Monthly Archives: September 2013

What the Pro-Life Position Ignores

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Who’s not pro-life? In the abortion debate, one side focuses on the life of the fetus, while the other focuses on the life of the woman and the quality of the life of her potential child.
One Christian view of life on earth portrays it as “the cramped and narrow foyer opening up into the great hall of God’s eternity” (William Lane Craig). What a dismal view of life—something simply to be endured as we wait for the real Life to begin. By contrast, the atheist, certain of only the one life we all know exists, is the one who lives life to the fullest. It can be argued that the atheist is the one who’s truly pro-life.
But let’s leave the conventional labels and consider the pro-life position. If there were no downsides of carrying a fetus to term, if carrying the fetus to term were nothing more than a minor inconvenience for the mother, then the abortion question wouldn’t be an interesting issue. But of course there are downsides—big ones. To bring a child into the world, poorly cared for in the womb, unwanted and unloved by its mother, abandoned by its father, neglected or abused, or growing up in squalor or in an abysmal home—for me, that potential harm eclipses the harm of denying a cell the chance to grow into a person. Demanding that the state step in and declare that it knows the consequences better than the mother seems an odd position to take for typically conservative Christians.
Long-time commenter Y. A. Warren speaks from personal experience:

We are arguing for the wrong rights. Every child has the right to be wanted and loved. As one of nine children of neglect and abuse, I stand for the right of a child to be given back to the energy of universal life rather than suffer the abuse and neglect that leads to fear and anger, which in turn lead to violence against oneself and others.

A similar view:

I love my mother, and having an abortion would have given her a better life.

Adoption?
The pro-life advocate has a quick answer: carry the child to term and give it up for adoption. But this does nothing to address the problem of the woman unable to or uninterested in caring for herself and the baby properly during the pregnancy. Or of the baby with identified birth defects. Unhealthy babies are far more likely to live out their childhood in foster care.
“Just put it up for adoption” is hopeless naïve when only two percent of all births to unmarried women ended in an adoption. For teen mothers, the rate is even less. Let’s not pretend that if the mother’s life and home situation aren’t conducive to raising a baby until adulthood that she’ll always put the baby up for adoption.
Even if a teen mother chose to have her baby adopted, the consequences of the pregnancy are dramatic. She’ll miss school, she’ll be ostracized, and she’ll go through an emotional meat grinder when it comes time to give up her baby. And since the statistics say she won’t and will almost surely keep the baby, she’ll have no chance to get back on track for the life she had planned.
I have a mental image of an anti-abortion activist looking with satisfaction on the girl he just talked out of having an abortion, with no understanding of the shackles he may have placed on her life or the hellish environment to which he has may have consigned that child-to-be. Infuriating.
A request for plain talk
Imagine hearing this from a pro-lifer to a pregnant 15-year-old girl: “Okay, an abortion would be a smart thing from the standpoint of your education, career, life, family, finances, happiness, and so on. I’ll grant you that. But it’s still morally wrong.” Oddly, they never do.
I don’t know if they don’t understand it or if they don’t want to admit it.
The alternative to abortion rights is compulsory pregnancy. My claims are simple: that (1) some lives are truly abysmal and (2) creating such a life (for the mother or the child) is a bad thing. I doubt that my argument has convinced any pro-lifers to budge in their position, but I do demand that they acknowledge the terrible burden that making abortion illegal would place on a million women each year.
Read more: “The Spectrum Argument”

Only in American can you be pro-death penalty, pro-war,
pro-unmanned drone bombs, pro-nuclear weapons,
pro-guns, pro-torture, pro-land mines,
and still call yourself “pro-life.”
— John Fugelsang

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 1/11/12.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia

Human Memory: Vivid Doesn’t Mean Accurate

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Apologist Frank Turek gives the 9/11 attack as an example of a vivid memory. Can you remember where you were and what you were doing on September 11, 2001? How about the same date a year earlier? Why is one date memorable and the other not? And what does this tell us about the accuracy of the gospel record of the remarkable life of Jesus?
Important events impress themselves on our memories, but there’s a big difference between a vivid memory and an accurate one. “This American Life” provided a great example a few weeks ago of how our memories fool us—a startling example, in fact. Let me briefly summarize it.
Emir’s story
Emir Kamenica was born in Bosnia in 1978. Yugoslavia began to unravel when he was 13. Though his father was killed, the rest of the family was lucky to get out of the war and make it as refugees to Atlanta.
Their new life was no paradise. Their apartment was dirty, and Emir made no friends. He was one of a couple of dozen white kids out of 900 in his high school. He felt the racial tension both in his neighborhood and his school. His English was terrible, and he practiced by translating passages from his favorite book, The Fortress, into English.
The one bright light in his school experience was Miss Ames, a student teacher in his English class for only a couple of weeks.
For one assignment in her class, Emir took a shortcut by submitting a translated passage from The Fortress that he found especially moving. The book was in Bosnian—who would find out? Miss Ames was impressed and said that he needed to get to a better school. By good fortune, she had a job interview at a local private school in a few days, and she took him along.
To Emir, the school was paradise. He had practiced a short line: “I’m a Bosnian refuge. My school is really bad. Please, can I go here?” For her own interview, Miss Ames had brought his essay as an example of what inspired her to be a teacher.
Though student applications were due months earlier and financial aid for that year was already arranged, the school highly valued diversity, and a Bosnia refugee would be a nice addition to the student body. Strings were pulled, and Emir made it in. After graduating there, he went on to Harvard as an undergrad. Then he earned a PhD from Harvard. And now, at 35, he’s a professor of Behavioral Economics at the University of Chicago.
This Bosnian refugee became a success all because one teacher took the time to help him out, fooled by his plagiarized essay. She mistook him for a genius and got him into a private school, which got him into Harvard, which launched a successful academic career.
This was Emir’s defining story, and he told it over and over. He contrasted it with that of his one friend from public school, a fellow Bosnian, who had no guardian angel. The friend got into trouble, spent time in jail, and went back to Bosnia.
Miss Ames didn’t get the job, and Emir never saw her again. As an adult, he tried to find her a couple of times, without success. He didn’t know her first name and wasn’t even sure of the spelling of her last name.
… the other side of the story
“This American Life” hired a private detective and found Miss Ames. Her version of the story was … different.
She had been a new teacher but wasn’t an intern. In fact, she had been Emir’s full-time teacher for an entire semester. His English was “tremendous,” and, in talking to his other teachers, Miss Ames realized that this sophomore was beyond senior level in all subjects.
She also disagreed about the character of the school. It wasn’t a ghetto school but had a great mix of students, like a teenage UN. She remembered about 20% white kids (later confirmed by fact checking).
And the essay that Emir plagiarized, the central fact to Emir’s story? She didn’t even remember it. It played no role in her decision to push him into the private school.
Emir never saw Miss Ames at the new school, not because she didn’t get the job, but because that trip had never been for a job interview. It had all been for him.
After Emir, Miss Ames’ story took a bad turn. The school administration was annoyed that she had poached their prize pupil, and they exiled her to whatever amounted to Siberia in that school district. After another year, she quit teaching.
(I’ve written more about our fallible brains here.)
The punch line of her story was that Emir had been any teacher’s once-in-a-lifetime student. He could’ve still gotten a great education if he’d stayed at that public high school, been at the top of his class at a good regional college, and then gone to Harvard for the PhD. After leaving Atlanta, she didn’t keep track of his career except by looking for his name in the Nobel Prize list every year.
For both people, but Emir in particular, these stories weren’t incidental but were important stories in their lives. His story was of plagiarism, luck, and a guardian angel. Her story was of innate gifts, inevitability, and martyrdom.
That doesn’t mean that Emir’s story wasn’t vivid–it was. It also doesn’t prove that it was false. What it proves is that at least one story was false.
A vivid memory may not be an accurate one. Remember that the next time someone points to the gospels and insists that so remarkable a story as the resurrection must’ve been remembered accurately despite the long decades from events to first writing.

A church steeple with a lightning rod on top
shows a total lack of confidence.
— Doug McLeod

Photo credit: Joaquin Villaverde

Five Intuitive Pro-Choice Arguments

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My primary argument about abortion is that there’s a spectrum from a single cell (not a person) to a newborn baby (a person). My summary of the spectrum argument is here. This is in response to pro-life advocates who deny this spectrum to argue that we have a “baby” from newborn all the way back to that single cell.
I’d like to make five arguments in favor of my position, but since emotion plays such a strong part of the discussion, I’ll set aside intellectual arguments and focus instead on emotional ones.
1. Child vs. Embryos
Suppose a building were on fire, and you could save either a five-year-old child or ten frozen embryos. Which would you pick?
Of course, everyone would save the child.
But now imagine the same situation two years later. The ten embryos have become one-year-old babies and the child is now seven years old. Which would you save? Obviously, the ten babies.
As an aside, note that the decision in the second instance is much tougher. In the first, we lost ten insensate embryos, but in the second, it’s a child. No one equates a newborn or a child with an invisible clump of cells.
2. Different Reactions to Abortion Procedures
Anti-abortionists focus on the horror of a late-term abortion. Did you ever wonder why they don’t focus instead on a woman swallowing a Plan B (emergency contraceptive) pill? Or a drug-induced abortion (the most common procedure for first-trimester abortions)? Imagine anti-abortion activists carrying signs, not with a photo of an eight-month-old fetus but with life-size drawings of a 100-cell human blastocyst. The signs would appear blank.
By choosing as they do, they admit that all procedures are not equal and that there is a spectrum. Their story is more powerful the older the fetus is. A blastocyst is very unlike a person, but an 8-month-old fetus is very much like a person.
3. Slaughtering Animals for Food
Which would be more horrible to watch: a woman swallowing a pill of Plan B or a cow going through a slaughterhouse? The cow can experience fear and pain, while the single cell can experience neither. The cell’s claim to superiority is only its potential to be a person.
There’s a big difference from what is and what might be. A blastocyst has impressive potential but has vastly fewer cells than the brain of a fly. The only trait it shares with a person is its DNA, a vague and abstract commonality.
And there’s no guarantee that our imagined cell will develop properly during pregnancy. A single cell might become a human baby or not, just like betting $1000 on black at the roulette table might win or not. With half of all pregnancies ending in spontaneous (natural) abortion, the odds for each are about the same.
4. Cloning and Skin Cells
Imagine that in ten years we’re able to clone a human from a single skin cell. Would you never scratch your skin to avoid killing a potential human being, like the Jain who wears mesh over his face to avoid accidentally breathing in a flying insect? And if not—if “potential human being” is very different in your mind from “actual human being”—then why not see that same difference between a single cell and a newborn baby?
5. Saving Another Person’s Life
If a blastocyst is a person, would you give up your life for it? You might risk your life to save a stranger, but is the same true for a stranger’s blastocyst?
What we value changes across this spectrum, and, while we might intellectually argue that a human is a human is a human, emotionally we don’t see both ends of the spectrum the same.
Let me make clear that I’m simply arguing for the existence of a spectrum. We can agree on this and still disagree on when the okay/not-okay line is for abortion. The status quo seems to resolve this appropriately: society decides on the upper bounds and, before that date, allows girls and women to choose.
Show me why a single fertilized human egg cell is equivalent to a trillion-cell newborn. The newborn has arms and legs, fingers and toes, eyes and ears, a brain and a nervous system, a stomach and a digestive system, a heart and a circulatory system, and so on. The cell has … none of these.
These are not equivalent in any important biological sense; why should they be equivalent morally?

Nothing in the world is more dangerous
than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 1/6/12.)
Photo credit: ebmarquez

Rebutting the “God is Simple” Argument

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In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins said, “God, or any intelligent, decision-making calculating agent, is complex, which is another way of saying improbable.”
Is God simple or complex?
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga argues that he is not complex:

According to much classical theology (Thomas Aquinas, for example) God is simple, and simple in a very strong sense.… So first, according to classical theology, God is simple, not complex.

Seriously? We’re consulting a 13th century scholar to understand modern cosmology? Modern science takes us to the Big Bang, and we need Thomas Aquinas to figure out the remaining riddles?
Here’s philosopher William Lane Craig’s input:

As a mind without a body, God is amazingly simple. Being immaterial, He has no physical parts. Therefore to postulate a pure Mind as the explanation of fine-tuning is the height of simplicity!

So anything that isn’t physical is simple? Sure—something that isn’t physical is maximally simple physically because it doesn’t exist physically. It has no gears or cams or levers. But that doesn’t help us with immaterial things, whatever they are. I don’t know what it means to be an immaterial mind, so I have no way of evaluating its complexity. Incredibly, neither apologist gives any evidence of the claim that God is simple. They seem to have no way of evaluating its complexity either and propose we just take their word for it.
Of course, science has shown that complex can come from simple. For example, we see this in the formation of snowflakes, in erosion, in weather, in chaos, or in evolution. From a handful of natural rules comes complexity—no intelligence required.
But we’re talking about something quite different—an intelligent creator. And in every creative instance we know of (the creation of a car, the creation of a bee hive, the creation of a bird’s nest), the creator is more complex than the creation. Plantinga’s God would be the most stupendous counterexample to the axiom that, in the case of designed things, simple comes from complex, and yet we’re supposed to take this claim on faith.
A resolution to the problem
But there’s a way to cut through all this. Is God as simple as Plantinga or Craig imagine? Then demonstrate this. Make us one. Humanity can make complex things like a microprocessor, the worldwide telephone system, and a 747, so making this “amazingly simple” thing shouldn’t be hard. Or, if we don’t have the materials, they can at least give us the blueprints.
But, of course, they will fail in this challenge and must admit that they have no clue how to build a god. In that case, how can they critique the simplicity of such a being? Now that their argument that God is simple has evaporated, we’re back where we started, and Dawkins’ argument stands: a complex God is improbable.

Why are we asked to pray after a disaster? Hasn’t god made it clear that he doesn’t give a f**k? — Frankie Boyle

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 1/2/12.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia

Football Christianity

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Tim Tebow is back in the news after being cut from the New England Patriots. When he was with the Denver Broncos, Tebow made a name for himself (and added his name to the dictionary) with his flamboyant public appreciation whenever God helped him out with a football play.
The interesting thing about his kneeling in praise is that it’s self-aggrandizing while pretending not to be. It was precisely anticipated in Matthew: “When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others” (Matt. 6:5). Jesus makes clear that they’ve received their reward here on earth and don’t get bonus points from heaven.
Mr. Tebow, are we to imagine that the Creator of the universe took time out of his busy schedule of not saving starving children to help you make a good football play? I understand that it’s important to you, and it’s nice to see a professional athlete not bragging about how great he is, but doesn’t football seem a little trivial? Doesn’t it make your religion look bad to even suggest that? And doesn’t it seem illogical to imagine God being yanked first one way by you and then in the opposite way by some dude praying for the opposite result on the other team?
But I’m probably too harsh. Let me applaud something else that Tebow does.
He’s known for evangelizing through Bible verses painted in the eye black on his face. Above, he’s proclaiming Ephesians 2:8–10: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
That’s good advice. But Tebow has promoted a variety of verses, not just the standard John 3:16 (“For God so loved the world …”) or Luke 2:10–11 (“I bring you good news of great joy …”). He not afraid to say what needs to be said.
Here he gives us Exodus 22:29, which says, “Do not hold back offerings from your granaries or your vats. You must give me the firstborn of your sons.” God’s demand of child sacrifice is often forgotten, but it’s good to be reminded of the basics.
Other verses that show how God used child sacrifice within Israel are Ez. 20:25–6.
Of course, the size constraints of eye black make Twitter look like an encyclopedia, but these messages are worth reading. This one is a nice reminder of God’s limitations. 2 Kings 3:26–27 tells of the end of a battle against Moab. The prophet Elisha promised Judah a victory. But when the king of Moab saw that he was losing, he sacrificed his son and future heir. This magic was apparently too much for Yahweh, because “there was an outburst of divine anger against Israel, so they broke off the attack and returned to their homeland.” (I write more here.)
A verse with a similar message is Judges 1:19: “The Lord was with the men of Judah. They took possession of the hill country, but they were unable to drive the people from the plains, because they had chariots fitted with iron.”
Another oldie but goodie. Psalms 89:7 says “In the council of the holy ones Elohim [God] is greatly feared; he is more awesome than all who surround him.” How often do we forget that God is part of an Olympus-like pantheon? Ps. 82:1–2 gives a similar message.
I’m waiting for someone to reference Deuteronomy 32:8, which describes how Yahweh’s dad divided up his inheritance (all the tribes of the earth) among his sons: “When El Elyon [the Most High] gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided up humankind, he set the boundaries of the peoples, according to the number of the heavenly assembly.”
You rarely see an entire chapter reference, but Leviticus 20 is a meaty one with a lot of good fundamentals. Everyone knows that homosexual relations are abominable, and verse 13 gives the death as the appropriate penalty. But it’s easy to forget the other demands of this chapter: eat no unclean animals (:25), exile any couple that has sex during the woman’s menstrual period (:18), death to spiritual mediums (:27), death for adultery (:10), and death for “anyone who curses their father or mother” (:9). It comes as a package, people!
Eye black references to divine genocide are common. Who hasn’t seen a football player displaying 1 Samuel 15:2–3, Deut. 20:16–18, or Judges 21:10? But it’s nice to see this one. Deuteronomy 2:34–5 says, “And we took all [Sihon’s] cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain.”
I’ll skim through a few more that I’ve seen. Why aren’t more sermons taught on these verses?

  • In our modern unbiblical and slavery-free society, we too often forget that not only did God permit slavery, but he regulated it. Exodus 21:20–21 says, “And if a man smite his slave with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. But if [the slave] live for a day or two, he shall not be punished, for [the slave] is his property.”
  • I guess with football players you’ll find lots of verses about violence. Isaiah 13:15–16 is a popular one: “Every one that is found shall be thrust through; and every one that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword. Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished.” Another that’s so common as to almost be cliché is Ps. 137:9: “Happy is the one who seizes your [Babylon’s] infants and dashes them against the rocks.”
  • It’s not surprising that sexual slavery interests football players. Numbers 31:15–18 says, “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”
  • I like to see reminders for racial purity. Ezra 9:2 says, “They have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and their sons, and have mingled the holy race with the peoples around them.” Other verses in this vein are Nehemiah 13:1–3 and Deut. 23:3.
  • Finally, a helpful reminder that even Jesus can be wrong: “There be some standing here which shall not taste of death till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom” (Matthew 16:28). Two thousand years later, and we’re still waiting. Ah well, we all make mistakes!

I think of these as the Forgotten Verses, and I praise athletes like Tebow for putting them front and center where they belong. It’d be great to get them back into circulation by making them the subject of sermons. After all, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16).
(If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the SNL skit where Jesus visits Tim Tebow.)

Men occasionally stumble over the truth,
but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off
as if nothing had happened.
— Winston Churchill

(This is a modified version of a post that originally appeared 1/9/12.)

“God Did It” Explains Everything … or Maybe Not

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Apologist Greg Koukl is the gift that keeps on giving. In his “Is Consciousness an Illusion?” podcast, he talked about Daniel Dennett’s 2006 book Breaking the Spell.
Let me first seize the opportunity to agree with something. Koukl says, “Reality is the kind of thing … that will injure you if you don’t take it seriously.” It’s good to see us sharing the goal of seeing reality clearly.
Unanswered questions within science
But we don’t agree on everything. Koukl said:

[Dennett has] made a claim in this book about something that is very, very difficult for a materialist to deal with that makes sense completely within a Christian worldview.

The “something” is consciousness. So Koukl says that the scientist has a tough time explaining consciousness, but it’s easy for the Christian.
While it’s true that science has much to discover about consciousness and how it works, I don’t see anything in particular that ought to keep the naturalist up at night. Science has an unanswered question—big deal. Science has lots of unanswered questions. It also has a marvelous track record for answering them.
But what trips me up here is the idea that the Christian worldview adds to the discussion. How does God explain anything?
Let me make clear that I can never prove that God didn’t do something. For example, let’s consider a few claims about God by Pat Robertson. He said that God is “lifting His protection from this nation” to allow terrorist attacks (2001). And that Hurricane Katrina might be God’s doing (2005). And that the people of Haiti made a pact with the devil, in response to which God allowed the earthquake that killed 300,000 (2010). These are assertions without evidence (and, in the case of Haiti in particular, of much contrary evidence), but I can’t prove that “God did it” is false.
The uselessness of the Christian’s ultimate explanation
The fact is, “God did it” can explain everything. As a result, it explains nothing.
“God did it” is simply a repackaging of “I don’t know.” It tells us nothing new. I’m no smarter after hearing “God did it” than before. It tamps down one set of questions, but others pop up: Who is God and how does he act in the world? Is he one of the thousands of gods that humans have already formed religions around or someone new? Why did God do what he did? What natural laws did God use to do it, and what laws did he suspend? How can we communicate with him? And, most importantly: how do we know that there was a supernatural cause and not a natural one?
The Christian must ask: What would falsify my position? If it’s unattainable or if you’ve so protected your belief that nothing could perturb it, you’ve left the domain of evidence. When your God belief is supported no matter what happens, be honest with yourself and admit that you just believe and drop the pretense that you’re following evidence or being scientific.
Contrast that with this observation from Marvin Minksy:

As scientists, we like to make our theories as delicate and fragile as possible. We like to arrange things so that if the slightest thing goes wrong, everything will collapse at once!

Not all claims are equal
Think about the size of various claims. The claim “1 + 1 = 2” is not controversial. The claim “I had a sandwich for lunch” is unsurprising, and thorough evidence could be provided to back it up. But the claim “There is a being that created the universe” is without scientific precedent—that is, science knows of no supernatural anything, let alone a being that could create the universe. I can think of no bolder claim than “God did it.” It’s baffling to me how apologists can toss out that immense claim and simply let it hang there, supported by nothing more than wishful thinking and tradition.
“God did it” doesn’t do it. It satisfies only those who want their preconceptions affirmed.
But let me take a step back for a moment. I’m treating this claim with the dignity due those that make testable pronouncements about reality. Perhaps that’s my mistake—if it’s simply a theological claim divorced from reality, fine. In that case, it’s a claim to be taken simply on faith, with no pretense of evidence or verifiability, and I have no use for it.
Supernatural vs. natural explanations
Let me end with a song, “Tell Me Why” by Pat Benatar*, which nicely makes the “God did it” claim.

Tell me why the stars do shine,
Tell me why the ivy twines,
Tell me what makes skies so blue,
And I’ll tell you why I love you.
(refrain)
Because God made the ivy twine.
Because God made the stars to shine.
Because God made the sky so blue.
Because God made you, that’s why I love you.

This Christian explanation is poetic, but for those of us who prefer to actually understand the world, Isaac Asimov has a new and improved refrain:

Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine,
Tropisms make the ivy twine,
Rayleigh scattering make skies so blue,
Testicular hormones are why I love you.

I’ll stick with the discipline with the track record for explaining reality.

The man who prays
is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong,
but who also thinks
that he can instruct god how to put them right.
― Christopher Hitchens

(This is a modified version of a post that originally appeared 12/28/11.)
Photo credit: Wikipedia
*Lyrics © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, EMI Music Publishing.