Thinking to Believe

The slippery slope of euthanasia is slipping as projected in England, Europe’s hotspot for bioethical immorality. Len Doyal, professor of medical ethics at Queen Mary University of London, argues that physicians should be able to actively euthanize severely impaired patients whose lives they deem no longer worth living, without their consent. He recognizes that this is already going on in the form of dehydration (as in the Terri Schiavo case), but argues that this can cause a “slow and distressing death.” To alleviate this distress Doyal proposes that the British government legalize the active euthanizing of these patients so that they die immediately.

This is important for several reasons. First, it is the doctors—not the patient or family—who decide whether the patient’s care should be ended and their life terminated. Secondly, this is no mere passive euthanasia where medical care is simply removed and the person dies from their disease. This is the active killing of human beings. And for the record we are not talking about brain dead humans being kept alive only artificially by machines; we are talking about severely damaged humans (suffering from severe cognitive dysfunction) being intentionally killed because their lives are deemed invaluable by the medical community. Thirdly, I find it interesting that during the Terri Schiavo fiasco doctors were arguing that people like Terri would not feel the pain of dehydration, and yet Doyal admits that such a death can be slow and distressing. Which is it?

HT: Wesley J. Smith

Melinda Penner at Stand to Reason had a good blog post

The box is one of God’s own nature we’re all just trying to figure out what the box looks like. God should be in a box. What’s the alternative? God has no limitations on what He can be like or act like? That is frightening. God Himself is limited by His own nature. He can’t lie. He can’t sin. He’s can’t go out of existence. God’s box – the definition of what He is like – is what makes Him God and a Person we can love and trust and glorify. If God isn’t in some kind of a box, He would be arbitrary. … Our goal is to get the best idea of what that box looks like.

I love it! God is in a box because God is an ontological reality, and as such there are certain things that are true about Him and a lot of things that are not true about Him. The task of theology is to separate the false notions about God from the true so we can get an accurate picture of who God is, what He is like, and what He wants. So the next time someone tells you “Don’t put God in a box” tell them, “He’s already in a box. I’m just trying to delineate what that box looks like.”

Albert Einstein predicted and Edwin Hubble confirmed that the universe is expanding. What I find so amazing is that the universe is not expanding into space, but is expanding space itself. Space is continually being created as the universe expands into what was previously nothingness. While it is well recognized that the singularity (the mathematical point at which the spatio-temporal material universe came into being) “created” space from nothingness, it is not so well recognized that even now new space continues to emerge “from” nothingness. What is space expanding into if not space? What does the border of space look like? What is on the other side?

These questions are similar to asking what God was doing before the beginning of time. There can be no such thing. It is a categorical mistake to even pose the question. Likewise, there is nothing on the other side of the border of space. It’s not empty space, but the absence of space. What does the absence of space look like? My spatio-temporal brain can’t even begin to comprehend it.

Tune in tomorrow for a discussion of space and God’s relationship to it.