Whatever Happened to the Human Race?

Francis A. Schaeffer, C. Everett Koop

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781433577024
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Why Should Christians Care About the Dignity of Human Life?

What determines whether a life has value? Does age, ability, or health? Scripture tells us that we are all created in the image and likeness of God, and Christians are called to defend the dignity of his creation. But as debates rage around issues from abortion to euthanasia, it can be difficult to speak up against opposing viewpoints.

In Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, renowned theologian Francis A. Schaeffer and former US surgeon general C. Everett Koop, MD argue that society's view of life quickly deteriorates when we devalue God's creation through "anti-life" and "anti-God" practices. First written forty years ago, their perspectives are still relevant today as secular humanist issues, including euthanasia and infanticide, increasingly take hold in our culture. Their medical, historical, and theological insights empower readers to affirm a pro-life worldview and defend it confidently.

Chapter One

The Abortion of the Human Race

Cultures can be judged in many ways, but eventually every nation in every age must be judged by this test: How did it treat people? Each generation, each wave of humanity, evaluates its predecessors on this basis. The final measure of mankind’s humanity is how humanely people treat one another.

The great dramatic moments of history have left us with monuments and memories of compassion, love, and unselfishness, which punctuate the all-too-pervasive malevolence that dominates so much human interaction. That there is any respite from evil is due to some courageous people who, on the basis of personal philosophies, have led campaigns against the ill-treatment and misuse of individuals. Each era faces its own unique blend of problems. Our own time is no exception. Those who regard individuals as expendable raw material—to be molded, exploited, and then discarded—do battle on many fronts with those who see each person as unique and special, worthwhile, and irreplaceable.

The reason we are writing this book is that we feel strongly that we stand today on the edge of a great abyss. At this crucial moment choices are being made and thrust on us that will for many years to come affect the way people are treated. We want to try to help tip the scales on the side of those who believe that individuals are unique and special and have great dignity.

Yad Vashem is the monument in Jerusalem to the six million Jews and others who were killed in the Nazi Holocaust.1 It is one of the many memorials that are scattered over the world in tribute to those who have perished in upheavals of rampant evil—evil that swirls in on people when they no longer have a basis for regarding one another as wonderful creatures worthy of special care. Yad Vashem is a fitting place to begin, for it reminds us of what, unhappily, is possible in human behavior. Those who were murdered were people just like all of us. More important to realize is that those who murdered them were also people just like all of us. We seem to be in danger of forgetting our seemingly unlimited capacities for evil, once boundaries to certain behavior are removed.

There are choices to be made in every age. And who we are depends on the choices we make. What will our choices be? What boundaries will we uphold to make it possible for people to say with certainty that moral atrocities are truly evil? Which side will we be on?

The Thinkable and the Unthinkable

There is a “thinkable” and an “unthinkable” in every era. One era is quite certain intellectually and emotionally about what is acceptable. Yet another era decides that these “certainties” are unacceptable and puts another set of values into practice. On a humanistic base, people drift along from generation to generation, and the morally unthinkable becomes the thinkable as the years move on. By “humanistic base” we mean the fundamental idea that men and women can begin from themselves and derive the standards by which to judge all matters. There are for such people no fixed standards of behavior, no standards that cannot be eroded or replaced by what seems necessary, expedient, or even fashionable.

Perhaps the most striking and unusual feature of our moment of history is the speed with which eras change. Looking back in history, we notice that cultures such as the Indus River civilization (the Harappa culture) lasted about a thousand years. Today the passing of eras is so greatly sped up that the 1960s stand in sharp contrast to the 1970s. The young people of the 1970s do not understand their older brothers and sisters of the 1960s. What was unthinkable in the 1960s is unthinkable no longer.

The ease and speed of communication has been a factor in this. A protest in South Africa, for example, can be echoed by sympathizers in New York in just a few hours. Social conventions appear and disappear with unprecedented rapidity.

The thinkables of the 1980s and 1990s will certainly include things which most people today find unthinkable and immoral, even unimaginable and too extreme to suggest. Yet—since they do not have some overriding principle that takes them beyond relativistic thinking—when these become thinkable and acceptable in the 1980s and 1990s, most people will not even remember that they were unthinkable in the 1970s. They will slide into each new thinkable without a jolt.

What we regard as thinkable and unthinkable about how we treat human life has changed drastically in the West. For centuries Western culture has regarded human life and the quality of the life of the individual as special. It has been common to speak of “the sanctity of human life.”

For instance, the Hippocratic Oath, which goes back more than two thousand years, has traditionally been taken by the graduates of American medical schools at the time of their commencement.2 The Declaration of Geneva (adopted in September 1948 by the General Assembly of the World Medical Organization and modeled closely on the Hippocratic Oath) became used as the graduation oath by more and more medical schools. It includes: “I will maintain the utmost respect for human life from the time of conception.” This concept of the preservation of human life has been the basis of the medical profession and society in general. It is significant that when the University of Pittsburgh changed from the Hippocratic Oath to the Declaration of Geneva in 1971, the students deleted “from the time of conception” from the clause, beginning: “I will maintain the utmost respect for human life.” The University of Toronto School of Medicine has also removed the phrase “from the time of conception” from the form of the oath it now uses.3

Of course, the Hippocratic Oath takes us back to the time of the Greeks. But the fully developed concept of the sanctity of human life that we have known did not come from Greek thought and culture but from the Judeo-Christian worldview, which dominated the West for centuries. This view did not come from nowhere. Biblical doctrine was preached not as a truth but as the truth. This teaching formed not only the religious base of society but the cultural, legal, and governmental bases as well. As a total worldview it answered the major questions people have always asked. It dealt not only with the questions Who is God? What is He like? It also gave answers to the questions of Who are we as people? How ought we to live together? What meaning does human life have? In this way, Judeo-Christianity formed a general cultural consensus. That is, it provided the basic moral and social values by which things were judged.

Judeo-Christian teaching was never perfectly applied, but it did lay a foundation for a high view of human life in concept and practice. Knowing biblical values, people viewed human life as unique—to be protected and loved—because each individual is created in the image of God. This stands in great contrast, for example, to Roman culture. The Roman world practiced both abortion and infanticide, while Christian societies have considered abortion and infanticide to be murder.

Until recently in our own century, with some notable and sorry exceptions, human beings have generally been regarded as special, unique, and nonexpendable. But in one short generation we have moved from a generally high view of life to a very low one.

Why has our society changed? The answer is clear: the consensus of our society no longer rests on a Judeo-Christian base, but rather on a humanistic one. Humanism makes man “the measure of all things.” It puts man rather than God at the center of all things.

Today the view that man is a product of chance in an impersonal universe dominates both sides of the Iron Curtain. This has resulted in a secularized society and in a liberal theology in much of the church; that is, the Bible is set aside and humanism in some form (man starting from himself) is put in the Bible’s place. Much of the church no longer holds that the Bible is God’s Word in all it teaches. It simply blends with the current thought-forms rather than being the “salt” that judges and preserves the life of its culture. Unhappily, this portion of the church simply changes its standards as the secular, humanist standards sweep on from one loss of humanness to the next. What we are watching is the natural result of humanism in its secular and theological forms, and the human race is being increasingly devalued.

In our time, humanism has replaced Christianity as the consensus of the West. This has had many results, not the least of which is to change people’s views of themselves and their attitudes toward other human beings. Here is how the change came about. Having rejected God, humanistic scientists, philosophers, and professors began to teach that only what can be mathematically measured is real and that all reality is like a machine. Man is only one part of the larger cosmic machine. Man is more complicated than the machines people make, but is still a machine, nevertheless.

As an example, in 1968 Dr. Edmund R. Leach, Provost of Kings College, Cambridge, wrote in the London Times:

Today when the molecular biologists are rapidly unravelling the genetic chemistry of all living things—while the radio astronomers are deciphering the programme of an evolving cosmos—...