After watching the soulless liberals & pro-aborts here argue for months that the unborn fetus is not a baby, much less a human, it occurs to me that this error arises from a serious defect in epistemology that is afflicting them. Pro-aborts typically demand empirical evidence, to prove the fetus is human, crippling them w/ the handicap of scientism. They completely ignore the reality that one may enlarge their understanding of reality through appeal to other epistemologies. The fact is that the scientific method is very powerful, but also limited in its scope. It cannot, for example, prove historical events, it cannot be used to prove aesthetic statements, metaphysical/ontological statements, moral statements, etc. Furthermore, any argument that relies solely upon one epistemology when others are available to address the issue must necessarily be limited. So, as the question of epistemology applies to this dialogue, consider the debate, rooted in a rational epistemology, between the Ancient Greek philosophers Heraclitus & Parmenides.
When considering the nature of things, Parmenides remarked about a river that *is*. To which Heraclitus noted that you could not step into the same river twice. Meaning by this that as the waters flowed and your foot disturbed sediment, the river, though very nearly the same as it was moments before you interacted with it, was now ever so slightly different. From this debate arose a great conundrum among the giants of ancient thought. The dilemma that now vexed them was: is It possible for things to ever be? Or are things always in a state of becoming? Being or Becoming? Such was the question of essence that took over 100 yrs to begin to adequately address. The brilliant thinker who sought to reconcile the tension between this dualism was Plato.
Now for our purposes, note that Plato argued that there was an ultimate archetypal reality of ideals & that here on earth, we only observed imperfect copies or shadows of them. For a fuller treatment, see Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. But to draw an analogy for illustrative purposes, consider this. I once heard it given in a lecture series given by theologian and philosopher, Dr. R. C. Sproul. Many of you reading this are sitting in something we call a chair. But how do you know it’s a chair? You might reply that it has 4 legs & I can sit on it. To which Dr. Sproul would retort, ‘Well horses have 4 legs & you can sit on them too.’ So how do you know it’s a chair? After all chairs come in all manner of sizes & shapes & many different kinds of materials. To answer this, Plato would have appealed to his archetype of chair. The chair ideal embodies all the properties of ‘chairness’ and is the only chair in a state of being. All other chairs are mere shadows or copies and are in a perpetual state of becoming. Thus he reconciled, for a time, the nexus of essence. He answered the question (to co-opt Shakespeare) ‘To be or to become? That is the question.’
But how does this aid us here? Like this. Whether you agree w/ Plato’s archetypal ideals or not, the distinction remains. There is being, and there is becoming. A river that is, is still a river even as it may be in the process of becoming a different river. In the same way an unborn baby, even an embryo, is still a baby, it is still a human, even as it is in the process of becoming the person God intends.