Faith is not contrary to reason

Ken Orr, Right to Life spokesman

Opinion

Martin Hanson (October 6 column) claims that faith is usually defined as “belief without evidence”. “Fact on the other hand, is that which is strongly supported by empirical evidence.” Where then is the evidence that there is no soul and therefore no life after death?

It is of critical importance that mankind understands the importance of the soul in accepting belief in a life after the death of our body. The soul is the animator of our body where we think, experience feeling and will to action. Those who deny an afterlife attack the existence of a spiritual soul.

It is in the soul that our intellect and will reside. If we accept that there is life after death then we must accept that the soul continues living after the death of the body and is reunited with the body at a future time designated by our Creator.

This profound truth has been accepted by uncivilised peoples who by virtue of the human intellect arrive at this critical truth. Acceptance of this truth is proof that by human reason alone, man can accept with faith the existence of the soul and our destiny to live with our Creator in life after death.

This faith in a soul and a loving Creator is not contrary to reason or science. The only real opposition to faith in the soul, life after death and a Creator is the pride of man.

Man can reflect that our Creator has installed in the heart of every human being the intense desire to live in eternal happiness with his Creator.

The writer continues to deny the humanity of the unborn child until it is eight weeks old. Its humanity is not defined by the child’s appearance but because the parents are human — belonging to the species Homo sapiens — the new being is therefore also human. By 21 to 25 days the baby’s heart is beating. Other internal organs are present in simple form and functioning as they grow. Early facial features appear.

“By 30 days, just two weeks past mother’s first missed period, the baby — one quarter of an inch long — has a brain of unmistakable human proportions, eyes, ears, mouth, kidneys, liver, an umbilical cord and a heart pumping blood she has made herself.”

The writer is sadly following the advice of Family Planning which warns that we should be careful not to humanise the unborn child by calling it a baby; up to 10 weeks it should be called an embryo and after that and up to birth should be called a foetus.

The writer claims that the unborn child does not feel pain until the 27th week. The accepted medical consensus is that the sensory connections for feeling pain are present at 20 weeks gestation. In fact, there is a steadily increasing body of medical evidence and literature supporting the conclusion that a fetus may feel pain from around 11 to 13 weeks, or even as early as 5.5 weeks.

Martin Hanson claims, like Family Planning, that the UN Human Rights Committee is recommending countries decriminalise abortion because they, including us, are in breach of the Convention for the Elimination of All Discrimination Against Women. This is untrue, there is absolutely nothing in the Convention supporting this baseless claim.

It is a tragedy that women die in “unsafe abortions”, and that in every abortion an innocent child is killed. Eight percent of maternal deaths are abortion-related with 92 percent dying during pregnancy or childbirth. It is estimated by the World Health Organisation that in 2015, 303,000 women died in pregnancy or childbirth.