Value in Human Life? Part II

Ok, so a couple days ago I posed the question: Does human life have intrinsic value? I talked a lot about the entertainment that humanity has received from human injury/death throughout history, and how that seems to indicate that human life does not intrinsically have any value, but I also said that I disagreed, that I believe human life does have intrinsic value. So today, I'm gonna talk about why I believe this.

To begin, if human life, truly has no intrinsic value, than life is valued on its accomplishments/failures, contributions to/detractions from society/the world, what it does, or possible even what it has the potential to do, but that last one's moving more into granting intrinsic value. So naturally, we would determine a value of a life by examining it, and that value could change. Most likely, value would be highest during the peak of ones life, and life would be considered less valuable in the beginning, when it is unproven and unsure, and at the end, when the usefulness is winding down. Based on these assumptions, there could be a case made that the value of life is dependent on what it does. We see things like abortion and geronticide in the world, and strong arguments are made for all sorts of mass killings of "useless" drains on society. Whether, this is dependent on age, societal status, race, intelligence, health, etc... there have been plenty of proponents of this way of thinking throughout society, and while they may have logical arguments, they are viewed by most as deranged or evil or something like that. That seems to indicate to me that human life must have some sort of intrinsic value, because if not, why does the loss of life in those "drains" on society upset the general populace so much?

That's not a very strong argument, however, so here is my next thought. If the value of life is based on what it accomplishes, what sort of accomplishments are considered valuable? If you ask most people you will get an answer that refers to the person helping others, doing some sort of humanitarian work, being a doctor/nurse/firefighter/police officer, something like that. Or, the are great innovators/leaders who develop things to better society as a whole or increase the quality of life for others. This poses a problem, however. If human life has no intrinsic value, then no value is added to one's life by performing actions that benefit the lives of other human beings, either collectively or individually. You cannot find value in your life by aiding something that is intrinsically not valuable. Therefore, actions that add value have to be those actions that either aid other forms of life (animals, plants, etc...) or somehow add to to the overall value of the universe, or possibly advancements in technology, but not for any human benefit. Robot production for the sake of robot production only may be considered valuable, but robot production to aid in health, rescue efforts, or to make life easier for humans has no value, or minimal value. However, this brings up another issue. If human life has no intrinsic value, it can be easily argued that other forms of life on earth have no intrinsic value either, and if no life has intrinsic value, where does that leave us? Everything, every action, is futile, meaningless, utterly devoid of any value.

So, I've made an argument that if life has no intrinsic value then nothing really has any value, intrinsic or applied, but that still doesn't really argue that human life has intrinsic value. So here we go.

First of all, in order to find intrinsic value in human life you have to have a Christian worldview, believe that God exists, and that He created everything. Now, we see in Genesis that "God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." Immediately we see a distinction between Humanity and everything else. We were created in the image of God. Think about a famous artist or musician. Their art is valuable because of who made it. The art is not intrinsically valuable, and prints or copies do not hold value because the art itself does not intrinsically have value. It's value is ascribed to it by its creator. Think of a Picasso. The exact same image may have been created by someone else and hold absolutely no value, while almost anything that Picasso painted was valuable because he painted it, regardless of what it was.

The same thing is true of Humanity. Humans, as a physical body of muscle, skin, bones, nerves, etc... have no intrinsic value. However, they are ascribed value, at creation, by God. However, it moves beyond that. Human life is more than physical bodies. We also see in genesis that God "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being." Human life is unique, Humanity is more than a creation "formed...from the dust of the ground." Human life is literally the breath of God, This breath of life is the essence of Human life. While Picasso's paintings are ascribed value because he painted them, his creative/artistic ability to paint intrinsically has value. It is why he is able to ascribe value to his paintings. In the same way, God ascribes value to creation, but with Humanity, He literally infused His own intrinsic value within the creation that He formed. This infusion resulted in the creation, us, not just having ascribed value, but having intrinsic value, which allows us to to then ascribe value to other things.

This is why the concept of the value of human life is, in at least some way, evident in most people, why humanity throughout history has found murder to be morally wrong, why doing things that aid people or increase the quality of life for people are viewed to be noble and of value. Human life intrinsically has value because we were infused with it from the beginning from the Creator. 

Granted, we do not have ultimate value. Human life is not priceless, but neither is it free. It is extremely costly, so much, in fact, that the Creator who infused us with His own value paid with His life to purchase ours. That doesn't mean our lives are worth more than His. His death was only temporary. But, it was still death, it still cost Him a great deal to buy our life, life that He gave us.

So does human life have intrinsic value? Yes, absolutely! God created us, ascribing value to us, infused us with value, thus causing human life to be intrinsically valuable, and then paid a great price to purchase human life, thus verifying and proving our value.

You are valuable, and so are those around you. Live like it! God says that our bodies are sanctuaries, we should treat them as such, with the same respect and care that we would treat something we find to be highly valuable. We need to treat ourselves this way, and we need to treat others this way. How are you doing that? How can you do that from here on out?