In this clip from our Reality Student Apologetics Conference, Megan Almon uses a Polaroid photograph to illustrate how human life, though initially unseen, is valuable and fully present from the start.
Transcript
We often think of embryos as constructed things, things that are put together piece by piece, like something on an assembly line, which isn’t terribly surprising given that we live in a very industrial society. We build a lot of stuff, right? But ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims. If you’ll notice even the way our language has shifted, my grandmother, when we spoke about baby-making, would have used the word “procreation.” We, in this room, almost exclusively use the word “reproduction.” It’s a very industrial term, so it’s no surprise that we hear people say things like “It’s just a clump of cells” or “just a mass of tissue,” as if you could add some more parts, and the end product would be a baby. But men and women, that is not how we came to be. You did something that no constructed thing could ever do. From the moment you were an embryo, you have driven your own development from within, and many of us are still doing that. That’s remarkable.
Richard Stith is a philosopher who gives us a word picture to help us understand this very, very well. He says, imagine that you are in the Amazon jungle, and you have taken with you, not your iPhone, but instead of taking that with you, you forgot it at home. So, you took an artifact called a camera. No, seriously, these are coming back! How many of you have one of those Polaroid cameras, where it spits the image out? So, you have one of these, and you’re taking pictures in the jungle, and you go to snap a photo of the scenery that’s in front of you, and right when you snap the photo, a black jaguar jumps out.
I am an expert on black jaguars because I watch Wild Kratts with my kids. Black jaguars are extremely rare, and so, it’s hard to find them in the wild—there aren’t many photos of them in the wild. So, what you would be holding in this instance is something of great value. And I want you to imagine that someone comes and looks over your shoulder, and they take that tab from you, rip it in two, and toss it aside. Now, you would be furious with them. But imagine they looked at you and said, “What’s the big deal? It was just a brown smudge.” You would say, “No, it wasn’t! No, it wasn’t! I was holding a photograph of a jaguar. It was rare and beautiful, valuable. It was already there. You just couldn’t see it yet.” Because it was doing what? Developing. Just like each of us has done.
Men and women, you didn’t come from an embryo. You once were an embryo. Everything that makes you you was already there at that first stage of your development.