Category Archives: Polemics

Polemics

Mary takes on a pro-abortion “Christian” woman

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Our commenter Mary likes to debate online. She found a pro-abortion woman to fight with. The pro-abortion woman explains in the post how she supports abortion in her work on “maternal health” in the developing world.

The pro-abortion woman’s first argument is that because we don’t have funerals for miscarried babies, that proves that the unborn aren’t human:

We don’t issue death certificates for miscarriages, nor traditionally perform funerals for them. My mom miscarried at six months before she got pregnant with my first brother. She didn’t consider herself a mother until she had my brother two years later. That is anecdotal of course.

Her second argument is that making abortion illegal is not practical:

This is a genuine question: how do you see ending abortions being carried out? I understand on an abstract level what I think you and others who are pro-life want–no more abortions (unless perhaps in the case of the mother’s life being in danger?). But practically, what would that look like? Making abortion illegal? Incarcerating doctors who perform and women who have abortions? Increasing access to family planning? Better sex ed? Better health care? Increased social services for poor women? All of the above? I can’t get behind something that says “Don’t have sex or live with the consequences.” It’s incredibly impractical.

And finally, she argues that people who are some pro-life people are “religious, misogynistic crazy people”, so the unborn have no right to live:

I guess that’s what frustrates me about the stunt from last week–it was meant to terrorize and disrupt, but I don’t see what it did constructively to further their agenda. Honestly, all it did was solidify for most people there that anti-choice activists are religious, misogynistic crazy people. Not very helpful.

That’s it. Those are her 3 arguments. I should add that this woman thinks that she is a Christian. But she finds chastity and personal responsibility for one’s own decision to treat sex as recreational “impractical”. Incredibly impractical.

Mary to the rescue

And now, here comes Mary:

Thanks for posting this, James-Michael. And thank you for asking the questions, “Rachel”. I love it when I’m given the opportunity to be persuasive on a topic which is close to my heart. :)

Rachel:
Regarding miscarriages, I actually think that there *should* be funerals for children that die before birth. I am close to someone who lost children in a miscarriage and the pain she feels is as real as that of a mother who loses a newborn. I think that our society does women a disservice when it ignores the reality of loss in the instance of miscarriage. Our society’s omission in the case of miscarriage is no grounds on which to disregard the humanity of the pre-born.

You bring up the issue of practicalities, which is a good one. A very similar argument was brought up by those in favour of retaining legal slavery in the British Empire. But thankfully, we no longer have legal slavery in the western world. Just because something will require work does not mean that we should avoid it – especially when it is something as important as this. I support abortion being made illegal, except in the instance of saving the life of the mother. I would support incarceration for doctors or nurses who subsequently performed such illegal abortions, and for those who sold abortificants. I think there needs to be better education regarding foetal development, I believe that women should be offered an ultrasound of their baby, and I would love to see the resources currently being allocated to abortion being reallocated to crisis pregnancy centres.

I think it’s also vital to recognize that the pro-life position is based on the following sound logic:
1) Taking an innocent human life is wrong (we call it murder).
2) The pre-born child is scientifically definable as a human life and is as innocent as they come.
3) Abortion takes the life of a pre-born child.
4) Abortion takes an innocent human life.
4) Abortion is therefore wrong.

As a fellow woman, I would also like to challenge you to seek better things for women. Your commitment to maternal health is commendable. However, did you know that abortion increases the incidence of miscarriage in subsequent pregnancies? Did you know that it has been implicated in a dramatically increased incidence of breast cancer? And this is in addition to the psychological damage done to women who have abortions. Abortion is bad for women. Check out Feminists for Life. This organisation believes that women deserve better. I love that.

Think also of the unborn women. Women’s health begins in the womb. Pre-born women have a right to life too. Surely their right to life is of greater importance than any other right of the mother’s, except her right to life. Did you know that abortion is used by societies that do not value women to eliminate women? Sex selective abortion and female infanticide are common in China and India. Women’s rights are not furthered by offering women the right to kill their own children.

Thank you for reading.

And then the strange pro-abortion “Christian” replied with craziness:

Mary, I will join you in lifting up miscarriage as loss. I’m not sure, though, after reading your comments that you want to have dialogue with me because your only questions to me about breast cancer, miscarriage, and gender-selection are rhetorical in tone.

I would still be interested in hearing how you would address eliminating abortions. Women with unintended pregnancies will seek abortions, illegal or legal. So, how do we go about eliminating (or more practically, reducing) unintended pregnancies in the first place?

Go here to read the whole thing. Mary tells me that she’s going to go right back there and reply to Rachel again, but she was too tired to do it on Tuesday night. If you feel like debating, like Mary seems to like to do, then you can march right over there and help her out.

Learn about the pro-life case

Polemics

Angus Menuge on methodological materialism and the search for truth

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Dr. Angus Menuge
Dr. Angus Menuge

Methodological materialism is the view that requires scientists to explain everything they observe in nature using material causes and never intelligent causes.

And now, from the Evangelical Philosophical Society blog, an article entitled “Is methodological materialism good for science?”. The article is written by Dr. Angus Menuge, whom I wrote about before.

Intro:

Should science by governed by methodological materialism? That is, should scientists assume that only undirected causes can figure in their theories and explanations? If the answer to these questions is yes, then there can be no such thing as teleological science or intelligent design. But is methodological materialism a defensible approach to science, or might it prevent scientists from discovering important truths about the natural world? In my contribution to The Waning of Materialism (OUP, 2010), edited by Robert Koons and George Bealer, I consider twelve of the most common arguments in favor of methodological materialism and show that none of them is convincing.

Of these arguments, perhaps the most prevalent is the “God of the gaps” charge, according to which invoking something other than a material cause is an argument from ignorance which, like a bad script writer, cites a deus ex machina to save our account from difficulty. Not only materialists, but also many Christian thinkers, like Francis Collins, worry that appeal to intelligent design commits the God of the gaps fallacy.

As I argue, however, not only is an inference to an intelligent cause not the same as an inference to the supernatural, it is a mistake to assume that all gap arguments are bad, or that only theists make them. If a gap argument is based solely on ignorance of what might explain some phenomenon, then indeed it is a bad argument. But there are many good gap arguments which are made both by scientific materialists and proponents of intelligent design.

So how do you make an argument like that?

As Stephen Meyer has argued in his Signature in the Cell, intelligent design argues in just the same way, claiming not merely that the material categories of chance and necessity (singly or in combination) are unable to explain the complex specified information in DNA, but also that in our experience, intelligent agents are the only known causes of such information. The argument is based on what we know about causal powers, not on what we do not know about them.

Since the inference is based on known causal powers, we learn that the cause is intelligent, but only further assumptions or data can tell us whether that intelligence is immanent in nature or supernatural. It is a serious mistake to confuse intelligent design with theistic science, and the argument that since some proponents of design believe that the designer is God, that is what they are claiming can be inferred from the data, is a sophomoric intensional fallacy.

Basically, you identify what material processes have been OBSERVED to be capable of, and then you show that the effect you are trying to explain is beyond the reach of those powers. For example, think of a Scrabble board left alone in a locked room with an open window from morning till evening. It’s summer, so the air conditioner is working hard all day. If you come home and enter the room and find a sentence on the Scrabble game board that says “IF YOU LEAVE YOUR WINDOWS OPEN THEN YOU PAY HIGHER ELECTRICITY BILLS” then does it make more sense to attribute that effect to the wind, or to an intelligent intruder?

If you are a materialist, then you can only appeal to matter, chance and time (and not much time, too). By ruling out intelligence, you are really confining yourself to an obviously wrong answer. But suppose you came home and found that that the tiles were scattered all over the board and on the floor and the only sequences spelled out “AN” and “ZYKDSFGOJD”. I think a better inference there is that the wind blew the bag open made a couple of nonsense sequences. Of course the idea that wind could blow open a bag of Scrabble letters at all is very unlikely, but if you rule out intelligence, that’s all you have left, no matter how strained the inference. You have to believe nonsense.

But what about the design theorist who can rule nonsense out as impossible? Well he hits on the correct explanation of the effect – intelligence.

As the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes says:

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

But if an intelligent design theorist comes along and rules out material causes as an explanation of the effect by showing that the effect is beyond the reach of matter, time and chance, then the explanation of intelligence must be, however improbably, true. The important thing is to rule out materialism by evaluating what material causes can do. We don’t want to rule it out by pre-supposition, because that’s what the naturalists do when they rule out intelligence as an explanation. Ruling things out by pre-supposition is how you get wrong answers to questions. Everything has to be on the table that we have experienced. And every human knows what it is to sequence Scrabble letters into meaningful words and phrases

By the way, the publisher of the book, OUP, is Oxford University Press. Angus Menuge doesn’t mess around.

Polemics

Objective moral values and the Euthyphro dilemma

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Here’s a post on this objection to objective morality from Reformed Seth.

Excerpt:

What is another response from unbelievers? It’s called the Euthyphro Dilemma (named after a character in of Plato’s dialogues). The dilemma is: Is something good because God wills it? Or does God will something because it is good? This is a popular objection to the moral argument for God’s existence. If you say something is good because God wills it, then that good becomes arbitrary. God could have willed that cheating is good or that hatred is good, etc. That doesn’t work does it? If you say that God wills something because it is good, then that good becomes independent of God, which makes moral values and duties exist independently of God, which contradicts premise 1.

How does Craig answer the Euthyphro dilemma? He says that “we don’t need to refute either of the two horns of the dilemma because the dilemma is a false one: There’s a third alternative, namely, God wills something because He is good…I mean God’s own nature is the standard of goodness, and His commandments to us are expressions of His nature. In short, our moral duties are determined by the commands of a just and loving God.”

So according to Craig, moral values and duties don’t exist independently of God because God’s own character/nature defines what is good and those morals flow out of God’s nature. When the atheist asks, “If God were to command spouse abuse, would we be obligated to abuse our spouses?” he’s asking a question akin to “If there were married bachelors, who would the bachelor be married to?” There is no answer because the question is absurd.

Craig assures us that the Euthyphro dilemma presents us with a false choice, and we shouldn’t be tricked by it. “The morally good/bad is determined by God’s nature, and the morally right/wrong is determined by His will. God wills something because He is good, and something is right because God wills it.”

That response splits the horns of the dilemma.

Glenn Peoples has a paper and a podcast

I noticed that Glenn Peoples is good at responding to the Euthyphro dilemma. Glenn wrote an article (PDF here) that appeared in a Cambridge peer-reviewed journal. And he even did a podcast in case you don’t want to read stuffy articles.

Here’s the blurb about the paper:

Plato’s Euthyphro is widely thought to contain a knock down argument against theologically grounded ethics – widely thought, that is, outside of the field of philosophy of religion. The so-called Euthyphro dilemma is said to show that moral rightness cannot possibly consist in what God wills, but much of its success lies in the way the author was able to paint Euthyphro as the loser. Had Euthyphro been better informed and quicker on his feet, he would have won hands down – as he does in this revised version of the Euthyphro dialogue. A bit of philosophical fun – with a point. (Published inThink: Philosophy for Everyone 9:25 (2010).

Disclaimer: I believe in a soul, and Hell, and that the trinity is very important for being a Christian. Glenn thinks that humans don’t have non-material souls, that people who reject Christ are annihilated after death and are not punished eternally, and that belief in the Trinity is not required in order to be saved.

William Lane Craig debates are fun

If you want to see the Euthyphro dilemma debated in front of a university audience then you can listen to the Craig-Antony debate here. (MP3)

That debate is being turned into a book as well.

UPDATE: Seth linked to a William Lane Craig podcast on Euthyphro.