Tag Archives: Speculation

MUST-READ: What does the Bible say about forcing pro-lifers to perform abortions?

Story from the New York Post. (H/T Hot Air – Cassy Fiano)

Excerpt:

A Brooklyn nurse claims she was forced to choose between her religious convictions and her job when Mount Sinai Hospital ordered her to assist in a late-term abortion against her will.

The hospital even exaggerated the patient’s condition and claimed the woman could die if the nurse, a devout Catholic, did not follow orders, the nurse alleges in a lawsuit.

“It felt like a horror film unfolding,” said Catherina Cenzon-DeCarlo, 35, who claims she has had gruesome nightmares and hasn’t been able to sleep since the May 24 incident.

The married mother of a year-old baby was 30 minutes into her early-morning shift when she realized she had been assigned to an abortion. She begged her supervisor to find a replacement nurse for the procedure. The hospital had a six-hour window to find a fill-in, the suit says.

Bosses told the weeping Cenzon-DeCarlo the patient was 22 weeks into her pregnancy and had preeclampsia, a condition marked by high blood pressure that can lead to seizures or death if left untreated.

The supervisor “claimed that the mother could die if [Cenzon-DeCarlo] did not assist in the abortion.”

But the nurse, the niece of a Filipino bishop, contends that the patient’s life was not in danger. She argued that the patient was not even on magnesium therapy, a common treatment for preeclampsia, and did not have problems indicating an emergency.

Her pleas were rejected, and instead she was threatened with career-ending charges of insubordination and patient abandonment, according to the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Brooklyn federal court.

Feeling threatened, Cenzon-DeCarlo assisted in the procedure.

She said she later learned that the hospital’s own records deemed the procedure “Category II,” which is not considered immediately life threatening.

WARNING: I am now going to be really mean. Please don’t read the rest of this if you don’t like me being judgmental against atheists.

I was thinking about the kinds of things that atheists think are “moral” and interpreting those things within a Biblical framework. I know that atheists support abortion because they don’t want to be compelled to diminish their own happiness by tending to the needs of their own baby, conceived as a result of their own irresponsible sexual behavior. So when they force a pro-life nurse to perform an abortion, what they are really saying is “I don’t want anyone punishing other people with the unhappy consequences of their own selfish pursuit of happiness, because then no one will judge and punish me when I do the same as they did”.

The problem is that atheists don’t want to be thought of as people who are willing to go as far as killing others in order to avoid facing judgment and consequences for their own actions. They have to invent some myth that justifies the abortion, instead. If they could only invent some plausible-sounding myth that would convince other people, and themselves, that their abortion was justified by some greater good. With the right myth, they could continue their pursuit of pleasure unimpeded by consequences and social disapproval. What possible myth could possibly provide moral justification for something as extreme as abortion?

Well, atheists decided to invent several myths to provide rationalization for abortion:

  • Darwinism – animals do it, and we’re just animals, so let’s do it!
  • overpopulation – we’ll all starve by 1970! Oops, I mean 1990! 2050!
  • resource exhaustion – we’ll be out of oil by 1970! Oops, I mean 1990! 2050!
  • global warming – too many people are driving cars so some have to go away!
  • embryonic stem-cell research – it will turn lead into gold, you’ll see!
  • rising crime rates – who cares about what economists say!
  • etc.

So basically they are inventing myths in order to justify abortion as a legitimate means of pursuing happiness in this life. And this made me think of how child sacrifice was used by pagan nations in the Bible. It’s exactly what is predicted in Romans 1:18-32, which is arguably the most useful passage in the Bible for understanding what our existence here is really about. They didn’t want to take responsibility for those demanding, expensive children they conceived during unmarried sex, because those children would reduce their selfish pursuit of pleasure. So they invented a variety of baseless myths in order to make abortion appear “moral” to themselves and to others.

The Bible mentions the habit of inventing “speculations” in order to avoid having to obey the moral law. Atheists feel that they are too “smart” to be restrained by authentic morality, especially one that is constantly under fire in the public schools, the mainstream media and pop culture. So they do destructive things and then are surprised to feel guilty about it. They want to be happy while sinning, and to avoid the natural consequences of sin that serve as warning signs of the judgment to come. If anyone dares to imply that there is any morality higher than selfishness, (say, by wearing a cross in public or by questioning Darwinism), then they use the power of the state to silence them.

That’s atheist “morality”. The Bible’s diagnosis of sin really hasn’t changed in 2000 years. The people who rebel against God have just found more sophisticated myths to justify their selfish pursuit of pleasure. Before, it was Molech. Today, it’s overpopulation causing global warming. And they are not afraid to enforce these myths on religious people using the power of the state. Anything to make everyone celebrate their destructive actions as though they were in fact good. And if they have to kill many people to pursue happiness, well, that’s fine on atheism – there is no “right to life” on atheism. It’s survival of the fittest. Morality is just an illusion created by evolution.

And that is why a pro-life nurse was forced to perform an abortion – because she made people who reject God feel guilty by calling attention to a real standard of objective morality which defies atheistic efforts to rationalize hedonism with speculative myths. She was telling them that we should not take the life of an innocent unborn human being just because it makes us happier to do so. She was opposing their hedonistic purposes, and the speculative myths that they had invented to justify their selfish, irresponsible pursuit of pleasure. Christian morality isn’t a headlong pursuit of selfish pleasure. It’s about self-denial and self-sacrifice – which is not pleasurable.

As I wrote before:

The great moral accomplishment of atheists in the last 100 years has been to murder 100 million people. And this is not counting the millions of deaths caused by abortion, and environmentalist bans on DDT. It also doesn’t count the millions of broken homes caused by the sexual revolution, or the social costs of raising children without fathers who go on to commit crimes.

When the intuitive awareness of God’s moral requirements conflicts with the atheistic desire for selfish happiness, atheists first do the crime, then they search around frantically for some fig-leaf to justify it as “moral”. Any speculation will do, and the “evidence” can be manufactured (at taxpayer expense) to fit the myths. They believe that if they could just get everyone to see that evil is really good, and to celebrate their selfish hedonism, then their feelings of guilt would vanish, and their happiness level would increase. Their attempts to demonize Christianity and Christians is also part of their plan – they want to celebrate their own behavior as moral and deride the behavior of authentic Christians as immoral.

The very concept of morality is illusory on an atheistic worldview.

And lest anyone think that I can’t defend the Christian worldview as true, click here and start engaging.

How I respond to atheists who speculate about unobservable entities

I noticed a new comment to my article explaining how to argue for God from the fine-tuning of the universe.

The commenter wrote this:

Hey, atheist here. Just astounded by your characterisation of the atheist’s response. I’ve never heard any atheist use the argument that humans caused the fine tuning. It doesn’t make sense because humans would still have to exist in some now corrupted timeline where the universe wasn’t fine-tuned.

I have a whole post on my blog dedicated to this topic but I’ll summarise my main arguments.

[SNIP! See below for his 8 points]

Maybe you can integrate these arguments into your post and address them, instead of a straw man?

Mike

This is a pretty good comment, with only a little acceptable snark at the end. I hate it went people write loads and loads of stuff without citing any evidence.

And I wrote this back:

Thanks for your comment. You’ll note that in my piece I cited numerous scientific facts and produced an argument that was logically valid. Now let’s take a look at what you wrote.

And here’s how I replied to his 8 points.

“1. Possibility of a multiverse.”

1) This is a speculation with no scientific evidence. Notice how I appeal to an experimental particle physicist for my conclusion.

“2. Possibility of an oscillating universe”

2) This has been disproved theoretically and observationally. Notice how I cite research papers that do not merely speculate, but are based on observations.

“3. The Vast (to use Dennett’s terminology) majority of the universe does not contain life, so to claim that life is its purpose is merely superimposing your own subjective judgement onto it.

3) This is speculation about God’s motives. You are not in a position to dictate to God how he would have accomplished his goals. If you would like to listen to William Lane Craig speak on these scientific arguments, and listen to Dennett’s LAME response, click here.

“4. Related to 3. Clearly the universe is fine-tuned to make hydrogen, since that is the most abundant substance in the universe. Life seems to be fairly far down in the priorities of the universe. Of course I’m (half) joking, but there is no reason why one natural phenomenon needs a fine tuner any more than any other.”

4) This is speculation about God’s motives. You can feel free to joke about the evidence for and against God. I don’t joke about these issues – I prefer to cite evidence.

“5. The argument flauts its own premises by posing the existence of a creator which doesn’t need a fine-tuned universe. So either the premise is wrong, or we have an infinite regress of fine-tuners.”

5) Fine-tuning is an example of intelligent design such that a selection from a field of possibilities corresponds to an independently specified pattern. I.e. – the subset of functional proteins compared to the set of possible sequences of amino acids. God is not composed of parts so is not fine-tuned.

“6. We have no idea if these constants are even capable of changing. To state that they have been fine tuned without this information is nothing more than speculation.”

6) This is more speculation. Don’t make arguments based on what “we” don’t know. I make arguments based on what we do know. You do the same.

“7. It could be that the state of the universe is unlikely, but not as unlikely as the existence of a fine-tuner. In this case it would just be a big coincidence.”

7) “It could be…” It could be that monkeys will fly out of my butt. Stop speculating about things we cannot know. Let’s see your argument, and the peer-reviewed data to back it up. This is not a game.

“8. Even if the fine-tuning argument were valid, it says nothing about the type of creator that exists, so to go from this deist creator to the Christian God is a huge leap.”

8) The argument is not meant to prove the Christian God. The argument, taken together with a bunch of other scientific arguments, is meant to prove a Creator and Designer of the universe. To prove Christian theism, you make a case for the resurrection and then debate it in public in the university. And then you respond to philosophical objections, such as evil, suffering and the hiddenness of God.

I thought it was a useful example of how to ask people for arguments and evidence, and not take a speculation for an argument.

I find that atheists speculate a lot about unobservable entities in order to escape from good scientific arguments. They speculate about hyper-universes to explain the big bang. They speculate about a multiverse to explain the fine-tuning. They speculate about aliens seeding Earth with life to explain the origin of life. They speculate about as-yet-undiscovered precursor fossils to explain the Cambrian explosion. They speculate about as-yet-undiscovered developmental pathways that use co-option to get around irreducible complexity. And on, and on, and on.

And that suggests to me a question. What sense does it make to build an entire worldview on speculations about things you cannot observe? Or is atheism not about truth, then, but instead about thinking that you are better than other people and throwing off the demands of morality? If the truth is that God exists and that Jesus rose bodily from the dead, then why try to dance around it using speculations? What possible benefit could there be, ultimately, to having blind faith in a religion just to pursue pleasure?

My entire series on how moral values and moral duties cannot be grounded rationally on atheism is here.

How well do Darwinists do in debates with skeptics?

UPDATE: Welcome Post-Darwinist readers! Thanks for the link Denyse!

I thought that I would introduce a couple of my favorite critics of Darwinian fundamentalism, Stephen C. Meyer and Jonathan Wells. Here they are debating with Michael Shermer. I like Michael Shermer for two reasons – fiscal conservatism and engagement with his opponents. I’ve seen him MC sessions at Christian conferences. So let’s give him a chance to make his case.

Biographies of our debaters

Michael Shermer

Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com), the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech, and Adjunct Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University. Dr. Shermer received his B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine University, M.A. in experimental psychology from California State University, Fullerton, and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University (1991).

Stephen C. Meyer

Stephen C. Meyer is director and Senior Fellow of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, in Seattle. Meyer earned his Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University for a dissertation on the history of origin of life biology and the methodology of the historical sciences. Previously he worked as a geophysicist with the Atlantic Richfield Company after earning his undergraduate degrees in Physics and Geology.

Jonathan Wells

Jonathan Wells has received two Ph.D.s, one in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkeley, and one in Religious Studies from Yale University. He has worked as a postdoctoral research biologist at the University of California at Berkeley and the supervisor of a medical laboratory in Fairfield, California, and he has taught biology at California State University in Hayward.

Massimo Pigliucci

Massimo Pigliucci, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he conducts research on the ecology of plant populations and the evolution of adaptations…. He received his doctorate in genetics at the University of Ferrara in Italy, his Ph.D. in botany from the University of Connecticut, as well as a Ph.D. in philosophy of science at the University of Tennessee.

Let’s get ready to rumble!

Let’s start with a short 15-minute debate between Michael Shermer and Stephen Meyer, moderated by Lee Strobel.

Meyer starts with these points:

  • the origin of the universe implies a Creator who exists outside of time, space and matter, because he created time, space and matter
  • the physical constants and ratios of physics must be fine-tuned in order to support the minimal requirements for life
  • the cell is filled with molecular machines that are identical to machines built by humans, such as rotary engines
  • the cell contains biological information in the DNA, and the origin of this information cannot be explained by evolution

Shermer makes these points:

  • we should never infer intelligent causes, we should keep searching for a materialistic explanation and say we don’t know until we find an explanation that allows me to continue to be an intellectually-fulfilled atheist
  • who made the designer?
  • maybe the big bang will be overturned and then we can go back to the eternal universe that I want to be true in spite of the evidence
  • we can speculate (without any experimental evidence) about alternative theories of how the universe got here, unlike the standard big bang theory which is backed by multiple lines of scientific evidence

Then a dialog ensues:

Shermer: The design of life is sub-optimal – if God did it, it should be perfect, with no trade-offs between non-functional requirements, just like Wintery Knights’ software architecture designs and Java code are perfect

Meyer: There is no such thing as a perfect design. Software architects, like Wintery Knight, who have studied software design, will tell you that non-functional requirements must be traded-off against one another. (Source: Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University)

Shermer: Let me commit the ad hominem fallacy by attacking the motives of intelligent design proponents instead of dealing with their arguments and evidence.

Meyer: Two can play at that game, since evolutionists are atheists and secular humanists. But who cares? let’s stick to the arguments and evidence, ok?

Strobel: Meyer, are evolution and Christianity compatible?

Meyer: No, because evolution requires that the natural processes that create the diversity of life be random and unpredictable.

Shermer: Well, maybe the natural forces could be caused by the designer but in a totally undirected and undetectable way, so you Christians could have blind faith and we could run the public square.

Meyer: But Darwinism says and that no design is detectable in those processes, so they processes cannot be actually directed on Darwinism.

Shermer: But the designer could use natural selection and mutation.

Meyer: If so, then why did Darwin explicitly reject God having a role in these processes?

Shermer: I don’t believe in God because there isn’t enough evidence and it would require too many changes in my life. I like having autonomy from God and his moral demands. Also, we must always prefer material explanations, we can never infer that an intelligence played a role. I will only allow you to have two explanations of natural phenomena: 1) God didn’t do it, or 2) we don’t know.

Meyer: I like that you allow “we don’t know” as an explanation if we don’t know, because that is a rejection of dogmatic explanations that don’t fit the available evidence. But the arguments for design are based on what we do know, not what we don’t know – science gave us these arguments – and the progress of science has only strengthened them.

Conclusion

Well, I think it’s pretty clear who won, and who had the evidence! I like Michael Shermer, though, and I hope that he comes around to our point of view in time. At least he’s willing to debate, and he has a pretty moderate view compared to other Darwinian fundamentalists.

Other debates on Darwinism vs intelligent design

Michael Shermer debates Jonathan Wells at the pro-Darwinism Cato Institute (in 7 parts), MP3 audio is here.

Massimo Pigliucci debates Jonathan Wells for the pro-Darwinism PBS, downloadable video and audio.

John Lennox debates against Michael Shermer about the existence of God.

Further study

Here are posts on cosmological argument and the fine-tuning argument. I’ll respond to hopeful, but unwarranted, speculations about quantum mechanics and chaotic inflationary models, which I will be blogging about later. I’ll blog about molecular machines in a future post.

An essay on the origin of biological information by Meyer is here and a debate between two software engineers on it is here. I’ll also mention Meyer’s forthcoming book Signature in the Cell. Don’t forget about the upcoming debate between William Lane Craig and Francisco Ayala!

By the way, William Lane Craig has also debated Massimo Pigliucci on the topic “Does God Exist?”.

UPDATE: Did you see my post on why Darwinists don’t allow debates like this to happen in school classrooms?