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In today's culture if you want to know something, and really know it, you ask a scientist or at least that's how it's generally thought of.” Science gives us truth. Religion might give us a feeling or a purpose but science tells us about the world as it actually is, not things we have to believe on ‘faith’, or in some type of belief in spite of evidence.”

Science tells us the truth, or at least that how it's said. Some people would even say that if science doesn't say it or can't support it then it's not something we can know, that it's not true. This is what's involved in the shift in our educational system to saying that a fact is something that can be proven. An opinion is something you believe but a fact is something that can be proven, through some type of scientific or naturalistic process. 

Well this has grave implications for very important life issues like abortion and euthanasia, and so we're going to talk about that today and answer the question, "Can science tell us when abortion is okay?" You might be expecting me to say, "Yes, it can tell us when it's okay and it actually says it's never okay."

That is actually not something science could ever tell us. Science can never tell us when something is okay, or when it's wrong, because that's a moral claim, that's a moral determination. That would be something for the area of philosophy, or theology, or ethics, but certainly not science.

Science has an important role and we need to understand what that role is, because as I started out saying most people think science is the source of knowledge about the way the world really is. In some ways that's true, but science gives us a subset of knowledge about the world and the way it is. It cannot tell us everything, and the mistake today is to ascribe too much worth and give away too much in our lives to science and its supposed authority.

Let's talk about when live begins. 

Is there scientific consensus on this? Marco Rubio was recently doing an interview on CNN and he said that there is scientific consensus about when life begins, and he actually did a very good job, especially for a politician, of defending unborn life in pointing out: what else could it be that's growing in there besides a human being.

The fact that a human being is growing in its mother is not actually that controversial. We try to use other terms to distance ourselves like fetus or tissue, but it is human. It's not a dog. It's not a cat. He did a great job pointing that out. It is a being, it's alive… or is it? That's the question that we're going to look at now.

There are actually quite a few views in the scientific community about when life begins. There's the metabolic view, and this would say that when a cell is functioning that cell is alive. It's really easy to tell if a cell is alive or not. Is it taking in nutrients? Is it expelling waste? Is it doing cellular respiration? Is it creating energy? 

If the answer to those questions is yes, then whatever that thing is - that cell or group of cells - that's alive. That's one view. On that view the sperm is alive, and the egg is alive. We would affirm both of those things but they're not the same type of “alive” as the fertilized zygote or fertilized egg. 

We need to look at another view of when life begins, and this would be the genetic view. This would say that when you have a new genome that has been formed, a totally unique set of DNA that life has begun. I think this view actually pairs well with the metabolic view. You take two cells that are themselves each alive, they come together to create a totally new set of genetic code that never been seen before and never will be again. 

Those two living cells, now one, reproduce and recreate after themselves and grow. All of those constituent cell…