Downs Syndrome and Biblical Human Identity

Did you know that on average, 9 out of every 10 unborn babies that have been diagnosed with Downs syndrome are aborted? For those of you not good at math (like myself), that’s 90%! That’s a staggering number, and it has to be statistically significant. It also has to tell us something about our American society, especially the way we as a culture view and value those of us with handicaps.

While this statistic is appalling, I’m not going to rant and rave about the injustice being done to the challenged and the unborn. I don’t have near enough space to do that. Rather, I just simply wish to diagnose the problem from a philosophic point of view.

Why do we abort 90% of those children diagnosed with Downs syndrome? More or less because our society has become infected with a view of human identity called “dualism.” Advanced by such philosophers as Plato and Descartes, dualists believe that humans fundamentally are not bodily or animal creatures. Rather, they believe that we are disembodied minds/souls that happen to reside in bodies for a short time.

Immediately, you might stop to say, “Hey, isn’t that what the Bible says? Aren’t we just ‘jars of clay’ that hold our souls until we meet Jesus?” While this is true, the Bible teaches us that we are fundamentally more than just souls. When God created us, he created us as, to borrow from Boyce, a composite of body and soul, not simply a soul that resides in a body (Abstract XXIX). While this is a very fine distinction, it is of the utmost importance. At the end of times, God has revealed that we will be resurrected. We will have a new body. In heaven, we won’t be souls wandering around, but we will be in perfect bodies that taste and feel and touch just like ours, except they are perfect. What this doesn’t mean is that we don’t have souls but rather that our souls are inextricably tied to our bodies. What this does mean is that humans aren’t primarily a mind or a soul, but an animal body. God created us as animals, and he will sustain and resurrect us as bodily animals at the end of all things.

So what does this have to do with Downs syndrome? Essentially, this: if humans are primarily physical animals that breathe and eat and think and not immaterial minds, then we should treat each other as bodily animals. The reason people disrespect and abort handicapped children is that the minds of handicapped kids don’t operate the same way that most human minds do. Under a dualist view of human identity, we begin to value handicapped people less and less, because they don’t measure up to the wrongheaded dualist criteria of what it means to be human. I submit that we need to change the criteria of what it means to be human back to what the Bible says, and the Bible says that we are physical bodily animals with souls, regardless of our mental state, and not souls that use bodies for a short time. If we start viewing human identity Biblically, then we start to see that all humans are created in the image of God and are valuable, no matter the state of mind. When we deviate from what the Bible says about human identity, we start to value people for what they are worth mentally, and that is never good. We would do well to remember that.