Category Archives: Uncategorized

Scholarly Consensus for the Resurrection? Not Really.

Posted on by

The kid and the shadow

Theologian Gary Habermas has for over fifteen years cataloged articles debating the empty tomb of Jesus and the resurrection. From the thousands he has collected, he concludes:

75% of scholars today say that resurrection or something like it occurred.

(He also cites the same percentage in favor of the empty tomb, but the resurrection is the more sensational claim.)

It would seem that scholars are heavily in favor of the resurrection conclusion. However, a closer look (informed in large part by an excellent article by Richard Carrier) shows a very different conclusion.

This is not peer-reviewed scholarship

Habermas admitted in 2012, “Most of this material is unpublished.” With his data secret, his conclusions are uncheckable. Carrier says that Habermas has denied repeated requests to review his data.

Habermas cites the ever-growing list of articles in his database (3400 at last count), but what does the 75% refer to? Is it 75% of the database articles? If so, how does he deal with multiple articles from one author? Or is it 75% of authors? If so, are professors and street preachers weighed the same? If it’s 75% of scholars, are experts in the fields of theology and philosophy given equal weight with experts in history? What journals and other sources does he search?

Habermas assures us that he is careful to include scholars both friendly and unfriendly to the resurrection idea, but how do we know without seeing the data?

Who’s motivated to publish?

Suppose someone has an opinion on the resurrection and is considering writing an article, pro or con. Are those defending the resurrection more motivated to write an article than those who reject the idea? Are resurrection defenders more likely to find a publisher?

Carrier gives Atlantis as a possible parallel. Even though belief in Atlantis is a fringe idea, there may be more published articles defending the idea of Atlantis simply because defenders are more motivated, and those who reject Atlantis may feel that this is uninteresting or that the few skeptical articles out there already address the issue.

That Habermas’s database can’t correct for motivation and hasn’t been peer reviewed makes his conclusions useless, but there’s more.

A Christian bias

What fraction of the pro-resurrection 75% are Christians? Not having the data, we don’t know, but I’ll guess 99%. I’ll grant that Christians are as smart as anyone else, but does their religion bias their conclusions?

Here’s why I ask: consider polling a group of Muslim scholars. They have no bias against the supernatural, and they understand the Jesus story. But ask them about the resurrection, and they will universally reject it.

The Christian might respond that Muslims are biased by their religious beliefs to dismiss the resurrection. That’s true, but then why are Christians, who are biased to accept the resurrection, allowed to weigh in on this issue?

Is 75% a big deal?

Habermas admits that 25% in his database reject the resurrection claim. Even if we were inclined toward Habermas’s conclusion, is this the foundation on which to build the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and most of some scholars accepting the resurrection ain’t it.

In an Olympic figure skating event, just 75% of the judges might pick the winner, but that’s not a reliable route to validate a fundamental truth claim.

Or maybe that 75% is compelling!

William Lane Craig defends Habermas’s conclusion this way:

[Ask those who reject Habermas] what source of information they have that leads them to disagree with over 75% of the trained scholars who have studied this question. How did they come by such insight? How would they refute the evidence of the resurrection which has led so many scholars to the contrary conclusion?

Habermas is happy to reject the conclusion of 99% of the experts who understand evolution (see his attitude toward evolution here, here, and here). Ditto for William Lane Craig. Neither is in a position to object to anyone rejecting the 75% conclusion about the resurrection.

There are no grounds by which a layman like Habermas can reject a consensus in science. This problem doesn’t exist within religion because there is no consensus! (I explore that more with the example of the Map of World Religions.)

Habermas ignores the all-important “excluded middle”

Habermas counts votes in only two categories. To see the mistake behind this, consider a 1979 ad for the Bic razor that claimed, “In our test, 58 percent found the Bic shave equal to or better than the Trac II shave.” Notice that the 58% is composed of two subsets: those who found the Bic better (it was the cheaper razor, so I’m guessing this was quite small) plus those who had no opinion. We can only guess, but suppose the fractions were 8% for Bic better, 50% couldn’t tell, and 42% for the Trac II better. With this, the message is suddenly quite different, and it all comes from slipping the large Undecided group into your preferred category.

That’s the problem with Habermas. He counts two categories of authors who cared enough to write a paper and succeeded in getting it published, (1) those in favor of the resurrection hypothesis and (2) those not. But don’t forget category 3, “Other,” composed of scholars who have no opinion or who couldn’t be bothered.

Historians may be the only category of scholar qualified to have a relevant opinion on the historicity of the resurrection (though Habermas doubtless includes many philosophers and theologians). Few historians of pre-Roman Britain or ancient Egypt or Ming dynasty China will have written about the resurrection, but the consensus of historians universally scrubs supernatural stories out of history. Historians are an enormous silent majority that Habermas doesn’t count and that would discard his conclusion if he did count them. Relevant scholars who reject or have no opinion on his hypothesis doubtless overwhelm those who accept it.

What biblical scholar can speak freely?

How many of the scholars in Habermas’s database signed a statement of faith at their place of employment? That is, how many are not free to follow the facts where they lead but have their jobs and even careers on the line if they stray?

Consider what happened to Mike Licona when he wrote a 700-page book in 2010 containing a single conclusion objectionable to fundamentalists. He lost two jobs and was out on the street. Christian scholars in such positions are unable to be objective, and every scholarly conclusion of theirs is suspect. Their statements of faith hang like a Sword of Damocles over their heads.

This includes Gary Habermas himself. The statement of faith at his Liberty University says, in part, “We affirm that the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, though written by men, was supernaturally inspired by God so that all its words are the written true revelation of God; it is therefore inerrant in the originals and authoritative in all matters.”

Dr. Habermas, about that conclusion of yours: is that you or your faith statement talking?

But forget all that for a moment. Let’s pretend this argument—“Given the crucifixion, heavy stone, and guarded tomb, how do you explain the empty tomb??”—is strong. The most we could say in response is, “Wow, good question—I dunno.” Habermas wants to jump to the most ridiculous option possible, that it’s all part of the perfect (yet unaccountably convoluted) plan of a supernatural being who created the universe.

Anything explained has been explained to date with naturalistic explanations, and Habermas would need to show why this situation is the counterexample. Until then, we already have a bin for the hundreds of other false supernatural tales, and that’s where this one belongs.

Recommendation to Habermas

Habermas says about his database, “The result of all these years of study is a private manuscript of more than 600 pages.” That’s an impressive project, and yet his argument crumbles under scrutiny. This frequently-cited database is no proxy for a simple poll of historians.

A poll would have been far less work, and it actually would’ve provided useful information—just not the information that Habermas would like to see.

Continue: “Responding to the Minimal Facts Argument for the Resurrection”

If Christ has not been raised,
our preaching is useless and so is your faith.
— 1 Corinthians 15:14

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/17/14.)

Image credit: Paolo Braiuca, flickr, CC

Evolution is Crazy, Says Man Who Thinks the Earth Was Created 6000 Years Ago, All the Animals Were Saved on a Boat Built by a 600-yo Noah, and our Loving Creator Drowned Everyone

Posted on by

fish fight

I watched the debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye (the “Ham on Nye” debate) live in 2014. The question was, “Is Creation a viable model of origins?”

Ken Ham is a young-earth creationist, meaning that he thinks the earth is 6000 years old and that evolution is nonsense. He’s the founder of the Creation Museum in Kentucky.

How poorly did Ham do? Let me count the ways.

1. Ham wants to make a distinction between experimental or observational science (reliable) vs. historical science (not). His point: you weren’t there, so how would you know?

Bill Nye pointed out that this is a make-believe distinction not made within science. For example, astronomy inherently looks back in time, since the light from distant objects might have taken millions or billions of years to reach us.

Ham repeated, “You weren’t there” several times, though this applies to him as well. Ken, were you there to see God make everything? Did you see the Genesis story accurately transcribed and copied? And I wonder how Ham would accept a lawyer defending a man accused of murder whose case was, “Yes, I’ll admit that you’ve got damning evidence, but so what? Were you there?”

Ham gave the example of our spherical earth, which we can observe, vs. millions of years, which you can’t. But of course you can. Science has long since left personal observation behind and uses instruments and clues to piece together the reality of nature. The clues pointing to an old earth and universe are not hard to put together—red shift from moving galaxies, radioisotope dating, plate tectonics, and so on.

2. Non-Christian scientists borrow from the Christian view for logic and an understandable universe. That sounds like the Transcendental Argument (responded to here) or the Argument from Mathematics (here).

3. Though the topic was the scientific evaluation of the Christian origin claims, Ham gave a surprisingly long Christian pitch. I naively thought that he would start with the evidence and then have God as the conclusion. Nope. Ham’s organization has a faith statement that begins, “Answers in Genesis seeks to give glory and honor to God as Creator, and to affirm the truth of the biblical record of the real origin and history of the world and mankind.” He obviously puts his presuppositions first and selects the facts to support that.

Ham’s response: I have faith, but so do you.

No, science doesn’t use faith. Science follows the evidence where it leads, while Ham wants to select and reinterpret the evidence to support the conclusion he started with.

During the question phase, Ham was asked, “What would change your mind?” After a long pause and much rambling, he admitted that no one could show him that there was no god. He did say that he would be happy to change his models if need be. That is, he’ll change his models as necessary to keep his God hypothesis alive in spite of new scientific discoveries.

4. Ham discussed Darwin’s errors. Only Creationists imagine that what Darwin thought constrains evolution today. More here.

Intermission.

Can you believe that we’re actually wasting time talking about a 3000-year-old mythology as if it’s actually true? It’s like we’re in kindergarten or Klown Kollege, debating the flat earth or geocentrism. Don’t we have bigger issues that this ridiculous debate is keeping us from?

Should we have a national debate over Scientology’s Xenu? Or the Haida myth that the Raven brought the sun to humanity? Or the Babylonian creation story where Marduk slays Tiamat and forms the universe from the corpse?

We live in interesting times. Let’s get back to what passes for science at the Creation Museum.

5. Dogs will always be dogs. Ham rejects speciation (despite Creationist darling Michael Behe accepting speciation and common descent). Whatever you show him—Lenski’s experiment with E. coli or a bacterium’s sudden new ability to metabolize nylon—he’s determined to reject it, though he never makes clear what confines the change within a species to keep it from becoming another species.

To squeeze all those animals onto Noah’s Ark, he imagines that there were less than 1000 “kinds,” but that, in the 4000 years since Noah landed, they were so profligate that they gave us the 16 million (or more) land animal species we have today. That’s some serious speciation.

Ham never defined “kinds,” but it sounds like it would map roughly to the biological concept of order (two steps down from phylum, and two steps up from genus). Let’s see where this takes us.

There would be just one pair for the primate order—that’s baboons, gorillas, chimpanzees, all the monkeys, and many more. Rodents are another order—that’s mice, rats, voles, beavers, squirrels, and lots more. Carnivores are another—the cat family (tigers, panthers, etc.), the dog family (wolves, foxes, etc.), bears, raccoons, mongooses, hyenas, and lots more. Ungulates are another—giraffes, deer, cattle, pigs, hippos, camels, and lots more.

But mammals are just one category. There are also insects, arachnids, birds, amphibians, reptiles, centipedes, roundworms, tapeworms, flatworms, and dozens more that most of us have never heard of, each with many orders. And don’t forget orders that are now extinct, since Ham imagines all animals that existed were thundering around during Noah’s time.

So the Ark lands, and the pairs go off together to repopulate the sterile earth. Can diverse members of an order mate today—say a rat and a beaver? A bear and a lynx? A giraffe and a hippo? If not, then why imagine that they could 4000 years ago? Perhaps this genetic diversity was available but unexpressed so that each pair was close enough genetically to create viable offspring but that the original rat-like pair would give us squirrels today or the original tiger-like pair would give us raccoons?

But where’s the evidence? We don’t see the record of this remarkable change in diversity in the DNA of modern animals.

I have no idea what the Hamster’s fantasy means, and we’ve wasted far too much time speculating.

6. There are hundreds of dating methods (natural clocks). They’re all fallible, and most give dates of the earth much younger than 4.6B years. Ham’s conclusion is to use the perfect source, the one who was there—God.

Oh, so then I guess Ken “Were you there?” Ham wasn’t there either. So much for his epistemology.

Ham showed a slide listing these natural clocks for just a few seconds and didn’t go into any of them. I assume he was referring to arguments like, “If you look at the rate at which minerals rinse off the land to add salt to the ocean, the oceans should be much saltier if they are billions of years old.” This was a world-class Gish gallop, since to explore and dismiss each of them would take far longer than the three seconds they deserved. (In the case of the salty ocean, there are ways that salt is removed from oceans—seen in salt domes, saline lakes like the Dead Sea, or the million cubic kilometers of salt deposited at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.)

Bill Nye pointed to direct evidence for the age of the earth by citing trees dated at 6800 years in America and 9550 in Sweden and the 680,000 annual layers found in ice cores. He brought it home by noting that there were ancient coral fossils under the Creation Museum.

During Q&A, Ham was asked: if evidence showed the earth to be much older than 10,000 years, would you change? Ham said that it’s not possible for observational science to contradict the claim of a young earth.

But then how can Ham’s science confirm a young earth without being falsifiable?

7. The Noah story. Ham didn’t spend much time on Noah, though his Creation Museum is responsible for the Ark Encounter replica of the Ark.

But Bill Nye spent much time lampooning the Flood. (My summary of the Bible’s Noah nonsense is here.) Some of Nye’s points:

  • The Grand Canyon shows clearly distinct layers of fossils, not an enormous mix of every living thing, sorted by size, that you’d expect if they were deposited there in just days. Further, you never see modern animals mixed with dinosaurs that lived in the same habitat—modern hippos with sauropod dinosaurs, for example, since they both favor(ed) shallow fresh water.
  • Plants die after being under salt water. Where did our plants come from?
  • Why is there just one Grand Canyon? If the Flood caused it, there should be many around the world. And how does the Flood both lay down the layers and cut out a canyon?
  • How did the animals get home after the Flood?
  • The Ark would’ve been the biggest wooden ship ever. Compare that to the Wyoming, the world’s largest wooden schooner. It was built in 1909 as the culmination of centuries of shipbuilding expertise, but its size made it twist too much, and it leaked. Noah was an amateur, and his project was larger. He’s going to succeed where seasoned shipwrights couldn’t?

And why do Bible coloring books show just a little round Ark with happy animals on top? Why not show the corpses of millions of people and perhaps billions of other animals floating on the surface of the water? Wasn’t a corpse-covered ocean part of God’s perfect plan as well?

8. Ham thinks that the Bible stories are accurate statements of what actually happened. My favorite: the Bible points to one race. How he can say that given the racism in the Bible? The Bible forbids intermarriage with other tribes (Deuteronomy 7:3) and makes clear that impure ancestry forbade one from becoming an Israelite (Deut. 23:3). God demands the genocide of many tribes. Even Jesus was careful to focus the evangelism of his disciples: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel” (Matthew 10:5–6).

Other observations

Ham made clear that his view should be taught in public, taxpayer-supported schools, though I couldn’t make sense of his logic. He didn’t say why astrology wasn’t a valid alternative to astronomy or why other origin myths shouldn’t also be taught. And somehow he slipped in the claim that God intends marriage to be between one man and one woman (I’ve slapped down that ridiculous argument here and here).

Nye made clear that “I don’t know” isn’t embarrassing and says nothing about the validity of science. Referring to various aspects of science, he said, “that’s how we do it on the outside.”

Nye’s main point was that the citizens of America deserve better. Teaching accurate science, not make-believe, is essential for America’s competitiveness. It’s simply unpatriotic to settle for less.

Let’s be real, let’s not make a joke of ourselves.
— Pat Robertson responding to Ken Ham

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/7/14.)

Photo credit: Doug Geisler

 

The Bible’s Shortsighted View of the Universe

Posted on by


Saul Steinberg’s famous “View of the World from 9th Avenue” mocks the outlook of the self-absorbed New Yorker. Manhattan is shown in sharp detail, but that detail fades with interest. Looking west, beyond the Hudson River is a featureless “Jersey” and a rectangle of land with a few scattered state labels representing the United States. Beyond that, the Pacific Ocean and a couple of distant countries. That’s it. That’s enough.

The Myopia of Genesis 1

And that’s the view we get in Genesis.

God created the sky as a vault to separate the saltwater sea above from the earth below and the freshwater sea beneath (Genesis 1:6). This is from Sumerian cosmology, which preceded the Bible, and which the Judean priesthood probably picked up while in exile in Babylon during the 500s BCE. We see this prescientific cosmology later during the flood story: “All the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened” (Gen. 7:11). Water comes from above and below because of the two hidden seas.

Over subsequent days, God’s creative focus narrows as he makes vegetation (Day 3), lights hung in the vault of the sky (Day 4), sea creatures (Day 5), land animals, and then Man (Day 6).

“He also made the stars”—it takes half of one verse, and in Hebrew, it’s a single word. That’s all the Bible says about the 99.9999999999999999999999999% of the universe that’s not the earth.* It’s just a blue watery dome over Mesopotamia holding little stars hung by strings to guide us at night.

“View of the World from the Bible”

Let’s recreate this famous magazine cover as the biblical version. This myopic view of the world would show the newly rebuilt Temple in sharp detail, as well as Jerusalem. Looking east, we’d see the Jordan River valley and the Dead Sea, and beyond that, a featureless Moab and Ammon, the desert, and then Persia. Out at the horizon beyond Persia, we’d see the edge of the water dome that covered the world. High up in the sky, we’d see the sun, moon, and little bitty stars.

The Bible is a human document. Its only perspective was that of Iron Age men.

Maybe the Bible is supposed to be that way

You could respond, of course, by saying that this was a natural view for a primitive people. It was all they could handle. But these people 2500 years ago weren’t fundamentally different from us. They had the same mental capability. If we can understand and marvel at the view of the universe provided by modern science, why wouldn’t God document the modern scientific view?

The God of Genesis was a primitive, stunted god. He’s given a very limited palette to work with. Many Christians today whip up (without justification) all sorts of extraordinary qualities of God—new qualities that the authors of Genesis couldn’t imagine. That he’s infinite, beyond time, omniscient, omnipotent. The Genesis god needed six days to shape his limited earth, while today’s god is said to have created the entire universe with its 100 billion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars.

Whatever science comes up with, the Christian response from many quarters is, “Oh yeah—we knew that. Let me tell you how we modify our god concept to adapt.”

Christians quickly co-opt the awe that science gives to add to the majesty of God’s creation—from the aurora borealis to Saturn’s rings to a distant nebula. But if awe is important to modern believers, why not give it to ancient ones?

Science is where awe comes from, not from the Genesis story or the Bible’s assurance that God can move mountains.

If the Bible were from a god, it would look like it.

Atheists read the Bible the way we have to read the Bible:
in the same historical manner with which we read every ancient source.
To do anything else is special pleading.
— commenter vorjack

* That’s not an arbitrary number.  The mass of visible matter in the universe is 6×1051 kg, while the mass of the earth is 6×1024 kg.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/5/14.)

Image credit: Donnie Ray Jones, flickr, CC

God is Always the Worst Explanation: 8 Reasons (2 of 2)

Posted on by

Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? These are some of life’s big questions. Christian answers involving God are often put forward as answers, but God is always the worst guess. Let’s conclude our list of reasons why (part 1 is here).

5. It ignores the trend.

Supernatural explanations are superseded by natural ones, not the other way around. Lightning used to be of heavenly origin, but now we have a natural explanation. Plague, famine, drought, accidents, death, and so on used to have supernatural explanations, but these have been replaced. Might we suddenly discover strong evidence that argues that some religious claims are true? Maybe, but that’s not the way to bet.

Just how poorly does the “God did it” explanation do against natural explanations? Might a natural explanation be so ridiculous that “God did it” becomes plausible? Probably, but since we have no prior examples of supernatural explanations being universally accepted (unlike a natural explanation like the germ theory of disease), this hypothetical explanation would have to be pretty ridiculous to be worse than anything from the supernatural category, which has never produced a single universally accepted explanation.

One Christian podcaster proposed this deliberately ridiculous explanation of Jesus: time-traveling insurance salesmen led by a clone of Elvis go back in time to manufacture the idea of Jesus to get the concept of “act of God” into insurance law. Have we finally found an explanation so ridiculous that the supernatural Jesus story is finally plausible by comparison?

No, and I explain why here.

6. It ignores the default position.

Hundreds or thousands of religions are practiced today, and many more were practiced in humanity’s long history. People invent things like ghosts, fairies, and superstitions. We understand how urban legends, conspiracy theories, and even traditions develop and take hold. And people make up religions by the thousands.

Ghosts don’t exist, urban legends are false, and so are made-up religions. Given any particular supernatural belief, the default position is that it is yet one more false belief by a mind that is susceptible to lots of false beliefs.

The Christian claims are a bold rejection of this default position. That doesn’t mean that Christianity is false, but it does mean that it has the burden of proof. (A discussion of Christian attempts to shirk their burden of proof is here.)

See also: Why Christianity Looks Invented

7. God catching uses evidence inconsistently.

We can imagine the Christian throwing out a net to catch fish, where the “fish” is the truth about supernatural claims, and the “net” is the evidence criteria. The trick is being consistent when evaluating the evidence.

When the Christian seeks evidence for God, the holes in the net are small. The evidence criteria become flexible, and any little clue is evidence—personal feelings, good luck and happy coincidences, the dismissal of inconvenient science by a Christian nonscientist, apologists’ assurances that the Bible (but not other ancient religious texts) is real history, and so on.

But when evaluating other religions’ supernatural claims, the holes are big and only the most compelling evidence counts. The Christian becomes skeptical and stringently applies the evidence criteria. They sound like an atheist and reject all but the most compelling evidence: this looks like just another manmade religion, those religious books are too old and unreliable, the supernatural claims are laughable, and so on.

This is a biased approach to the evidence. Sure, all of us are at least a little biased in how we sort through the evidence, tending to keep what confirms our beliefs and reject what challenges them, but we must do our best to evaluate evidence objectively. (More on what Christians’ loose criteria for evidence captures here and here.)

8. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Claiming that a god exists who created the entire universe is about as extraordinary a claim as possible. Such a claim needs extraordinary evidence. Not only must Christians make do with handwaving similar to other religions’ believers, they’re often reduced to protesting against this demand.

Most apologetic discussions devolve into, “Well, you can’t prove God doesn’t exist.” That’s correct, but that never was the goal. All we can try to do is follow the evidence. Sorry—it doesn’t lead to God.

One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.
— Robert Heinlein

Image credit: Bob Seidensticker

God is Always the Worst Explanation: 8 Reasons

Posted on by

For the answer to any of life’s big questions—such as “Why are we here?” or “What is the meaning of life?”—God is always the worst guess. Super-smart aliens would be better. Fairies would be better. “I dunno, but there’s gotta be something better” would be better.

“God did it” is perhaps the most remarkable claim possible since it assumes, without compelling evidence, that a supernatural being created everything.

Let’s explore why God is the worst explanation for anything.

1. “God did it” is unfalsifiable. It explains too much.

“God did it” is the ready answer to explain any scientific puzzle—what caused abiogenesis (the first life, which allowed evolution to begin), what caused the Big Bang, and so on. Of course, science keeps answering those puzzles, meaning that “God did it” was both wrong and premature, but apologists never seem to learn that lesson.

I can never prove that “God did it” is not the explanation for anything. What about a tsunami that kills hundreds of thousands of people, God’s hiddenness despite earnest prayers, or anything else within Christianity that confounds us? The Christian can always say that God might have his own reasons that we simply aren’t entitled to know or aren’t smart enough to understand.

(A god who made knowing about him a requirement to avoiding hell in the afterlife and yet remains hidden is not the omnibenevolent Christian god, but let’s ignore that for now.)

Handwaving away challenges to the God hypothesis is exactly what you’d do if there were no God.

The problem is that “God did it” can never be falsified, which makes it useless. By explaining everything, it explains nothing. More here and here.

2. “I don’t know” is a perfectly reasonable answer. Don’t stretch to fill the void—if you don’t know, just say so.

Christians will say that they have the answers to life’s big questions. They seem to imagine a time limit, with the teacher saying, “Time’s up! Pencils down. Pass forward your quizzes.” Yes, Christianity does have answers to life’s big questions; it’s just that those answers suck. They’re given without evidence.

Things are clearer when we pull back to take in all the world’s religions. The map of world religions makes clear that religion’s answers to these questions depend on where you live. If you live in Tibet or Thailand, Buddhism teaches that we’re here to learn to cease suffering. If you live in Malaysia or Morocco, Islam teaches that we’re here to submit to Allah. Christianity, Scientology, and all the rest—they each have their own supernatural answers to these big questions, and each answer must be taken on faith.

3. Popular apologetic arguments don’t point to God.

The most popular Christian apologetic arguments today—the Cosmological, Moral, Transcendental, Ontological, Design, and Fine Tuning arguments and so on—are all deist arguments. The Christian god is never the conclusion; all these arguments can do is allude to some sort of vague and undefined Creator. Yahweh fits the bill no better than the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

4. The Principle of Analogy tells us where to put supernatural claims.

We’re familiar with supernatural stories. Even the most secular society has in their history some approximation to Grimm’s Fairy Tales or the Greek pantheon of gods or magical folk such as fairies, leprechauns, and elves. We have a bin for these stories labeled “Mythology and Legend.” Zeus, Odin, and Merlin go in the bin, and so does Yahweh. More.

Concluded in part 2.

I’m afraid I don’t believe there is such a thing as blasphemy,
just outrage from those insecure in their own faith.
— Stephen Fry

Image credit: Bob Seidensticker

Spectrum Argument for Abortion, Revisited

Posted on by

blue green spectrum

Since conservatives seem determined to get votes by making an issue out of abortion, I’d like to look at some of these arguments. At the Secular Pro-Life Perspectives blog, Clinton Wilcox rejected my spectrum argument supporting abortion. This is a particularly relevant response since he doesn’t use religious pro-life arguments.

The spectrum argument

My argument is more fully discussed in this post, but I’ll summarize it here briefly.

Consider the above figure of the blue-green spectrum. We can argue where blue ends and green begins, but it should be easy to agree that blue is not green. In other words, the two ends are quite different.

The same is true for a spectrum of personhood. Imagine a single fertilized egg cell at the left of the nine-month-long spectrum and a trillion-cell newborn on the right. The newborn is a person. And it’s far more than just 1,000,000,000,000 undifferentiated cells. These cells are organized and connected to make a person—it has arms and legs, eyes and ears, a brain and a nervous system, a stomach and digestive system, a heart and circulatory system, skin, liver, and so on.

The secular pro-life response

Wilcox begins by praising the argument as having substance rather than simply demonizing pro-life advocates, so we’re off to a good start.

His first concern:

The immediate problem with this argument is that he gives no attempt to argue at what point we actually do become persons.

Yes, it’s important to get the OK/not-OK dividing line for abortion right, but that’s not my interest here. Legislators deal with tough moral issues all the time. Take the issue of the appropriate prison sentence for robbery. Six months? Five years? What mitigating circumstances are relevant? Does it matter if a gun was involved? What if the gun was used as a threat but it wasn’t loaded? What if some other weapon was used? What if someone was hurt?

It’s a person’s life we’re talking about, so the sentence must be decided carefully, and yet penalties for this and a myriad other specific crimes have been wrestled with and resolved in 50 states and hundreds of countries.

The same is true for the cutoff for abortion—it’s a tough decision, but it’s been made many times.

My focus here is not on the cutoff line. I’ll leave that to medical experts and policy makers who have more expertise and interest than I do.

Potential

Back to Wilcox:

He resorts to the tired old arguments that an acorn is not an oak tree (no, but it is an immature oak tree) ….

Nope. An acorn is not a tree at all. It’s a potential tree, and it may become one in twenty years, but it’s not a tree right now.

Wilcox next responds to my comparison of a brain with 100 billion neurons versus a single neuron. I said that the single neuron doesn’t think 10–11 times as fast; it doesn’t think at all.

It may be true that a brain with one neuron doesn’t think nearly as fast as a brain with 100 billion neurons, but he misses the point that it is still a brain. It is just an immature brain.

No, it is a potential brain.

Analogy to the personhood spectrum

Let’s consider the brain by first considering an analogous situation with water. A single molecule of water does not have the properties of wetness, fluidity, pH, salinity, or surface tension, but these and other properties emerge when trillions of trillions of water molecules come together.

Wetness is an emergent property—we see it only when enough water molecules get together. Similarly, thinking and consciousness are emergent properties of the brain. A single neuron doesn’t think slower; it doesn’t think at all. A “brain” that doesn’t think is not a brain—immature or otherwise.

It hasn’t had the chance to develop into a fully mature brain.

Bingo! That’s precisely the issue. Wilcox is making the Argument from Potential: the single neuron isn’t a brain now, but it will be. The single fertilized human egg cell isn’t a baby now, but it will be.

He’s right, of course—it will be a baby. But the point is that it isn’t now. A future baby is not a baby. It’ll be a baby in the future.

The vastness of the spectrum

The spectrum argument fails to adequately address the fact that there is a continuity of human development that begins at fertilization and doesn’t stop until after birth. Logically, that suggests that teenagers are “more of a person” than toddlers ….

I addressed this in the original argument, but let me illustrate the issue with a quick round of “One of these things is not like the others.” Our candidates today are an adult, a teenager, a newborn baby, and a single fertilized human egg cell. Okay, candidates, raise your hand if you have a brain. Now raise your hand if you have a pancreas. If you have skin. Eyes. Nose. Bones. Muscles.

Now raise your hand if you have hands.

The difference between newborns, teens, and adults is negligible compared to the single cell at the other end of the spectrum, which has nothing that we commonly think of as a trait of personhood. The commonality across the spectrum is that they all have eukaryotic cells with Homo sapiens DNA. That’s it. That’s not something that many of us get misty-eyed about. Very little sentimental poetry is written about the kind of DNA in the cells of one’s beloved.

What do we call the spectrum?

The unborn may be less developed at the single-cell stage than the 100 trillion cell stage, but it is still a human person at that stage.

Take the spectrum from single cell to newborn. Wilcox argues that it’s not a spectrum of humanness because a single cell and a newborn are both human. But it’s a spectrum of something. I call it a spectrum of personhood, but I’m flexible. You tell me: tell me what a newborn is that a single cell isn’t. I say that a newborn is a person and the single cell isn’t, but I’m open to better terms.

Wilcox wants to skirt the spectrum and say that it’s irrelevant or meaningless, but it’s everything to this discussion. A newborn is something that a single cell isn’t. Think of the many words we have for subtle distinctions after birth: newborn, baby, infant, toddler, and so on. Surely English has a label that Wilcox will find acceptable for capturing the difference between the cooing, crying, pooping, sleeping, eating newborn and the microscopic, insensate cell.

Be honest with the facts. Don’t try to pretend that this immense spectrum doesn’t exist.

Miscellaneous arguments

[Seidensticker’s] comparison of the pro-life argument to PETA’s slogan of “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy” is simply a false analogy.

Sounds like Wilcox missed my point. PETA tries to collapse a spectrum with this slogan. They want to argue that, no, we shouldn’t put animals into bins along a spectrum (in this case: vermin, livestock, pet, and human). Animals are animals—all the same.

Does Wilcox accept this? If he rejects PETA’s attempt to collapse or ignore this spectrum, then perhaps he sees the problem with ignoring the vast difference between newborn and cell.

Seidensticker’s point about how evangelicals thirty years ago supported abortion is simply irrelevant.

Not to people who bring up Christian arguments! If it doesn’t apply to a secular perspective, fair enough, but I was addressing more people than just you.

I have . . . soundly refuted the “spectrum argument.”

Gotta disagree with you there. You’ve mischaracterized it and sidestepped the argument. If you want to address it squarely, I’ll consider responding to your reaction.

If my oven quits working in the middle of making a cake,
do I call the undercooked mess a cake?
— Nate Frein

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/24/14.)