Machines vs. Souls

Policy matters and engaging in weekly podcast, family policy is family and were grateful to have you with us for this week's program is our prayer that you will be informed and encouraged and inspired by what you hear on family policy matters and that you will for better equipped to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state and nation, and now here's our house to family policy matters Tracy to victory. Thank you for joining us this week for family policy matters. As Christians it's important for us to spend some time thinking about new technologies and how our faith applies to those without that, we are in danger of not being salt and light in our culture regarding these issues and stumbling into big ethical blunders will. This is especially true in the field of medicine and biology. Dr. RJ Snell spends his days thinking through these deeper ethical questions and his work at the Witherspoon Institute and is a prolific author and longtime professor of ethics in natural law and theory and more were going to talk today about this very fundamental issue of what it means to be a human being and how this can affect where we land on some very important issues. Dr. Snell welcome to family policy matters. Tracy will start off by talking about philosophy in general. So why in our busy lives to media people family. Everybody beckoning at us every minute. What is important for us to take time to reflect on some of these underlying issues.

A lot of people imagine for you to be in order to study your vote of all obscure problems whereby philosophy is reflection about how to live well to seek wisdom and to bring with them and world life.

We all want to live well. We all want to have a happy life for life that we can admire and respect pretty difficult for us to do that without soberly considering the things that we value and how we act and the things that we love and in philosophy is mainly about learning to live without. Well, we all want to do this we did.

So let's talk about how we view the human person and the human body and how this is changed in our current culture yet so for some of myself who believe in God and believe that God created the world deep commitment to imagining my body and my very identity of the gift, something that is been given to me by grace in which I don't own it is not merely my property. Whereas for good. Many people live don't necessarily believe in God or don't believe that God is a creator there's a sense that the body's property in the body is a product, something that one can manage and control and dominate to seek our own ends, and that's a pretty significant change if I think that I have a responsibility for a gift that is been given to me as opposed to something which is my property and even a product of a machine or a product of the technology that's a pretty significant difference. So what kind of issues. Is this affecting then in our culture.

Well, everything from life to death and doing everything in between. We can think about how increasingly children are thought of as products to be grown or made in the laboratory to the way that increasingly were thinking of of death, a wonderful piece recently of how people in Silicon Valley think of death is optional just a glitch in the hardware and like any glitch there's a solution to it. So death at that point becomes something that is optional for something that we can control something we can even reject the changes the meaning of life, the meaning of suffering the meaning of love meaning of children. Everything is at stake. Let's unpack some of these things but let's talk a little bit more about what you see as the greatest challenge to preserving positive and in our view, of course, accurate view of the human person today. I don't have any problem with with technology per se human being is endowed by God with creative capacities and work technology per se is not necessarily the problem but of you human reality is a product that can be controlled and dominated by what some philosophers call the technological viewpoint, which is just a fancy word for thinking that every aspect of our life be controlled.

The newest fastest growing religion in the world is the religion of Silicon Valley that has an account of Original Sin which is that human limits in human death. There are problems to be overcome is an account of salvation really which is that human enterprise and human genius gives us control over everything over life and death, and I think it's a fundamental challenge to those of us like myself who believe that God has given us our reality and that what it means, in part, live live a good life is to live in beekeeping and responsibility for the structure in order that God is given class I would have to say that I'm surprised to hear you say that I don't think I realized that there was a concerted effort to go in that direction. But people are clearly geniuses in their technological fields, but there also thinking pretty deeply in writing about the meaning of life in the meaning of death, possibly Peter Teal who many people week will be familiar with as a venture capitalist and founder PayPal and others spend a lot of time reading and thinking about philosophy and about human freedom and so on. A very thoughtful man but some of the claims coming from that world are claims that I find quite problematic in their visions of the meaning of life just to dig deep purpose of people who are like say Peter Teal who read philosophy all the time.

We can still though get caught up in this thinking right, without maybe even realizing they were being influenced by the data.

For instance, just on depression, especially among teenage girls since the adventure, the ubiquity of it. The iPhone is pretty startling.

If you look at the charts of teenage depression and suicidal ideation is fairly steady throughout 2008 2009, and that it goes almost straight up in the charts.

Why is that you would imagine that most young teenagers are thinking philosophically about the meaning of technology and yet are bombarded every day with Instagram snapshot, which give pictures of the curated life for life without imperfections. Life in which everyone's teeth are straight than whites, and everyone is beautiful course reality isn't like that reality has suffering and loneliness and and so there's a disjunct between the appearance of reality in the technological world and the ongoing experience we have as humans, which hasn't really changed fundamentally of sadness, loneliness that are still human realities, including the idea that some have that if everything is all of reality is open to technological control than those sorts of traumas are somebody's fault, they shouldn't have happened. There's a sense that whenever tragedy occurs, it's not fake it's not an act of God. It's not Providence.

It's not just the human condition, but it's a problem which should be solved in the fact that it isn't solved means that it somebody's fault, listening post weekly radio show and podcast of Carolina family policy Council. This is just one of the many ways since he works to educate citizens across Mr. Lana about policy issues that impact families.

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The anxiety that it happened at all.

When everything should be open to control. So let's talk about this religion of Silicon Valley in this whole philosophy and how it affects some more specific things that you mentioned earlier.

Let's talk about life. How does it affect that with you. I think the principle of ethics is what John Paul II called the personals principal notion that all action to preserve and protect an act for the good of persons.

If we consider persons to be embodied. Souls then of course the unborn child at every stage of her development as a person from the other hand, we think of persons just as machines then machines which are incapable of certain actions walking, talking, having likes projects having a sense of their own identity, then they're not persons there machines that one can fix dispose of bringing the being of one's own one's own whim. The mindset of abortion is is in my mind pretty clearly linked to this notion of the world as machine in the world is product for our use. When you have an unborn child whose convenience is convenient to have an unborn child was inconvenient.

It's just an inconvenient machine that one can dispose of. But if it's a person well there's nothing more valuable than a person the matter of small so let's go to the opposite end of that spectrum. Spectrum of light and talk about death somehow how are we seeing this effect our fears of death, the prevalence of euthanasia or assisted suicide in Europe and Canada is now fairly well documented and well. States were not as far along down that path seems to be very long before we are in many ways. It's the same problem.

If we think of ourselves as machines or if we think of our bodies as our property as opposed to gifts like dispose of property when it's broken, whereas a gift from another. My life is a gift from God.

It's not mine to dispose of its mind to care for. If my body is mine. The tool will broken tools get disposed out other repercussions. Does this result in conditions like anorexia, self-harm, sexual confusion and those kinds of issues that we face singly every day. The body is somewhat resistant. We imagine her body is something we can manipulate in shape to its own effects and then we will suffer with it or go ages or still not attractive as attractive as the neighbors body is and people suffer enormously as a result, as opposed to thinking of their bodies and their selves as opportunities and gifts from God to deal with and to grow in where the imperfections and limits of my body now become by God become the occasion for my self-control and self mastering growth and virtue. I have to imagine that there's all sorts of mental struggles which come with the vision of imagining my body is a recalcitrant tool that I'd like to be better. So is it too much of a reach to think that this type of philosophy about our humanness has implications on issues like immigration so much of the immigration debate we see people on either side of that issue. Those supporting more open borders.

Those supporting more close borders see people on both sides of that debate. Thinking of and referring to immigrants and their bodies as either tools or resources or plagues, as opposed to persons let them solve immigration breaks right that would tell us whether we should have more open or more close borders does fundamentally change the nature of how we imagine and think of immigrants. If we think of them as persons and not just as bodies which we can use in our orchards or as bodies which get in the way of our labor and our enjoyment of goods the proper answer is immigration matters a whole lot how we imagine the identity of the other person well this is been a fascinating conversation before we go though. Could you give our listeners somewhere that they could go to explore this topic a little bit more. I'm a big fan of the thinker is a medical doctor and researcher Leon Kass KAF S and much of his work is about the meaning of the body and and its limits. Sometimes referred to as a bio conservative meeting someone who has a sense that the body and its nature needs to be preserved for any Leon Kass's work is good. I also suggested the work of my colleagues here at Princeton. Robbie George book that he and Chris Tollefson co-authored called embryo which is not only about the moral status of the embryo but explains and in pretty good detail very accessible. This notion of dualism in the mind as relates to the body and personal identity either of those sources be very good. Thank you Dr. R Chase now with the Witherspoon Institute for being with us today on family policy matters even listening to family policy matters. We hope you enjoyed the program and plenitude in again next week to listen to the show online insulin more about NC families encourage and inspire families across from Carlotta go to our website and see family.org that's in see family.org. Thanks again for listening and may God bless you and your family