Over the past several weeks I've been reading atheist Sam Harris' 2006 book, "Letter to a Christian Nation." I'm not done yet, but there is one particular part I'd like to illuminate for the rest of you.

On page 19 of the PDF version of the book he writes about how Christian morality is hindering scientific progress, particularly with embryonic stem cell research. I don't want to get into the fuller topic of this, but rather focus on one small argument of his in his larger diatribe. Here's a quote:

But let us assume, for the moment, that every three-day-old human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. embryos [sic] at this stage occasionally split, becoming separate people (identical twins). Is this a case of one soul splitting into two? Two embryos sometimes fuse into a single individual, called a chimera. You or someone you know may have developed in this way. No doubt theologians are struggling even now to determine what becomes of the extra human soul in such a case.

Isn't it time we admitted that this arithmetic of souls does not make any sense? The naive idea of souls in a Petri dish is intellectually indefensible. It is also morally indefensible, given that it now stands in the way of some of the most promising research in the history of medicine. your [sic] beliefs about the human soul are, at this very moment, prolonging the scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings. [Italics in original.]

I added the second paragraph so you can get a flavor for what and how Harris is arguing his case, but I'm going to ignore it for this blog, as it's quite fallacious.

What I want to focus on is the idea of twins and souls.

For starters, I believe that the moment the genetic material from the male blends with the genetic material from the female is when a new, unique, complete human being is created. I'd say that's the moment of fertilization and of conception, but I think these words have been technically redefined in the past few years to mean an event six to seven days after the event I described. I call the event I described as conception.

Second of all, I believe twins posses unique souls in need of independent and personal salvation by Jesus Christ. Twins are clones, but natural ones by a process God created, little different from lab clones except by the process.

Topic 1: Twins. Harris is probably right when he says that theologians are struggling with this fact. Here's the problem: if a new person is created at fertilization, and if twins each have their own soul, then what happens with the soul at the moment the fertilized egg splits to form twins?

Topic 2: Chimeras. Harris defines a chimera as an egg that was fertilized, conceived, split into two (twins) and then fused back together (a single person). I really never heard of such a thing before. Can anyone comment on this? I think it's quite safe to say that the resultant person from this chimera action has a single soul and is impossible to differentiate between a non-chimera person. So this presents a second problem: if the fertilized egg had a soul, the twins each have their own soul, what happens when they fuse back together?

Topic 3: Traducianism versus Creationism. In my superficial studies on this topic, I ran across these new words. According to Wikipedia, traducianism is a doctrine about the origin of souls, in the same category as creationism (different from the doctrine of the origin of the universe). Traducianism distinguishes itself from creationism in that souls are derived from the souls of the individual's parents. This implies God only created the soul of Adam. Creationism holds that all souls are created directly by God, nearly the opposite of traducianism.

As a young person, I'd like to take a quick position on the doctrine of the origin of souls, but the more I think about this, the more indecisive I become. At the risk of committing an ad populum, what are my readers' thoughts on this? Scriptural guidance is highly appreciated.

In conclusion, I really have nothing to contribute on each of these three topics. My intent from the beginning, however, was to raise awareness about these topics and to generate meaningful dialog. It is important that we familiarize ourselves with new topics as they arise, because, as you can see, they are being used by the enemy to influence America. "Letter to a Christian Nation" is a bestseller book, and "highly recommended" to me by an atheist friend. His opinion of this book, no doubt, is derived in part by the twin/chimera/soul argument.

Postcript: I'm 2/3 done reading the book, and this is the only argument I've read so far that seriously causes me pause. (The others are quite trite.)