drsmooth wrote:rigid fundamentalists who insist with increasing vehemence that life begins at "conception" have, almost certainly unwittingly, because they are almost without exception witless, put themselves on the slipperiest of slopes.
Because as you trace back to that instant of conception, what's to stop 'originalists' from grasping that if the 'spark' comes from the engagement of one differentiated cell formation (sperm) with another (egg), one might be obliged to say that those 'spark elements' surely come from somewhere, and so that conception began even further back to the sperm or egg producer's own 'engendering', and so on back through the hall of poorly-reasoned mirrors to...places these fundamentalist 'originalists' are assuredly not prepared to go. Yet if one must pursue this obsession with a conceptual 'certainty' to its roots, one can't simply declare that you've reached the end - unless, again, you're prepared to acknowledge that you're blaspheming.
You've said this before, I think, and I disagree completely. I agree that finding the point where it begins is open to some interpretation, but it seems like the moment when a complete set of DNA is formed, the structure that will determine that life, seems like a reasonable place to say it begins. I suppose epigenetics might throw a bit of a wrench in there, but not much. The moment when a child can exist on its own or birth seem like two other reasonable places.
