One irony of enlightenment modernity is that in the move to exalt human kind and to liberate man from the shackles of guilt and repression imposed by medieval religious institutions, man was actually dehumanized. When God was dispensed with as the basis for human dignity and worth, dignity and worth washed away like bare topsoil in a thunderstorm. There was nothing left to hold it. The attempt to deify man wound up paradoxically reducing him to the status of a herd animal - something to be manipulated, exploited, and slaughtered to suit the convenience and the needs of whoever controlled the levers of power in society.
Thus the twentieth century, the zenith of modernity, the age of state atheism, the age of the ascendency of reason, was the most savage, murderous century in human history.
Our dignity, worth and thus our right not to be harmed, our fundamental right to life, is rooted, John Locke reminds us, solely in the fact that we are created by God for His purpose and in His image. He loves us and we are His property. No one can with impunity harm that which is cherished by God. But modernity has sought to render God irrelevant to the human enterprise and to replace rights rooted in God with rights rooted in reason. Reason, however, cannot bear the weight that modernity wishes to place upon it.
The following story about Peter Singer is a good illustration of the erosive effect that modernity's rejection of God has had on our belief in the value of human life. Perhaps no contemporary thinker is as clear, consistent, and forthright about the implications of modern atheism as is Singer:
An internationally known Princeton "bioethicist" and animal-rights activist says he'd kill disabled babies if it were in the "best interests" of the family, because he sees no distinction in the child's life whether it is born or not, and the world already allows abortion.
The comments come from Peter Singer, a controversial bioethics professor, who responded to a series of questions in the UK Independent this week.
...Singer believes the next few decades will see a massive upheaval in the concept of life and rights, with only "a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists" still protecting life as sacrosanct.
To the rest, it will be a commodity to be re-evaluated regularly for its worth.
Singer's response came to Dublin reader Karen Meade's question: "Would you kill a disabled baby?"
"Yes, if that was in the best interests of the baby and of the family as a whole. Many people find this shocking, yet they support a woman's right to have an abortion," he said.
He added that one point on which he agrees with the pro-life movement is that, "from the point of view of ethics rather than the law, there is no sharp distinction between the foetus and the newborn baby."
The statement furthers the argument that Singer's position is just an extension of the culture of death that has developed in the world, with euthanasia legal in some locations, abortion legal in many and even charges that in some repressive societies there's an active business in harvesting healthy organs from victims in order to provide transplants for the wealthy.
Singer holds that man is no different from other forms a life, and therefore man's life is not worth more than, for example, the life of a cow.
The only moral absolute, he noted, "is that we should do what will have the best consequences for all those affected by our actions."
Here in this last sentence Singer slips into inconsistency. If there is no God then there are no moral "shoulds", there are no moral absolutes at all. As Dostoyevsky writes in the Brothers Karamazov "If God is dead then everything is permitted". In the Godless world that modernity wishes to build there is no reason, moral or otherwise, why I shouldn't just do what will have the best consequences for me and not care at all about how my actions affect anyone else.
Nor can atheism offer us any consistent, non-arbitrary reason why the killing should be limited to fetuses and newborns. After all, as Singer points out, there's no qualitative difference between the born and the unborn child, but neither is there a sharp qualitative difference between the newborn and the toddler, or the toddler and the child, or the child and the adolescent. The boundaries are blurry at best and completely arbitrary at worst. The logic of Singer's argument leads us, once we accept killing defective newborns, to killing less defective newborns and eventually normal newborns, and from thence to killing defective children and eventually normal but inconvenient children. From there the horror will eventually extend to adult undesirables and eventually to any adult who is politically inexpedient.
In other words, Singer's atheism leads us right back to the mass exterminations of the Nazi holocaust.
Peter Singer's ideas, as affable and congenial as he might be in person, would, if followed consistently, lead us straight into the pit of hell.