06 What next?

This series of opinion pieces has been running in the Grazier since mid September. It began by making the point that believing in God is quite a reasonable thing to do, in fact more reasonable than believing the universe came into being by chance.

Belief in God is at the foundation of many values we have traditionally held, values which are under increasing attack.

My motivation to write these articles was a book, “Practical Ethics” 2^nd edition, which I read recently. The author is Professor Peter Singer, a well known atheist, listed by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential persons in the world today. Professor Singer sometimes appears on ABC’s Q&A.

In the preface to his book, Singer says that he approaches issues such as human equality, abortion, euthanasia, and the environment on the basis that humans do not have “any distinctive worth or inherent value that puts them above members of other species”.  Singer denies any need to believe in God.

He believes rational and self-conscious animals (and he believes many animals are) can be defined as persons. Conversely he believes newborn infants and severely disabled people may not be persons, if they are not rational and self-conscious. If you read his book, you can see where this takes him on issues such as abortion and euthanasia. He also believes that sexual relations raise no unique moral issues at all; he is on the record as saying he sees no inherent problem with bestiality (human-animal relations).

These types of beliefs represent a huge shift from Christian values. Christians believe that God created humans in His image. We are distinct from all other animals. God gives life and humans must always respect this in decisions about life and death.

Things change dramatically when you begin to leave God out of the equation, and things are changing rapidly in Australia at present. Proposals for change such as same sex marriage are not one-off decisions. They are part of a flood of change bearing down on us, and we must be aware of these things. If this trend continues, it will have far reaching consequences, inevitably moving to the whole range of values espoused by Peter Singer.

Peter.