I am opposed to any policy or program that increases the odds that a child will not have a relationship with their biological father as they grow up. This would include anything that makes it easier for parents to divorce or that facilitates single motherhood. Consequently, I oppose premarital sex, abortion, sex education in schools, no-fault divorce, and giving legal recognition to cohabitation or same-sex marriage. I want children to be able to have their biological father and biological mother close at hand, and to be able to rely on them and know them, so that they don’t feel alone and lost in the world. Although I am willing to permit other arrangements, I think society should celebrate traditional marriage – for the sake of the children.
Well, consider one challenge to this ideal situation where a child grows up with a mother and a father: conception via anonymous sperm donor.
Here’s a video that shows how children are hurt when they are denied a relationship with their biological father: (H/T Stacy McCain)
The practice of anonymous sperm donors, and children fathered by them, is certainly legal and has a market. That would lead one to conclude that it is ethical, rather than unethical. In other words I’d say ethical means ‘not illegal’.
But is it moral? […]That is, does anyone think that the Almighty is pleased, and/or glorified by people thumbing their noses at the clear, simple, obvious, form-follows-function beauty of:
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. Gen 2:24
There is vast capacity to use modern technology to tinker about with the natural order of things. I’d like to fall short of a sweeping judgement here, in the space of a blog post. It’s possible that there may exist a really good case for why using an anonymous sperm donor is not immoral. But it seems that protecting the father’s (or the mother’s in the case of an egg donor) privacy at the expense of dropping a sizable existential dilemma on the offspring is immoral. That is, the biological parents (i.e. DNA providers) are doing to the child emotionally what the government is doing economically: casting debts upon them without any sort of dialogue. A variation on taxation without representation, if you will. Progressivism seems to be about finding the least vocal victim.
I don’t think that it’s enough for the child to just know who their biological father is, or to just see a picture of their biological father. I think it’s important that we promote the best situation for children, where each child has a real relationship with their biological father. And we can do that, if we are serious, in several ways.
Promoting marriage
Here are few wild, shoot-from-the-hip ideas to help children to have access to their fathers:
We can research how fatherlessness affects children
We can research what decisions are likely to lead to stable marriage, e.g. – regular church attendance and chastity
We can repeal laws that are hostile to lasting marriage, e.g. – no-fault divorce
We can enact laws that are hostile to divorce, e.g. – shared custody laws
We can stop paying unmarried women to have babies
We can give tax deductions to married couples who have babies
We can give tax deductions to couples planning on marrying if they undergo marital counseling from a program of their own choosing
We can give tax deductions to married couples whose children earn incomes, e.g. – the parents get a tax deduction for 1% of income earned by each child for life
We can give tax deductions to married couples whose children don’t collect government assistance, e.g. – the parents get a 1% tax deduction on their household income for every child who doesn’t collect government welfare during the year
We ban IVF for women who have not been married for at least 5 years
We ban all taxpayer funding of IVF treatments
We ban ban all private insurance coverage for IVF treatments
And so on, like that. This communicates to women that it is not OK to have a baby with an anonymous sperm donor. It communicates that we as a society want fathers to be around their children. It communicates that cohabitation is not the same thing as marriage. It communicates that marriages are for life. We need to get tough if we want children to be spared from the harm of not knowing their biological fathers.
Walter Bradley (B.S., Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin) is Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Baylor. He comes to Baylor from Texas A&M University where he helped develop a nationally recognized program in polymeric composite materials. At Texas A&M, he served as director of the Polymer Technology Center for 10 years and as Department Head of Mechanical Engineering, a department of 67 professors that was ranked as high as 12th nationally during his tenure. Bradley has authored over 150 refereed research publications including book chapters, articles in archival journals such as the Journal of Material Science, Journal of Reinforced Plastics and Composites, Mechanics of Time-Dependent Materials, Journal of Composites Technology and Research, Composite Science and Technology, Journal of Metals, Polymer Engineering and Science, and Journal of Materials Science, and refereed conference proceedings.
Dr. Bradley has secured over $5.0 million in research funding from NSF grants (15 yrs.), AFOSR (10 years), NASA grants (10 years), and DOE (3 years). He has also received research grants or contracts from many Fortune 500 companies, including Alcoa, Dow Chemical, DuPont, 3M, Shell, Exxon, Boeing, and Phillips.
He co-authored The Mystery of Life Origin: Reassessing Current Theories and has written 10 book chapters dealing with various faith science issues, a topic on which he speaks widely.
He has received 5 research awards at Texas A&M University and 1 national research award. He has also received two teaching awards. He is an Elected Fellow of the American Society for Materials and the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), the largest organization of Christians in Science and Technology in the world. He is President elect of the ASA and will serve his term in 2008.
Below, I analyze a lecture entitled “Is There Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer?”. Dr. Bradley explains how the progress of science has made the idea of a Creator and Designer of the universe more acceptable than ever before.
1. The correspondence of natural phenomena to mathematical law
All observations of physical phenomena in the universe, such as throwing a ball up in the air, are described by a few simple, elegant mathematical equations.
2. The fine-tuning of physical constants and rations between constants in order to provide a life-permitting universe
Life has certain minimal requirements; long-term stable source of energy, a large number of different chemical elements, an element that can serve as a hub for joining together other elements into compounds, etc.
In order to meet these minimal requirements, the physical constants, (such as the gravitational constant), and the ratios between physical constants, need to be withing a narrow range of values in order to support the minimal requirements for life of any kind.
Slight changes to any of the physical constants, or to the rations between the constants, will result in a universe inhospitable to life.
The range of possible ranges over 70 orders of magnitude.
Although each individual selection of constants and ratios is as unlikely as any other selection, the vast majority of these possibilities do not support the minimal requirements of life of any kind. (In the same way as any hand of 5 cards that is dealt is as likely as any other, but you are overwhelmingly likely NOT to get a royal flush. In our case, a royal flush is a life-permitting universe).
Examples of finely-tuned constants and ratios: (there are more examples in the lecture)
a) The strong force: (the force that binds nucleons (= protons and neutrons) together in nucleus, by means of meson exchange)
if the strong force constant were 2% stronger, there would be no stable hydrogen, no long-lived stars, no hydrogen containing compounds. This is because the single proton in hydrogen would want to stick to something else so badly that there would be no hydrogen left!
if the strong force constant were 5% weaker, there would be no stable stars, few (if any) elements besides hydrogen. This is because you would be able to build up the nuclei of the heavier elements, which contain more than 1 proton.
So, whether you adjust the strong force up or down, you lose stars than can serve as long-term sources of stable energy, or you lose chemical diversity, which is necessary to make beings that can perform the minimal requirements of living beings. (see below)
b) The conversion of beryllium to carbon, and carbon to oxygen
Life requires carbon in order to serve as the hub for complex molecules, but it also requires oxygen in order to create water.
Carbon is like the hub wheel in a tinker toy set: you can bind other elements together to more complicated molecules (e.g. – “carbon-based life), but the bonds are not so tight that they can’t be broken down again later to make something else.
The carbon resonance level is determined by two constants: the strong force and electromagnetic force.
If you mess with these forces even slightly, you either lose the carbon or the oxygen.
3. Fine-tuning to allow a habitable planet
A number of factors must be fine-tuned in order to have a planet that supports life
Initial estimates predicted abundant life in the universe, but revised estimates now predict that life is almost certainly unique in the galaxy, and probably unique in the universe.
Even though there are lots of stars in the universe, the odds are against any of them supporting complex life.
Here are just a few of the minimal requirements for habitability: must be a single star solar system, in order to support stable planetary orbits, the planet must be the right distance from the sun in order to have liquid water at the surface, the planet must sufficient mass in order to retain an atmosphere, etc.
The best non-theistic response to this argument is to postulate a multiverse, but that is very speculative and there is no experimental evidence that supports it.
Evidence #2: The origin of the universe
1. The progress of science has shown that the entire physical universe came into being out of nothing (= “the big bang”). It also shows that the cause of this creation event is non-physical and non-temporal. The cause is supernatural.
Atheism prefers an eternal universe, to get around the problem of a Creator having to create the universe.
Discovery #1: Observations of galaxies moving away from one another confirms that the universe expanded from a single point.
Discovery #2: Measurements of the cosmic background radiation confirms that the universe exploding into being.
Discovery #3: Predictions of elemental abundances prove that the universe is not eternal.
Discovery #4:The atheism-friendly steady-state model and oscillating model were both falsified by the evidence.
And there were other discoveries as well, mentioned in the lecture.
The best non-theistic response to this argument is to postulate a hyper-universe outside of ours, but that is very speculative and there is no experimental evidence that supports it.
Evidence #3: The origin of life
1. The progress of science has shown that the simplest living organism contains huge amounts of biological information, similar to the Java code I write all day at work. This is a problem for atheists, because the sequence of instructions in a living system has to come together all at once, it cannot have evolved by mutation and selection – because there was no replication in place prior to the formation of that first living system!
Living systems must support certain minimum life functions: processing energy, storing information, and replicating.
There needs to be a certain amount of complexity in the living system that can perform these minimum functions.
But on atheism, the living system needs to be simple enough to form by accident in a pre-biotic soup, and in a reasonable amount of time.
The minimal functionality in a living system is a achieved by DNA, RNA and enzymes. DNA and RNA are composed of sequences of proteins, which are in turn composed of sequences of amino acids.
Consider the problems of building a chain of 100 amino acids
The amino acids must be left-handed only, but left and right kinds are equally abundant in nature. How do you sort out the right-handed ones?
The amino acids must be bound together using peptide bonds. How do you prevent other types of bonds?
Each link of the amino acid chain needs to be carefully chosen such that the completed chain with fold up into a protein. How do you choose the correct amino acid for each link from the pool of 20 different kinds found in living systems?
In every case, a human or other intelligence could solve these problems by doing what intelligent agents do best: making choices.
But who is there to make the choices on atheism?
The best current non-theistic response to this is to speculate that aliens may have seeded the Earth with life at some point in the past.
The problem of the origin of life is not a problem of chemistry, it is a problem of engineering. Every part of car functionality can be understood and described using the laws of physics and chemistry. But an intelligence is still needed in order to assemble the components into a system that has the minimal requirements for a functioning vehicle.
In an effort to bring down surging front-runner Newt Gingrich, the Romney campaign has deployed a very strange choice of attack dog: former White House chief of staff John Sununu.
Sununu is everywhere these days. On a campaign conference call with reporters last week, he accused Gingrich of “a pattern of anti-principled actions that really irritated his own leadership and produced 88 percent of the Republicans in Congress voting for his reprimand.” On Sunday, the Romney campaign put him up against former Pennsylvania congressman Bob Walker on CNN’s “State of the Union,” where Sununu hit Gingrich for his “$500,000 outstanding bill at Tiffany’s” and warned, “The conservatives that he has turned his back on should recognize the fact that he’s not a conservative.” And this week, Sununu has begun hitting the airwaves on conservative talk radio, telling host Scott Hennen that Gingrich is “not stable.”
All of this raises a question: Has the Romney campaign lost its mind?
No doubt Sununu’s support is important for Romney in New Hampshire, where he was a popular governor in the 1980s and served as chairman of the state Republican Party from 2009-2011. But Sununu is a discredited figure among conservatives. To deploy him on the national stage — in an effort to convince conservatives that Gingrich is not one of them — is, quite simply, insanity.
The New Hampshire newspaper the Union Leader reports that Sununu said in an interview last week, “Then-House Minority Whip Gingrich reneged after telling then-President George H.W. Bush (41) that he approved of the 1990 budget agreement with Democrats that included tax increases.” This is supposed to show that Gingrich is an unreliable leader. Gingrich denies ever supporting the deal, but even so: Gingrich ended up on the right side — opposing the Bush tax increase, which is still reviled by conservatives to this day. So the Romney campaign is attacking Gingrich for opposing a massive tax increase — and is doing so by using the White House chief of staff who brokered the deal in which Bush broke his “no new taxes” pledge.
How on earth does trotting out the mastermind of Bush’s still-hated “read my lips” tax flip-flop to attack Gingrich help Romney? This is not territory where Team Romney should want to tread. Conservatives’ biggest worry is that Romney will flip-flop the way “41” did on his tax pledge. Sending out a man responsible for that reversal as a national spokesman only helps Gingrich and raises questions about Romney’s judgment.
[…]As White House chief of staff, Sununu spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars flying on military jets to ski lodges, golf resorts, and even his dentist in Boston, as well as taking a government limousine to New York to attend a Christie’s stamp auction. He was investigated by the White House counsel’s office and forced to repay the government. A few months later, he was forced to resign. The New York Times reported “The uproar over the 1990 budget deal, in which Mr. Sununu was seen by many Republican lawmakers as a malevolent influence, exacerbated Mr. Sununu’s troubles. In the same fashion, he was badly wounded by disclosures of his extensive use of military aircraft for personal and political trips.”
But it’s worse than that. John Sununu is the one responsible for recommending David Souter to then-President George H.W. Bush for a Supreme Court appointment.
John H. Sununu, the White House chief of staff, said today that he had assured President Bush that David H. Souter would uphold conservative values on the Supreme Court. He also said he had given ”strong personal support” to Judge Souter at a key moment in the President’s decision-making.
As Governor of New Hampshire, Mr. Sununu named Judge Souter an Associate Justice of its Supreme Court.
”I was looking for someone who would be a strict constructionist, consistent with basic conservative attitudes, and that’s what I got,” the chief of staff said in an interview. ”I was able to tell the President that I was sure he would do the same thing when he encountered Federal questions.
”What he says and does is what he is. No pretense, no surprises.” Their Kind of Man?
The chief of staff’s comments were designed to advance the overall White House strategy of seeking to convince conservatives that Judge Souter was their kind of man, who could be trusted to vote ”right” on the big issues, without getting him involved in fierce debates about abortion or flag burning or other contentious specifics.
[…]Mr. Sununu said that President Bush had had two candidates under consideration when he retired to his office on Monday with a yellow legal pad to make his decision – the two he had just spoken with, Judge Souter and Judge Edith H. Jones, 41, who sits on the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in Houston.
Let me tell you something. I am a strong conservative on fiscal issues, foreign policy and social issues. My candidates for President in 2012 are Michele Bachmann, followed by Rick Santorum, followed by Rick Perry. And if I had a choice to nominate anyone to be on the Supreme Court of the United States, the last person in the world that I would choose is David Souter, and the first person in the world I would choose is Edith H. Jones. She is my absolute favorite for the Supreme Court, followed closely by Janice Rogers Brown.
I recommended Jones and Brown in this old post from May 2009, and nothing has changed since then – they are my favorites. But John Sununu passed on Edith Jones and recommended David Souter – a staunchly liberal activist judge. Sununu is not a conservative.
If you would like to see some videos of Mitt Romney explaining his liberal views on everything from abortion to gun control to global warming, then click here.
