Whatever Happened to the Human Race? - Francis Schaeffer & C. Everett Koop Summary
Date: August 16, 2025
Source: YouTube Video Transcript
Original Work: Francis Schaeffer & C. Everett Koop (1979)
Type: Documentary Series Analysis
Overview
This landmark documentary series by theologian Francis Schaeffer and Surgeon General C. Everett Koop presents a prophetic analysis of the devaluation of human life in Western civilization. Released in 1979, the work traces the philosophical roots of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia to the abandonment of the Judeo-Christian worldview in favor of humanistic materialism.
Central Thesis
"Why is a human life worth saving? Why is it worth the trouble? Human life includes so much potential evil as well as good, it would hardly seem worth preserving at all unless there is a specific compelling reason for doing so. Traditionally in Western culture, the life of a human individual has been regarded as very special."
The documentary argues that the traditional high view of human life "came directly from the Judeo-Christian consensus which was the framework in the West for centuries, based on biblical teachings that people used to view human life as unique, something to be protected and loved because it was made in the image of God."
The Philosophical Shift
From Christian to Humanistic Base
"The answer is clear: the consensus of our society no longer rests upon a Christian base, but upon a humanistic one. Humanism is man putting himself at the center of all things rather than the Creator God."
The Mechanistic Worldview
Dr. Edmund R. Leach (Cambridge University, 1968) represents the new thinking:
"Today when the molecular biologists are rapidly unraveling the genetic chemistry of all living things, all the marvels of creation are seen to be mechanisms rather than mysteries. Since even the human brain is nothing more than an immensely complicated computer, it is no longer necessary to invoke metaphysics to explain how it works."
The Dehumanizing Effect
"By constant repetition, the idea that man is nothing more than a machine has infiltrated the popular mind. Year after year the schools and media have taught this idea... gradually, after being generally unquestioned, these ideas are blindly accepted."
The Consequences: Three Stages of Devaluation
1. Abortion: The Unborn
The Supreme Court Decision
"In January 1973, the United States Supreme Court passed the abortion decision known as the Roe versus Wade ruling. Justice White of the Supreme Court, in his dissent to the abortion decision, called it 'an exercise of raw judicial power, an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review.'"
The Impossibility of Drawing Lines
Dr. Koop's challenge to pro-abortionists:
"My question to the pro-abortionist who would not directly kill a newborn baby the minute it was born is this: would you have killed it a minute before that, or a minute before that, or a minute before that? You can see what I'm getting at. At what minute does an unborn baby cease to be worthless and become a person entitled to the right to life and legal protection?"
Early Development Evidence
"By the time a baby is 18 to 25 days old, long before the mother is sure that she's pregnant, the heart is already beating. Even at this early stage, the baby can hardly be considered just another part of the mother's body."
The Schizophrenic Society
"More than a million babies were being destroyed in the womb each year. The same Supreme Court which made that slaughter possible delayed the completion of a 116 million dollar dam in Tennessee because it might wipe out the snail darter, a three-inch fish."
2. Infanticide: The Defective Newborn
Medical Profession's Role
"There is a strange silence on the part of the law in reference to the fact that infanticide is being practiced today quite openly by members of the medical profession."
The Johns Hopkins Case
The documentary references a case where:
"A newborn infant with Down syndrome... was permitted to die by inattention. I suspect starving to death is a better way to say it."
Voices of the "Unwanted"
The film features testimonies from individuals with severe birth defects. One young man born without arms and a leg states:
"I think they don't really understand that they're talking about people... they can only see the severe birth defects and the handicaps that are there, and they can't see that really what they're talking about is murder."
Dr. Koop's Medical Ethics
"I became a physician in order to help save lives, not to destroy them. My earnest effort is to uphold medicine as a high calling, a sacred profession."
3. Euthanasia: The Elderly and Infirm
The Progression of Logic
"First the sick and infirmed, and later perhaps the poor, the underprivileged, and all those who for one reason or another become inconvenient... by opening the door to death as a solution for suffering and inconvenience, we will and have created a monstrous world."
Economic Pressures
"Economics then creeps in. Somehow old folks are made to feel that they are in this crazy schizophrenic society in some way depriving someone younger and more deserving of the care that is being given to them."
Historical Parallels
The Nazi Precedent
"It started with the acceptance of the attitude basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived. Many had reached this point, including many in the medical profession, before Hitler came on the scene."
Leo Alexander's warning from 1948:
"It is likely that had it not been for the active participation of German physicians, the progress of Hitler's extermination program would at least have been slowed down."
The Progression Pattern
"Hitler exterminated 275,000 people in these killing centers... these 275,000 killed were merely the entering wedge for extermination. The methods used and the personnel trained in these killing centers for the chronically sick became the nucleus for much larger centers in the east."
The Worldview Foundation
The Inadequacy of Humanism
"What one's basic worldview is matters. Outward acts against euthanasia, infanticide and abortion must be preceded by inward acts of considering what one's own worldview is."
The Two Basic Questions
Schaeffer argues any adequate worldview must answer:
- The Universe and Its Form: "Why does the universe exist and how did it get this way?"
- The Mannishness of Man: "What worldview adequately explains this remarkable phenomenon that man is not a machine but a person?"
The Problem of Knowledge
"There are only two basic alternatives: first, that man attempts to find the answers to his questions alone; second, man can seek revealed truth from God."
The Christian Alternative
Biblical Worldview
"One worldview can explain the existence of the universe in its form and the uniqueness of people - that is the worldview given to us in the Bible."
Human Dignity Restored
"The Bible tells us that the universe exists and has form and meaning because it was created by a personal Creator. Therefore we who are personal creatures are not something strange, something out of line in an otherwise impersonal universe."
The Image of God
"Each human being from conception in the womb until the last gasping breath of old age is in the likeness of God. All men and women and all children have great value... simply because of their origin."
Practical Responses
For Christians
"Churches and individuals that oppose abortion must be ready with practical help for the pregnant woman, married or unmarried, as she faces the question of abortion. To say you must not have an abortion without not only making suggestions but being ready with practical help... is another way to be inhuman."
Personal Responsibility
"We as Christians cannot slough off the whole responsibility upon the state. We had my mother in our home for the last seven years of her life after she broke her hip... in community together she was not only cared for but it was a thing of beauty."
The Ultimate Challenge
"If in these last decades of the 20th century the Christian community does not make a determined stand on the issues of each individual having a right to live and a right to be treated as made in the image of God rather than as a machine, I believe we have failed in the greatest moral challenge of this century."
The Historical Nature of Christianity
Objective Truth
"Christianity involves real history... The Bible is not just a system of abstract ideas, it is rooted in history."
Evidence-Based Faith
"Faith is bowing to that which is adequately sure. Faith is bowing in acknowledging that we have been created by the infinite personal God."
The Resurrection as Historical Event
"According to the gospels, the resurrection of Christ is open to historical verification. It is written in the same frame of reference as science in the sense that when Christ rose, he did not leave his body in the tomb."
Prophetic Warnings
The Slippery Slope
"Times of monstrous inhumanity do not come all at once. They are slipped into subtly."
The Power of Language
"Semantics can be the preparation for accepting a horror... Think of all the euphemisms for infanticide and euthanasia. In England they refer facetiously to starving a child with myelomeningocele as putting it on 'a low-calorie diet.'"
The Pattern of Acceptance
"Small pressure groups begin their arguments with both the legislators and the public using extreme examples, but as soon as these are accepted, these are then expanded and they become common practice."
Contemporary Relevance
The Foundation Question
"Without the Judeo-Christian base which gives an intrinsic dignity to the individual as made in the image of the infinite personal Creator, each successive monstrosity slides naturally into place."
The Choice Before Us
"This is the great moral test of our age which I am laying before you. The choice is yours to make."
The Human Race at Stake
"Whatever happened to the human race is being washed down the sink drains with the murdered remains of the unborn babies in today's hospitals... we must do something."
Conclusion
The documentary presents a comprehensive analysis of how the abandonment of biblical anthropology leads inevitably to the devaluation of human life. Schaeffer and Koop's work remains prophetic in its accuracy about the trajectory of Western civilization's approach to life and death issues.
Their fundamental argument is that only a worldview grounded in the reality of God as Creator and humans as made in His image provides sufficient foundation to resist the slide toward utilitarian calculations about human worth. Without this foundation, they argue, society will continue to expand the categories of "expendable" human life based on convenience, economics, and subjective judgments about quality of life.
The work stands as both a warning about the consequences of philosophical materialism and a call to return to the biblical understanding of human dignity that historically undergirded Western civilization's respect for individual human life.