One small Christian conclusion has sweeping political consequences

Last updated on: June 2, 2021 at 11:41 pm By Bob Seidensticker

It starts small. Pro-life voters say that a fetus is a baby. When it’s eight months old and is viable on its own, it’s a baby. When it’s five months old and the mother can first feel the fetus moving, it’s a baby. When it’s three months old, with tiny eyes and fingers, it’s a baby.

When it’s a single fertilized human egg cell at day one, just 100 microns across, it’s not much of a baby, but who can begrudge a couple calling it whatever they want?

So let’s say it’s a “baby” right back to day one—that’s a popular Christian conclusion. Babies must be protected. Everyone has a right to safety, and babies are vulnerable and deserve particular attention. Our natural instincts to protect cute big-eyed things come into play—who could complain about that?

The simplest moral logic would demand that these babies be protected, and it isn’t surprising that millions of American voters are single issue voters, declaring that it’s a baby right back to day one. Does the conservative candidate say that they’re going to fight to protect those lives and the liberal candidate not? With Supreme Court appointments in play for the future president, that makes it easy—you vote for the conservative even if you must hold your nose to do so.

Where does it end?

That first step is like a drop of rain falling at the crest of a mountain range that is carried downhill by a stream and then a river. If it falls a little this way, it flows westward. A little that way, and it flows eastward. A small change makes a big difference.

And the small change in our example of pregnancy is that definition of “baby.” You say that it’s a “baby” on day one, and you flow inevitably to cute, then vulnerable, then protective instincts, then society must protect it, then government must protect it, … and then voting for Donald Trump.

But maybe you don’t need to start with that. Let’s make a small change. What if you said that as a newborn in your arms at the hospital, that’s a baby. The five-month-old fetus that begins to kick? It’s not really a baby if it hasn’t developed enough to be viable on its own. The three-month-old fetus with eyes and fingers? That’s even less of a baby—it’s just two inches long, not very baby-like, and nowhere near able to live on its own.

Reconsider those definitions

On the left is a three-month-old fetus. Think that that’s an adorable baby that must be protected by law? Guess again. On the right is a five-week-old embryo that’s less than half-an-inch long and looks like that thing from the Alien movies.

You see the progression. When you go back in time from a trillion-cell newborn to a single cell, it becomes less of a baby at each step as you regress along that spectrum. When you go from a newborn with arms and legs, eyes and ears, brain and nervous system, heart and circulatory system, and all the rest back to where there isn’t even a single cell of any of these, it becomes not a baby at all. (More here.)

Gestational development is a spectrum. It’s a baby when it’s done; it’s not a baby when it starts.

A pregnant woman can call her fetus anything she wants. The problem is when someone wants to impose their own definition of “baby” onto the rest of the country by law. You say the cell is a baby? You say you’d never have an abortion? That’s fine, just don’t force that on the rest of us. And consider the political consequences when you demand that a single cell is a “baby.”

I do not believe that just because
you’re opposed to abortion
that that makes you pro-life.
In fact, I think in many cases,
your morality is deeply lacking . . .
if all you want is a child born but not a child fed,
not a child educated, not a child housed.
And why would I think that you don’t?
Because you don’t want any tax money to go there.
That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth.
We need a much broader conversation
on what the morality of pro-life is.
— Sister Joan Chittister

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/28/16.)

Image from Phil Warren (license CC BY 2.0)

Why a Single Human Cell is Not a Baby

Last updated on: February 27, 2021 at 1:27 pm By Bob Seidensticker

abortion

[Mother Teresa] preached that poverty was a gift from God.
And she believed that women
should not be given control over the reproductive cycle.
Mother Teresa spent her whole life making sure that
the one cure for poverty we know is sound was not implemented.
— Christopher Hitchens

(This is a repeat of a post that originally appeared 9/14/16.)
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The Most Powerful Argument Against Christianity (2 of 3)

Last updated on: January 22, 2021 at 12:40 pm By Bob Seidensticker

divine hiddenness

The Problem of God’s Hiddenness, where God wants a relationship with us and knows that hell awaits those who don’t know him (but refuses to make his existence obvious), is the most powerful argument against Christianity.

We’ll continue our critique of a rebuttal of this argument by apologist Greg Koukl. (In part 1 we analyzed the free will response and the “Yeah, but that wouldn’t convince everyone” response).

What requests for evidence are reasonable?

Koukl said that the evidence people have today for God is “fully adequate.” He clarified his position this way:

[Doubting] Thomas had fully adequate evidence but then made the ridiculous request that I wouldn’t believe until I stick my finger into the nail holes. . . . That was really above and beyond what was really required.

Bullshit. Beyond a certain point, apologists’ making excuses for God just gets embarrassing.

So Thomas had clues indicating that his teacher had validated his claim to be the creator of the universe in human form, but it would be rude to check them out? Wouldn’t Thomas have been smart to firmly ground his evangelical message with solid answers to the questions skeptics would obviously ask about the facts of the resurrection? “How do you know it wasn’t a lookalike?” “Did you make sure it really was the same guy?”

It’s not like God has a rule against providing public evidence. In Elijah’s contest with the priests of Baal, God lit Elijah’s waterlogged sacrifice (1 Kings 18). God enabled Moses to perform magic tricks to convince the pharaoh (Exodus 4). Later, “The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend.” Jesus did his miracles in public, in part to convince people of who he was. But today God won’t even show us that he exists?

I wonder if Koukl is this gullible in response to claims from other religions. Would he read the Book of Mormon without making the ridiculous request to see if its claims of horses and elephants in the New World held up? Would he accept that the “Hindu milk miracle,” where statues drank milk from spoons, was indeed a miracle, or would he make the ridiculous request to see if scientists have a natural explanation?

Skeptical Thomas demanded strong evidence for an unbelievable claim. No apology is needed for this reasonable request. Gullible Greg makes quite a contrast. God gave you that big brain to use, Greg.

In his quest to denigrate evidence, Koukl then said that if God appeared right in front of you, you wouldn’t go to God, you’d go to a psychiatrist.

Wow—that’s a great point! What does that tell you about the plausibility of the Christian message and the reasonableness of atheists’ demands for excellent evidence?

Rhetorical tricks

Throughout his response, Koukl added an undercurrent of bluster. Every couple of minutes, he dropped in a confident, evidence-free, off-topic claim that his position was the right one:

I’ve seen what people have done with enormous evidence and how they’ve often rejected it.

My evidence for God is quite good, and I think it’s available to many people.

Atheism’s not even in the running for me because the problems are so much bigger than anything I face in Christianity.

There is so much evidence all over the world, and we’re constantly offering that kind of evidence as apologists. . . . We have lots to say, but for some people it just simply isn’t adequate, and I wonder why because the rational aspects (it seems to me) are certainly covered here. There must be something else going on in the minds of people who reject it.

If he were backing the winning argument, he’d let the evidence do the blustering.

He complains when non-Christians are given “enormous evidence” but reject it. I’m pretty familiar with Koukl’s work, and I’ve responded to some of it in this blog (for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). No well-informed atheist would be impressed by his tired, retread arguments.

I presume he wants to shift the conversation to his hand shadow figures rather than the topic at hand, God’s hiddenness, to which he has responded poorly. His argument has become, “Yeah, but Christianity is true, so it doesn’t matter that I can’t respond to this problem!”

Koukl again:

From where I sit, I think the evidence is absolutely overwhelming, and the problems with atheism are so much more massive than anyone can come up with for theism that there’s no contest between the two.

Yet again, this is stated without evidence, and our Problem of God’s Hiddenness alone defeats Christianity. If God wants a relationship, where is he? Christianity has promised too much, its god is a no-show, and Christianity is no longer a worldview candidate.

Thought experiment: God World

Koukl says that if God appeared to us now, some people would have a hard time believing. He imagines that people like me wouldn’t want to believe because we enjoy sinning so much, but Koukl’s thought experiment is flawed.

To see the problem, consider an Earth-like planet without natural disasters—let’s call it Gaia. If you visited Gaia and asked the people there to imagine tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and so on, many couldn’t. For them, a violent and unpredictable Nature would be inconceivable because the concept is completely foreign.

Now suppose that on this gentle planet natural disasters began to happen like they do in our world. An earthquake that kills 20,000 people? A tsunami that kills 200,000? Disasters that we think of as inevitable natural events would be to them unbelievable tragedies. They’re familiar to us but inconceivable to them.

Natural disasters on Gaia would be hard to accept, just like God suddenly appearing on Earth would be hard to accept. The lesson from the Earth vs. Gaia comparison is that natural disasters are easy to accept if they’re simply an ever-present part of reality. And God would be easy to accept if he were an ever-present part of our reality—if we lived in God World.

The lesson here can be seen from two viewpoints.

Telling people on Earth about God is like telling people on Gaia about natural disasters. The people of Gaia would have a hard time accepting the idea, and they’re justified in doing so. It’s a completely foreign idea without precedent.
Telling people on Earth about natural disasters is easy. We already know all about them. But convincing people on Earth about God is difficult. They’ll have a hard time accepting the idea, and they’re justified in doing so.

If Koukl wanted to preach the idea of natural disasters, Gaia is not the place to do it. And if he wants to preach the idea of God, Earth is not the place to do it. For each place, these are foreign concepts that should come with evidence but don’t.

He wants it both ways. He wants to imagine God making his existence known but many people still not believing. He also wants to imagine that “the evidence [for God] is absolutely overwhelming.”

Concluded in part 3, where we discuss other apologists’ approach to this problem plus some unexpected weaknesses in the apologists’ position.

Man to pastor as he leaves church:
“Oh, I know He works in mysterious ways,
but if I worked that mysteriously I’d get fired.”
— Bob Mankoff cartoon

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/11/16.)

Image from Old Book Illustrations, public domain

Fat Chance: Pigs Will Fly Before Ray Comfort Writes an Honest Critique of Atheists (3 of 4)

Last updated on: November 23, 2020 at 1:10 pm By Bob Seidensticker

We continue with my book review of Ray Comfort’s Fat Chance: Why Pigs Will Fly Before America Has an Atheist President (part 1).

Ray has positioned his pig book as an evangelistic tool, a book that is supposed to convince atheists of the rightness of the Christian position. Let’s see how well Ray did toward that goal.

Christians and atheists in positions of power

Ray shares his insights into how Christian voters see atheist political candidates.

Our founders understood that people in positions of power would have opportunities to do corrupt deeds for their own benefit. But if they believe in God and in a future state of rewards and punishments, then when tempted to do wrong they won’t give in.

Is that how it works in practice? Christians don’t commit crimes? They’re immune to temptation? No Christians in prison? Are crime statistics in countries inversely proportionate to the fraction of Christians?

Not really. In fact, the very-Christian U.S. does far worse than those godless European countries on measurable social metrics like homicide, suicide, alcoholism, teen pregnancy, and so on.

Oblivious to what it does to his argument, Ray brags that Christians have subverted the Constitution’s prohibition of a religious requirement (Article VI) and made it impossible for an atheist to get elected to national office. But atheists have achieved political power in other countries. Polls within science show that education and prestige correlate with atheism. And I wonder how many of America’s self-made billionaires are atheists. Bill Gates is one, and his foundation, the world’s largest private foundation, is worth $50 billion and has made $55 billion in grants. He’s using it to improve health care and reduce poverty in the developing world.

Because atheists have no absolute basis for good and evil, and don’t believe in an afterlife, they therefore can’t be trusted with public office. Whether this ‘bias’ would stand up to today’s Supreme Court scrutiny, it clearly shows the intent of our founders.

What an obnoxious moron. “Our founders” were very clear about the role of religion in government, and they deliberately kept them separate. The U.S. Constitution admits of no supernatural grounding backing up the government, and it begins, We the people.

Your bias would indeed fail a Supreme Court test because the intent of the founders was clear: there can be no religious test for public office.

Church-state separation

I can’t imagine Ray has thought this through. Despite evidence to the contrary, he has assurance from his deity that non-Christians are bad people. Is that how a society should work? If, decades from now, Ray’s group became a minority, would he still want a religious test imposed by the majority? Or does this only apply when he’s got the power? If that future doesn’t sound good, Ray, maybe you’re seeing the value in the founders’ wisdom.

Atheists, like the rest of us, are not morally “good.” Without an unwavering moral compass to guide him, an atheist president would be easily swayed by the winds of popular opinion and his own selfish desires—doing whatever was right in his own eyes.

Demonstrate this “unwavering moral compass.” Take a contentious social issue like abortion or same-sex marriage and show that all Christians get the same God-given response. Last time I checked, Christians were all over the map on social issues. Some churches have rainbow flags, and some have signs that say, “God hates fags.”

Ray undercuts his non-argument when he denounces the many corrupt Christian politicians:

And this from people who claim to believe in a Supreme Being who will one day hold them accountable!

So then he admits that being Christian is no guarantee of moral action. He doesn’t even attempt to show a correlation. ”Christianity makes you good” is just a bold claim supported by handwaving.

Ray drops in a predictable attack on Islam. His argument is basically: Say what you will about Christianity, it’s better than Islam! Uh, okay, and say what you will about dengue fever, it’s better than smallpox . . . but I’d rather have neither.

He frets that atheism’s attack on Christianity will create a vacuum for Islam:

By dismantling Christianity’s influence in our nation, [atheists] are preparing the way, and making every path straight [for Islam].

You don’t fight fire with fire; you fight it with water. Similarly, you don’t fight Muslim illogic with Christian illogic; you fight it with reason.

The Constitution is all the protection we need against excesses from either Islam or Christianity. Don’t mess with it.

Getting the Ray Comfort treatment

You might have seen Ray’s Ten Commandments challenge on his videos. He gets people to admit that they’ve stolen, lied, cursed, or lusted. You’d feel like you haven’t gotten your money’s worth if you read a Ray Comfort book and didn’t find this flabby challenge, but the pig book has it. He concludes it with this:

God sees you as a lying, thieving, blasphemous, adulterer at heart. Do you still think that you are good?

Yes, pretty good, though not perfect. If not being perfect is a problem, talk to my Maker.

And Ray does nothing to untangle the problem of the incompatible versions of the Ten Commandments. Given how little he understands the issues he talks about, I’m guessing he doesn’t even know that there is more than one.

I hope you’re sitting down for Ray’s next argument

Atheists, how confident are you in your worldview? Prepare to have it rocked.

Using the infallible logical fallacy of the Argument from Incredulity, Ray gives an argument that he plans to stretch into his next movie, The Atheist Delusion (critiqued here). First, he points to a book and asks, Do you believe that this book could happen by accident? When you say no, he pounces: the content within human DNA is equal to that within a thousand ordinary books. How could DNA happened by accident?

Ray hammers home the punch line:

DNA’s complexity (for any sin-loving sinner who is honest) instantly shows the absurdity of atheism, which holds that the unspeakably amazing instruction book for life happened by chance.

Wow—where does one begin?

It’s biologists who have useful opinions about the origin of DNA, not atheists.
Sin isn’t relevant to any issue within biology.
Neither atheism nor biology say that DNA “happened by chance.” Mutations happen by chance, but natural selection (also part of evolution) doesn’t.
Evolution is the consensus of the scientists qualified to evaluate the evidence. Deal with it. I’d be an idiot to reject that consensus view based on any argument from a non-biologist like you.
“Amazing” is no argument. That you’re amazed doesn’t mean that a Designer is behind it.

DNA isn’t a powerful argument against evolution or atheism. In fact, it alone is a powerful rebuttal to the Design Argument, the popular Christian argument that the apparent design we see in nature is evidence of God.

How well would Ray do on his own Ten Commandments challenge?

Ray keeps using his simple platitudes, like DNA happening by chance, because he’s kept the one-liners that work on people and discarded those that don’t (an example of artificial selection, by the way). He’s been corrected by the best—Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and other biologists have pointed out his errors. And yet he pops back up like a Weeble with the same stupid arguments. (This explains my subtitle of this post series, “Why Pigs Will Fly Before Ray Comfort Writes an Honest Critique of Atheists.”)

Ray, what do you call someone who makes a mistake, has it corrected by a reliable authority, and then deliberately repeats that mistake? You him a liar.

Have you thought about how you would do on your Ten Commandments challenge, Ray? Does it worry you that you lie? Or maybe you have some rationalization like it’s okay to lie for Jesus or you can lie as long as you ask for forgiveness afterwards. Or maybe you reserve the right to declare who’s an authority based on how their arguments please you. One wonders how your argument about immoral atheists being unqualified for elected office stands now that you’ve shown that even you don’t feel bound by God’s moral commandments.

Ray then makes the Appeal to Authority fallacy as he points to Antony Flew, who was convinced by the DNA-is-complex argument and went from atheism to deism. (I care nothing about the musings of a non-biologist like Flew about evolution; more here). And then it’s the Christianity of Francis Collins, who was head of the Human Genome Project. (Collins will be quick to tell you that DNA alone gives overwhelming evidence for evolution.)

I think Ray needs to select his authorities with more care.

Concluded in part 4.

To borrow from The West Wing,
“If you demand expressions of religious faith from politicians,
you are just begging to be lied to.” . . .
If a politician can win your vote
simply by claiming that they are part of the religious majority,
what do you imagine they will do?
— Andrew Seidel

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/27/16.)

Image from Paul Sableman (license CC BY 2.0)
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6 Flaws in the Pro-Life Position (that Pro-Lifers Must Stop Ignoring)

Last updated on: October 24, 2020 at 10:21 am By Bob Seidensticker

Ultrasound of 8-week-old human fetus

The U.S. election is two weeks away. Let’s talk about the biggest issue in the minds of Trump’s supporters, abortion.

I want to expose six fundamental flaws that underlie the pro-life position. I think I have solutions, and next time I will outline them. My goal (perhaps surprisingly) isn’t to tell pro-life advocates that they’re idiots but to expose the errors and show them how to fix them. In this post, let’s look at the problems.

(Going forward, I will use “you” to refer to an imaginary pro-life advocate.)

Problem 1: Abstinence doesn’t work as birth control

Congress has put billions into abstinence-only sex education. That money peaked during the Bush administration, was largely redirected to other sex ed programs during the Obama administration, and has increased again during the Trump administration. As one example, the Texas state board of education recently doubled down on abstinence as the focus of sex ed.

But these programs don’t work. Toward the end of the Bush administration, a study was done to evaluate the results of these programs. Out of 700 federally funded abstinence-only sex education programs, “[four] were handpicked to show positive results and they still failed”! There was no increase in sexual abstinence, no increase in the age of sexual debut, and no decrease in the number of partners.

We can analyze this another way. Look at the 2018 list of states ranked by teen birth rate. Take the top 10 worst states and compare them against the top 10 reddest states (ranked by the percentage that voted for Trump in 2016). Six are on both lists: Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama.

Now do the opposite comparison: match the 10 lowest teen birth rate states with the top 10 bluest states (ranked by the percentage voting for Clinton). Again, six are on both lists: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and New York. None of the worst-birth-rate states are on the blue list, and none of the best-birth-rate states are on the red list. Whatever conservative states are doing, it’s not working well.

Now consider abstinence teaching in schools. While it’s hard to make a quantitative comparison, bluer states are (in general) likelier to cover abstinence, cover contraception, and take a positive view of sexual orientation. Redder states are likelier to stress (rather than merely cover) abstinence and emphasize that sex is reserved for marriage. They are less likely to cover contraception or take a positive view of sexual orientation (source).

But isn’t abstinence 100% effective?

I’ve talked with conservatives who shake their heads at my ignorance and inform me that abstinence, by definition, eliminates the need for abortion. Abstinence means no sex, no sex means no pregnancy, and no pregnancy means no abortion—QED.

But it obviously doesn’t work like that in the real world. The effectiveness of contraception is measured in two different situations, perfect use and typical use. Perfect use is how it is used during a clinical trial, where every step is done correctly. Typical use is how it is used by ordinary consumers, and these consumers can misunderstand or misread directions, not bother with or forget to take a daily pill, ignore cautions, and so on. So, yes, the perfect use of abstinence gives perfect results, but as we’ve seen above, typical use of abstinence doesn’t give great results.

Abstinence “always works” in the way that dieting always works. If your last weight-loss diet or fitness commitment didn’t work, then you probably have first-hand experience with typical use not matching the expectation of perfect use. It’s like saying “Don’t get shot!” to someone off to war or “Just stop smoking!” to someone trying to quit—not really useful advice since you’re confusing typical use with perfect use.

Abstinence isn’t even a birth control method. To see this, imagine you plan to do some outdoor chores and ask someone for a recommendation for sunscreen. Their response: just stay inside.

It’s true that if you stay inside you won’t get too much sun, but that ignores your goal of doing chores. “Stay inside” isn’t a kind of sunscreen. (h/t Love, Joy, Feminism)

An analogous example is that you want to take a long trip, and you ask for advice on whether it’d be safer to go by plane, train, or car. The response: the safest option is to stay home. That’s true, but it ignores your goal of making the trip.

The choice of birth control method asks, assuming I will be sexually active, what is the best method to avoid STDs and pregnancy? “Just don’t have sex” doesn’t answer the question.

Problem 2: You focus on the symptom, not the problem

Abortion isn’t the problem; abortion is the symptom. No one would have abortions without the problem of an unwanted pregnancy.

No one enjoys getting an abortion. It’s an unpleasant medical procedure with some risk. About this we’re all on the same page, which brings us to the next problem.

Problem 3: You’re working against pro-choice community

You might think “So what? Why would I want to work with my enemy?” but you’d obviously be more effective if you could work with them rather than against them, given the stalemate we have today.

The pro-life movement wants no abortions and the pro-choice movement wants to keep them as an option, but there is common ground. Both would like to see fewer unwanted pregnancies. An unwanted pregnancy prevented is far cheaper, safer, and easier than one treated with an abortion. Fewer unwanted pregnancies mean less demand for abortions (which makes pro-life advocates happy), and that means less pressure to restrict abortions (which makes pro-choice advocates happy).

The pro-life movement’s focus on the wrong thing—the symptom of abortion rather than the problem of unwanted pregnancy—is so flawed that it looks deliberate. It’s like someone wants there to be conflict, to prevent people coming together and making progress on the real problem.

(More on who that might be in the next post.)

Problem 4: Children will become sexually mature, whether you like it or not

Christian pundit James Dobson said about the recent decision by the Texas state board of education to focus sex ed on abstinence:

Activists groups like Planned Parenthood and its morally bankrupt allies were salivating at the chance to eliminate abstinence-based teaching once and for all and replace it with a not-suitable-for-children indoctrination program. If they got their way, 11 and 12-year-olds would spend classroom time learning about gender identity, condom use and other highly sexualized topics.

By “11 and 12-year-olds,” I assume you mean “children who are about to become sexually mature.” Yes, they need to understand how their bodies will soon work.

Imagine a world where every teenager got a car, and you couldn’t prevent that. They would be eager to drive their cars, and all you as a parent could do would be to put up constraints and educate them so that when they left your house as adults, they would be responsible drivers.

Wouldn’t you want them to get driver’s ed?

In our world, people are getting married later and sexually maturing sooner. In the U.S., women are marrying on average at age 27 and men at age 29. Onset of puberty is now 10–11 for girls and a year later for boys (about five years earlier than it was in the 1800s). The process is complete about five years later.

That’s a given, and your only option is how to respond. “Wait until marriage” won’t work for everyone. It’s particularly naive given the many years typically between sexual maturity and marriage. Wouldn’t you want them to get driver’s ed?

Problem 5: Making abortion illegal doesn’t prevent abortions

Remember Kermit Gosnell? He ran a filthy abortion clinic in Philadelphia that focused on illegal late-term abortions and was sentenced to life in prison in 2011. Though they may not realize it, this is pro-life advocates’ goal. When safe, legal abortion is unavailable or inconvenient, it will be performed in unsafe, illegal clinics. One of Gosnell’s patients said about the closest Planned Parenthood clinic, “The picketers out there, they just scared me half to death.”

We’re seeing the beginnings of this today. A recent study of the restrictive climate in Texas, where more than half of abortion clinics have closed, has found that seven percent of patients seeking abortion tried to end the pregnancy on their own rather than jump the obstacles to get to a clinic. That’s more than three times the national average. The restrictions in Texas have also made late-term abortions increase.

Reliable data about the abortion rate before the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision made abortion legal nationwide is hard to find, but it appears that about 800,000 abortions were performed per year. That’s roughly the rate today. With our substantially higher population, that means the abortion rate was higher before Roe.

We find the same thing in other countries. Abortion rates are highest in countries where the procedure is illegal. No, making abortion illegal won’t make it end.

Problem 6: Obstacles erected for abortion clinics won’t work against medication abortions

Nuisance regulations like demanding that clinics have wide corridors or that their doctors have hospital admitting privileges (as Texas has imposed) will become less relevant. Medication abortions are abortions done by pills rather than an operation, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved this treatment twenty years ago. For abortions up to ten weeks’ gestation, the majority are done this way in the U.S., and that fraction is increasing.

Regulations about corridor width won’t matter if the abortion can come through the mail. Prescription drugs already come into the U.S. illegally from countries with cheaper prices. The tighter the controls on bricks-and-mortar clinics, the more demand for safe medication abortions will increase.

Let’s find solutions to these problems and find ways to make the pro-life movement effective. Continue with: Most U.S. Abortions are Due to Pro-Life Movement

“Explain to me how making abortion illegal
wouldn’t lower abortion rates.”
Explain to me how making drugs illegal
didn’t lower drug use rates.
— commenter adam

Image from Ragesoss (license CC-BY-SA-3.0,2.5,2.0,1.0)
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Arguing the Pro-Life Case (Such as It Is)

Last updated on: September 9, 2020 at 3:28 pm By Bob Seidensticker

Let’s critique three points often made by pro-life Christians.

This is a continuation of our analysis of the question, “Does Pro-life Logic Mean Women Who Get Abortions Should Be Punished?” addressed by Greg Koukl of the Stand to Reason podcast. (Start with part 1 here.)

I’ve responded in detail to the case against abortion here, but let me respond to the pro-life argument given in this podcast. To quote Sherlock Holmes, “Elementary as [the argument is], there [are] points of interest and novelty about it which may excuse my placing it upon record.”

The pro-life case point 1: abortion is killing a child

Koukl said:

We spend our time helping people see clearly that taking the life of an innocent human child in the womb is just wrong. What surprises me is that we have to continue to make this point because it strikes me that the point is so obvious. (@26:25)

You think your point is obvious? If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve heard the obvious response: a fetus is not a child, a baby, or a person—it’s just a fetus. In the same way, a cake that’s not done cooking isn’t a cake—it’s just batter.

The pro-life case point 2: the SLED test shows that the fetus is a child

SLED is an acronym for Size, Level of development, Environment, and Degree of dependency. The argument attempts to show that, while the fetus is different than a newborn on each of these categories, none disqualify it from being a child (I use “child” because Koukl used it above, though other pro-life advocates might use “human being” or “person”). I’ll respond to the SLED argument as laid out in the Cold Case Christianity blog, since Koukl didn’t discuss it thoroughly.

Size: A fetus is much smaller than a newborn, but is size important? An adult might weigh 300 pounds while a newborn might weigh 5 pounds, but is the adult any more human? Any more a person?

Response: An adult being 60 times heavier than a newborn doesn’t begin to illustrate the difference between the newborn and the single cell that it started out as. The newborn has a trillion cells, and the single cell has just one. I expand on this thinking with the spectrum argument here and here.

Level of development: A fetus is less developed than a newborn, but so what? A newborn is less developed than an adult—does that make the newborn less a human?

Response: Here again, this childish approach doesn’t begin to acknowledge the differences. Yes, a 30-year-old adult (say) is far stronger, smarter, and more agile than the newborn, but these are mostly changes of degree. Both the newborn and the adult have arms; the adult’s arms are just better developed. Both the newborn and the adult have a brain; the adult’s is just better developed. And so on.

By contrast, the difference between the newborn and the single cell is one of kind. The newborn and the adult have pretty much the same parts—arms, legs, eyes, ears, skin, brain, and so on, while the single cell doesn’t have any of these parts. It doesn’t even have a single cell of any of these parts.

Environment: The fetus is in the womb and the newborn isn’t, but so what? Is the location of the child important?

Response: Abortion laws must have a simple, unambiguous criterion for drawing the line after which the fetus is too much a person to abort. Once a baby is born, it has crossed that line. That doesn’t change the fact that a growing fetus becomes more a person with time and that a single cell is not a person or a child.

Degree of dependency: The fetus is totally dependent on the mother, but then the newborn is also dependent on caregivers. Even as adults, we might not be completely independent—perhaps we need heart or thyroid medicine, a pacemaker, dialysis, or a wheelchair. We might be bedridden or even comatose. Just because we’re dependent on others doesn’t make us not a person.

Response: Dependency isn’t the issue. There’s a spectrum of personhood through gestation. A newborn is a person, and the single cell nine months earlier wasn’t.

The pro-life case point 3: ignore the facts and change definitions to suit yourself

Koukl again:

People say, “Well, the unborn doesn’t look like a human being.” To which I respond: of course it does; he or she looks like any human being ought to look like at that stage of development! (@27:30)

This is simply the Argument from Potential: the fetus isn’t a human being (or a person) . . . but it will be!

Ignoring the possibility of miscarriage, I agree. That there is a spectrum of personhood that increases through the nine months of gestation is my main point.

Koukl takes what it will be (a human being) and applies that definition retroactively. The fetus is a potential human being, so Koukl simply drops the unwanted word “potential” and declares victory. Taken to an extreme, the thought, “It might be fun to have a baby” is also a potential human being. Is it immoral to deny that one life as well?

Seen properly, babies aren’t killed with abortion; they’re prevented.

The only thing that changes is how they look at any given point in time, and that should not change the value, because if it did, it won’t be long before ugly people are going to be on the chopping block, right? (@28:00)

Once again, Koukl is either confusing himself or deliberately confusing his audience about the kind of development we’re talking about. The differences between a child, teenager, or adult on one hand and a newborn on the other (or the difference between an ugly person and a beautiful one) are trivial compared to the difference between that newborn and the single cell it started as. In the first case, we’re talking about the set of persons (with eyes and ears, arms and legs, stomach and digestive system, brain and nervous system, heart and circulatory system, and so on) who have trillions of cells each precisely interconnected into a whole. And in the second case, we’re talking about a single unindividuated cell.

See the difference?

There’s one final post in this series on abortion: Do Pro-Life Advocates Want to Reduce Abortion? Sure Doesn’t Look Like It.

The consensus in a well-informed field of expertise
is not the same thing as a show of hands from ignoramuses
who can’t be bothered to learn about the subject.
— commenter Susan

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/2/16.)

Image from Hartwig HKD (license CC BY-ND 2.0)

Pro-Life Advocates Running from the Consequences of their Actions

Last updated on: September 4, 2020 at 12:30 pm By Bob Seidensticker

Some things you just want to run away from

Can you have a crime without the corresponding punishment? This is a continuation of our analysis of the question, “Does Pro-life Logic Mean Women Who Get Abortions Should Be Punished?” by Greg Koukl of the Stand to Reason podcast. (Start with part 1 here.)

The question puts pro-life advocates in a dilemma. Declaring abortion to be murder demands punishment to fit the crime, but that makes them look heartless. Is there another way?

A parallel from the Bible

Here’s a Bible parallel to Koukl’s dilemma. In the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53–8:11), some of Jesus’s enemies try to put him in a no-win situation. Here’s a woman found in an adulterous situation, they say. What should be done with her?

If Jesus says to free the woman, he’s violated Mosaic law. If he says to stone her, he’s violating his preachings about love.

Koukl is in the same boat. He wants to charge the woman having an abortion with murder, but then he comes off as unfeeling.

Jesus’s response was, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” which isn’t actually part of the law. Koukl’s response is equally ungrounded. His wishy-washy compromise is to label the act as murder but pretend not to hear the demand that he attach the relevant punishment.

Moral question vs. policy question

Koukl wants to disentangle the moral question (Is abortion wrong?) from the policy question (If it’s wrong, what punishment should apply?). He says that you can correctly answer the first without having an answer to the second and assures pro-lifers in this situation that they’re not inconsistent.

Here’s his prerequisite for deciding the policy (punishment) question.

We can’t ever make a decision on the policy concern unless we’re really, really clear on the moral concern. (@8:40)

Are you really, really certain that abortion is murder? Then you’ve suddenly become really, really clear on the policy response as well. If the punishment that goes along with murder doesn’t apply, then the crime couldn’t have been murder.

This is what happens when pro-lifers play games with definitions. It suits them rhetorically to call abortion “murder,” so they do. They want to retreat from the consequences that come along with that definition. In the same way, it suits them to call a single cell a “person,” ignoring that in common parlance persons may be big or small, but that only extends down to newborns. Persons have arms, legs, and faces, and they aren’t microscopic. (I expand on this spectrum argument here.)

If you detach yourself from reality in one place, it may bite you in another.

Koukl next grants himself permission to avoid the policy question. Pro-lifers can judge the moral issue, but they can justifiably avoid the policy question if they’re not “specialists in the law,” he says. But how difficult is it to decide that if something is “murder,” it should get the penalties that go along with murder? The word and the punishment are well understood.

This is hardly the first instance of pro-lifers having their noses rubbed in the consequences of their thoughtless rhetoric. In November, 2015, three people were killed and nine injured by a gunman at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. Koukl’s backpedaling about the consequences of his stand on abortion is like that from the pro-life community as they distanced themselves from a gunman whose actions were the reasonable consequences of their “abortion = murder” rhetoric.

(And I must point out a tangential but flagrant inconsistency. Koukl and other Creationists have no reluctance judging evolution. They lose no sleep over the fact that they’re not biologists and are not qualified to even evaluate the evidence, and yet they still declare evolution false. But in the case of abortion, Koukl is suddenly cautious about the boundaries between disciplines. He’ll call something “murder” but say that he’s not a “specialist in the law” and so can’t figure out what that means. Oh, please.)

As a final attempt to stop the leak in this dike, Koukl says that even if he were to grant that pro-lifers were inconsistent, so what?

[That] says nothing about abortion; it says something about us! (@9:40)

Yeah, and what it says about you is that you have no argument. If you can’t provide a coherent argument without self-contradictions, then it’s useless.

It certainly doesn’t follow [from our supposed inconsistency] that if we are being inconsistent in our view that our view is false. (@10:00)

I don’t conclude that your view is false, it’s just you’ve done nothing to argue that it’s true!

Continue with When Abortion is Illegal in America

[Pro-life conservatives are] like comic book collectors.
Human life only holds value until you take it out of the package.
And then it is worth nothing.
— Trevor Noah

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/27/16.)

Image from Markus Rauscher (license CC BY 2.0)

Unraveling Bad Pro-Life Thinking

Last updated on: September 2, 2020 at 11:31 am By Bob Seidensticker

Abortion is a huge issue in the upcoming U.S. presidential race. A large fraction of Donald Trump’s support comes from single issue voters for whom the pro-life issue is the only issue. They’ll hold their noses and vote for someone who, in every other category, is arguably worse than his Democratic opponent.

Greg Koukl and Alan Shlemon of the Stand to Reason podcast responded to an issue raised in the U.S. Republican campaign for the 2016 election, “Does Pro-life Logic Mean Women Who Get Abortions Should Be Punished?” With the 2020 election on the horizon, this is timely now as well.

Here’s their dilemma for pro-life Christians. Christians declare that abortion is murder, but you can’t have a crime without the appropriate punishment. Both the abortion provider and the woman herself should be severely punished—this is murder, after all.

On the other hand, that paints Christians as callous and unfeeling, so maybe we shouldn’t impose a harsh penalty on the woman. Or maybe any penalty at all. But in that case, what happened to the “abortion = murder” claim? Was that just hyperbole? Does the Christian carrying the sign know that abortion isn’t really murder? But if it’s just a harmless little exaggeration to make a point, how compelling is the pro-life case?

Though the boys tried mightily to extricate the average Christian from the punish-her-or-not dilemma, none of their attempts eliminated the problem. Here’s the first attempt.

Attempt 1: suicide analogy

Maybe the labeling of the crime (which the pro-lifers want) could be detached from the associated punishment (which they don’t want). They point to an analogy they’d like to follow.

Until the late 1960s, suicide was illegal in the United States. Of course the successful suicide cannot be prosecuted. Still, given that the great majority of suicide attempts are unsuccessful, we could in principle prosecute large numbers of people for unjustified attempts on their own innocent lives. Why don’t we do this?

We don’t now because attempted suicide has been decriminalized. But in the 1960s, in some states it was a misdemeanor or even a felony. That is, it was a crime with a punishment. (Is there any other kind?)

Public opinion on suicide has since softened. The article continues:

In general, it doesn’t seem either prudent or constructive [to punish suicide attempts]. Suicidal people typically aren’t a public safety risk. Anyone who wants to end his own life probably needs support and care.

The parallel is that women who have abortions are also not public safety risks, which allows Christians to sidestep punishing those women.

But there’s more to this parallel. The hypocrisy of toothless laws against suicide led to it being decriminalized. So then does the pro-life movement want to repeat that blunder and criminalize abortion with no threat of punishment? Is all this just hyperbole, or is abortion actually murder? If it is, they must demand the appropriate punishment.

This parallels the problem with many Christian anti-gay arguments. They point to the Bible to argue that homosexuality is wrong (it doesn’t actually say that—see here and here), but then they refuse to bring along the Old Testament’s punishment. With both abortion and homosexuality, there can be no crime without a punishment.

We’re not off to a good start.

Attempt 2: drug use analogy

Drug use is another parallel. The drug user is the pregnant woman, and the drug dealer is the abortion provider. Punish only the latter, Koukl says. (Tangent: can Koukl be arguing that society make all recreational drugs legal to consume?)

The analogy argues that drug users only hurt themselves, like the person attempting suicide. Drug users do hurt society if their habit drives them to crime—robbery or burglary, for example—but of course when they commit those crimes, they get the regular punishment.

So then when a woman asks for and then consumes a chemical abortifacient (the preferred approach up to 12 weeks of gestation and even beyond), she should logically receive the punishment due any crime she committed.

As with suicide, the trends aren’t going where Koukl wants them to. Attempted suicide was criminalized; now it’s not. Drug use was criminalized, but that’s being reduced. Crimes are punished consistently; it’s just that some things are no longer crimes. Koukl wants the unbalanced situation where abortion is a crime . . . but without punishment for the central participant.

Attempt 3: fetal homicide laws

Koukl notes that 38 U.S. states have fetal homicide laws. These laws apply to “fetuses killed by violent acts against pregnant women.” There you go, Koukl says—killing a fetus is homicide.

There’s just one point that must be emphasized. It’s a small point. Indeed, it’s so trivial that I hesitate to muddy the water by mentioning it, but it must be made clear: sometimes the pregnant woman very much wants to keep the pregnancy and sometimes she very much doesn’t! These are two completely different situations, and fetal homicide laws are meant to protect the woman and fetus in the first situation only. For our discussion, this is a red herring.

I wonder if Christians like Koukl have thought this through. If abortion were murder that wasn’t punished, actual murderers could demand that they get the same treatment. This is surely not a legal precedent that Koukl would support (h/t commenter 90Lew90).

Continue with Pro-Life Advocates Running from the Consequences of their Actions

If men struggle and strike a woman with child
so that she has a miscarriage,
yet there is no further injury,
he shall be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him,
and he shall pay as the judges decide.
— Exodus 21:22–3

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/25/16.)

Image from Anna Levinzon, (license CC BY 2.0)

Sifting Natural from Designed Is Harder than You Might Think (2 of 2)

Last updated on: August 27, 2020 at 11:29 pm By Bob Seidensticker

How do we separate natural from designed? The last post critiquing the Creationist project of Christian apologist Jim Wallace looked at some of the cases that make this sorting project so difficult. Now, let’s pull back and look at the bigger picture. This is just one of a number of similar challenges.

The first post in this series is here.

Other difficult category challenges

Separating things into natural vs. designed is just one of many similar problems. Here are a few more we’re all familiar with. Bang your head against a few of these to remind yourself that making these distinctions is often easy, but that’s only for things we already have an answer for. For each category, add your own ambiguous cases that should encourage humility in anyone who thinks this is easy.

I bring up these familiar questions only to remind you of that familiar feeling of not knowing which bin something belongs in. Wallace wants to imagine that these questions are easy, but read this list to remember that they are not.

Arthur C. Clarke observed, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is the challenge that we find in lots of areas—separating real from fake, life from nonlife, and designed from natural.

1. Real vs. hoax, lie, or fake. Is the Venezuelan poodle moth real? Yes and no. What about the Mpemba effect, which claims that hot water can freeze faster than an equal amount of cold? Or the Voynich manuscript, hundreds of illustrated, handwritten pages written 600 years ago. If it’s just a joke, it’s an extremely elaborate one, but if it’s not, then what the heck does it say? And what do we make of the Wenatchee child abuse panic of 1994—were there 29,726 incidents of child sex abuse, as officially charged . . . or were there actually zero?

2. Stage magic vs. real magic. We all know that magic shows are just illusions. But even knowing this, we still pay to see them because we still can’t conceive how the tricks were performed.

Imagine a team of stage magicians summarizing the audience experience for five of their most impressive tricks. Now they make another list. This time, it’s for five tricks with a similar wow factor that they don’t know how to do as illusions. They mix the two lists and give them to you to separate back into two piles, stage magic and impossible.

3. Right vs. wrong. Christians insist that objective moral truths exist, and yet they never get beyond the insisting part. They point to shared or strongly felt moral claims. Yes, those exist, but that doesn’t make them objective. More to the point, Christians can’t even agree among themselves which things are right and which wrong. Abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, same-sex marriage—you’ll find Christians on different sides of each of these. More.

4. Science vs. pseudoscience. It’s easy to dismiss flat earth claims, ESP, and even the popular horoscope as pseudoscience without much pushback, but what about claims about weight-loss diets? Does echinacea cure colds? Is apple cider vinegar a health panacea? Is homeopathy effective?

What about Creationism and ID, young earth, and the historicity of Jesus? What about the historicity of other figures from history (here, here, and here)?

There’s Bigfoot, Nessie, and other cryptids. There’s are the supposedly nefarious Illuminati, Bilderberg Group, and Trilateral Commission. There are conspiracy theories like chemtrails, Paul is dead, and the moon landing “hoax.” And there’s always the things that go bump in the night like haunted houses, ghosts, spontaneous human combustion, and alien abductions. Skeptics will likely have the same opinions, but millions will disagree.

5. Life vs. nonlife. What is life? Bacteria are living, but what about viruses? What about prions? If a kind of life relied on an information storage technique other than DNA and RNA, could we detect it? We keep being surprised at extremophiles, microorganisms that live in environments with extreme temperature, pressure, salinity, radiation, and so on.

NASA’s Mars 2020 mission launched a few weeks ago. One goal is to bring samples back to earth to test for life. But if we don’t even understand the scope of life on earth, we risk missing clues to life on Mars.

6. Science consensus vs. speculation. On the topic of life on Mars, a five-pound meteorite from Mars found in Antarctica in 1984 might hold fossil evidence of life on Mars from the earliest days of the solar system. But so far this argument is scientific conjecture. The jury is out on this and many other important questions.

And there are more categories where debate continues—what is art?, coincidence vs. the hand of God, and so on.

Of course, these are different categories than the one brought up by Christian apologists, designed vs. natural, but I hope these other categories remind us how difficult it can be to reach an overwhelming consensus on sorting problems like these.

Continue: Final Thoughts on the Problem of Sifting Natural from Designed

I think I have now finally understood
what “irreducibly complex” really means:
a statement, fact or event so simple
it cannot be simplified any further,
but still too complex to be grasped by a creationist.
— biologist Björn Brembs
(h/t Ignorant Amos)

Image from Senjuti Kundu (copyright free)
.

BSR 18: Being a Good Person Is All that Really Matters

Last updated on: June 6, 2020 at 2:48 pm By Bob Seidensticker

Summary of reply: Objective morality is make-believe, the dictionary already defines “good” (no need for God, thank you), and God sets no moral standard that anyone should be striving to follow.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: Being a good person is all that really matters

Christian response #1: Don’t judge “good” by your own standard. Your good will differ from your neighbor’s. The objective standard of good comes from God.

BSR: We’ve all seen or heard countless individual moral dilemmas where we might argue with friends about which course of action was best. We also see moral issues within society like abortion or same-sex marriage that drag on contentiously for years. Where is this objective standard from God that will neatly direct us to the one correct moral answer?

The standard that people use is their own. A person’s moral standard begins with the moral programming they got from being born a human, and that is then shaped by their personality, upbringing, and society.

We already have a source to find out what “good” means—it’s the dictionary. Look up the word and there’s no mention of God. The standards we use are our own, grounded by ourselves. An objective, accessible moral standard would be nice, but there is no evidence of such a thing.

And even if we want to imagine objective morality, why imagine that the Christian god is behind it? Maybe it’s Allah or Zeus or the Aztec god of wind and learning, Quetzalcoatl. As Christopher Hitchens observed, this is slipping God through customs without declaring him.

Morals have a natural explanation. “But where did objective moral values come from but from God?” fails if there are no objective moral values to explain. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: No one’s thoughts and actions are entirely pure. If being a good person is all that really matters, then we all fail because we aren’t consistently good.

BSR: When did “good” become “perfect”? We know we’re not perfect. Even more so, we know that others aren’t perfect. The idea “he’s a good person” is never confused with “he’s morally perfect.” Here on earth, we try to live a life that’s at least more good than bad, more helpful than hurtful. We try to leave the earth better for our having lived. We see this codified into the legal system with the idea of character witnesses who argue that, though the defendant has made mistakes, there is a good side that mitigates the bad side.

Jesus’s parable of the sheep and the goats makes clear that works (not faith) get you into heaven and that perfection isn’t required: “The Son of Man will come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done.”

You’ve ceded the right to have your moral judgments taken seriously if you accept the idea of infinite punishment for finite crimes in hell. Here again we see a difference between Christians’ one-size-fits-all imagination of the afterlife and proportional punishment here on earth. If a single horrible punishment for all crimes makes no sense in our legal system, why would it make sense coming from the omniscient and all-wise Judge of All?

Jesus agreed that perfection wasn’t needed to get into heaven (Matt. 25:31–46). And speaking of imperfection, the one-size-fits-all hell is an example. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: “Good” isn’t good enough when God is perfect.

BSR: Read the Old Testament, and you’ll see that God sets a terrible moral standard. He breaks pretty much every commandment that it’s possible for him to break. It’s not clear what moral rules he follows, if any.

Don’t tell me that God’s ways are higher than our ways or that God is good by definition or that God’s various rampages are in “difficult passages” that must be reinterpreted. The word “good” has a definition, and God doesn’t meet it. If you’re going to say that God is “good” when he does good things, you’re obliged to label him “bad” when he does things for which, if you did them, you’d be called bad.

Even if we did allow that God were morally perfect (remember that this is the same God who supports slavery, commands genocide, and kills everything in a flood), why does his moral perfection mean that we must be perfect? In this view, God creates us, so he’s well aware of how flawed we are. We’re imperfect by design—his design. No father would insist on a standard of behavior from his children that he knew they couldn’t meet.

God sets a terrible moral standard—just read the Old Testament. Supporting slavery, demanding genocide, drowning the world—he breaks just about every moral rule it’s possible to break. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue with BSR 19: Jesus Was Just a Man

For further reading:

He’s your god; they’re your rules—
you burn in hell.
— seen on the internet