When you’ve worked hard to build wealth, protecting it becomes just as important as growing it. However, even high net worth individuals (HNWIs) often fall into avoidable traps, especially when navigating wealth without a formal financial plan. Without a clear […]

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Every American state boasts of its residents who have become famous. Illinois is no exception, and its list features American leaders of the highest level: Lincoln, Reagan, Sheen, and now Robert Prevost (Pope Leo XIV). Until the recent papal election, Ven. Sheen was probably the most-recognized American Catholic figure. But instead of seeing one man surpassed by another in the popular imagination…

Source

Herewith, a guest post from long time commenter Peter West, sometimes known in comments as PBW.

Writing a half-century ago, Thomas Nagel, in his essay What Is It Like To Be a Bat?, sent a wake-up call to purveyors of “[t]he recent wave of reductionist euphoria” who claimed to have explained phenomenal consciousness in materialist terms.

… we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be. Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless … no currently available concept of reduction is applicable to it.

He then reveals the purpose of his curious title.

[Fundamentally] an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism — something it is like for the organism.

This poses a severe problem for materialist analysis of consciousness.

It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness. Without some idea, therefore of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required of a physicalist theory.

In pursuit of “some idea,” he introduces types of subjective experience; types of point of view (hereinafter PoV types.)

I am not adverting here to the alleged privacy of experience to its possessor. The point of view in question is not one accessible only to a single individual. Rather it is a type.

In Panpsychism, he maintains this distinction, asserting “that a feature of experience is subjective if it can in principle be fully understood only from one type of point of view …”. His argument, if I read him correctly, is that, while an investigation of physicalist causes of human consciousness will be informed by our knowledge, based upon our own phenomenal experience, of the riches of consciousness in all humans, we cannot conduct similar investigations into the consciousness of, for example, bats, because those investigations cannot be informed by any similar experience of bat phenomenology. As a result, no matter how comprehensive is our objective knowledge of the physiology of, in particular, a bat’s organs of perception and nervous system, we cannot derive from these objective facts any comprehension of a bat’s subjective experience, of what it is like to be a bat. So any general project of understanding subjective non-human experience through comprehensive objective analysis is doomed to failure. If so, how can we expect to succeed in a similar project with human experience?

However, the notion of such types needs some elaboration.

Everything ever speculated and communicated concerning religion, philosophy, music, the visual and plastic arts, science and nature, every instance of an infant learning a language, of friends gathering convivially or of enemies clashing, speaks to the degree of commonality of the human phenomenal experiential type. But this commonality has specific features and limitations.

Take the experience of having some mathematical principle explained to you, a student, by a lecturer in a lecture hall. Understanding the mathematical principle is subjective; all understanding is subjective. Because mathematics is abstract, the verifiable circumstance, or state, of understanding this particular or any such principle can be determined for each person in the hall by testing. The type of point of view is that of a human being with some pre-existing familiarity with other mathematical principles and the requisite aptitude for their understanding — not everyone. The same applies to all topics of abstract reasoning, and in these circumstances, if we allow ourselves some leeway, we might also allow that the experience of coming to understand a particular topic is itself fully understood. It depends what we mean by fully.

Even here, though, there is, in the capacity to apply and elaborate some abstract principle, enormous variation amongst those who are believed, and believe themselves, to have the same understanding of that principle.

This capacity for abstract reasoning is, to the best of our knowledge, distinctive to human beings, and was assigned by Aristotle, and subsequently Aquinas, to the uniquely human rational soul. Such things we perceive with the mind’s eye, but these are facts of our phenomenal experience, just as much as is our experience of colour or music or incense.

Once we move from the abstract to the particular, the breadth of application of the human type of point of view from which a subjective experience can be “fully” understood becomes much more uncertain. The projects of human culture in music, the visual and plastic arts, and in cuisine, evidence considerable functional commonality of the evoked sensory experience — functional in the sense of enabling successful cultural interactions — even as the variety of responses to these artefacts evidences limits to that commonality. For instance, super-sensory individuals are deemed to have more intense experiences, via one or more of their senses, than is usual. This is often associated with autism, but there is, I should think, a spectrum of such variations.

All language presupposes abstraction, and no matter how extended and precise the language used to convey some particular of sensory experience (as for example in Proust) that experience can never be fully conveyed, fully understood.

In so many of the experiences most compelling for us humans, the most satisfactory way of conveying that experience is by metaphor — by inspired imprecision. Even in the circumstances of the lecture hall, the experiential pathway to understanding, and the actual subjective experience of that understanding, cannot be conveyed. Considered in this sort of detail, the “privacy of experience to its possessor” is not an allegation, but a fact of the human condition. The concept of PoV type, in attempting to universalise human phenomenal experience is, in fact, another reductive objectification of that teeming population of similar but unique worlds of being.

Phenomenal consciousness is impenetrably private, to the extent that no proof of the existence of other human minds, other loci of phenomenal experience, can be conceived, although the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming.

What is it like to be a bat?

Less well supported than our confidence in other human minds is the almost universally expressed confidence in the phenomenal consciousness of at least the higher animals. This seems to be based on our extrapolation from the likenesses to us in physiology and likenesses to us in certain behaviours; in particular likenesses to the non-verbal signs by which we read the workings of phenomenal consciousness in our fellow humans. It is our recognition of familiar forms with which we unquestioningly associate consciousness that underlies our confidence in this extrapolation.

Nagel is bullish on the scope and dispersion of consciousnesses.

Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it. … No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe. [Emphasis mine.]

Doubt enters in though. Regarding the subjects of his essay, he writes:

I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. [Emphasis mine.]

Faith, because of the impossibility of knowing. Our faith might be rationalised by reference to the level of development of the nervous system, for instance. But the thrust of Nagel’s argument is that mental realities can have no explanation in physical or physiological terms, so reasoning from neurology is merely another act of faith.

Nagel has chosen bats precisely because in them the similarity of forms on which we rely for our attribution of animal consciousness is so attenuated that our facile anthropomorphisms in respect of, say, apes, break down, even as bats’ complexity of physiology and behaviour keeps on the hook our confidence in their consciousness.

In all of Nagel’s discussion, he presumes that consciousness is found in organisms. It is a function of the life of organisms. Given that, in Nagel’s view, there is no soul, we can be confident that he attributes no consciousness to an organism that has just died.

This prescription — there is something that it is like to be that organism — for conscious mental states seems to have universal application in enquiries about consciousness. It is always about the self. In his essay Panpsychism, Nagel sets out four premisses from which he deduces panpsychism. The third is Realism, defined so: mental states are properties of the organism, since there is no soul, and they are not properties of nothing at all. He subsequently pens this illuminating paragraph.

For Realism as I have defined it to be true, physical organisms must have subjective properties. What seems unacceptable about this is that the organism does not have a point of view: the person or creature does. It seems absurd to try to discover the basis of the point of view of the person in an atomistic breakdown of the organism, because that object is not a possible subject for the point of view to which the person’s experiences appear. And if it makes no sense to ascribe subjective states to the complex whole, there will be no basis for ascribing proto-mental states to its constituents; so they cannot be appealed to in explanation of what it means for an organism to have experiences. I simply record this feeling of impossibility because I have no more to say about it. When a mouse is frightened, it does not seem to me that a small material object is frightened.

Nagel comments later of the vulnerability of this premiss, but he does not elaborate further (“I have no more to say about it”) on the difficulty that the above paragraph poses for his whole argument.

Phenomenal experience is, by definition, experience by a subject. All consciousness is in this respect self-consciousness; the conscious self is the locus of phenomenal experience. What is the self, except its consciousness? This is not the same as consciousness of self — the focus of conscious attention reflexively on the self, as is purportedly demonstrated by the mirror test.

If we take a leap of faith and accept, with Professor Nagel, that consciousness is widespread in organisms, our association of our own agency, our own expressions of our will, with our consciousness, ought probably also be projected equally widely. For example, in urban environments with plentiful, readily accessible liquids, our experience of thirst can be assuaged by a barely conscious exercise of the will. We see similar behaviours across the animal world, and we suppose an analogue of our consciousness to be in play. If so, then the agency of the thirsty animal is also an analogue of our own exercises of the will, guided by phenomenal awareness.

In this view, then, grazing animals — to take one example — are not automata, but conscious beings whose actions, for the most part, are inextricably tied into their own forms of phenomenal consciousness. What happens to our faith, though, when we descend to the cellular limit of the phylogenetic tree?

What is it like to be a Stentor roeselii?

Stentor roeselii (sometimes raesilli) is a single-cell organism. The replication in 2019 of an almost-forgotten experiment conducted by Herbert Spencer Jennings in 1906 had troubling implications. Articles such as Can a Cell Make Decisions? from Scientific American and Can a single-celled organism ‘change its mind’? New study says yes in phys.org, focussed on the main questions. This description is from the latter.

These single cells are notable for their relatively large size and unique trumpet-shaped bodies. Their surfaces and trumpet “bells” are lined with hairlike projections called cilia, used to swim and to generate a vortex in the surrounding fluid, which sweeps food into their “mouths.” At the other end of their bodies, they secrete a holdfast, which attaches them to detritus to stay stationary while feeding.

In the experiment, microscopic plastic beads were repeatedly propelled towards the mouth of the organism, invoking a hierarchy of responses, as depicted in the sketch. There are, however, marked differences between individuals in the rate at which the responses progress. In sum, S. roeselii “remembers” how much irritation it has “experienced,” and it “decides” on a course of action that depends on its “memory” of preceding events. And individual S. roeselii have individual rates of response and make individual decisions. Nothing known about the structure of this single-cell organism explains these behaviours.

As already noted, a fundamental aspect of consciousness is an awareness of the distinction between organism and not-organism. Survival in organisms as diverse as human beings and S. roeselii depends on this distinction. It is raw material for action, that is, the will, to motivate activities of the organism as a whole within the context of the not-organism. For example, S. roeselii detaching from its anchorage.

If there is consciousness in S. roeselii, will it not, too, convey this distinction to the “will” to act upon? But how can a single cell be conscious? If, on the other hand, it is not conscious, how can its behaviour be explained? Is it a machine, with a memory and processing unit which can take input from the environment and run a program, including apparently random pathways, which determines subsequent behaviour? How can a single cell perform such feats? But it does, one way or another.

Does the question, What is it like to be a Stentor roeselii, for a Stentor roeselii?, have meaning? If some form of phenomenal awareness is required for the agency of living things, then the underlying principle of phenomenal awareness is independent of the complexity of organisms.

What is it like to be a Large Language Model?

For that matter, what is it like to be any other AI system that is currently being touted as approaching, or having achieved, consciousness, once that milestone has been achieved?

The hallmark of consciousness we have been working with here, following Nagel, requires at least a potential answer to this question. Nagel doubts neither that such an answer exists for a bat, nor that the question cannot be answered by human enquiry. But in the case of AI systems, we are in completely different territory.

When we attribute consciousness to animals, we do so on the basis of formal similarities between our living selves and living members of other species. On what basis do we attribute consciousness to an AI system?

Is it not because we seem to detect a facsimile of our own verbal interactions with other human beings in our interactions with AI, especially when supplemented by generated images of non-existent people displaying facial gestures mimicked from painstakingly charted observations of actual human interactions? All of this apparatus lends verisimilitude to the machine in the ghost.

But what “I” can we conceivably postulate for such a system, one comprising vast banks of GPUs and memory, occupying gigawatt data centres, perhaps powered by their own modular nuclear reactors to feed the appetite for electricity, while it simultaneously expresses its “personality” or “personalities” to a small army of interlocutors with whom it is at that moment interacting? What is the locus of this “I”? Can this myriad of instantiations of the same algorithm or set of algorithms possibly have such a locus?

Whatever might be said about such a distributed electronic machine, it cannot be characterised as “conscious” in any sense that makes sense to us — to whom even the consciousness of bats seems feasible — when we consider the extended physical reality of the AI machine. However, when that extended structural reality evaporates to the immediate environment of screen, keyboard and microphone, we can more readily anthropomorphise the entity with which we are interacting. Nagel notes, I think it is fair to say, that our necessary anthropomorphism is simultaneously the best we can do in comprehending animal conscious experience and an insurmountable barrier to the same. Our attribution of consciousness to these machines is also anthropomorphic, just as much as is our attributing consciousness to our dog or cat, but without the support of any underlying formal correspondences, relying only the mimicry that we have designed into it. By virtue of that mimicry, it is more seductive. Our interactions so closely mimic the interactions on which we build our unquestioned confidence in the phenomenal experience of other people that many — notably those who design them — are seduced into more readily allowing that these machines are conscious than that our pets are.

Lifelessness

Even though we have analysed the processes of life by reductive means; even though we have dissected the living cell, peered into its nucleus, pulled apart its DNA, drawn conclusions about its processes of division and replication, and have shaped aspects of its nature to suit our purposes; even though we have imagined and drawn beautiful animations of its ceaseless interior processes, we do not know how it came to be, and do not understand, or have forgotten what we once understood of, the driving force of this mysterious phenomenon of life, this new thing which seized the building blocks of the inanimate world to construct the teeming self-motivated world-upon-a-world that we call the biosphere, and within that world, the teeming world of worlds comprised of the minds of humans.

All of our confidence in the reality of our fellow minds, and all of our speculation about the phenomenal experience of other species had, until this fraught and chaotic moment, been constrained to our affinities with other living creatures, for excellent reasons.

We have since persuaded ourselves that the difference between the essential realities of animate and inanimate has been obliterated. In that conceptual wreckage it becomes possible to attribute to inanimate objects some important things proper to our human nature.

This is a new idolatry, congenial to modern sensibilities, yet one that seems so familiar.

The Psalmist complains that

…their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. (115:5)
They have mouths but do not speak, and eyes but do not see.
They have ears but do not hear; noses but do not smell.
They have hands but do not feel; feet but do not walk… (115:5-7 ESV)

And the result is

Those who make them become like them;
so do all who trust in them. (115:8)

Man, made in the image and likeness of God, is in the process of constructing a god made in the image of man, and having made this god, surrendering to it, and worshipping it.

Religious revivals have an important place in American history. They have helped Americans deal with difficult social changes, as Billy Graham’s missions helped Americans (especially soldiers) overcome the emotional wounds of World War II and navigate the moral dangers of prosperity. Such movements influenced elites and, more importantly, millions of ordinary people, giving moral ballast to the whole nation. 

The first of these revivals, the Great Awakening of the 1740s and ’50s, gave rise to American “civil society”—the moral sentiments and customs that unite Americans apart from the government, and that check government’s power. As Joseph Stuart recalls in Rethinking the Enlightenment, the Awakening “was the first common experience” shared by all the American colonists. It touched not just naturally fervent people, but deists like Benjamin Franklin, a friend of the Awakening’s leading preacher, the Anglican (and Englishman) George Whitefield. John Adams referred to this experience when he said the American Revolution “was effected before the War commenced . . . in the Minds and Hearts of the People”—as a “Change in their Religious Sentiments of their Duties and Obligations.” The Awakening created America’s “civil religion”—not religious symbolism that served politics, but a set of “common values transcending any one denomination” and the colonies’ political boundaries. The Awakening showed the colonists that they could reach God without the state, and that politics was legitimate only insofar as it served man’s “unalienable rights,” dictated by “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” From this common religious sense arose a common national identity, independent of the British monarchy, that naturally called for a more suitable political framework. 

Today, however, Americans’ religiosity is weaker than ever, and their civil society is coming apart. Those with no religious affiliation (the so-called “nones”) make up 29 percent of the population, and they aren’t exactly thriving. Fifty-five percent are divorced, separated, cohabiting, or never married; 63 percent have not finished college; and 36 percent make less than $50,000 a year. The sufferings of the nones may be no accident, as going to church has numerous proven benefits: churchgoers are less likely to die prematurely, commit suicide, suffer from depression, or die from drugs or alcohol. If American religion continues declining, America will become a sad place. It will be more susceptible to the sort of resentful, angry revolutions that destroyed eighteenth-century France and Weimar Germany (where religion had also been weak), and which on occasion we already see flaring up. 

America needs a new Awakening for the good of suffering souls and the whole country. To imagine what a national religious revival might look like today, we should consider the winning strategies of George Whitefield and his more famous collaborator John Wesley, the leader of England’s Methodist revival. 

John Wesley: Apostle of Modern England 

Stuart’s description of England during John Wesley’s youth, in the early 1700s, reminds one of our own times, marked by secularization, economic change, and discontent among the working class. Religious fervor had had a bad reputation ever since the English Civil War and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, when religious extremists spread political chaos and violence in the name of God. After Cromwell’s death, people turned away from God to find fulfillment in “the increasingly dynamic secular world” of the early industrial revolution. Technological advancements were improving life for everyone, and making some very wealthy. But coal miners and factory workers suffered tremendously. These uneducated “squatters and wandering migrants” worked in dangerous conditions, for little pay, and with little religious formation to help them find meaning in their suffering. They became “untamed and ungovernable,” and liable to riot. 

Whitefield began preaching to the coal workers of Bristol, England in 1739. Starving for the hope of the Gospel, people flocked to him, and Whitefield called on his friend John Wesley, another Anglican minister, to help. Wesley eventually became the most important preacher of what came to be called Methodism, the religious movement known for its “methodical” approach to Christian living. By the end of Wesley’s life in 1791, 70,000 people were “committed” members of the Methodist societies that he had started, and countless more were converted to the broader “evangelical” movement he inspired (whence today’s evangelicalism). William Wilberforce, one of those evangelicals, was then beginning the long, but eventually successful, effort to abolish slavery in the British Empire (in which Wesley gave him direct encouragement). Meanwhile, France was undergoing a revolution that soon ended in a bloodbath. In England, workers’ riots occurred from time to time, but they always ended peacefully, as preachers rushed to the violence as blood to a wound, healing souls with the Gospel. 

How did these men preserve the English-speaking world from the disasters that plagued France and Europe for generations?  

First they met suffering, unchurched people where they were, which was not in churches but in the dangerous neighborhoods of industrial towns, places filled with “drunkenness, cursing, and swearing—even from the mouths of small children,” Stuart says. Wesley said, “I look upon all the world as my parish.” Over his lifetime he traveled 250,000 miles on horseback (ten times the earth’s circumference) to preach 40,000 sermons. He preached wherever was most convenient, often in open fields, a highly unconventional approach. If the location was properly situated (beside a church wall, or in the pit created by a collapsed mine) the acoustics could allow as many as 25,000 people to listen at a time.  

Methodist preachers studied public speaking and theater, both to be heard at a distance and to find phrases that “pierced the heart,” as Stuart says. Their preaching elicited “unusual phenomena” among the crowds: “murmurs, groans, outcries, trembling, convulsions, and falling down”—“called being ‘slain in the spirit’ today.” The Anglican establishment disapproved of such enthusiasm, and John Wesley himself was wary of it. He was well educated (at Oxford) and a committed member of the Church of England, which grounded itself in Scripture, tradition, and reason. He knew that fervent emotions could be “dangerous” if not molded by the moral discipline and sound doctrine that filled his sermons. But Wesley also knew “it was . . . dangerous to regard [the emotions] too little”: Anglicanism’s turn away from religious fervor had alienated many of its faithful. Wesley saw it as his mission to evangelize both hearts and minds, raising his hearers to the spiritual plane by starting from their sub-rational emotions. 

He also engaged people’s minds through print media. Commercial newspapers and pamphlets were the internet and social media of Wesley’s day. The free press came into being only around 1700, when England’s censorship laws ended. Christians like Wesley immediately jumped into the lively print culture that arose, communicating “in clear, forceful writing.” Wesley “wrote, edited, or abridged some four hundred works” during his lifetime. He exhorted people to read spiritual literature “leisurely, seriously, and with attention,” in Stuart’s words, and “to put it into practice.” Wesley’s efforts, along with those of numerous other Christian writers of the eighteenth century (such as Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson) rebutted English rationalists, so that no English Voltaire (eighteenth-century France’s brilliant critic of religion, whom Wesley called a “coxcomb”) ever dominated public discourse. G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Ronald Knox continued this tradition of Christian public intellectuals in England into the twentieth century.  

The Methodists also used hymns to connect minds and hearts. When Wesley first came to Newcastle, he stood on a street corner and sang until fifteen hundred people had gathered, and only then did he preach. Charles Wesley, John’s brother, composed more than six thousand sets of hymn lyrics, which were set to German melodies and compiled into hymnals. These songs summarized profound truths in simple and memorable poetry. Their emotionally stirring music implanted the words in people’s memories and increased their love of the truths they sang. Many of these hymns—such as “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today”—continue to inspire Christians in our time. 

Of course, Stuart says, “[o]ne could preach, write, and sing to thousands, but if no structures were in place to support them afterward, all could be lost.” Wesley therefore set up “religious societies [that] nurtured the life of faith through mutual accountability, confession, and Christian fellowship.” These “voluntary associations” were not meant to replace churches, which were the guardians of Scripture and creeds. (It was only after Wesley’s death that Methodism became an independent denomination.) Stuart likens Wesley’s religious societies instead to “centralized religious orders such as the Jesuits” in the Catholic world: they overlay churches and supported them, providing supplemental formation in faith and morals. These societies tried to “avoid fomenting Christian division and sectarian thinking,” as John Wesley’s father Samuel characterized the ones he founded (which influenced John’s approach). Independent businesses cooperate through trade groups for the general benefit of commerce; through Wesley’s societies, different Christian groups cooperated for the general evangelization of the public. 

Bringing Biblical Basics to the Unchurched 

Many Christians have already employed Wesley’s methods for years, especially the evangelical communities that are descended from his movement. Many are already using the most dynamic media of our day—digital media—to spread the Gospel, often to great effect. Many are going to the roughest and poorest neighborhoods to bring to God those who seem farthest from him. But it is hard to think of any contemporary evangelizer that has attained media success on the scale that Wesley did (although some non-Christian influencers do quite well). It is also hard to think of anyone who has traveled as much as Wesley to meet people face-to-face, or who like him combines electrifying oratory with solid doctrine. And it is rare to find major Christian movements today that, as Wesley did, value both fervor and church life proper, without confusing them.   

Much of the evangelical tradition emphasizes extended preaching and enthusiastic, musical praise-and-worship, which so efficiently evangelize the unchurched. But some might turn these into a substitute for more formal, liturgical worship. Lively singing can help many people feel that God is with them, doctrinal sermons can prepare their souls for contemplating God, and both can be good; but they alone are not sufficient for religion. God is a mystery that one cannot know only by emotion and reason. Liturgy is also needed to connect worshippers to God himself—in solemn, direct meditation on his revealed Word, and in sacramental actions he established, such as the Lord’s Supper.  

Catholics and Orthodox, like the Anglicans who did not follow Wesley, have participated less in evangelical revival movements. Those groups emphasize orthodoxy and liturgy, but many of their members have not appreciated the benefits of reaching people first with general biblical instruction, regardless of whether they enter full communion with one’s denomination. Many also have forgotten the value of non-liturgical, enthusiastic revivals, like the ones Franciscan field-preachers led in medieval England, well before Methodists did. Some have tried to retrieve revivalism by importing praise-and-worship into the liturgy, but that often precludes the solemnity that liturgy requires.  

A movement like Wesley’s today would preach basic biblical morality and faith to the unchurched, regardless of which specific church they finally joined. It would draw on the resources of all Christian denominations and, therefore, be more effective for its purpose than one denomination acting alone. But the movement would also encourage people to join some liturgical community, ideally the one with the fullness of truth (although each person ultimately will have to discern that for himself, with God’s help).  

Such an effort would be eminently worthwhile. It would help those suffering from today’s cultural and economic upheavals, and it would strengthen civil society—as did the Awakenings of the past. It would recommit all Christian groups to the fundamental beliefs that they share. And it would unite them, across denominations, in a common, noble cause, hastening the coming of that day when they might again be perfectly one, as their Lord prayed they should be. 

Image by EWY Media and licensed via Adobe Stock.

At IFI, we seek to raise awareness of and address cultural and political trends here in Illinois and throughout the nation. An increasing number of these trends pose a threat to human dignity, endangering the lives of image-bearers of the living God from conception to natural death.

Recently, we received a response to this article about the push to legalize physician-assisted suicide (PAS) in Illinois. The writer, a hospice nurse, disagreed strongly with our stance concerning the risks of legalization, accusing us of making “despicable” assertions and claiming to know for certain that we are wrong. Her reasoning featured some of the common arguments for PAS, which we’ll respond to below.

You might wonder why we would take the time to address this. In this brave new world of ever-changing technologies and at a time when appeals to empathy and compassion are commonly used to advance political aims, we must familiarize ourselves with the arguments that will be leveled against us.

Many Christians have been and are confused by this kind of reasoning.

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In her email, the writer challenged us to produce evidence for our assertions. She closed by saying that if we cannot prove them, we’re just like liberals who only argue from emotion. Make no mistake, this is an emotionally charged topic. Lives are at stake, so it should be. However, the claims made in the article are also rooted in fact.

Sadly, with the spread of euthanasia and PAS in the West, there is legitimate reason for concern.

The first two items on which the writer disagreed were that

a) No doctor has a crystal ball. An assisted suicide law could cause patients to take their lives based on inaccurate predictions about their life expectancies and

b) Legalizing assisted suicide would create a culture in which terminally ill persons believe that they have a “duty to die.”

Her response:

“You demonstrate an inability to appreciate the dignity and integrity of patients, family members, hospice doctors, nurses, aides, social services staff and chaplains!”

It can’t be ignored that after accusing us of emotionalism, the writer appeals to emotion here. Just because a patient and his or her care team have generally good intentions does not mean they cannot make mistakes. Medicine is not God, so it follows that doctors cannot possibly know for certain when a patient will die.

We cannot “prove” this claim since there is no way to know how long someone would have lived after they are dead, but there are countless stories of someone receiving a prognosis only to outlive it. In fact, many times, when a patient enters hospice care and their symptoms are managed, they live longer than their prognosis.

To end your life based on a doctor’s prediction of how long you have is to place your faith in an inherently flawed human, not the God who made you and knows the length of your days.

We must also remember that even the best of intentions, when rooted in a godless worldview, can and will lead to evil outcomes. It ought to cause us to pause any time a physician, who has taken an oath to “first do no harm,” finds his or her way to becoming a willing accomplice in a patient’s suicide.

The risk of patients feeling a “duty to die” is rooted in the larger context of our nation’s increasing slide into humanism, materialism, utilitarianism, and a pathological avoidance of suffering. There simply is no way to guard perfectly against coercion in the life of the patient.

As Family Research Council Director of the Center for Human Dignity Mary Szoch states about the Illinois legislation,

“According to the latest data from Oregon, fear of being a burden to friends and family is the fifth most common reason people choose assisted suicide. Coercion can be subtle. It can be the long sighs or the grumpy interactions that cause a person to feel like their existence is no longer wanted, or coercion can be overt — an heir to the estate who pressures or even forces the patient to take the suicide drugs. Since there is no requirement for an independent witness to be present at the time the drugs are taken, and there’s no requirement for a mental health evaluation, if SB 9 passes, either is possible.”

Particularly in the West, where many people experience the privilege of being able to avoid much if not all forms of inconvenience, let alone suffering, disability is viewed as the worst-case scenario. There can be no doubt that the men and women who face degenerative disease and terminal diagnoses get the message that many of their peers think they would be better off dead.

Add to this the risks to those suffering from depression and other mental illnesses, and you can see how easily someone could be “tipped” over into choosing an early death. Coercion, while often personal, can also be societal.

The third and final claim our writer took issue with was this: Assisted suicide would give insurers—whether state-run or private—a financial incentive to cover lethal drugs, but not costly life-saving treatments. No one should feel pressured into choosing assisted suicide for financial reasons, or because they fear becoming a burden upon others close to them.

Our reader’s response:

“I understand being cynical about insurance companies, and many of the decisions they make are unconscionable to me, but this idea is so far out, that it’s ridiculous.”

Sadly, there are documented cases of this very thing taking place, either at the hands of insurers or hospital systems:

• A healthy Canadian Paralympian who was offered “medically assisted death” instead of the wheelchair lift she was waiting to have installed in her home.

• A terminally ill mom from California who was denied treatment but offered a suicide drug instead.

• A physician who was seeking insurance coverage to treat two patients in states where PAS was legal, but was denied and offered assistance in ending their lives instead.

• A Canadian woman who was offered euthanasia or PAS multiple times throughout her breast cancer battle.

Toward the end of the email, the reader asked,

“Why do you think that you … know more about the topic than the community of hospice staff with the patient at the center, making the difficult choice for themselves?”

We can agree that end-of-life decisions are deeply personal, but that does not place them off-limits for ethical scrutiny. Medical training does not confer moral or ethical infallibility.

We can and must consider the implications of pro-death policies. While our friend may believe that legalizing PAS in Illinois will only yield positive outcomes, that is wishful thinking at best.

Proponents of PAS may think the policy only concerns patients who are seeking physician-assisted suicide, but the effects are much more far-reaching. If PAS is legalized in Illinois, it will not only impact those who face a terminal diagnosis and their family members, but also the medical professionals who will endure moral injury by participating, and other insurance policyholders who will, by extension, fund the deaths of fellow image-bearers.

As time passes, Illinoisans are at risk of becoming desensitized to the culture of death already on the march.

Physician-assisted suicide is not purely personal, nor is it benign, no matter how badly some might wish it to be.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to email both your state senator and state representative to ask them to vote NO. If it passes in the Illinois House, it will move quickly to the Illinois Senate for concurrence and then be sent to the governor.

LifeNews Note: Mae Arthur writes for the Illinois Family Institute, where this article appeared.

The post Responding to Assisted Suicide Supporters appeared first on LifeNews.com.

Born alive and stillbirth late term abortions for 2023/2024. Totals for late-term born alive/stillbirth abortions combined, are more than the total for the previous year by 125. Comparison of the last five years below.

That is 642 late-term born alive abortions in just five years.

That is 5,738 late-term stillbirth abortions in just five years.

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These numbers are most probably grossly underreported because CIHI only publishes numbers from nine provinces and the three territories. Noticeably absent is Quebec’s numbers. I’ve asked CIHI why this is the case, and am waiting for a response.

The study was based on all second trimester abortions (13,777) performed in the hospitals of Quebec between 1989 and 2021. In Quebec, the law does not stipulate a maximum time limit for performing an abortion. The researchers found that abortions performed during the second trimester of pregnancy due to fetal anomalies doubled between the period 1989 – 2000 and 2011-2021. At the same time, they observed a significant increase in live births following a second-trimester abortion: the rate of 4.1 live births per 100 abortions in 1989-2001 climbs to 20.8% for the 2011-2021 period.

This is particularly true for abortions between 20 and 24 weeks of amenorrhea (18-22 weeks of pregnancy): in this case, more than one fetus in five is alive at the time of expulsion (21.7%).’

The pro-abortions always like to say that these late-term abortions are always done because of fetal anomalies or the health of the mother. But in 48% of these cases, the Quebec abortions took place for “personal or unspecified reasons” on a healthy fetus:

‘The study showed that in 48% of second trimester abortions in Quebec, i.e. almost half the cases, there was no medical indication on the fetal side, nor any medical emergency on the maternal side. In these cases, the abortion took place for “personal or unspecified” reasons, on a healthy fetus.’

So many lies.

UPDATE: In the past when I reported on Canada’s late term live-birth abortions, Quebec’s numbers were always excluded from CIHI’s data. For the first time, I have now received Quebec’s numbers for 2023-2024.

I originally reported 123 abortions for 2023-2024 for Canada, and now we know that Quebec performed an additional 27 of these late term born-alive abortions for a new total of 150.

The post Canada Killed 150 Babies in Live Birth Abortions Last Year appeared first on LifeNews.com.