to imagine that God has some hand in making pregnancy happen—at least for those who are inclined to a supernatural worldview. But now that scientists are deliberately creating new babies in test tubes, it looks like God no longer has any control over the matter. Now he is forced to test souls whether he wants to or not.
So yeah, if there’s a God, he’s got to be pissed. And the theologians in the Catholic Church have got to be pissed too, because now they have to explain away one more thing about life that no longer requires their God.
If god is all powerful can’t he decide which IVF embryos survive. What difference should it make to him if the egg is fertilized inside a body or in a test tube. Would it help if the little blastulas were baptised.
I am a 20 year old woman, conceived through IVF technology.
My parents, as well as most of my family, are very very Catholic. When my mom first began trying to conceive through IVF, my uncle told her to repent. When she became pregnant with me, his son (a priest) said I would be born without a soul.
I found this out thirteen years later. As you may guess, I am one of the non-Catholics in the family.
@kdsjad: It’s a pity that priest said that about you, but he is not God almighty, nor is he a man of very much power. No priest’s words should be taken for the word of God. That is what encyclicals, constitutions, ecumenical councils, doctrine, and dogma are for. Read.
As for the point of this article, it is a false point. We’ve only asserted that God knows everything, not that he does everything.
The real problems with IVF are threefold:
1) that there is a risk of the embryo not latching on and dying. Seeing that that embryo is human, we should not risk its death.
2) Very often the cultivated embryos die, either in their freezers or being butchered for research.
3) The child is no longer the product of two people coming together in love for a procreative act. Reproduction becomes a science project, a mechanical process, manufacturing human life instead of creating it.
In short, the problem with IVF isn’t that God doesn’t have control. It takes the humanity away from the embryo. It dehumanises life and makes it into another process.
How can a process which is creating life be dehumanizing life?
1and 2)Embryo can die due to so many other reasons even in a natural conception, IVF may have a higher rate but then science would come along to tackle it I believe.
I served in my country’s army for 5 years, seeing so many decorated officers die in my battalion for various reasons never made me question my decision nor made my country question my presence.
3) Love making is anyways condemned in so many religions, with Christianity exalting the Immaculate Conception. How then can love making be the right way of producing babies? To take the logic to a lil extreme, the babies born out of forceful or unplanned pregnancies may also be also be considered dehumanized. I guess Vatican anyways does that.
Respect and Peace
IVF is the immaculate conception
The problem with it is this: The Divine Plan is for husband and wife to procreate in the confines of Holy Matrimony, thus creating the best environment for the development of a child into a holy family blessed by God. Anything outside this Plan is not blessed, but cursed. The Bible has said so for millenia. Read it. (We all know the consequences when unwed mothers give birth, the fathers are absent, and society has to care for and bear the burden of these children. And we know what happens to most of those children later in life.)
The soul is created by God and placed into the human body at the moment of conception. The Book of Jeremiah quotes God as saying, ~ I knew you before I formed you in the womb.~ Thus stating that God had this Plan for souls He created as He placed them into human beings.
In test tubes, God is not there. This is not a natural course of conception. There is no human womb. There is no infusement (so-to-speak) of the spirituality which occurs in the love of a husband and wife in the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony in the natural conception of a child into a family. God does not “bless” this act of scientific experimentation in which man “plays God.” In fact, He condemns it as anathema. Likewise, so does the Catholic Church, that is, the True Catholic Church, and not the offshoot schismatic abominations now calling themselves the Catholic Church.
Adolf Hitler “played God” during WW2 and the Holocaust. He experimented along with Dr. Mengela and his ilk with test tube babies, lobotomies, cloning, and the widespread use of steroids in conjunction with invitro-fertilization in the hopes of creating an Arian Superhuman race. He did years of experimentation especially on twins and triplets, desiring to find the secret to the “cloning” of humans to further his NWO agenda of a Super Race of humans. He wanted to get rid of God’s Chosen People (this is Satan talking), and create his own line of morphs. And he did. And he cremated and slaughtered all of God’s Chosen people and then some in a vile attempt to rid the world of God’s Souls.
The combination of cloning and steroids created people without conscience, without depth, without spirituality (or soul). Mankind, in this regard, IS NOT CREATED IN THE IMAGE AND LIKENESS OF GOD, as the Bible tells us God created Man. The human body, in this regard, IS NOT THE TEMPLE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT, as the Bible tells us God created Man to be. It is a cluster of cells created in a petri-dish, divided, prodded, and watered like a seeded plant, and then transplanted to another better environment in the hopes that it will grow further. There is no soul infusement into these creatures. They are soul-less!
In the same breath, animals that are cloned, plant seeds that are genetically-modified have no soul either as God intended their types to be. These are soul-less also.
And Hitler, while creating this so-called Master Race, hoped that with the infusion of steroids, he could create a soul-less, strong, muscled, dominant race of beings that could be programmed any way he wanted them to be. (Look how dumb and stupid steroid-riddled athletes are after years of this drug infliction!) They did not have the Divine Finger of God infusing anything into them. Therefore, they can be programmed differently. Mankind is inherently good because of his Creator. It is the freewill that gets in Man’s way, and the deception of Satan and his devils and demons for an ulterior motive.
Therefore, under no circumstances does a test-tube human, animal or plant life contain a soul on any level!
Indeed!
The Book of Bible (and every other religious/spiritual scripture of all the culturally constructed sects/groups/religion/state religion) said what it said when man had already traversed the path from being a unicellular entity into a ‘thinking’ multi-cellular organism. The contents of these sacred books were coded by thinking men, as revealed to them by God. And since then, all of us have tried to follow them.
Some how, none of the books reveal at which point of human evolution did God transplant the ‘soul’ in all of us blessed selves who are born through natural process.
Or should we just follow that it, indeed, started from Adam and Eve, and if yes, then why didn’t the first-borns themselves follow the expectations of ‘soul-full’ creation?
Or may be the Satan in form of Serpent took away their souls, which then brought in their ‘free-will’ and then they did what they did to suffer the ‘Fall’.
God didnt quite have them to be, what ‘he intended them to be’.
But then, the question is what are these ‘soul-less creatures’ anyways.
Jehovah said ‘I am’, and thats all he said when asked who he was.
For he was everything and anything that can be or not be.
Then may be, the poor ‘soul-less’ are also Jehovah, for even ‘they are’
And when Christ (blessed be his name) said that he is the way, the truth, the life, he never quite mentioned that he is the ‘soul-full life’, so may be these poor ‘soul-less’ beings are Christ.
But then, since Bible never says this, so we shall also ignore it.
So essentially, we have men who can think, and men who can think and also have a soul. And what tells a man that he has a soul, well may be his thinking process conditioned by the Bible, Ramayan, Quran…. which again were written by thinking men because till the time he didnt learn to think, God never revealed itself to him.
Why did God waited for man to start thinking?
Because may be, God had ‘always been’ and was felt by even non-living. But how can the thinking man has same stature as a non-living. He could think, and think that he is better , and he is better only if he is the first, the first born, or the first thought, if not the God, at-least he is closest to God, and if he is closest to God, God should talk to him, and Lo and Behold! in the very next thought, God revealed itself to him.
So he came back, wrote a book on what he thought God has told him and those book we all follow.
Just one question. If there really be a Supreme God, how can anything ‘created’ be un-godly?
He is what is, for what will be, from what was, and none of it.
He is.
And so is everything.
This is an atheology blog, and I anyways do not believe in the concept of God.
But if there be one, then he is the only one and everything in it and outside.
I used ‘He’, ‘Man’ only out of the usual stupid writing habit. Please ignore the gender thingy.
Love and Respect.
People, people. God has giving man the ability to cure diseases, perform life saving surgeries, and make medicines. There is nothing made in this world without God.
God has to be in the creation of a IVF baby because it has a SOUL AND SPIRIT. Man didn’t put the soul and spirit in the body. God breath into Adams nostrils and man became a living soul. The only thing that the doctors do is help form the body.
“Therefore, under no circumstances does a test-tube human, animal or plant life contain a soul on any level!”
Well Jane, since when did an animal or plant supposedly even have a soul, and more importantly, who says there even is a god, you?
Jerk Off!!!!
No one has a soul.
The soul hypothesis is a part of the god hypothesis.
There is not sufficient evidence supporting the latter, therefore there is none supporting the former.
It does not matter whatever you are.
You do not have a soul.
The only thing that you, as a human have is a heightened consciousness.
Oh man! Sorry for the confusion.
The comment
“No one has a soul.
The soul hypothesis is a part of the god hypothesis.
There is not sufficient evidence supporting the latter, therefore there is none supporting the former.
It does not matter whatever you are.
You do not have a soul.
The only thing that you, as a human have is a heightened consciousness.”
was made by me.
I did not see that there was another George here too!
Look at this another way:
God does not exist. Science can disprove that theory, and substitutes the Big Bang.
Thus, there is no problem with science making children instead.
Also, I think IVF is a very swell idea if a couple has troubles producing a child.
To George Dabre:
I agree.
Anyone who truly believes in the Lord will first look at what God has to say and there are 750 references about the soul in the Bible. The first mention in the book of Genesis is that God breathes breath (neshamah) into man and he became a living soul. So through out scripture you can see that God gives and takes life, lets remember that the soul is life and a test tube baby after birth has life. The real issue is not does a person have a soul but does a person have a new birth and that is what this smoke screen about having a soul is all about. Lets talk about all the individuals who are judging and be concerned with do we have the living eternal spirit. So we know all living have souls but not all have asked forgiveness and given their will to the Lord. Accept a new birth through the one and only mediator Jesus Christ. If any man be in Christ He is a new creature, old things have passed away, behold all things have become new.
Please.. let God Judge… its not for you deliberate….this is simply mental masturbation..
arrogant to state that God is angry… Perhaps hes angry at you…
take up a good cause instead
I pers. & still, by eye, don’t think that God, That Pig, can deny Its Existence, however, if It(!) exists, Its Existence is against me being just myself, yet without any idea, whatsoever that I can fail to rely on it to be good enough of me to be myself, on to other hand & as far, as I’M concerned, my only & good news is still my repetitive ‘testimony(!)’ to being happy to avoid counting on Its ‘Famous’ Palace, (The One That I per sé don’t count on), so I can find out & so on, greetings, ‘J.A.,’ guit_artie@yahoo.dk, – as I believed in trying to be just myself, there were Many Corrupt Museum Piece Capitalist Pigs, Who even indirectly, by eye & after all gave me no right, no good idea, whatsoever that I could get away with it, unless It was Each Other Themselves, Who could get away with being against me being ‘just’ myself, any suggestions, please, – what of it?
That is, guit underscore artie etc., H. N. Year to You All.
If you don’t believe in God, this is moot. Clearly, any discussion between believers and non believers on this is going to be the dialogue of the deaf. However, even if you do believe, it’s quite the non-issue. Children of rape are fully formed children and the Church protects their right to life, but the Church certainly isn’t in favor of rape. Same goes for test tube babies. They are people and therefore have souls. The sins of the father should not be visited on the sons (let’s take the Ezekiel 18:19-20 approach on that one). How can the tiny ones be blamed for their parents’ sins?
IVF is not a sin James H.
and how did i get into this discussion with a bunch of fouled up folks who have no reverence for life. … i must leave.