>So what should we do in your opinion? Are the unborn entitled to protection by our laws or not?

I think Roe was a good compromise affording choice to the mother up to a point while protecting the unborn later. Again why do you fixate on conception, what turns cells merging and replicating into a person and why is it at the point when the sperm and egg merge, not before and not sometime after? Why did you choose that line to take your stand?

>Roe wasn't a law, it was a legal precedent dehumanizing a class of people for another class's benefit. Now we do have actual laws that are made by legislatures across the country to try to do justice to a complicated subject as you admit it is.

Decisions made by the Supreme Court are law regardless of whether you like them or not, specifically case law. Trying to act like it wasn't a real law is a petty argument, it obviously was until overturned. I am skeptical you believe this should be left to the states since because if you truly believe this murder why would you be ok with letting some state allow it. You seem to think this is very simple reducing a person down to a zygote but not a sperm and egg in a very black and white manner.

>I think people should have access to contraceptives, I'm not sure it's guaranteed by the constitution though.

The constitution does not guarantee the right to assault rifles specifically, are you ok with leaving that decision up to the states? Arms is a very open ended term as is the right to privacy this must be interpreted by the court to have specific meaning, currently allowing assault rifles but not nuclear arms and contraception but wire tapping is allowed with a warrant.

>Apparently He preferred beings capable of deciding to follow Him of their own free will rather than automatons.

The distinction between free will and automatons has no meaning to a being that creates everything including free will itself. To have true free will not predetermined by god would require outside input, it would require a source of entropy that was not created by god. The only way god could not control our actions is if there is uncertainty from some other source otherwise we are doing exactly as we where designed. Either the universe is deterministic as god designed or is non-deterministic due to outside input, simple logic.

>What's more impressive though? Designing a program that can choose between multiple options and determine its fate or designing a program completely constrained to make the choices I orchestrate? And yet, we would be comfortable saying a programmer would be totally justified if they shut down or even deleted a program erring as you've described!

This still make no logical sense, did god create everything including all choices possible or not? God created the constraints unless you believe there is something beyond god a greater universe created by whom?

If a programmer creates a sentient AI that makes its own choices I guarantee it will be getting input not created by the programmer that helps form and drive its choices. A programmer is not god and did not create everything, and if he did I would hope he would not be so stupid as to blame his own program for bad choices based on input he created!

Conception is when the genetic material from the father merges with the genetic material with the mother to create a new complete set of genetic material in a cell. Sperm and egg only contain half the genetic material, subsets from the father and mother respectively. As I originally asked, if there's a more logical, rational place for the origin of the human being (or life in general) let me know!

>Decisions made by the Supreme Court are law regardless of whether you like them or not, specifically case law.

This is a fair point. I don't want to equivocate on the word 'law'. I was referring to law as codified by elected legislature but you're right that 'common law' is also law in a different sense :)

>The constitution does not guarantee the right to assault rifles specifically, are you ok with leaving that decision up to the states?

I guess? If we throw out the constitution we'd better have a replacement system with an equal force behind it. Otherwise history can dictate what happens next when a power vacuum forms in a pluralistic society: authoritarianism.

Free will is kind of a paradox. If you design a game, you also design the space of possible games that can be played (the game tree). You can also determine a function on the space of these games to label some as 'good' and others as 'evil'. When you create players of the game and they choose to go down an 'evil' tree was that your fault? I think this is where the paradox comes in. You can make fancy arguments about entropy all you want but for a Christian we believe the players in the game have real agency of choice.

Christians aren't the only ones who believe in agency - justice (retributive justice specifically) requires agency, otherwise it makes no sense to penalize someone for wrongdoing as it was their environment that caused their behavior _always_ rather than their own conscious choice. If you want to live in a society with no retributive justice that's a fair and even perhaps logically consistent viewpoint but it isn't one that Christians share. Our worldview holds that the economy of justice is fundamentally retributive justice because we have real agency of choice.

> As I originally asked, if there's a more logical, rational place for the origin of the human being (or life in general) let me know!

Both the sperm and egg are "alive" so no "life" does not begin there. Any sperm and egg combination together is a unique genetic sequence, both before and after conception. This also cannot be a unique "person" because identical twins form after conception into two unique people. Same with clones, the same genetic sequence does not make a unique person, what ever personhood is comes later, it is a potential person just like a sperm and egg is before conception.

There is no single bright line I can find, as I said any line drawn is arbitrary to satisfy law. I believe Roe to be a good multistage compromise based on trimesters, you believe conception to a be a single line for the law, neither has any scientific or religious basis. During biblical times "quickening" was thought to be when ensoulment occurred, first movement.

>If you design a game, you also design the space of possible games that can be played (the game tree). You can also determine a function on the space of these games to label some as 'good' and others as 'evil'. When you create players of the game and they choose to go down an 'evil' tree was that your fault?

As god you didn't just create the game, you created the laws of physics that allows the game to exist and the players themselves. God designed our brains and how we make decisions.

This isn't a fancy argument this is very simple, did god create everything or not (including evil) and does he know everything or not (including what choices we will make)?

Again its seems rather stupid to blame your own designed creation for making choices that you know they will make in a universe you created for them with laws of nature designed by you. This makes no logical sense unless there is outside influence to allow for surprising choices. Either god understands exactly how everything works because he created all of it, or he doesn't and can be surprised by bad choices and blame this "agency" that comes from somewhere outside of himself.

>If you want to live in a society with no retributive justice that's a fair and even perhaps logically consistent viewpoint but it isn't one that Christians share.

Of course I don't, but it's not hard for me, I don't believe in an omnipotent god that designed me just to punish me for making incorrect choices. There seems to be uncertainty baked into all things that creates agency and choices matter, I have personal responsibility for my choices because they affect the world around me, this is logical. I don't believe things are predestined or known ahead of time nor that some super being designed me and is judging me for how I perform in their sandbox, it is a ridiculous illogical notion.