Unalienable Rights, You Say? Why We Must Resist Yuval Harari’s “Scientific” Nihilism

Editor’s note: We are pleased to present this excerpt from the new book by Professor Richard Weikart, Unnatural Death: Medicine’s Descent from Healing to Killing (Discovery Institute Press).

When 17-year-old Joni Eareckson Tada tragically broke her neck in a 1967 diving accident, she was understandably devastated by the shocking news that she would be paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of her life. During the long months she lay in the hospital and then in a rehabilitation center, she contemplated suicide and even pleaded with a friend to help her commit suicide. If assisted suicide had been a legal option for her — as it is today in Canada, the Netherlands, and elsewhere for those suffering from incurable conditions — it seems likely she would have ended her life.

Joy, Meaning, and Purpose

Now, 57 years later, Joni rejoices that she is still alive and able to help others. Certainly she has faced many challenges and difficulties in her life, but she still insists that she has had a life filled with joy, meaning, and purpose. Indeed, it is astonishing to learn of her numerous achievements. For many years she has devoted her life to improving the lives of people with disabilities. In 1988 she was appointed to serve on the National Council on Disability, which reviewed legislation and government regulations that affect people with disabilities. She and her colleagues on the council drafted the Americans with Disabilities Act, one of the most important pieces of U.S. legislation to improve the lives of people with disabilities.

She also founded Joni and Friends, an organization which sponsors retreats for children with disabilities and their families, distributes wheelchairs for free in impoverished countries, and sets up centers in poor areas to help people with disabilities access health care. She has inspired millions of people through a biography and film about her life, through her radio program, and through her speaking engagements. She also has recorded music and completed (holding a brush between her teeth) many lovely paintings. What a loss, both to herself and to the world, if she had killed herself in the depths of her despair right after her injury.

Joni addressed the problem of assisted suicide in her 1992 book, When Is It Right to Die?: Suicide, Euthanasia, Suffering, Mercy. In this work she vociferously rejected suicide, assisted or otherwise. She expressed thankfulness that assisted suicide was not legal when she was a depressed teenager laid up in the hospital. The love and care of other people often rescued her, she said, from the temptation to end her life.

When a new edition of her book was released in 2018, Joni noted in the preface that the situation had grown worse in the intervening 26 years. Now “it is no longer a matter of merely ‘supporting’ a person who has decided that his or her life is not worth living,” she writes. “No, we are witnesses to more instances where the ‘right to die’ has been given to a person with no say in the matter.”

Some people, so the argument goes, are so disabled that they can’t decide for themselves whether to live or die. In such cases, according to the euthanasia movement, a properly merciful society would help such individuals to end their suffering, which would simultaneously relieve loved ones and medical staff of the burden of caring for the disabled individual, freeing them to put their energies to better use elsewhere.

Some Necessary Definitions

As Joni notes, this is not the same thing as assisted suicide. For clarity’s sake, here are some generally accepted definitions:

• Assisted suicide: A physician or other person provides the means for the patient to kill himself.
• Voluntary euthanasia: The patient asks to be killed and someone else kills him.
• Nonvoluntary euthanasia: The patient is incompetent, unconscious, or otherwise unable to consent, and someone else kills him.
• Involuntary euthanasia: The patient is capable of giving or refusing consent, but is not asked; or the patient is killed against his will.
• Passive euthanasia: A physician or other person withholds or withdraws life-saving measures from someone with the intent of causing death; a refusal to act causes death. (Note the problematic broadness of this definition. Not all situations where life-prolonging measures are withheld or withdrawn constitute euthanasia; in medical settings most do not).

When I use the term “euthanasia” in these pages I am referring to active forms of euthanasia, unless otherwise noted.

Until the past few decades, assisted suicide and euthanasia were illegal almost everywhere in the world. That’s largely because the influence of the Judeo-Christian worldview was pervasive. Traditionally Christianity taught that humans are created in the image of God, thus imbuing humans with great value. Because of its stress on the value of human life, Christianity rejected not only murder, but also suicide, assisted suicide, and euthanasia. To be clear, the terms assisted suicide and euthanasia do not refer to administering painkillers even if that has the unintended effect of hastening death. Christians have consistently defended the view that easing pain is acceptable, even if an unintended side-effect is the hastening of the patient’s demise. Assisted suicide and euthanasia refer instead to the intentional ending of a person’s life, usually by poisonous pills or a lethal injection.

The Death of Humanity

Over the past few centuries, especially since the 18th-century Enlightenment, secularization has slowly eroded the Judeo-Christian sanctity-of-life ethic, as I document painstakingly in my book The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life. As intellectuals and opinion leaders jettisoned the Christian religion, they also called into question many Christian values, including its prohibitions on suicide and euthanasia.

The increased acceptance of assisted suicide and euthanasia led to the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland becoming the first countries in the modern West to legalize various forms of these acts. Some other countries have followed suit, so now euthanasia or assisted suicide is legal in Germany, Austria, Spain, and Canada, among other countries. Additionally, Washington, DC, and ten states in the US, including California, have legalized assisted suicide. However, opposition to assisted suicide is still prevalent enough that in most countries it is still illegal, and many efforts to legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia in the U.S. and in other countries fail each year.

How a secular worldview undermines the Judeo-Christian sanctity-of-life ethic and paves the way for assisted suicide and euthanasia is illustrated in Yuval Noah Harari’s bestselling book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. There Harari explicitly rejects the famous statement from the U.S. Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Harari counters this with what he considers a scientific worldview, arguing:

According to the science of biology, people were not “created.” They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be “equal.” . . . Evolution is based on difference, not equality. . . .

“Created equal” should therefore be translated into “evolved differently.” . . . Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a “Creator” who “endows” them with anything. There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals. . . . Equally there are no such things as rights in biology.

By denying human equality, human rights, and purpose and meaning in life, Harari opposes the foundation for valuing human life, thus opening the door to acceptance of assisted suicide and euthanasia.

A Fundamentally Misguided View

Harari’s view is, I believe, fundamentally misguided. Human life does have value, purpose, and meaning. Some may object to my stating this and point out that my Christian worldview leads me to this conclusion, a conclusion I am free to hold and which others, with a different worldview, need not embrace. For those not constrained by Christianity, why not adopt Harari’s nihilistic view?

First of all, other religions of the world agree with Christianity that human life has value, purpose, and meaning. Further, even most secularists recognize that human life has intrinsic value. It seems to be an intuition built into almost all of us. As I have shown in my short work Made in the Image of God: Why Human Dignity Argues for a Creator, some of the staunchest secularist intellectuals, who overtly denied the value of human life, were unable to live or speak consistently with that viewpoint. Somehow, deep down, they understood that human life has value and purpose, even if they vigorously denied it because of their worldview.

Another way we can see that the vast majority of us recognize that human life has value is by considering the suicide prevention measures we fund. If human life has no value or purpose, then no suicide is a tragedy, but is rather just another “ho, hum” event without any moral significance. It’s just a random rearrangement of chemicals in the cosmos. We know better, and this should lead us to recognize that all human lives have value; so any suicide — including the forms of assisted suicide currently being legalized in many places — is tragic.

Finally, history attests that when a culture does not draw a firm line protecting human life, it inevitably progresses to ending lives for all manner of reasons — often against the will of the victims and their families. This should be as troubling to the secular person as to the religious.

All scholarly references may be found in Unnatural Death: Medicine’s Descent from Healing to Killing.

In November 2021, Wesley J. Smith interviewed Jodi Eareckson Tada on his podcast Humanize. You can listen to it by clicking here.