To say something is “life” is a category that is itself outside of science when brought to bear on a moral issue. (For example, life means many things; trees and bacteria are alive, but they may be killed. The real question in the abortion debate is who is a human being entitled to rights, which science is incompetent to answer.)

Deference to science is often an escape from the incomplete and inadequate philosphies of liberalism and materialism. Liberalism cannot ultimately answer what makes human beings special and unique without resorting to nonscientific categories such as dignity, rationalism, and “free will.” That is, while purporting to create a rational philosphy on the solid foundations of science and logic, liberalism soon finds itself in the same murky, metaphysical quandries as ancient philosophy. When faced with socially and individually harmful behavior liberalism must respond. While assiduously avoiding any moral judgments, morality necessary for social life reasserts itself through the backdoor of psychopathology.

This seemingly abstract problem creates troubles in many areas. Libertarians, for instance, often state that the line between freedom and paternalism should be drawn at adulthood or the capacity to exercise rational competency. These categories are no more precise than the line between immoral and moral behavior and are discerned with the same aesthetic and intuitive faculty. There is something problematic in that many libertarians mock this tool when it is brought to bear on legislation proscribing objectively, immoral behavior. Setting aside the prudential concerns, the very possibility of any knowledge that it is wrong to do certain things and thus helpful to individuals to prevent such actions is set aside as merely dressed up opinions and assertions, which stand in a subordinate position to our “knowledge” of rights.

I noticed this error again this weekend on Meet the Press when Mario Cuomo said that our abortion laws should be decided by a panel of scientific and medical experts who would tell us where life begins and thus when it deserves legal protection.

These flights from uncertainty and metaphyisics are understandable. Liberalism has abandoned and affirmatively slandered the cultural and intellectual tools needed to obtain this knowledge. Yet we must still make these judgments, because we still must live in the world together in communities. Science cannot answer these questions–Who is a person? How should he live? What should be legal and illegal?–any more precisely than men have always been able to do so, with the tools of their moral, aesthetic, traditional, and religious understandings. And science is particularly ill equipped to make any such judgments because they involve a different kind of knowledge and a different level of certainty than we encounter in traditional science.

To recognize individually and collectively that science will not save us from the burden of moral inquiry would be a likely starting point to our civilizational rebirth.