But another
and uncomfortable truth is that the Republican Party is itself worse on the
issue than it was a little over two years ago.
The reason is Donald Trump.
Indeed, as Peter Laffin has
argued, “Trump-Vance is the most anti-life Republican administration in
history.” During the 2024 campaign, Trump
rigged
the GOP party platform process so as to exclude pro-lifers and ram through
a removal of the pro-life plank. He actively
opposed Republican efforts at the state level to restrict abortion. He has actively supported IVF, which
kills more embryos than abortion does.
He has urged
Republicans to be more “flexible” on the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use
of federal funds for abortion. Trump and
Vance promised during the 2024 campaign to preserve access to abortion pills,
and the administration has kept that promise.
Yet abortion pills are
the means for the majority of abortions in the United States today. As Laffin notes:
Trump’s DOJ-enforced and FDA-approved mail-order abortion
regime effectively nullifies the overturning of Roe v. Wade. That’s because,
in practice, it all but guarantees the right to an abortion no matter what
state you live in. Under the current
rules, abortion providers in blue states freely ship their product into red
states. This availability of
mifepristone via “telehealth” providers largely accounts for the climbing total
of abortions nationally since the fall of Roe.
It is true
that opposition to late-term abortion remains in the GOP platform and is still
part of standard GOP rhetoric. But the
significance of this fact should not be overstated. Early-term abortions are no less murderous
than late-term abortions. They are
simply less grisly. And pro-lifers are
in other contexts sensitive to the fact that the grisliness of a practice is
not what is fundamentally at issue when determining whether it counts as murder. For example, they vigorously condemn
euthanasia and assisted suicide as murder, even when they are carried out
painlessly. Hence, if pro-lifers express
outrage when Democrats support late-term abortion, then they should also
express outrage when Republicans like Trump support abortion pills and the
like.
As it
happens, though, too many pro-lifers who are rightly outraged by what Governor
Healey has done have over the last two years either kept silent about Trump’s
betrayals or offered only muted criticism.
This shows how far the tail of partisanship has come to wag the dog of
principle. Pro-lifers have tended to
support the GOP because they believe that that is the party more likely to promote
their goals. But that will be true only
to the extent that pro-lifers make it clear that the GOP will pay a political
price for betraying them. If instead
they remain silent in the face of betrayals, they will ensure that the
Republican Party will move even further away from pursuing any serious pro-life
policies. It is not they who will be
using the GOP for their ends, but the GOP that will be using them for its
ends.
Some
pro-lifers nevertheless rationalize relatively uncritical support for Trump and
the GOP on the grounds that they are the lesser of two evils. In Mere
Christianity, C. S. Lewis noted the dangers of this kind of thinking:
I feel a strong desire to tell you – and I expect you feel a
strong desire to tell me – which of these two errors is the worse. That is the devil getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs
– pairs of opposites. And he always
encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one
error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go
straight through between both errors. We
have no other concern than that with either of them. (p. 145)
When we stay silent about a purportedly lesser evil, we end up aiding and abetting that evil rather than merely avoiding the greater evil. The thing to do is to oppose all evils, whether great, small, or in between. That requires putting all political parties and politicians at arm’s length, and vigorously criticizing any and all of them when they promote policies at odds with respect for the lives of the unborn.
So let's say there are no national or state laws forbidding murder. Only local laws of which there's a great variety. A priori, is the an objectively unjust situation? Feser seems to say "yes, the situation is unjust, and the 'state' needs to intervene". But to whence does all this lead? Let's say the "state" allows murder. What is local law to say? Feser is incoherent on this point. Not in a deep philosophical sense, but just he says one thing, means another, and then changes what he says.
ReplyDeleteNo idea what you're talking about.
DeleteProfessor I'm quite confident he doesn't know either
DeleteEvery man has his limitations
DeleteSo let's say there are no national or state laws forbidding murder. Only local laws of which there's a great variety. A priori, is the an objectively unjust situation?
DeleteIn practice, nearly all law regarding violence and harm of individuals are handled at the state level. You are asking us to envision a complete re-writing of criminal law to instead have it done at the local level. Where? Cities? But a city is only a portion of the county of which it is a part. What about the rest of the county? County law? Counties are organs and operatives of the state, designated with its powers by state rules.
Or would you prefer to have each neighborhood make its own criminal law?
Yes, in theory this could be tried, and could be considered as a way of carrying out the necessary rule of law for a society. But it would be so ridiculous a patchwork as to be an unworkable mess, i.e. not prudent. Imagine the result of each town, city, and county having its own rules for car pollution limits: in effect you could not drive anywhere without meeting the standard for the MOST stringent rule. And so on. A "society" that is large must have some similarity of law that applies across the society to function. Because of our history, we function that way with most criminal law being at the state level.
As the popes have made clear (but was articulated also by secular statesmen as well), a society needs to not only have laws that defend people from specific harm, they also need laws that spell out basic human rights. The right to life is one of those. Notionally a society that had no positive law forbidding murder could be considered, but it would be a defective one for failing to spell out that basic human right. In addition, it would tend toward grave injustices in fact through this negligence. So it would be a damaged community by that very condition.
With "Let's say the "state" allows murder. What is local law to say?", you seem to be imagining that local law is beholden to the state, rather than to principles of justice, natural law, or divine command.
DeleteSo long as we reject that premise, the answer seems obvious: local laws should protect against gross injustices that aren't already handled by the state.
I have no idea how this would contradict anything in Feser's original post—meaning that I have no idea how he's been incoherent.
Women celebrating the right to murder their own children.
ReplyDeleteI cannot even bring myself to pray for these kinds of people. They're disgusting. Their smile and performative gestures sicken me. Even eternal fire is too kind a fate for scum like this.
You could always pray they change their minds.
DeleteMost of these women will likely make it to heaven, if there is one, while you performative Christian hypocrites will face the wrath you all so desperately desire for others.
DeleteAh, so Anonymous #2 believes, at least, that some people face damnation. I believe this is what they call "a handsome" admission.
DeleteDays latter, i'am sure you can see things diferently. Even the Psalms have the registration of rage in they(like that famous one about the rocks), so this comment is understandable, but one must pray for all. It is suprisingly good, tends to help me see the value in these than i disagree with.
DeletePersonally, i sometimes wonder if i should worry, for it is very hard to media to affect me(entre os americanos ou mesmo o que acontece aqui no nosso país, embora os desastres frequentes entristeçam) but who knows.
No matter what we few, that we do our duty for all, my friend, that we do our duty for all.
Hey Talmid,
DeleteI am very grateful for your exhortation, and I know you are right in what you are saying. However, I must admit that these ideologies have pushed me to my limit. The intellectual dishonesty of certain arguments and the constant twisting of meaning — I simply can't tolerate this nonsense anymore. God gave us anger to move us to action against injustice. If we do nothing but pray for people who are completely entrenched in 'the cause,' we are wasting our time. They are not going to change. So, dimitte mortuos sepelire mortuos suos.
@Vini Tadeo
DeleteYep, you also need to act. But aways remember: take away grace and you would be way worse than the worse of these people.
Our Lord loves they, we should to, even while opposing their madness, for He can change what seems immobile to us.
A heroi job and who looks stupid to these outside the faith, but it is our job.
(A estrutura do latim ai parece a da frase em português, só o finalzinho muda, interessante)
@Talmid
DeleteYou weren’t just speaking — you were writing poetry when you said,
“Take away grace, and you would be way worse than the worst of these people.”
I can’t argue with that in any possible way. Sometimes the words that rise straight from the heart, pure and sincere, carry a power nothing else can match. They reach deeper than any carefully crafted argument ever could.
Truly, man… thank you for this. From the bottom of my heart.
I really need to value God more than the hatred I carry toward those who have wronged Him and His commandments.
May God bless you for this, Talmid.
I am aware of Trump's breaking of his promises on the Epstein files, and the Iran war, but only now have I been made aware of his breaking of his promises on the pro-life issue.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I'm no longer a Trump supporter due to the war and Epstein files issues.
Congratulations on finally getting some clue as to how bad the dude is.
DeleteVery well Written , Prof. I completely agree. Mm
ReplyDeleteNot even Aristophanes could have predicted it that far, and he was quite the longshot when it came to decadence in politics...
ReplyDelete"Early-term abortions are no less murderous than late-term abortions"
ReplyDeleteProve that "ensouled" moral personhood begins at conception. Prove it without recourse to "Da Big Pope Man With Da Fancy Hat Says So", or else concede that your position is purely a religious one with no rational basis.
Additionally, a question: if abortion is murder from conception, why did the Church disagree with that idea for nearly 14 centuries? Up until 1869's Apostolicae Sedis, that was not the position of the Catholic Church! For the vast majority of Christian history, the Church followed Augustine of Hippo's opinion that life truly began at "the Quickening", or when the mother can feel the baby move for the first time. Prior to that, abortion was considered contraception, but not killing. So, for 1400 years or so, hundreds of thousands of faithful Catholics murdered their babies and believed in good conscience that they weren't committing anything anywhere near as serious as murder. I guess God just didn't think that was an important thing to know?
Derrr I’m Catholic, I guess I’d have to say it’s because peepol thot babies formed diffwently in da womb in da forteenf century. And dumb old me seems to think you acknowledge that point in your very description of “quickening”. But what do I know… except that thing I just said… I know that.
Delete"Ensoulment" is not some kooky metaphysical concept that can resolved by papal fiat, despite the way the Catholic Church has pointlessly muddled the question. The soul is the life, form, and rational principle of the body. This is the standard Aristotelean view, which Catholics have modified to make room for their doctrine of the special divine creation of the human soul, which is basically just a clumsy attempt to distinguish human beings from animals. Set that aside, and there's no difficulty. The idea that ensoulment begins at quickening was simply bad science, no different than the belief in the humours or phlogiston. The Church also believed that women were inferior and that slavery was allowed for about 1800 years. Most Christians have no trouble putting the blame for that on the institutional church rather than God.
DeleteAnon,
DeleteOK, so we didn't know. Sure - and apparently your all-knowing, all-loving God didn't see this as an issue at all? He's super-duper against killing babies in all its forms, but He also thought there was no need to inform you that the actions you thought were innocent actually involved killing babies? Do you see the contradiction here?
Thur,
DeleteI see. I was under the misapprehension that you were Catholic. But even so, you still end up having to deal with the fact that God apparently allowed Christians to ignorantly engage in infanticide by permitting an incorrect understanding of biology to win out for some 14 centuries. And while I'm glad that you acknowledge that the Church was wrong to teach women's subjugation and the moral defensibility of slavery, you still have to face the question of why God would permit such a disastrous state of affairs, and for it to be done by people trying to follow His own name? Is this not gross, criminal neglect? If my children killed someone because I hadn't bothered to tell them that playing with knives can kill people, I would be held responsible and considered a detestably wicked human being. Why does God get a pass, especially when He's supposed to be infinitely *better* than us?
EXE,
Delete"But even so, you still end up having to deal with the fact that God apparently allowed Christians to ignorantly engage in infanticide by permitting an incorrect understanding of biology to win out for some 14 centuries."
You seem to be under the impression that Christians were once permitted to voluntarily terminate a pregnancy. But this is mistaken. Even on the outdated theory of ensoulment occurring long after contraception, it was still viewed as wrong, for the same reasons why contraception is viewed as wrong. It's deliberately frustrating the activity of the reproductive faculty. So no, God wasn't "allowing Christians to ignorantly engage in infanticide."
the fact that God apparently allowed Christians to ignorantly engage in infanticide by permitting an incorrect understanding of biology to win out for some 14 centuries.
DeleteExcept that your ignorance shows of historical fact: the Church regarded abortion as immoral even during the period most theologians thought that ensoulment happened at quickening. It was forbidden in the Didache, circa 150 AD.
No, I am not ignorant of the Didache's existence, nor am I ignorant of the fact that the Church still condemned pre-Quickening abortions as contraceptive. But none of that actually changes my point. It was that you did not view the procedure as *murder* at the time. Even in your own schema, contraception is less serious than murder. My point is that God was apparently fine with letting people who engaged in infanticide believe that they were only engaging in contraception instead. Again, apparently he thought it was fine to leave you in the dark on that front.
DeleteAnd furthermore, trying to rely on the Didache for your position is problematic. The book's a manual used in some regions of early Christianity as a guide to orthopraxy. Well and good, but there's a couple of issues: firstly, it still distinguishes abortion from infanticide, saying that "you shall not murder a child in destruction (en phthora) *nor* shall you kill infants." Sure, it might have thought abortion was bad, but it still seems to have regarded it as not-infanticide. Secondly, it's a bit hypocritical to cherry-pick from the Didache's instructions, accepting its position on abortion while rejecting its positions on other topics. For instance, it also commands non-retaliation in the face of assault (echoing the sermon on the mount), requires you to give to anyone who asks without asking for anything back, and specifies fasting twice a week. Do you do all these? If not, why do you think you can strip one command out from the others and hold it up as authoritative?
Any time I see a demand for proof, I strongly suspect I'm not dealing with a serious argument.
DeletePersonally, I'm more inclined to want proof that something isn't murder before doing it. People that say "Prove to me that firing this gun won't kill an innocent person; only then will I stop pulling the trigger." strike me as, to put it gently, irresponsible.
"Any time I see a demand for proof, I strongly suspect I'm not dealing with a serious argument."
DeleteAnd this is how we know you're dogsh&t stupid. Asking for proof of an assertion is "unserious"? What, then, do serious thinkers do? Simply accept the traditions that have come down to them uncritically? No wonder science wilted under you people.
On the demand for proof, is it not fair to suggest that your own moral indignation warrants some kind of proof for the justification of your own moral precepts? I suppose it might come across as a bit flippant, but one could also say "prove that rationality is possible on atheism, then I'll accept your argument" or similar
DeletePresumably this gestures towards the frustration displayed (whether justified or not)
Alright, that was a bit excessive as an insult. Still, though, I maintain that demanding proof for claims is the basis of critical thought, and so it is extremely foolish to adopt a *suspicion* towards asking for proof. That's fundamentally a suspicion towards the possibility of having good reasons for believing in anything.
DeleteEXE,
DeleteAbortion isn't "killing babies" because a fetus isn't an actual baby, but just a potential one?
Abortion isn't "murder" because a fetus isn't an actual 'person,' but just a potential one?
If your answer is
1) True: you'll be supporting the act/ potency division and then acknowledging that A-T is right.
2) False: you'll be in a lot of trouble.
Thanks, love!
@EXE-cute:
Delete"Abortion isn't "murder" because a fetus isn't an actual 'person,' but just a potential one?"
This is not correct, or even the best way to frame the issue. A fetus is an actual person; but the issue is rather what "moral personhood" (to use EXE's framing) is and how it "attaches" to a human being. If a desiderata is that personhood is essential to human beings, then there is pretty much only one possible answer. If you want to deny this, as the other side does, then you have to say that either "moral personhood" is not a real thing, or that it is an accident, and therefore is gained and can be lost. From this, all the philosophical vices of the position follow, e. g. the cut-off point being arbitrary, and necessarily so. If moral personhood is not a real thing or can be gained or lost, and if you value the freedom of women to do whatever they want with their bodies, then the position of Governor Healey is unavoidable and simply is logic working itself out in real time. There is no intrinsic reason why personhood is not denied on some other grounds other than age; justice and morality are reduced to a non-aggression pact designed to prevent us from killing each other. It is, to borrow from Chesterton, a pact designed to protect the tiny oligarchy of those happening to be walking around.
And this is not something that can be fixed in a non-question begging, non-ad hoc way. You need some form of essentialism and some form of teleology to be able to argue from Nature to morality, but Nature has been evacuated of all these so there is nothing you can conceivably appeal to. And if the other side (speaking generically), were to reinstate them, the Fifth Way would then checkmate them.
Of course, the case against the pro-life position will also follow predictable lines; the arguments do not work because, among other reasons, the pro-abortion side will have those problems as well, the difference being merely one of degree not kind. This is all well-trodden ground, so I will not rehearse the arguments here.
Wow, an imitator! Now I know I've really made the big leagues!
Deletegrodrigues,
DeleteMy point was that EXE-types are always deriding Aristotle and saying that 'he got it all wrong.' (Because the 'ancients' always got everything wrong, which is their favorite fallacy. Except the ancient materialists, which of course they were geniuses and got things right.) And then, at the same time, while trying to deride Aristotle, they 'checkmate' their opponents by using the act/ potency division.
A foetus is not actually a baby, but a potential one. That's why they claim 'victory' when they are accused of supporting baby-killing. And, at a certain moment in time, they *know* that the foetus becomes an actual baby. So while trying to make their point, they implicitly recognize that reality is grounded on hylomorphism. And if hylomorphism is real, then essences are real and intrinsic, not a 'social construct.' That would lead to Aquinas position: personhood can not be separated from humanity, because both terms are in the definition, which interlocks them inextricably. A human Zygote-Embryo-Foetus IS a person from the moment of conception, it doesn't *become* a person.
Imagine trying to discredit Descartes while using his 'I think, therefore I am.' What an exquisite absurdity would that be. That's the type of absurdity these people engage in.
I've also noticed that EXE-types tend to become quite elusive when this is pointed at them. Almost uncomfortable, which is a position that they should always be forced into.
"Any time I see a demand for proof, I strongly suspect I'm not dealing with a serious argument."
Delete"And this is how we know you're dogsh&t stupid. Asking for proof of an assertion is "unserious"?"
Yes. If proof only exists in mathematics and alcohol, demanding proof (as opposed to sufficient evidence or a sound argument) is an unserious response.
Wow, cutie, it's a good thing you're beautiful, because you sure ain't smart. You're just plain wrong about us "using the act/potency distinction". Aristotelians don't have a monopoly on the word "potential". Just because someone says that a fetus is a "potential human" doesn't imply that they're buying into the entire Aristotelian framework for explaining change and being. That's not even a fallacy, it's just a straight-up failure to understand what people are talking about. That's like saying that because you describe certain actions as happening "mechanically", you are therefore committing yourself to materialistic mechanism.
DeleteEXE,
DeleteWow, an imitator! Now I know I've really made the big leagues!
Are you going to answer the questions I asked? You don't want people who are reading the thread to start thinking that you're a coward, do you?
Abortion isn't "killing babies" because a fetus isn't an actual baby, but just a potential one?
Abortion isn't "murder" because a fetus isn't an actual "person," but just a potential one?
Why use the act/ potency division if you think that Thomists "are in the wrong"? That's very delulu!
Oh, and while we're talking about abortion, how about this little ditty:
ReplyDeleteExodus 21:22-25 (New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition)
22 “When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman’s husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine. 23 If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
Notice that Exodus regards the causing of death to an unborn child as merely property damage requiring a fine, NOT as the murder of a full legal and moral person, which would activate Talionic Justice and require life for life. But harm to the woman, as noted by verses 23-25, WOULD activate Talionic Justice and requires like punishment.
John
DeleteThere's a lot of dispute on the word "miscarriage." I'm pretty sure the Hebrew just refers to premature birth, and the later stipulation (eye for eye, life for life) could then be seen as applying to the baby as well as the mother.
DeleteFirst.. It is absolutely irrelevant what Exodus says Unless You assume that one must get ones's morality from a literal reading of the Old Testament. Even many who think the Bible inspired would reject this. I certainly would.. and A long discussion could be had in what way the Bible helps define moral principles and it would take us far afield but for sure not in this simplistic absurd way of cherry picking ancient texts and saying there see "gotcha".. If you do that you will be rather embarrassed by those more lurid texts that God suggests the Isreli's massacre everyone who falls under the ban.. and so forth. You need to interpret Biblical morality in the context of the entire text's understanding of God over time and in particular the New Testament. It is obvious that the Early Christians condemned Abortion as murder as noted in the first century Didache.
DeleteBut leaving all this aside since you appear to be the individual who wants to do the killing it is incumbent on you to create a morally defensible line that says yes you can not kill and dismember an infant ( presumably you agree.. ) but you can kill and dismember an unborn child at this stage of development but not 24 hours after this stage. If you look at an embryology text book it is very difficult, I would say impossible to find a morally significant difference between an unborn child at say 22 weeks and one at say 16 weeks or one at 16 weeks and one at 6 weeks.. I did not say a difference.. because of course there are differences.. I said a morally significant one that can be justified based on your arbitrary assertions.. Regardless even if one selected some arbitrary post conception time point at which you find the killing of unborn children objectionable you would find Trump wanting.. Trump attacked the pro life laws protecting Unborn children with a heart beat.. as "too extreme". In fact I can not think of a single pro life law Trump has promoted or proposed or defended. Indeed any Republican President would have appointed the Judges that overturned Roe. Bush appointed Justice Alito after all who authored Dobbs. If you are prolife this is adequate evidence that tells you Trump is not.. It is true he is not going after Pro Life groups in the same way a Democrat or Biden would so that might mean you can make the case that in a vote you can pick the one who does the less harm but the full throat-ed support that the Republicans in general, some conservatives and the Pro Life community have given him has been a mistake as he has burned much of all three to the grown. This is the central point of Professors Feser's piece and for which I think he provides ample evidence.
"There's a lot of dispute on the word "miscarriage." I'm pretty sure the Hebrew just refers to premature birth, and the later stipulation (eye for eye, life for life) could then be seen as applying to the baby as well as the mother."
DeleteWell then, you'd be at odds with the consensus of professional Biblical scholars, who agree that this is a very weak and unlikely reading of the text, and that miscarriage makes far more sense. But I won't stop there; I'll show you the reasons they give for why this is the case.
1. The Hebrew verb used here is "yatsa (יָצָא)", literally "go out, bring forth". This verb is used to refer to normal births, but also to stillbirths, miscarriages, and so on (you can find examples of it being used in all three ways within the pages of the Bible). The word itself is not determinative; you need to look at the context in which it's used in order to figure out which meaning is in play. If, say, the sentence is "she went into labor, her child "came out", and she was happy", it's obviously talking about a normal birth. If instead it's something like "she wanted to be a mother, but the child "came out" and she wept", it's obviously referring to a miscarriage. Since the context for Exodus 21 is very obviously not a normal birth (it's about a premature birth being induced via violent injury to the woman), your mind would naturally go towards thinking about miscarriage - because that's obviously something you would fear happening in such a situation, in fact it's probably the very first thought that would come to your mind if you heard about a pregnant woman being assaulted. Given that fact, we should conclude that it's being used in the "miscarriage" sense, as that's far more natural. If the authors wanted to specify a scenario where a premature birth is induced but the child is otherwise healthy and unharmed, they could have said so, but they would surely have used much more explicit language to make this clear. You don't write your laws in such a way that your intended meaning is actually the one that requires a far *less* natural and far *more* awkward reading of the text.
2. The basic fact that it would not make any sense (at least within the legal mindset of the Hebrew Bible) to impose a fine for an action that did *not* result in any material loss. To induce a premature birth that does not result in further harm to the infant is not a fineable offense according to the logic of the legislation of the Hebrew Bible - that would be entirely unique, an idea found nowhere else.
3. This is actually the strongest reason - namely, that the Covenant Code is not original. It cribs heavily from the Code of Hammurabi, which predated it by centuries (which is true even if you take a very conservative dating of the Hebrew Bible). It takes many of these laws, sometimes even in the same ordering that they're listed in Hammurabi's Code. Here's the laws that are being sourced in this passage:
Law 209. If a man strike a man's daughter and bring about a miscarriage, he shall pay ten shekels of silver for her miscarriage.
Law 210. If that woman die, they shall put his daughter to death.
Unlike in the Hebrew, the Akkadian is NOT ambiguous. It absolutely, definitely does refer to miscarriage, and not premature birth. There are also other laws in the region around the same time period, it was a standardised piece of legislation that was passed all around Ancient Southwest Asia. The Neo-Assyrian Laws, the Hittite Laws, etc all cover the same situation, and in each and every case those laws are always talking about two outcomes: miscarriage with no serious harm to the woman, and serious harm to the woman. In not even a single law code is it referring to some third outcome where a baby is born prematurely and otherwise unharmed, that is never even thought of. If you want to argue that Exodus is changing those laws, that's possible, but is something that needs to be seriously supported by argumentation - we need a good reason why we should assume that something totally different is meant.
(Addendum because the comment was too long):
Delete4. And finally, as a cherry on top, the first person to ever seriously suggest that this passage be interpreted as supporting fetal personhood (to my knowledge) was John Calvin, whose argument for doing so amounted to "well, obviously it must mean that, because...well, *I* believe that abortion is murder, so obviously the Bible must also think so, and if the Bible says otherwise, clearly my interpretation must win out." In other words, he simply asserts his own beliefs about the text onto it, rather than actually letting it speak for itself.
mdepie,
DeleteBefore we get into this, I'd just like to start by saying that you seem like a nice person. I often adopt a combative, mean, even snide personality around these parts because I have to deal with a lot of dogmatic blockheads dedicated to ignoring my points and just beating their chests at me. I won't do that with you - I'll try to be as straightforward with you as I can be. Now, the actual substance of your comment:
Well, I'm glad that you don't get your morality from the Old Testament, but my question is how you, as a Christian (I assume), can validly do such a thing. Is not the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament the very word of God? Are these not the Laws given by God to His people, to govern their behavior and make them holy and moral? The Laws which Jesus explicitly stated that He was not changing, and that it would be easier for the Earth and Heaven to be destroyed than for them to be altered even slightly? How does that make sense?
I agree that my use of various quotes from assorted books would be cherry-picking, IF the books were simply an ordinary collection of texts. Books can have different authors, viewpoints, moralities, they can contradict each other and that's usually fine. The problem comes only for people who believe that these Books represent a unified view or position. IF the Bible is supposed to be One Big Story, the expression of God's Message to Humanity, then those conflicting ideas suddenly become a problem. As a fictional example, if Book A says that it's never OK to enslave people, ever, and Book B says that enslaving people is totally fine, they contradict each other, but that's not a problem - they're just different stories. But if you tell me that *both books are 100% true*, NOW we have a problem, because that doesn't make sense. This is why contradictions in the Bible matter - because their existence means that the Bible cannot be what Christianity says it is, the infallible and inspired Word of God. Technically, you could solve this problem by simply cutting the offending books out of the Bible and declaring that only some of them are *really* inspired, but very few people are willing to do that these days, and I doubt that idea appeals to you either.
Unfortunately, I don't think talking about context actually solves any problems here. For context to matter, you need to show how putting the words back into their original context changes anything. Exodus 21 is part of the Covenant Code - a series of laws which the narrative says were given to Moses for Israel. That's the context - that they're normative laws given by God which should be followed, end of story. There's no indication that they're intended to be temporary or imperfect or anything other than what they seem to be at first glance.
"You need to interpret Biblical morality in the context of the entire text's understanding of God over time and in particular the New Testament"
Actually, this is one thing I want to push back on, and heavily. This is the Presupposition of Univocality, though you might not have ever heard that precise term. Basically, this is the idea that I described above - that the Bible is one great big unified story that must be interpreted "as a whole" rather than book by book. But the big problem is that this is a completely uncritical way to look at Scripture. There is literally no reason to think this is true unless you already come to the table believing that, usually because you were told that it was true while young and have just gotten used to the idea. It cannot be rationally defended - it's a dogma. Certainly nothing in the Bible would lead you to that conclusion on its own. To engage with the Bible honestly is to engage with it on its own terms - to allow the books to speak for themselves instead of telling them what they are and aren't allowed to say or mean. An honest person should try to follow the truth wherever it leads, even if that leads to uncomfortable places.
(Comment will be split in 2 to fit under the character limit)
(mdepie 2/2)
Delete"It is obvious that the Early Christians condemned Abortion as murder as noted in the first century Didache."
Well, the issue you have there is manyfold. Firstly, the Didache isn't and never has been accepted as Scripture, so simply pointing to it and saying that decides it is problematic. It is just an essay that was held in high regard by some Early Christians within their community. Apologists often say misleading things like "this shows what The Early Church thought", as if there were any such thing as a singular "Early Church". The Early Church absolutely did not have their collective sh*t together, and had nothing even resembling a unified structure, even loosely. There were vastly different communities separated by great distances, with different traditions, practices, Gospels, and such. These Gospels often have very different theologies, sometimes contradictory. For example, the Gospel According To The Hebrews (note, I'm not referring to the Book in your Bible called "Hebrews", that's the Epistle to the Hebrews) was a work held in very high regard by many prominent early church fathers, who quoted it extensively as a prooftext for their arguments about the interpretation of Scripture...and in fact it only survives in these quotes. Otherwise, the text is completely lost. What we do know about it is that it included some theological concepts that would sound very weird to a modern Christian. Among others, it has Jesus referring to the Holy Spirit as His "Divine Mother", claims that the Virgin Mary was actually the Archangel Michael, that James, brother of Jesus, was the first to see the Resurrected Christ after having fasted for some time. The Holy Spirit picks Jesus up by a single hair and flies him to Mount Tabor.
Later, when one specific group won the theological war and secured the support of the Roman State, they re-wrote this history to claim that they had always been the One True Real Church and that every other group were Evil Heretics who broke off from them because they were Evil. In reality, these condemned "heretics" were just as old as the "Orthodox" Church and were their equals at first. They just lost the war, and so got painted as the villains of the story.
Finally, you've got the issue that the Church...didn't ultimately follow its recommendation. From Augustine until 1869, the Church went with the Aristotelian position, which said that abortion prior to the time the baby first kicks was only contraception, but not murder. So clearly the Church didn't actually accept it?
Finally...I don't "like" abortion. No reasonable person does. Those who defend abortion do so for good reasons, even if you don't view those as justification. Reasons like not wanting to bring kids into the world that will have miserable lives, or that women are not ready to support, or who would certainly pose a serious risk to the mother's health, or not wanting women to be chained to abusive men. I've heard all the counter-responses to these, so I likely know what you'd say to those reasons. But know at least that it is done out of a genuine desire to produce good outcomes - happy families that actually want to be together and can afford to live good lives, rather than dysfunctional, broken nightmares that generate generations of traumatized, suffering people.
Hey EXE, please leave forever.
DeleteA school full of children being bombed deserves a fierce railing against the evils of American imperialism. Even an abstract child dying with cancer gets a passionate rant against an absent or evil God. Over 800000 children dead in a year in the United States alone only deserves a "Prove that "ensouled" moral personhood begins at conception.". If it cannot be proved to EXE's exacting standards that "moral personhood" begins at conception (when else would it begin?) then they can have their skulls crushed. In this moral world even dogs get put down more humanely. In this moral world, tragedy is tragic only if it can be weaponized for political goals. But remember that EXE is a "reasonable" person. He doesn't "like" abortion. All 800000 of them in year in the United States alone. Unlike "some of us", he is not fine with "mass murder". He wants "happy families". He says so, so what more proof would one want?
DeleteTerilien:
DeleteTough sh*t. I'll leave when I want to, and not before. What's the matter, do my words hurt your feelings so?
grodrigues:
Make sure you don't pop a blood vessel there, Roddy. Nobody (except extreme racists, maybe) would deny that nine-year-old Iranian schoolgirls are full moral people. This is less than obviously true in the case of a day-old zygote. *You* believe, because of your religion, that this is obviously true, but if you want other people to accept that, you're gonna have to show it. Unless you show it, saying "8 million kids are murdered by abortion every year!" is begging the question. Literally everything else in your post is just ad hominem and character assassination, more aimed at stirring up a froth of fanatical zealotry and religious dogmatism than proving anything. I get it, I inspire an overwhelming sense of rage, hatred, and disgust in your heart. I don't care. Make an actual argument or shut your mouth. Oh, who am I kidding? You never have and you never will. You're just here to scream, preach, and beat your chest like a gorilla. Have fun with that.
@EXE Unfortunately there's no way my response to you would pass through Ed's moderation.
DeleteSetting aside the mentioned translation issues, it seems fairly obvious that there are a number of ways to take this passage:
DeleteCausing a miscarriage in a fight could reasonably be seen as something more akin to involuntary manslaughter than first degree murder.
It could reasonably be believed that a lack of awareness at the time of fetal development could be a factor that is not available to us in the present.
The Mosaic law was never seen as a complete or final law, dictating all moral and legal positions for all time (Matthew 19:8 comes to mind).
And several others, I'm sure. In general, the idea that a literal reading of an individual verse should be binding for all Christians seems less a rational argument than an attempt to shut down opposition. Better to attempt to make a case in favor of abortion rights (namely, that the most reasonable definition of "human life" would exclude the unborn) than to insist that a minority reading of one verse is the only valid reading.
"Setting aside the mentioned translation issues"
DeleteWell, first of all, you cannot simply "set them aside". You cannot just ignore crucial information - that's incredibly dishonest. Most scholars agree that it refers to "miscarriage". You have to take that into account when trying to explain the passage. Otherwise you are simply shutting your eyes and pretending not to see the problem.
"Causing a miscarriage in a fight could reasonably be seen as..."
Debilis, nobody cares what YOU think about the actions in question. What we're discussing is what THE BIBLE thinks the character of the action to be. What does *Exodus 21* think causing a miscarriage in a fight deserves? You say "you think it could be compared to manslaughter", but that reading directly contradicts the actual words of the text. There is no way that manslaughter would be punished merely with a fine - as seen by the fact that "other harm" (to the woman) is explicitly stated to require life for life, tooth for tooth, stripe for stripe - even though it is also accidental! Your interpretation requires you to completely ignore the words in front of you, as well as every other time the Hebrew Bible talks about manslaughter!
"The Mosaic law was never seen as a complete or final law"
This is a Christian dogma, not something you can actually read in the text. The Jews certainly don't seem to agree with you. You only believe this because you have been taught to, not because you have any good reason to believe it.
Also, do you believe that the Bible is the inspired word of an omniscient and all-good God, or simply books written down by men without divine inspiration? Because if you believe the former, then you cannot appeal to "lack of awareness of science/fetal development" without concluding that God deliberately chose not to communicate this fact to His chosen people. God, presumably, always knew that a fetus was a person from the first instant of its conception, and yet chose to allow Jews and Christians to labor in ignorance of this vital fact for thousands of years. How is this possible?
You seem to be under the odd impression that the Catholic Church has taught that the conceived zygote is a human person as part of divine revelation, and that Catholics wouldn't have any reason to credit the idea other than because the Church says it's revealed truth. The reality is nearly the opposite.
DeleteFirst, the Church said abortion was immoral ages before any idea of a zygote, i.e. from the 2nd century AD at least. It would not be too much of a stretch to say that she taught it was immoral because of the person who would eventually come to be from the base material in the womb.
It was principally during the late 19th century that the Church started to give formal recognition of newer biology indicating that the early fetus was much more determinately a developing human being simply speaking, rather than a future human being, and did this in response to biological evidence, not revelation. It wasn't until JPII in the late 20th century that there were strong doctrinal assertions about the zygote being a human person: IIRC, even he was fairly cautious about definitive statements for more than 10 years of his papacy, being cagey and slightly reserved from saying flat out "the conceptus IS a human person from the moment of conception".
The allocation of the concept "human PERSON" to the biologically verified fact of a human living being that is a zygote is not, specifically, a biological determination. It would be difficult for that to be a purely biological finding, since scientists have just as much trouble DEFINING the concept "person" as they have defining "consciousness". So, the fact that there is philosophical dispute as to whether the thing that all of science recognizes to be a human being is also a human person is not surprising. The Church has weighted in on the issue, but as far as I know her weight has been levied in support in the same manner as other cases where she teaches truths of reason that are necessarily true from the way they touch on revealed dogmas, not as if it is, itself, a revealed truth. Even when she recognizes a truth of reason as being related to revealed truth, she doesn't claim that these truths are ONLY accepted because revelation requires it: usually, there are good and strong reasons wholly independent of revelation to say those truths are to be held, e.g. the principles of logic, the existence of material things, the preambles of faith, etc. There are good purely philosophical reasons to hold that every distinct being that is a human being is also a human person. Science tells us the zygote is a human being, good philosophy tells us that the human being is a human person, and the Church confirms that this combination of truths sits in happy conformity to revealed truth. She nowhere even remotely suggests, much less teaches, that the only reason to hold the zygote is a person is because of revelation.
You may hold a disputatious notion for the concept "person" that is incompatible with what I or other Catholics hold. But please give up the erroneous notion that it is revelation alone that drives that divergence.
Not agreeing with EXE view, but it seems like this Exodus passage does tend to be interpreted as defended here. At least in judaism abortion usually is viewed as not a big deal precisely by the rabbis interpretation of this verse.
Delete(I argue by what i saw from jews and a few pages of the Babylonian Talmud, notoriously hard to read, so who knows)
Just like it seems like the consensus in Christianity than Mosaic Law does not bind no one. Even to the jews it only aply to they l.
(Does it adress EXE argument, not completely, but it is a weird position to argue than christians need to follow this law, and one likely to make him lose christians reading)
Talmid,
DeleteI'm not necessarily arguing that Christians have to follow Jewish interpretations of Scripture. I'm mostly just interested in pointing out that their Holy Book's position on fetal personhood is remarkably different from their own. Now, maybe Christians are really familiar with glossing over awkward bits in the Bible so that this doesn't bother them, but if I were still Christian, this fact would greatly trouble me. It just *doesn't make sense*. That's simply not how reality ought to be if Christianity were true. I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't have the capacity to rationalize that away. It would never sit right.
Tony
DeleteWell, of course the Church *says* that its teachings are based on reason, wherever they can get away with that. They *would*. I, however, am not very convinced, in any of the cases that you list. But very well, I think we're starting to talk at cross purposes. I'll grant that the Church sources we have seem to be consistently against abortion, though many of them did not think it was *murder*, by virtue of the fact that they did not believe fetal personhood was achieved immediately. That's agreed upon. However, just...take a step back for a second and think. Think of all the confusion and discord caused by the lack of certainty as to when personhood is present and how we can know that is the case. Think of the cracks and wedges this opens for pro-choice Catholics to exploit in their arguments. Now ask yourself why any of it had to be? God could have decisively settled this issue easily - just include "a fetus is ensouled immediately upon conception, and abortion is always to be considered murder, no ifs, ands, or buts" in Scripture. Sure, some people would surely protest or reinterpret it away, but at least we would *have* clarity. Instead, God chose to allow you to labor in confusion and darkness until technology eventually showed that the by-then traditional view of ensoulment was wrong. Does this not trouble you? If not, why not? Why would God neglect to tell you crucial moral information, leaving you to rely on supplementary material and your own dubious reasoning? This kind of gradual, stumbling-in-the-dark approach is exactly what we would expect to see if the Church were merely a human institution, created by human beings and restricted to the knowledge possessed by those humans in their own time. It is not what we would expect to see if the Church's claims were true. Isn't that weird?
@EXE
DeleteI can see why this would bother you, the Bible does have a looot of bits than make we scratch our heads and, seeing both the ancient rabbis and the church fathers, it happens with believers for quite some time.
Perhaps it is because i tend to have some contempt for fundamentalists and do have a habit to read both secular points of view and believers than read the texts more on spiritual, moral etc meanings that i'am more prepared to seeing the Bible as needing the guide of Tradition to work out, so this does not bother me that much.
The catholic view than the Revelation was progressive seems acceptable to me here. That christians sometimes use Mosaic Law when arguing, that bothers me a bit more.
EXE,
DeleteI set aside the translation issues not to avoid your comments, but to not press them against you. If you want to maintain that the term definitely refers to a miscarriage, you are free to make that case. All I claimed is that I'd not be arguing against you on this point. I'm not sure why you think me choosing not to argue with you here amounts to me "closing my eyes".
"Debilis, nobody cares what YOU think about the actions in question. What we're discussing is what THE BIBLE thinks the character of the action to be."
Yes, and it is entirely reasonable that "THE BIBLE" (as you put it) is discussing something much more in line with involuntary manslaughter than first degree murder. This isn't about what I think; it is about what is a more reasonable reading of the text.
But you do say that "that reading directly contradicts the actual words of the text". I'm not sure how so. I do understand that you (rightly) call attention to the fact that "other harm (to the woman) is explicitly stated to require life for life", but I don't see that we've met the burden of proof to show that there is no other way to read this.
There are clearly other reasons why there may be different punishments for the listed actions. The intent and degree of violence are different here, as is the uncertainty of a causal relationship (the actual cause of the miscarriage is harder to determine in this situation). Are you sure that you've actually established that there is no other reason for the difference in punishment?
"The Mosaic law was never seen as a complete or final law"
"This is a Christian dogma, not something you can actually read in the text."
It's certainly not something one could read in the exact passage you quote, but I'm not sure why we are limiting ourselves to considering only this passage in isolation.
Frankly, I'm not sure why "this is a Christian dogma" (even if it could be established that it is completely divorced from anything in all of Christian scripture) is a relevant point in the first place. The entire argument seems to be that the Christian religion somehow "really" supports abortion. Unless you are claiming to be the final authority on how scripture relates to church teachings and interpretations, it seems beside the point to argue over what is scriptural versus "Christian dogma".
"The Jews certainly don't seem to agree with you."
This would be relevant, were I debating a Jew.
"You only believe this because you have been taught to, not because you have any good reason to believe it."
This seems both presumptive about me and an ad hominem fallacy. My personal psychology is irrelevant here.
It also may be an attempt at shifting the burden of proof. You are attempting to make the case that all Christians must necessarily read this passage as you read it. Others don't actually need "a good reason to believe it"; you need to offer a good reason to believe what you are claiming.
(continued below…)
(continuing from above…) EXE,
Delete"Also, do you believe that the Bible is the inspired word of an omniscient and all-good God, or simply books written down by men without divine inspiration?"
I don't see how that is relevant.
You are attempting to make the case that Christians are rationally bound to believe that abortion is permissible. So long as there is a reasonable interpretation of scripture (including the idea that later interpretations/dogmas can weigh in on earlier writings), then that case has failed.
As you point out above, what I personally believe about scripture is neither here nor there.
"Because if you believe the former, then you cannot appeal to "lack of awareness of science/fetal development" without concluding that God deliberately chose not to communicate this fact to His chosen people."
Just to put a fine point on it, that is not true. There are multiple views of inspiration. Some of them allow for this.
And, again, my personal view is not relevant. You are attempting to make the case that all Christians are bound by your interpretation. Thus, you need to establish that interpretation. What I happen to think is not relevant.
"God, presumably, always knew that a fetus was a person from the first instant of its conception, and yet chose to allow Jews and Christians to labor in ignorance of this vital fact for thousands of years. How is this possible?"
Presumably, because there were more pressing things to communicate in that particular context.
You seem to be suggesting that a communication about the ontological status of the fetus would have, in that particular context, been more helpful than what was actually communicated. How do you know this? How do you know that the overall effects throughout time would have been superior, had that been how the text read?
Most importantly, I don't see any real attempt here to make the actual case. Rather than attempt to demand the right to dictate to Christians how scripture ought to be interpreted, we need to see the definition of human life which excludes the unborn.
This fixation on one piece of the mosaic law strikes me more as an attempt to avoid making that case than as a genuine conviction that there is only one possible way to read the text, much less a conviction that one ought to accept the text as authoritative.
Debilis,
DeleteFirst, I apologize for going off over the translation issue. I realize now that I misinterpreted what you meant by that. It turns out it wasn't actually a big deal.
However, you've misrepresented my position. I'm not trying to make some case that "Christianity actually supports abortion". I've stated my point very clearly - that the Bible's understanding of fetal personhood is very different from that of Modern Conservative Christians, in a way that is incompatible with your teachings regarding abortion. That is all I've been arguing, I leave wrestling with that fact to you. I also have a very big problem with the entire approach towards scholarship that you seem to be using here. You seem to think that so long as it isn't *completely impossible* to interpret a Bible passage in another way, then that solves the problem. But that is not rational. You can't just say "well, other interpretations are possible". You have to show that your reading is the most ***plausible*** one. All beliefs should be apportioned to the evidence we have for them. You can't just pretend like an obvious and natural reading of a passage is somehow equal to a highly tortured reading that requires assuming that multiple words should be interpreted according to rare alternative meanings, and that the author was aware of concepts that wouldn't be invented until centuries after their death, for instance. More assumptions, and more unlikely assumptions = less plausible. You are only "rationally bound" to believe my interpretation to the extent that I can show that it's the most plausible one, this isn't some kind of cosmic mystery.
I criticize interpretations of the passage that are implausible or not supported by evidence, especially if they are reliant on ideas that the reader brings to the text from outside and imposes upon it, or on elaborate "well what if we assume that this thing we have no evidence for in the text happened..." hypotheticals. Because that's called "making sh*t up". You can force any text to "prove" anything you like if you're willing to do that. It's intellectually dishonest. In the case of this passage, it is not plausible to interpret it as referring to manslaughter of the fetus - because manslaughter requires the death penalty, and the text explicitly DOES NOT impose the death penalty if such a thing happens, whereas it *does* impose the death penalty if the mother dies. I repeat, the text says, summarized "if two guys are fighting and hit a pregnant woman, but it only causes a miscarriage, the guy gets fined. If he causes serious harm to the woman herself, apply eye for an eye." Far and away the most plausible understanding of this distinction is that the text regards the woman as a full legal and moral person while NOT regarding the fetus as such. All you're doing is attempting to claim that *maybe* there's secretly some other reason for why eye for an eye is not applied to the fetus. That's just grasping at straws, because there is *absolutely nothing in the text that says so*. Unless and until you can actually *find* evidence in the text for this position, you are firmly in the "just making sh*t up" camp.
EXE,
DeleteSpeaking of interpretation...
[The Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade (1973) that a fetus is a “potential life(1)”...]
Roe v Wade ruling supports the division of being into act/ potency.
Because at a certain point, said "potential life" is granted rights, meaning it has moved from potentiality to actuality.
(1)Very stooopid of course, because the definition of life is: an organism that engages in metabolism and has the capability of growth, which of course the foetus does. But the majority of the Court was 'progressive', and 'progressives' are not the brightest bulbs...
Terilien,
DeleteNo, please! EXE's buffoonish antics and crap arguments are hilarious! As heartwarming as Jar Jar Binks!
Actually, I missed this one last night, but there's one specific line that I feel the need to call out:
Delete"Presumably, because there were more pressing things to communicate in that particular context."
Really? Really. Really? In the passage that *specifically talks about what happens when you accidentally kill a fetus*, God didn't have time for one single line of text to clear up that the fetus was in fact a full and real human being with full rights - to clear up serious confusion on a moral issue that most people here consider so crucial they build their whole politics around it? Oh, the poor, overworked omnipotent Godhead! Give Him a break! There were so many rules and lists of genealogies and repeated stories to fit in there! There just wasn't room for a couple of lines about silly, secondary things like "life begins at conception", or "don't own slaves", or "treat women as equals". You can't *blame* the poor guy? Who do you think he is, God Almighty?
"First, I apologize for going off over the translation issue."
DeleteThat is the act of a mensch—more than most offer in an online discussion. I'm impressed and inspired to be better.
"the Bible's understanding of fetal personhood is very different from that of Modern Conservative Christians"
Fair enough. Apologies, and I'll only address this position.
Basically, I'd say that this is true only if we take a more literal reading of the passage you cite, and don't try to reconcile it with other pertinent passages.
That is to say:
1. We have the beginning of an interesting argument, but still need to make the case that this is the correct reading, and
2. This doesn't posit a positive alternative. What should one believe instead?
"You seem to think that so long as it isn't *completely impossible* to interpret a Bible passage in another way, then that solves the problem."
Then please let me correct that. I threw out some possibilities, but didn't mean that mere possibilities solve the problem. I meant to say that possibilities combined with no sufficient reason to take your interpretation solved the problem.
That is:
"You have to show that your reading is the most ***plausible*** one."
No, actually you would need to show that your reading is the most plausible in order to support your claim (that the Bible contracts opposition to abortion).
"I criticize interpretations of the passage that are implausible or not supported by evidence"
Isn't it your view that needs to be supported here?
Also, by what metric did you decide that other interpretations are implausible?
"because manslaughter requires the death penalty"
It required exile, but not the death penalty. Thus, it is not a perfect analogy, but is a relevant point to bring up.
Also, there's no mention of the other possibilities I raised, so I suppose I can't do more than mention them again.
Otherwise, what moral system are you proposing in place of this? What is its support?
"Really? Really. Really? In the passage that *specifically talks about what happens when you accidentally kill a fetus*, God didn't have time for one single line of text to clear up that the fetus was in fact a full and real human being with full rights"
DeleteYes, really.
What would that have done? In the absence of modern medicine, was there some thriving abortion industry in ancient Israel that this would have shut down? Was there a common practice of stripping rights from the unborn that needed to be addressed?
Or, was it more pressing to lay down a set of rules to clarify how people needed to get on with their neighbors in the ancient world?
"to clear up serious confusion on a moral issue that most people here consider so crucial they build their whole politics around it"
Were that to have happened, there wouldn't have simply been different confusions? I'm skeptical.
"Oh, the poor, overworked omnipotent Godhead!"
Who said anything about being overworked? I was talking about brevity in a written text.
"There were so many rules and lists of genealogies and repeated stories to fit in there!"
Yes, all of them more important to the original audience than what might become a political debate in a couple of millennia.
This entire response really seems to be reading contemporary concerns, values, and issues into ancient texts. I see no reason to believe that ancient people, much less a non-human (like God) should be particularly deferent to our cultural concerns.
while true .. childish.
ReplyDelete1 because one takes to heart what people define as lesser evil when their minds is both incompetent and imprecise
2 because there are people who DO consider it the greater good , not the lesser evil
And yet, the Bible itself nowhere condemn abortion as murder, at any point. At most it condemns it as a property loss of the father, subjecting the perpetrator to a monetary fine, not the death penalty, as was the punishment for murder.
ReplyDeleteThe movement Christianity took, of progressively taking Greek philosophical schools' speculations as overriding and delimiting what Biblical verses can and cannot say and mean, is very transparent on the issue of ensoulment. It started the process of overriding by sharing, with the Pharisees, acceptance of the Aristotelian speculation that ensoulment happens at the quickening. Then, several centuries later, as the overriding progressed into full on Aristotelianism, on this particular topic it adopted the Pythagorean-Stoic speculation that ensoulment happens at conception.
Meanwhile, the position of the one school of Greek philosophy that agreed with the Old Testament on this, Neoplatonism, was ignored.
And thus abortion moved from what it was, a civil misdemeanor subject to a fine *if* the father wanted to press the matter on it, into what it never was, murder.
If Catholics really believed personhood really began at conception, there would be a vast outcry at the huge number of fertilized zygotes that fail to implant in the uterus and are flushed down the toilet. It would be the biggest public health crisis imaginable.
DeleteA good point. From what I've heard, by the 1st century CE, the Greek philosophical views on ensoulment had more or less boiled down to three views:
Delete1.Ensoulment at conception. This was held by the Pythagoreans and the Epicureans.
2. Ensoulment at the Quickening, developing an animal soul into a rational soul. This was the Aristotelian position.
3. Ensoulment at birth, upon contact with the open air. This was the Stoic position, at least according to the sources that I'm reading.
The Hebrew Bible's conception of life actually seems to accord best with the Stoic position, in my view - in those books, the soul is consistently described in terms of breath or wind, to the point where "breath" is a synonym for the soul itself, and may even have been believed to literally, materially be the soul.
In Christianity, it seems like the early Christians were unsure which position was true, but tended towards Ensoulment at Conception, though this would have been problematic because the Pythagoreans and Epicureans believed in conception-ensoulment for reasons that were doctrinally unacceptable for most Christians (the Pythagoreans because they believed in reincarnation, thus the pre-existing soul transmigrates into the fetus upon conception, the Epicureans because they were materialists who believed that the soul was simply made of a special, unique type of matter, coming into existence with the body and perishing forever alongside it). That lasted until Augustine of Hippo decided to endorse the Aristotelian position, and his overwhelming fame and influence throughout the Church made that the settled position of the Church for over a thousand years.
You may want to push your thinking further to include Aristotle's distinction between what we might call nutritive, sensitive and rational soul functions. There is also the question, what Aristotle means when he talks about rational soul as coming in "from the door," literally.
DeleteYou may also want to work in the notion of "person." Is a zygote or embryo a "person"? If not, it doesn't have rights that persons have. If it is a person, that position has to be defended. If calls for blanket bans on abortion are justified by arguments that use premises about a spiritual [immortal] soul, it becomes tricky to base legislation in a non-theocratic state on such arguments.
I will never get tired of this stupid argument. Yep, some Christian and Jewish views on abortion were shaped by the incorrect biological science of the ancient world. They were also wrong about the age of the earth, whether species could change over time, how many teeth women had, and basically everything other particular about biology, physics, and chemistry. But ensoulment, even taken from an Aristotelean perspective, is a purely empirical scientifc question, and it was definitely settled in the 19th-century in favor of the Pythagoreans. To suggest that maybe the modern Church got it wrong puts you in the same intellectual camp as young earth creationists, flat earthers, and believers in spiritualism. To put it another way: You sound like a lunatic.
DeleteAristotle thought that rational soul was present from the beginning but potentially, not actually. Like how a baby has the potential to speak French but cannot actually speak French.
DeleteAs far as zygotes not implanting I wonder what that is supposed to prove. That God allows death? But we know that.
Here's a question:
Since most failures to implant are due to defects in the zygote/embryo then was it a successful conception in the first place?
a.morphous
DeleteGiven that some of them seem perfectly fine with mass murder so long as God's the one doing it, I don't think this would bother them, somehow. "It's God's Will, therefore it must be justified somehow even if we have absolutely no idea how that could possibly make any sense" is my guess.
Thur:
DeleteYou're downplaying it. No, not "some". *All* Jewish and especially Christian views were heavily influenced by Greek philosophy, because it was really the only game in town intellectually at that time. And no, it wasn't "the incorrect biological science" of the ancient world, it was the *philosophical beliefs* of the Greeks that were adopted. It's not just a matter of incomplete information, it's about the actual moral underpinnings of your beliefs.
"But ensoulment, even taken from an Aristotelean perspective, is a purely empirical scientific question, and it was definitely settled in the 19th-century in favor of the Pythagoreans."
I have to admit, this made my jaw drop. Really? Ensoulment is a solved empirical question? In that case, you can point me to the experiment that detected the existence of souls, and also identified the point at which the soul enters the child's body, yes? I *assume* you're talking about something more like "we now know there is the DNA of a full human present from conception" or something, but that is absolutely not the same thing as them "having a soul", unless you are using a very idiosyncratic definition of "soul".
Fundamentally, this isn't a question that science can resolve by itself, because this question is a judgment call about what traits an entity needs to have before we should consider it to be worthy of moral concern. It's a debate about what makes a human a "person". You appeal to souls to solve this problem, which doesn't help you much since you haven't been able to actually detect souls at all. I'm sure you have some Thomist response about "form of the body, not some kind of ghost" or something, but at that point you've left the realm of science and ducked back into theology, leaving me asking why I should accept hylomorphic dualism.
Not "allows death". *Causes* death. God is the cause of everything, right? God *kills* those children. And even if it were mere "allowance", that doesn't save you. If I saw a baby crawling towards a sheer drop, and could reasonably stop them from falling off, but chose not to do so, everyone would surely call me morally responsible for the baby's death. And that criticism would be even more furious if saving the baby was not just possible but trivially easy for me to do, such as by pushing a single button. Now, given that God is omnipotent, preventing the deaths of every baby in the world, and every baby that ever will exist, would be infinitely easier for Him than pushing a single button would be for me. Yet He doesn't do that. How is this NOT a grotesquely immoral abdication of responsibility? Every time a question like this comes up, it inevitably ends up seeming that those who view God as the perfect source of morality always end up holding their God to a far *lower* moral bar than they hold even human children to, much less mature adults.
Delete"But ensoulment, even taken from an Aristotelean perspective, is a purely empirical scientifc question, and it was definitely settled in the 19th-century in favor of the Pythagoreans. "
DeleteNow that is funny. Science proves nothing about the soul, which is unobservable. Even Catholic doctrine hasn't settled this apparently:
he Church has never doctrinally settled when ensoulment occurs — and twinning is one of the main reasons it stays quiet.
The official position, from Donum Vitae (1987) and reaffirmed in Dignitas Personae (2008), is carefully hedged: the Magisterium states that the embryo must be treated as a person from conception, while explicitly declining to make a philosophical commitment about the moment the spiritual soul is infused. Donum Vitae says the Church "has not expressly committed itself to an affirmation of a philosophical nature" on ensoulment timing. The moral claim (absolute protection from fertilization) is doctrine; the metaphysical claim (soul present at fertilization) is not.
This is a considered ambiguity, not an oversight. Twinning is the standard difficulty raised in the internal Catholic debate: if a rational soul is individual and indivisible, and the zygote splits into two people around day 5–14, then either one soul became two (impossible on Thomist terms), or a second soul was created and the first person's identity is murky, or the soul wasn't there yet.
Uh, I made a mistake. I made the comment above about God "causing" death. I intended to put bmiller's name in the top of the comment to make it clear that it was a response, but I seem to have made a mistake an accidentally placed that information in the "Comment As" box, so it showed up as if bmiller had written it. That's not him above, that's me.
Deletea.morphous,
Delete19th century science found that sperm and egg combine to create unique human organisms at conception. So if humans have souls it follows that it happens then. Later science confirmed this. You're welcome to think that humans are souless, but that is not the view of Catholics.
The question of twinning is a red herring wrt the abortion debate. First, no woman knows if she is pregnant within 5-14 days and second even if she did and aborted the question would be whether she killed 1 or 2 humans. Certainly one but perhaps two.
but I seem to have made a mistake an accidentally placed that information in the "Comment As" box, so it showed up as if bmiller had written it. That's not him above, that's me.
DeleteThank you for clearing it up, that makes much more sense.
Not "allows death". *Causes* death. God is the cause of everything, right? God *kills* those children. And even if it were mere "allowance", that doesn't save you.
You're right here: God does indeed cause the deaths of children, and of those older, too. The Bible is explicit: ""I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand." (Deut. 32:39)
The correct understanding, of course, is that "morality" in relation to God is not the same as in relation to man, because God is transcendent over all creation. To be more specific (so as not to just claim an exception because "God, that's why"): God created a natural order that has a hierarchy of goods, and that natural order entails living things live until old age, then die of natural causes (i.e. causes he designed), and then they undergo decomposition: the deaths and decay are by design. The decomposition just is some things (e.g. bacteria, molds, vultures, etc) living off the dead body. But also, some living things feed off of other living things, thus there are predators and prey, and the prey die in the course of "nature" feeding predators. This is by His design. From which we learn that death by natural causes, as such, is not a moral wrong. Neither is it a moral wrong when humans die from natural causes. For EVERY SINGLE such human death, (not just babies in utero) God could have superseded natural causes and made that death not happen, but this would have the result that by and large, the natural order isn't functional with respect to humans, and that would undermine it being "the natural order". His plan of the totality of good for which the whole order is designed would be undermined.
St. Thomas clarifies that He intends - for creation - primarily the whole good that encompasses all of nature and all the beings in it, not just the good of specific individuals therein. Considering that whole order's good, the death of an individual by natural causes is only bad-in-a-sense (i.e. "bad" for the individual compared to a good he might have had), not morally wrong. In fact, for each human who wills to cooperate with God, God's plan for his death is that the manner of this death can actually serve FOR his spiritual good, making his eternal life even better, so that what is bad-in-a-sense is meant for his good. (As is medicine that tastes bad, and that has unfortunate side effects, is bad-in-a-sense but meant for health. As is other suffering, death is only one instance of such suffering.) So there is nothing disturbing in God intending deaths that serve the overall good that is the whole good in His plan, he is the one who designed beings who are subject to death for the goods of that plan.
In making an order that includes intelligent beings with free will, one of the goods of the whole order is justice, which entails that good choices be rewarded and evil choices be punished. He carries out this, too, in fulfillment of the order.
I find this a strange line of reasoning, not least because it is typically given by non-Christians and takes as a premise "one is not allowed to morally oppose anything which is not explicitly opposed in Christian scripture" (a premise that no Christian I know would accept).
DeleteThat is to say that it sounds like a strange combination the strawman and tu quoque fallacies (if Christians read scripture I don't accept in a different way, they'd also support killing the unborn. Therefore, it is acceptable to kill the unborn.
If it could be shown that the unborn are not actually persons in the relevant sense, it would be moot to even bring this up. But I suspect that is precisely the inability to show this that is the reason to make such strange arguments.
Tony,
DeleteThank you for not trying the tack that many Christians take, of trying to deny that God does evil. Many do. But despite your honesty, I still don't think you can save your position.
Firstly, and most obviously, I don't see any reason to accept your assertions about the existence of a Natural Hierarchy of Goods, or an afterlife in which wrongs will be made right. But let's set that aside for a moment and just go with it for the sake of argument.
Even if I accept these premises, though, as far as I can see it, your argument seems to rest on the claim that "the suffering and evil in the Universe exist because God set it up in such a way that it couldn't be otherwise". Which seems more like an admission that I'm right than a refutation? He could have designed the Universe any way He liked, no? He could have made a Universe in which suffering did not exist, or at the very least, one where there was far, far less of it than we see in this one. I could rattle off a list of the awful sh*t that exist here, but we both know that'd be tedious, you've probably heard it before. But unless you're going to go full Pangloss and claim that this is genuinely The Best of All Possible Worlds (ie, God literally could not have made it better), I don't think this is going to fly. The Universe has suffering because it needs to given the way God created it. But unless He had no other options besides creating it in this form, then that still means he's morally culpable for this setup. If I engineer a situation in which babies get killed, and could have done otherwise, then I am morally responsible for their deaths.
"This is by His design. From which we learn that death by natural causes, as such, is not a moral wrong."
How does this follow at all? Does the fact that something is God's Design automatically make it not evil? That sounds a lot like Divine Command Theory. Even if that's not quite correct, it's still begging the question. All of this seems to presume that God has a plan such that all the suffering and evil will be worth it in the end. But not only do we have no reason to think that's true (nor could you, given that you have no access to God's Mind and could not know His reasons even if they were there to be found), that also seems to suggest that God is doing evil that good may result. God creates mortals (without their consent) and throws them into a world filled with violence, cruelty, disease, injustice, etc (again without their consent), all supposedly for the purpose that they will conform to His will and receive eternal life and bliss in Heaven. And if your God were not omnipotent, you might be able to get away with this - if this were the only way in which such perfection could be achieved. But your God is supposed to be able to do anything, at least anything which is not logically contradictory. Could He not simply have created us in that perfect state? Why is the horrible Earthly state even necessary to begin with? If you really want this to work, you're going to have to show that it is at least plausible that there are no sufferings that are unnecessary. Surely the much more natural conclusion would be that the story *has* to include the Earthly stage, because it's the only one that's actually real, so the people who wrote about God and Heaven had to include it, despite the fact that it would make very little sense for Earth to exist in the form it does if God actually existed the way you say He does.
Actually, I have another way of putting this. Let me ask you a question: imagine for the sake of argument that God did not exist. What kind of world would you expect to exist in that case? I'd appreciate it if you could answer this question, it would help us to make some real progress, I think.
Anon,
DeleteYou're misreading us (well, misreading me, anyway). I'm not saying "the Bible doesn't condemn abortion explicitly, so abortion is OK". I'm well aware that that needs to be argued for separately. It's more like "the Bible doesn't condemn abortion explicitly. Isn't that weird? Why the heck not? How could an all-good God omit that? Did it just slip His mind? How can the Bible be inspired in that case?"
@bmiller
DeleteThere is no scientific evidence for the presence of the soul at any point. That doesn't mean the soul isn't real, but it isn't accessible to the methods of science. If you disagree please cite some specific finding.
You missed the point about twinning, which has nothing (directly) to do with abortion. In twinning, one cell becomes two individuals (with separate souls). So either the soul is not present in the early zygote,. or if it is then souls are capable of duplicating like physical cells, which I suppose could be the case but seems to go against the usual conception of souls as singular and eternal.
Response to EXE, in 2 parts:
Deleteimagine for the sake of argument that God did not exist. What kind of world would you expect to exist in that case?
Well, I wouldn’t expect ANY world to exist. 😊
Oh, you mean if God did not exist AND some world did?
See, that’s not necessarily an answerable question. I think the world has “laws” and the relationships between aspects are knowable and conceivable BECAUSE they are made by a God who is a God of order and whose nature is that of knowing and knowability. A “world” that hasn’t this behind it might be so chaotic that nothing at all can be understood, and no “things” would exist long enough to be understood or to do the understanding, and no laws or order would necessarily reside anywhere. You might want to argue that quantum mechanics would still exist, but I ask you: why MUST there QM, necessarily - what metaphysical principle implies it? Starting from an absolutely blank slate, no reason can be educed that makes it necessary: we only know the outlines of QM because of THIS world, we cannot extrapolate to worlds wholly independent of all physical principles we can discern. So: I would have no expectation of any particular kind of world at all. I certainly would have no expectation of a world where morality has any meaning, nor one that has beauty.
If you mean, what if God did not exist and THIS world did exist, well you’re just stacking the deck, aren’t you? But I suspect the existence of beauty is (when looked at carefully) a defeater of atheistic evolution, because survival gets no benefit from it.
For the rest: I would not argue starting from God’s design of nature to a committed atheist and expect him to simply accept that starting point. Nor would I start with an assumption of the distinction of physical evils versus moral evils with a committed atheist as if it didn’t need prior groundwork. My main thesis was to explain the issue of moral constraints as (not) applying to God, which assumed the God that hypothetically would be the subject of those putative constraints. Of course, for a committed atheist, he doesn’t accept said God, so my points would be (mostly) irrelevant. So also would be my citation from Deuteronomy. No God means no revelation, obviously.
DeleteBut even within a non-theist perspective, there’s plenty of biologists who find the panoply of a complex living ecology a beautiful thing, even while directly observing that nature is red of tooth and claw: is their sense of that beauty ALSO a gross immorality of their minds and aesthetic sense? Or is it possible that what is sorrowful and painful and bad-in-SOME-sense is at the very same time part of a whole that is a beautiful thing? Is it even possible to make a value judgment about them and find that the larger picture is the one more wholly “the truth” and the smaller picture is – precisely because only part of the picture – to be understood as less determinatively “the truth”.
Similarly, I ask you this question: is bad-tasting medicine a good, or an evil? Should we consider a world in which a medicine needed for recovering health tastes bad to be “an evil universe” because of that bad taste, or should we more regard the health it produces than the taste and find that the universe has a medicine at all for that illness OUTWEIGHS the evil in the taste, to make it (in this regard, at least) a “good” universe? Is it possible for some goods to outweigh some evils, not merely because they are bigger, but because they comprehend the evils within a framework that makes them ONLY evil-in-a-sense and not evil absolutely? (For example, the bad taste comes from taste buds designed to tell us largely what is good for us, but they mis-interpret a medicine that is needed because of an imbalance in the body: the “bad taste” is a side effect of a GOOD sensory tool that (usually) gives beneficial info. Would you want a taste system that makes even poisons taste good, because bad taste makes the universe evil?)
that also seems to suggest that God is doing evil that good may result.
Again, the prohibition applies to doing moral evil that good may result. Do you object to a surgeon cutting off a limb to save a life? He causes a physical evil, yes, but his action is not a morally evil act. Do you reject the distinction between physical evils and moral evils?
Could He not simply have created us in that perfect state?
This is very similar to the position Job was in when God answers him “where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”
I wasn’t, so I don’t pretend to have the fulsome answer. It would more than take a library to fully answer. But I know this much: God’s design entails that free agents have the benefit of participating with Him (by moral choices) in the production of the final resolution of good, and THAT cannot be without our having those choices between good and evil.
"imagine for the sake of argument that God did not exist. What kind of world would you expect to exist in that case?"
DeletePresumably the broader issue is that such a world would not be considered possible (per typical arguments given) hence the hypothetical is more like saying "imagine a 4 sided triangle"
I know this is unlikely to be accepted, but this is obviously part of the bigger issue with these discussions
a.morphous,
DeleteYes science isn't in the business of "detecting" souls, but it seems biologists consider it within their scope to determine when an individual of a species becomes present as opposed to sperm and egg or the separate DNA of each parent as opposed to the unique DNA of the new individual. When I mentioned "later science confirmed this" I was referring to the DNA analysis.
I agree that twinning has nothing to do with abortion, but it is often brought up as argument against the Church's stand on abortion. I assumed that is why you brought it up in the present context. That said you missed at least one other possibility regarding twinning. There could be 2 souls present from the beginning which can only be known at a later stage. As you say science is not in the business of detecting souls.
then either one soul became two (impossible on Thomist terms), or a second soul was created and the first person's identity is murky, or the soul wasn't there yet.
DeleteJust curious about the twinning "problem": is there a reason we cannot propose that initially there is one soul, and when the twinning event occurs God creates another soul? I see that it implies one of the twins is truly older, and (at least with today's medical abilities) it is not possible to know which one is which. So? When you suggest that the "first person's identity is murky", I am not seeing an actual problem. The fact that we don't know which one was first doesn't make their personhood problematic. And after their birth, nobody has any trouble with one being "Fred" and the other being "George". There's nothing murky about the older one's '"identity" as his own person, merely an inability to SAY which is older. Again: so? Why is that a problem?
There could be 2 souls present from the beginning which can only be known at a later stage.
This does seem to be one of the proposed solutions, but it's certainly problematic from an A-T perspective. The soul is the form of the body: one body cannot have two distinct souls be the form of the body. Nor can one soul be the form of that body, and the other soul be just hangin' around until the split and there's a second body. You would have to argue, I think, that in addition to there being 2 souls that later are discovered, so also there are 2 bodies right from the beginning, and this fact too is only later discovered. This might be arguable, but it seems (so far as science can say) has no clear evidence in favor of it, in the case of twinning that happens (or appears to happen) during the blastocyst stage. In fact, it is doubtful even from the standpoint of twinning that occurs at the very 1st cell division, for there is still a need to explain how two souls can be the form of ONE cell that is (at least apparently) one organic whole before division. Merely positing "it's really 2 bodies, we just can't tell" is not a very strong position.
EXE,
Delete"It's more like "the Bible doesn't condemn abortion explicitly. Isn't that weird? Why the heck not? How could an all-good God omit that? Did it just slip His mind? How can the Bible be inspired in that case?"
In quite a few ways, I'd imagine.
First, I suspect that you are thinking of inspiration on the Muslim model, where God essentially dictates scripture. That has never been the Christian or Jewish view of scripture.
Second, there are clearly multiple ways to read the passage with respect to the question. It's speaking of strict legal issues in a particular time and place, meaning that it is open to multiple interpretations with respect to the larger question of the ontological status of a fetus.
There is a very long list of true things that God did not communicate in the scriptures. The only way this could be "weird" is if we either assume:
1. That God would have done so, or
2. That this passage is directly teaching something false.
But 2 requires a specific interpretation of the passage, as well as a specific understanding of inspiration. I don't yet see where we've established either of those.
Just curious about the twinning "problem": is there a reason we cannot propose that initially there is one soul, and when the twinning event occurs God creates another soul?
DeleteIdentical twinning is a rare event and it seems no one knows exactly what causes it. Most times for a successful conception everyone agrees that a new individual exists. It seems more logical to say that in the case of twinning that another individual comes into being rather than there is normally no individual present at the completion of a successful conception. If not what kind of animal is the zygote?
I'm not sure it contradicts A-T to say that there are 2 souls present in the beginning if we say that there are 2 souls potentially present in the beginning. If the right circumstances are present the second soul could become actual. Obviously, if the second soul was not potentially there it could not come into being.
It's surprising that we still don't know exactly what cause twinning.
(1/2)
DeleteTony,
Thank you for responding to me honestly. I do, however, find it strange that you seem to struggle with even conceiving of a world without God. I know pretty well what I would expect the world to look like if God *did* exist. But before I get to that let me briefly respond to what you say.
I'm not very convinced of arguments from beauty. Because beauty doesn't exist in any objective sense - it is a value judgment that sapient organisms make, something that only exists in their minds. There are some broad commonalities between humans, which is to be expected given that we are the same species. With regard to specific things (say, other humans), there may be some objective basis for beauty standards in terms of indicators of physical health and reproductive fitness, but even these are far from universal or normative. You also betray a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution when you say that the existence of a sense of beauty undermines atheistic evolution as it would "not help survival". Evolution does not *have* purposes. At all. Not even survival. Traits that increase survival rates are simply more likely to be passed on by virtue of the fact that they increase survival rates. Evolution does not select the best, it only cares about whether something is "good enough" to create a new generation. Its designs are, quite frankly, awful, riddled with inefficiencies and flaws that are bad, but not deleterious enough to be weeded out. Just to give one example, the appendix literally serves no function anymore. It spends its entire life being completely useless, unless it happens to get infected, at which point it poses a life-threatening risk to you. The brain is chock-full of cognitive biases that make thinking accurately and knowing the truth unnecessarily difficult. Our ability to appreciate beauty could easily just be a piece of random detritus from our evolution. It might be the remnant of a system that makes us better at selecting mates, or its presence might be a complete accident that means nothing at all. We can still value beauty, of course, but it does not HAVE to serve some useful "function" to survive the evolutionary process. It just needs to avoid being highly detrimental to human survival.
I agree that bad-tasting medicine or painful amputations can be justified in some situations. (I still think the Logical Argument From Evil is stronger than is typically assumed, but I won't attempt to defend it here, as I don't have the chops for that). However, the problem you have is that this only gets you to the *faint possibility* that the suffering in the world *might* be justified. "It's not impossible" is not a good basis for believing anything to be true, especially when we have plentiful examples of suffering that is practically impossible to even *imagine* a good purpose for. Even *I* could think of a better world than this one, and I am a mere mortal who isn't arrogant enough to think that they could order the world rightly by themselves. How about a world where cancer doesn't exist? Or at the bare minimum, one where you can't get it until after the age of 50, if you absolutely must have it as a way of culling the elderly? Is that *really* too much to ask for?!?
(2/2)
DeleteLet me finish by describing some ways I would expect the world to be if God did exist, at least the God you describe:
1. The supernatural (which I am here defining as mental phenomena that cannot be reduced to nonmental phenomena like brain chemistry, including beings that have these phenomena) would provably exist, and would be common knowledge. There's a ton of ways this could be done: magic could be real, ghosts could be real, miracles could be accessibly provable rather than relying on the acceptance of dubious testimony. Admit it, your faith would be bolstered tremendously if the Pope at least semi-regularly pronounced holy words over an amputee and their limbs miraculously reappeared. I'm not even asking for these things to be "done on demand", just that they be things that provably happen at least sometimes. As it stands, we have a world that LOOKS exactly like one where no supernatural phenomena exist. Explaining why God would set it up that way requires a bunch of contrivances.
2.The Universe would not look like the product of billions of years of random and wasteful evolution. Everything would be exactly as old as it needed to be. We'd have something like what the Book of Genesis describes, Creation simply working well together right from the beginning, without the need for millions of years of transitional forms stuffed with terribly flawed designs. Our minds would not be subject to cognitive biases that make us unable and unwilling to see the truth. The entire cosmos would be as big or small as it needed to be, and inhabited from top to bottom, rather than 99.99999999% of it being uninhabitable nothingness and 99.999999999% of the rest being incredibly hostile to life.
3. The existence of God would be obvious, exactly as Paul seems to naively think it is. Things would happen that simply have NO plausible naturalistic explanation, to the point where atheism and naturalism actually became far more ridiculous than believing in God. Evidence of God would be abundant and clear - He might walk among us and speak to us, actually explaining things. (And no, don't even start with any kind of "free will" defense - we're supposed to believe in God's *sovereignty and goodness*, not His existence. Satan knows God exists, right? Nobody claims he doesn't have free will, do they?)
He might actually, provably answer prayers, even if only to say no and explain why, and this would happen in a way that could not plausibly be explained as you just imagining it. There would be no contradictory religious traditions or books, everyone would simply have believed the same thing from the very beginning of time.
Contrary to what some might think, I absolutely DO think there could be such a thing as strong evidence for God and Christianity. I just don't think there actually IS any such in reality, certainly none that I've ever seen.
I find it surprising also. Is it too early to suggest "it's a miracle"? (Or, divine intervention?)
DeleteMost times for a successful conception everyone agrees that a new individual exists. It seems more logical to say that in the case of twinning that another individual comes into being rather than there is normally no individual present at the completion of a successful conception. If not what kind of animal is the zygote?
Right, I agree that it makes more sense to say that there is a new individual at the completion of the original conception. And it doesn't make much sense to say that there isn't ANY individual present until the twinning event, at which point 2 individuals are present. My suggestion was that there is ONE individual present (and one soul) at the completion of the conception, and that at the twinning event there is a new, second soul and the combined new soul + 2nd body is a second individual human.
My suggestion was that there is ONE individual present (and one soul) at the completion of the conception, and that at the twinning event there is a new, second soul and the combined new soul + 2nd body is a second individual human.
DeleteI think that makes perfect sense.
I do, however, find it strange that you seem to struggle with even conceiving of a world without God.
DeleteYou must have missed my point. I don't have trouble conceiving "some world pretty much like this, but without a God." I was having trouble with what kind of universe it would be if it is NOTHING AT ALL like this, because it hasn't ANY of the organizing principles and intelligibility principles that THIS one has because they originate from God. You know the ancient accounts that pose as base principle chaos and order? Can you describe for us a world where chaos alone is the base principle? I can't.
Let me finish by describing some ways I would expect the world to be if God did exist, at least the God you describe:
1. The supernatural (which I am here defining as mental phenomena that cannot be reduced to nonmental phenomena like brain chemistry, including beings that have these phenomena) would provably exist, and would be common knowledge.
You do know that there is NO truth so obvious that nobody disputes it, right? Some people think the world is flat, or that they are a cat, or a tree.
Anyway, I sympathize with what you would WANT the world to be like "if supernatural was real", it would be kinda nice. But that you would "expect" it hangs essentially on what purposes YOU have, and whether those purposes are the same as God's is up for debate. If not, then you have imbued your expectations with more personal flavor than you let on. There are saints and mystics who claim that God's purposes require that miracles be sufficient to lead people toward belief, they mustn't be so overwhelming that no sane person could fail to believe. It's not necessary for me to give that at length.
I'm not even asking for these things to be "done on demand", just that they be things that provably happen at least sometimes. As it stands, we have a world that LOOKS exactly like one where no supernatural phenomena exist.
Again, I sympathize with the complaint that miracles tend to be something that happened back there where we didn't have scientific instruments trained on them, and so they can't be investigated "properly". They tend to. But not ALL miracles are like that. There are some whose circumstances were scientifically evaluated both before and after (e.g. medically verified bone damage from cancer, then healed), where scientists a willing to say natural causes cannot account for the facts. A tiny few where the supernatural action itself persists.
EXE,
DeleteEvolution does not select the best, it only cares about whether something is "good enough" to create a new generation.
The 'good enough' individuals would be the 'best' among their competitors. Evolution strives for the best among what is available.
Its designs are, quite frankly, awful, riddled with inefficiencies and flaws that are bad.
Your brain being a prime example.
The brain is chock-full of cognitive biases that make thinking accurately and knowing the truth unnecessarily difficult. Our ability to appreciate beauty could easily just be a piece of random detritus from our evolution.
And maybe 'truth' is meaningless after all, another trick that our imperfect brains are forcing on us/ a piece of random neuronal detritus. Which would defeat your worldview, based on the 'truth' of materialism and 'random' evolution. Dum-dum.
Cutie,
Delete"The 'good enough' individuals would be the 'best' among their competitors. Evolution strives for the best among what is available."
Only if you define "best" to mean "didn't fail", which is such a broad definition that it's useless. Is everyone who crosses the finish line "the best"? If your definition of "the best" can't distinguish between mediocrity and excellence, then that seems like kind of a problem.
"And maybe 'truth' is meaningless after all, another trick that our imperfect brains are forcing on us/ a piece of random neuronal detritus. Which would defeat your worldview, based on the 'truth' of materialism and 'random' evolution. Dum-dum."
I...didn't say that, to begin with? Did you see me say "truth don't real"? I do think we can find truths, it's just unreasonably difficult to do so. We typically have to teach ourselves using tools like critical thinking, which were largely discovered through trial and error until we found something that worked. If you really wanna talk about truth and how we can find it, go check out Epistemology, there's a whole heaping helping of information on it there.
The real betrayal is by the Catholic hierarchy, which for decades has stayed chummy with pro-choice politicians and downplayed abortion in favor of immigration and the death penalty. The result is that most Catholics are now pro-choice and the culture in general has become more prochoice. Politics is downstream of culture; Trump and the Republicans are just reflecting where things are now. They are the effect, not the cause.
ReplyDeleteWell said.
DeleteLike a lot of conservatives, I was hopeful about a Vance vice-presidency. He has been deeply disappointing.
ReplyDeleteHe's really just another opportunistic politician willing to sacrifice principle [assuming he actually had any to begin with] for ambition.
You were a fool to think he would do anything. He compared Trump to Hitler in 2016. Nobody who honestly meant that could possibly consent to be his VP in 2024 in good conscience. So he had to have been lying at least one of those times - probably both. He's sold his soul, and I expect he won't even get anything for it. Donald Trump's Cult of Personality is the only thing holding MAGA together at this point, and barely. Vance absolutely does not have that mojo.
DeleteVance is also bought and paid for by Peter Thiel. He represents the interests of the transhumanist ruling class. His "Christianity" is empty LARPing.
DeleteAbsolutely. Screw Peter "the Reptile" Thiel. For my money, though, the weirdest thing about Peter Thiel is his bizarre, eclectic Christian(?) apocalypticism. That and his extreme lack of self-awareness, but that seems to be par for the course for the billionaire class. Seriously, have you heard him ramble about the Antichrist? He seems to really, truly believe it, albeit probably in a doctrinally heterodox form. What shocks me is that he can run a global surveillance company whose hands are soaked in innocent blood and then, incredibly, think that he's the good guy. He thinks Greta Thunberg (or someone like her) is the Antichrist. Yes, the powerless activist. Definitely gonna be her, and not the leader of a surveillance and technology empire that spans the world and wants to collect everyone's information. Seriously.
DeleteYou're not pessimistic enough. All the abortions, as you describe. Trump's "no forever wars" Forever Wars. The $40,000,000,000,000.00 and rising national debt. The AI crisis. China's rise. Europe's collapse. The Roman-style barbarian invasions there and here. Trump now is irrelevant. The GOP, too, is irrelevant, and will be wiped out on Nov. 3. Collapse ahead.
ReplyDeleteEurope is not being overcome by "barbarian invasions". Oh wait, I'm sorry, I forgot to source my news from OANN! Yeah, sure, there'll be a Franco-Belgian Islamo-Communist Satanic Gnostic Caliphate ruling the continent by 2030. Wow! Better get my People's Prayer Mat!
DeleteMassachusetts has always been a liberal Democratic state and abortion has always been legal there. But Kansas is a solidly red state, except when it comes to abortion. Although its Republican legislature has tried to outlaw abortion, the people of Kansas have continually voted to keep it legal.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article316869120.html
Wyoming is a solidly red state, but the people of Wyoming will not let the state take away their right to abortion.
https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/wyoming-supreme-court-strikes-down-laws-banning-abortion
"But that will be true only to the extent that pro-lifers make it clear that the GOP will pay a political price for betraying them." - and how are they supposed to do that?
ReplyDeleteCan they vote for the Democrats instead? No, definitely not. That is definitely worse.
Can they do something else that makes victory of Democrats more likely (for example, voting for some third party)? No, that also makes things worse. It could be an option if proportional representation was used, or if things were so desperate that symbolically voting for someone would not make things any worse, but that is not how things are in America nowadays.
Can they threaten to do those things, without doing them? That's both morally wrong and politically stupid. Making a threat and then demonstrating that it was empty is a good way to make others think that you should not be taken seriously. Even more so, if everyone can easily see that the threat is empty beforehand.
Can they do something during primary elections? But Trump is not going to be a candidate in any primary election any more.
Can they complain? Well, I remember that there already was a blog post complaining about this. Did it help?
Are there things that pro-lifers can actually do? Yes, there are, but they are not very spectacular. They can pray (conversion of Trump would be highly beneficial). They can argue for a more pro-life position (who knows who will be persuaded). They can be otherwise supportive of somewhat sympathetic politicians (that just might make them more willing to listen to pro-life positions).
Do they actually do any of this? Unfortunately, this blog post does not say anything about that.
As for the quote by C.S. Lewis, it seems to be an expression of the Aristotle's teaching that virtue is going to be found in the mean between two vices.
And it seems that here we have just an example.
That is, "hyper-partisanship" is clearly a vice (it would be when one sacrifices the most important principles for the tiniest political advantages, supports one's party no matter what). But then it follows that there is going to be "hypo-partisanship" (for example, ignoring what is politically possible, insisting on getting everything, and getting nothing, abandons one's party at the tiniest problem). The virtue would be between those two extremes.
And I'm afraid that this blog post expresses "hypo-partisanship", rather than the virtue in the mean.
(I suppose this triplet might be related to "prudence of the flesh", "imprudence" and "prudence".)
There is a good chance I am wrong, but the writing style seems to be reminiscent of Dr Michael Pakaluk as well as the initials.
DeleteCould MP confirm
Confirmed, Norm.
Delete@MP
DeleteCan they do something else that makes victory of Democrats more likely (for example, voting for some third party)? No, that also makes things worse. It could be an option if proportional representation was used, or if things were so desperate that symbolically voting for someone would not make things any worse, but that is not how things are in America nowadays."
On the long run is it worse? I mean as a serious question, to a outsider like me it seems like than getting rid of MAGA should be any serious right wing top priority.
@MP
DeleteCan they do something else that makes victory of Democrats more likely (for example, voting for some third party)? No, that also makes things worse. It could be an option if proportional representation was used, or if things were so desperate that symbolically voting for someone would not make things any worse, but that is not how things are in America nowadays."
On the long run is it worse? I mean as a serious question, to a outsider like me it seems like than getting rid of MAGA should be any serious right wing top priority.
Nonsense. To see why this reasoning is flawed, suppose you are playing a repeated cooperation game scenario. Cooperate -- both of you get $100. If one defects - defector gets $150, non-defector gets $50. Both defect - $0. Suppose your partner starts defecting on you. For each individual game, defecting as well is worse for you -- you get $0 vs $50! But in a repeated game, the optimal play is to punish the defector. Yes, both of you will lose that round, but the defector will very quickly learn that it is to their long-term benefit to play fair.
DeleteThe same is true in politics. If you occasionally punish your party for defecting on you, they will learn that they cannot deviate too far from your interests without starting to lose power. In the long run, you will get more of what you want. Alternatively, if you use this ridiculous reasoning and *never* defect, the party will learn it can walk right over you and will offer you as little as it possibly can. Occasionally defecting is long term net positive for you in politics, even if it is bad in the short term.
They succeeded in turning abortion into the ultimate wedge issue, and you've fallen for it. Because of the single-mindedness with which you regard the subject, the Republicans can take you for granted, and destroy your morality to boot. The Republican candidate can be a liar, a murderer, a r*pist, a p*dophile, a serial adulterer, and a warmonger. He can state openly that he plans to grind the faces of the poor under his boot and chop them up to be food for his dogs, he can crush the widow, the orphan, and the stranger with wanton cruelty.
DeleteAnd you will still vote for him and let him get away with it so long as he promises to be anti-abortion. It's tribalism like this that's resulted in absurdities like the Texas Senate Race, where Christians can seriously support Ken Paxton (a man so corrupt he was impeached by his own party for fraud, abuse of power, accepting bribes, and obstruction of justice, as well as brokering a deal that allowed Adam Hoffman, a man credibly accused of repeated r*pe of a young boy, to serve a measly 30 days in jail AND absolved him of need to so much as register as a sex offender) over James Talarico (a pastor who supports caring for the poor, the needy, and ensuring everyone has access to good healthcare). Such are the absurdities which you are complicit in and are chained to because of your abortion stance. Let me finish by reminding you all that murder is not the only sin claimed to cry out to Heaven for vengeance. Oppression of the poor and denial of the laborer's wages are treated as equally serious in the Books you claim to hold as holy, and they speak much more clearly, repeatedly, and forcefully on the wickedness of *these* evils. Yet on these topics you hem and haw, being lukewarm at best, treating them as matters of opinion, certainly not something to fight about or excommunicate someone over. But abortion, which the Bible seems largely indifferent to, and does not *clearly* condemn, *that* you consider non-negotiable?
What you fail to understand EXE, is that abortion is just as gruesome as some of the worst crimes commited in society.
DeleteAnd again as the good professor Feser mentioned above, we have to elect better statesman who are morally upright and accountable.
But your minimisation of abortion is completely unjustified and condemnable.
Right from the moment of conception the prenatal infant is a distinct member of the human race, that displays self directed development towards higher states, as a whole.
It is human because both the mother and father are human beings
It's distinct/unique because it's neither the father not the mother but a combination via a process that is referred to in the literature as genetic recombination.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/genetic-recombination-514/
And it clearly displays self directed development as a whole as it is evident that both maternal and paternal elements of the zygote are working in coordination with each other towards the good of the whole being.
Specifically on the paternal side, an enzyme called phospholipase c zeta has been confirmed to be responsible for oocyte activation, which in turn triggers a cascade of other events like a calcium wave that prevents polyspermy (multiple sperm fertilising the egg). This entails the presence of an organism where all elements are working towards the good of the whole entity.
It has also been observed through High Resolution RNA sequencing by researchers at the University of Cambridge and the University of Bath that Zygotic Genome Activation occurs at the single cell stage, they detected the upregulation of hundreds of spliced transcripts, that means the Zygote has already begun to transcript it's own DNA.
https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(21)00484-7
Again all this entails the existence of an distinct unique human organism which not some parasitic part of another organism. In other words, a human being, working completely from a science perspective.
It is the pro-choice defender who would have to invoke some fuzzy ascientific notion of "consciousness in order to account for his irrational distinction between the baby inside the womb and the baby outside the womb. Fuzzy because no one can agree on what this consciousness is, some people even say that the baby is not conscious untill delivery. Regardless, consciousness is not a standard in secular or religious ethics to confer the right to life. It's clearly wrong to kill a sleeping person and no one in their right mind would say it is ethical to kill a baby who is unresponsive immediately after birth (known in the literature as apparent still birth since it turns out the baby was alive and well even though initially unconscious.)
DeleteAll that matters if there is a human organism. This is also why it's not good to make comparisons to a skin cell since the skin cell is functionally oriented towards the functions of the skin , protecting the body etc.
Even the researcher who is trying to experiment on the skin cell is trying to "transform" it into a zygote or embryo. He knows that once he has achieved that the human being has come into existence and all that has to be done is place it in a hospitable environment with nutrition aka the womb. The rest will take care of itself.
There is no intrinsic orientation towards higher states of development when it comes to a skin cell unlike an organism. A skin cell can only be extrinsically manipulated to do so by changing it's orientation.
Something can only be parisitic if it's unnaturally latched on to a host. Something that is scientifically and biologically the natural function of an organism cannot be said to be parisitic.
The biological function of the uterus just is to provide nutrition and a hospitable environment, unlike a leach since our blood is not meant to be sucked by leaches
That brings us to the next point, which is that, yes the baby is dependent on the mother, for nutrition and hospitable environment but even outside the womb it is dependent on the parents for such things, we just refer to it as food and shelter post delivery. The fact that the baby is exclusively dependent on the mother is just a function of nature. It doesn't do away with the natural obligations to care for one's offspring, and if one wants to do away with that, they would also have to do with any natural obligation of the parent to the child outside of the womb.
This is why the violinist arguments and likewise don't work. They fail to account for natural obligations.
As such the pro choice defender just has to admit that they are killing an innocent human baby and they are ok with that. And people like Bill Maher have actually done so.
Don't vote for morally incompetent law makers but one can't also vote for politicians who defend the killing unborn babies like Talarico. It would be absurd.
And there is nothing here a full blown atheist cannot agree with. The way I laid it out even a militant atheist can espouse it.
Well, that's a big case you've made there. Unfortunately for you, I'm not interested in making a positive case for defending abortion (at least not here). My point here is that you are all hypocrites, because you treat abortion (which the Bible has little to say about, and doesn't seem to regard as that big of a deal) as if it were of absolutely supreme importance, so tremendous that opposing it justifies the support of any evil. Yet regarding the things the Law and the Prophets DO condemn with great vigor (oppression of the poor, theft of the laborer's wages, mistreatment of the foreigner), you have at best weak platitudes, and many of you actually SUPPORT these things. Oppose abortion, absolutely so if you must, but channel that same zeal into fighting for workers' rights, for social welfare, for the prioritization of the poor over the rich, for humane treatment of migrants, foreigners, and into fighting against racism. If you do these things, I still probably won't agree with you on abortion, but I will call you a man of honor and integrity, a true valuer of Life and no hypocrite. But if you hate abortion, and do not have the same hate for wage theft, or racism, or those who grind the faces of the poor, you are no more than a Pharisee, more concerned with how you look to your social group than with actually doing right. There's a reason why people say that you are not pro-Life, only pro-Birth: because your side consistently proves that they don't give a rat's behind about children after they leave the womb. Who makes it harder for children and the poor to eat? To have healthcare? To be educated? To retire? How on Earth can you support (or at least be indifferent to) these things and say that you value human life? I hope, against hope, that these words are capable of piercing the shield of dogma and emotion in your mind. I hope, against hope, that just maybe you can see the point I'm making. That I can at least save one person from the monstrous war against basic human empathy that the GOP is waging. A fool's hope, perhaps, but I've never claimed to be wise.
DeleteEXE
DeleteThe case I made is important, precisely because it is just wrong to kill an innocent defenceless human being...
When one side is directly mudering innocent babies and the other side is indirectly causing harm through bad policy.
Obviously one would say we need to stop the child sacrifice and murder first.
Ideally we would have both, but if we have to choose you have to stop the killing first.
The entire point of my caseis to show you it's a not a religious issue in the first place.
If one says Murder is wrong, but your response is the Bible doesn't say anything about it why are you obsessed with the issue, it is just ignoring the point that murder is wrong.
Apart from that there is no hypocrisy here, because the Bible doesn't mention a lot of things that are obviously wrong. It doesn't change the fact that they are wrong. That murdering the innocent and defenceless wrong is just something obvious. That "gay marriage" is not directly mentioned is obvious from the fact that it would have been absurd to even propose it. So your point is completely rendered moot. The Bible urges us to follow the natural law, the law that is written on the hearts of all man as Paul says.
And in this case that means prioritising the innocent babies from being directly murdered and alongside that if we could have good policy it would be great.
And again as I printed out even an atheist can agree that if we have to choose, then we ought to choose to defend the innocent babies.
You have just normalised abortion in your head to the point it doesn't register as murder to you even though the logic is clear, that is willful ignorance. And direct murder is obviously extremely grave compared to I'll thought out policies.
In places where abortion is banned the conversation will naturally shift to improving the living conditions and the poor
See, you're doing it again. You're doing exactly what I said. The Bible is FAR more concerned about economic justice than it is with abortion, yet because YOU, personally, think abortion is far more important than economic justice, you tell the Bible that it's wrong and has to listen to you. You take the weightiest matters condemned by the Prophets, which even the Catholic Church ranks as Sins That Cry Out To Heaven, matters that in the Catholic tradition are considered *equally as serious as murder*, and demote them to "simply bad policy" that "causes indirect harm". Bullsh*t. Is policy not an action that those who do it are responsible for? Is "indirect" harm somehow less serious than direct harm? It seems like you think it is - why? Just because it's easier to imagine? Why is dismembering five children a horrific atrocity deserving of death, but starving 5,000 children to death by cutting food benefits "just policy"? I'm making up the numbers here, but my point remains - all of your distinctions are arbitrary. It's as simple as this - your priorities are backwards compared to those of the Bible. The things it thinks primary, you think secondary, and vice versa.
DeleteAgain , I am not going to mention the Bible, it is clear that you don't understand it, you have hijacked this entire thread to talk about your nonsensical understanding of the bible.
DeleteWhy is dismembering five children a horrific atrocity deserving of death, but starving 5,000 children to death by cutting food benefits "just policy"?
Even your own examples betray you...There is literally no one out there directly trying to implement a policy that would result in such.
Of course policy might result in those outcomes, especially in the case of socialist policies, there's a good chance it will.
DeleteNevertheless, the consequences and aftermath and mechanisms by which we can judge the outcomes of certain policies are almost always ambiguous enough, that people of good will can legitimately disagree with them.
Killing , dismembering people is just outright wrong there is just no scope for disagreement there
"There is literally no one out there directly trying to implement a policy that would result in such"
DeleteWell, for one thing, it was an example, meant only to display the fact that policy is also moral action. But secondly, there is in fact a movement to do this. Last year, the "Big Beautiful Bill" slashed SNAP benefits, which will result in something like 1,000,000 people losing access to food aid. Let me guess, "oh they didn't explicitly intend to starve people so it doesn't count?"
"
Nevertheless, the consequences and aftermath and mechanisms by which we can judge the outcomes of certain policies are almost always ambiguous"
...no? Cutting a million people off of Food Stamps is *obviously* going to lead to hunger, and will very plausibly lead to starvation or at least malnourishment and further impoverishment. It is asinine to claim that this decision could not be predicted to kill significant numbers of the vulnerable and poor.
The way that abortion is presented confuses the fundamental issue. At the most basic level, it is a choice of individuals, not a riddle for experts. Society recognizes (correctly) that it is bad to drive drunk and injure or kill someone and furthermore that individuals have the power to understand this and avoid the situation.
ReplyDeleteBy contrast, abortion is treated as a riddle for the experts where individuals should just wait for the conclusion of the experts. But that is not actually so, individuals can choose to avoid having abortions or being in situations that might tempt them to do so. Some people may not, but it is not a valid principle of ethics that unless everyone else does something, then no one should do it.
People are able to choose to follow morality and that is a good thing. All of the rhetoric around abortion tries to obscure that. The individual choice is the most fundamental: if infanticide was legal but nobody did it, then that would be that.
Secondly, the way that abortion is argued for, opponents of abortion have to consider every little disagreement that someone somewhere has, every hypothetical situation, every thought experiment and until these are dealt with and not just dealt with, but dealt with definitively so that everyone agrees then have been dealt with, then and only then will people be justified in opposing abortion.
And yet, if everyone was as philosophical and self-controlled as all that, abortion wouldn't even be a major issue. And in the meantime, while opponents of abortion are supposed to be living in an imaginary philosophers paradise, where everything is put on hold until an issue is definitively settled, proponents of abortion are out there propagandizing for it under all circumstances, not all those hypothetical thought experiments they claim to love so much.
The point is that the basic framing leads to confusion. You can argue back and forth about a philosophical issue all day but at the end you have to choose what to do and choosing the better is better, that is what people should follow.
NLR, you seem to be arguing (roughly) that the pro-life side is proceeding in an ineffective manner by arguing as if they are required to win every jot and tittle of possible disputed issues before they may insist on laws outlawing abortion. At least, that's the sense I got.
DeleteI don't see it. First, many pro-lifers don't bother arguing, they do things like (a) pray, (b) offer alternatives, (c) live and breathe and speak pro-life in their behavior: these sometimes persuade women WITHOUT argument. I have seen it happen. Second, like the abolition movement, the pro-life movement may take a long, long time before the social conscience is moved sufficiently to be enshrined in law. Lack of legal success in the meantime doesn't equal lack of effect. Thirdly, you are right that many times pro-abortionists have used better strategy than pro-lifers, and have outmaneuvered them by smarter tactics. Pro-lifers should learn from their mistakes. Fourthly, while pro-lifers don't rely solely on argument, they have not really been successful in large scale efforts to use other media approaches, and this is a flaw in their efforts. But none of this remotely implies that the pro-lifers understand their own stance as being "we must successfully counter-argue every possible pro-abortion argument before we can attempt pro-life laws", and if pro-abortionists are attempting to foist that silly position on the other side, it should be shrugged off as mere straw-manning.
"NLR, you seem to be arguing (roughly) that the pro-life side is proceeding in an ineffective manner by arguing as if they are required to win every jot and tittle of possible disputed issues before they may insist on laws outlawing abortion. At least, that's the sense I got"
DeleteI apologize for my lack of clarity, I was not claiming that the pro-life side thinks this, my point was that when the issue of abortion is considered as a moral issue, from an impartial position (that is, it is believed by the people considering it that they are doing so in an impartial way), two things which confuse people's thinking are often tacitly assumed:
1. Abortion is a riddle for the experts rather than an issue that individuals can understand and act upon by themselves.
and
2. That arguments (I just mean reasons in general, not academic philosophy, though it could include that) against abortion cannot be considered successful unless it is agreed by everyone that these arguments defeat every objection. But this is assuming a totally self-controlled and philosophical society that does not exist.
I have no disagreements with your second paragraph.
An issue that is apparent at the present time is that often, when societal or moral issues are discussed, the framing of the issue biases any discussion before it even starts and it is good to clear the ground and clarify things ahead of time. But I should have added further explanation that this was the motivation for my comment.
Trump was a life-long Democrat until quite recently, i.e. basically through his middle age. He isn't likely to have become truly pro-life when he ran for the Republican ticket, and pro-lifers should never have trusted him on the issue. I didn't. He may have became a wee bit more willing to give the pro-life cause a bit of a boost after switching parties (read: both parties moved leftward while he mainly held still), e.g. he was prepared to let the states have more say, without taking any form of a principled position against abortion as such. His behavior was more readily read to be that he didn't think abortion should have a national mandate (like in Roe), but beyond that he didn't care much, and he was willing to throw bones to the pro-life side for political purposes without making it his life's mission.
ReplyDeleteWhat irks me more in Trump's "change" on abortion is the business of IVF during his 2nd term, making it a positive goal: there's no political need to do so (the actual numbers of those getting IVF done is quite small, (like 2%), and there's no good basis for any call for government to fund it, even if you don't forbid it. Trump's position on this is a repudiation of MANY Republican principles, and pointless politically to boot, he's adding insult to injury. Stupid on top of wrong. But Trump's ideas on issues like this have wandered all over the map, because (as far as I can tell) his understanding of moral principle is about as sophisticated as comic books meant for 10 year olds. Dull 10 year olds, at that.
As for Vance, his bishop needs to read him the riot act. But will he? Well, how often did Biden's bishop warn him that publicly supporting abortion is a mortal sin and exclude him from Communion?
While it is broadly true that the American people on average want abortion available and want IVF available, there's actually quite a bit of room for nuanced compromise in there. For example, most people are very uncomfortable with abortions purely for sex selection, and many people are extremely uncomfortable with very-late-term abortions. As currently constituted, no Democrat will lobby for laws imposing limits reflecting this, but a Republican could well hold a large majority on this isolated issue.
The moderator of this blog has tweeted that late term and early term abortions are murder. We execute or sentence to life imprisonment those who commit murder. Why don't we do the same to women who abort their babies?
ReplyDeleteThe ongoing debate over abortion will never be resolved in this lifetime. What we can know is how happy and proud people are with their position on it. That pride will either further condemn you or elevate you in the eyes of God.
ReplyDeleteSeeing how bad the right became here and how sadly these parasites attached themselves onto Christianity i fear for my country future.
ReplyDeleteWe do have our problems with these for years, even had a president back them, and they are becoming more and more popular on politics. Likely they will not have the presidency this year, but other positions are already full of these and who knows the future. Things are so bad than even the party than pretty much flopped for nearly 20 years seems better, but so is life in Latin America, i guess.
The espiritual effects seems as bad as the political ones. A lot of people tends to unite these and Christianity*, so to a lot of people either you sacrifice a lot of the faith to become a defender of these or you say farewell to the faith and to they. It is not good at all.
*seems more of a thing with evangelicals yet
(1/2)
ReplyDeleteAnd hey, while I'm here pointing out awkward contradictions, why don't we consider this little ditty: Exodus 22, 29-30:
"29 “You shall not delay to make offerings from the fullness of your harvest and from the outflow of your presses.[c] “The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me. 30 You shall do the same with your oxen and with your sheep: seven days it shall remain with its mother; on the eighth day you shall give it to me."
Catch that? "The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me". As in, *sacrifice* them to me. And we can be confident that this is the intended meaning because sacrificing the firstborn lambs and calves was normal practice, and the sentence connects the two things so tightly that it doesn't even bother repeating the verb when mentioning sheep and oxen. The grammar leaves no doubt that *the same thing* is supposed to happen to the lambs, calves, and human babies.
Sure, you've got circumlocutions in other passages that attempt to negate this command without formally contradicting it, whether it be saying that you should redeem/buy back the child on the way to sacrifice it, or Numbers attempting to claim "oh, it just means to dedicate the child to priestly service". But all these attempts are deeply problematic - firstly, most scholars agree that the Covenant Code (Exodus 20:22–23:19) is one of the oldest parts of the Bible, thus all the other passages are very likely later attempts to smooth over the problem. The Numbers example still clearly understands the original command to have been to sacrifice children, as it adds a layer claiming that the Levites will now act as "substitutes" for what God is owed...which still implies that God is owed your firstborn children. The "buy it back" solutions in Exodus suffer from the obvious problem that...well...if that's true, then God has done a spectacularly bad job at communicating to His people. If you wanted people to not sacrifice their children, saying "sacrifice your kids to me...psyche! Actually turn away and pay me money instead on the way" is about the worst way you could possibly do it. Why not just say..."don't sacrifice your children"? That makes no sense except as an attempt to get around a command to child sacrifice that couldn't simply be thrown out because it was too old and important.
Furthermore, anytime someone else in the Bible speaks of this command, they understand it to have been a command to sacrifice the firstborn. Quoth Ezekiel 20:23-26:
"Also with uplifted hand I swore to them in the wilderness that I would disperse them among the nations and scatter them through the countries, 24 because they had not obeyed my laws but had rejected my decrees and desecrated my Sabbaths, and their eyes lusted after their parents’ idols. 25 So I gave them other statutes that were not good and laws through which they could not live; 26 I defiled them through their gifts—the sacrifice of every firstborn—that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am the Lord"
Here, Ezekiel has God claim that He did in fact give these commandment, as a punishment for Israel's rebellion, in order to show them who was boss. But He *does* admit to having made such orders.
(2/2)
ReplyDeleteJeremiah, on the other hand, instead has God repeatedly deny that He ever gave any such command concerning sacrifice or burnt offering when He brought Israel out of Egypt...despite Exodus 22 claiming the opposite.
(Jer 7:22-24) (NRSVUE)
"22 For in the day that I brought your ancestors out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to them or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices. 23 But this command I gave them, “Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; walk only in the way that I command you, so that it may be well with you.” 24 Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but, in the stubbornness of their evil will, they walked in their own counsels and looked backward rather than forward."
Notably, some more dogmatic translations, like the NIV, actually alter the text of verse 22 to say "I did not ONLY speak to them about burnt offerings...", which is straight-up mistranslation. That is not a valid translation of the Hebrew original, it's an outright addition in order to harmonize the text with Exodus.
Later, he says (Jer 7:31)
"31 And they go on building the high place[e] of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire—which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind."
"They sacrificed their children - which I didn't command! No, it didn't even cross my mind!". Kind of an odd thing to say, nobody was accusing you, right?
(Jer 19:4-5)
"4 Because the people have forsaken me and have profaned this place by making offerings in it to other gods whom neither they nor their ancestors nor the kings of Judah have known, and because they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent 5 and gone on building the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not command or decree, nor did it enter my mind"
Again, "I never said that! I did not, I never said that!"
And again (Jer 32:35)
" 35 They built the high places of Baal in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter my mind that they should do this abomination, causing Judah to sin."
"I swear, I never said to do that!"
The deity doth protest too much, methinks.
Methinks EXE protests too much.
DeleteOh wow, what a burn! I am destroyed! You totally demolished my argument there. All those passages where it acknowledges that God commanded the sacrifice of children have just magically gone away!...oh wait, no they haven't.
Delete@EXE
DeleteSince i take a look on what the Halakhah is to jews i tended to be way more careful when interpretating jewish scriptures, but what you make on Exodus 13? A good deal of the chapter seems dedicated to how you give your firstborn to God.
Not that i think the whole question is relevant to the abortion case. Christians usually will say that the Mosaic Law is not binding and in a quite a few ways is is not aceptable
@EXE
DeleteI suppose that you must have taken your arguments from some source but your interpretation of Exodus 22:29-30 is very questionable.
Firstly, Exodus 22:29-30 does not say "sacrifice". The verb used in that verse is "to give" and is not used to mean sacrifice in the rest of the Pentateuch, or at least not without some additional contextual evidence, hence "dedicate"/"consecrate" is actually the most plausible reading.
Secondly, it is possible that Exodus 20 to 23 may be one of the oldest parts of the Bible but there are also scholars disputing this (John Van Seters, David Wright) and in general I wouldn't treat this kind of working assumptions by scholars as a "smoking gun" that overrides the whole rest of the Pentateuch.
Exodus 13 is very clear in explaining how and why firstborn are consecrated and redeemed. The reasoning is spelled out quite clearly: if the Lord had not saved you from Egypt, now your firstborns would have been taken by Egyptians; therefore keep in mind that you "owe" me your firstborn because without the help of the Lord you would have permanently lost them; therefore, in order to remember that I saved you and your firstborn from Egypt, you have to "redeem" the firstborn, i.e. give the Lord an offering. So Exodus 13 and the whole concept of "redeeming" firstborn is an important institution, not just a clumsy and contradictory way to say "don't sacrifice your children".
The entire Pentateuch manifestly portrays child sacrifice as a bad thing, from Genesis 22 (Abraham and Isaac) to Leviticus 18:21, Numbers 18:15, Deuteronomy 12:31, Deuteronomy 18:10. There isn't a single passage describing firstborn sacrifice as a good thing to do, or major Bible characters portrayed as actually sacrificing the firstborn to God as a fulfillment of a commandment or anything of the sort (Genesis 22 is manifestly a dramatic illustration of the concept that children shall NOT be sacrificed).
Numbers 18 has nothing to do with child sacrifice (again, 18:15 talks about "redeeming") but rather with instituting the authority of Aaron and his sons as priests, in response to the revolt of other Levites in chapter 16.
Jeremiah is very clear in stating that God did not command to sacrifice children.
Ezekiel 20 tells the story of how multiple generations of Jewish people disobeyed the commands of God, but probably it is "telescoping" generations rather than establishing a precise 1-to-1 mapping to Pentateuch events. If you really wanted to insist on mapping Ezekiel 20:25-26 to a precise Pentateuch event then you run into difficulty because 20:25-26 refers to the second wilderness generation, hence it cannot be automatically "mapped" on Exodus 22:29-30 that was given to the first wilderness generation. Ezekiel 20 would require a bigger discussion but the 1-to-1 mapping you propose just does not work.
In summary, it seems to me that your argument rests on a forced interpretation of a single Bible verse (Exodus 22:29-30) and on the pretense that the literal meaning of multiple Bible sections must be ignored or twisted.
Not that any of this matters to the abortion question, anyway.
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DeleteHey Raffaele, thank you for actually attempting to engage with the points I made. That's surprisingly rare around these parts. This response will likely need to be split into multiple parts, so please bear with me.
"Not that any of this matters to the abortion question, anyway."
Not directly, maybe, but it does rather undermine YHWH's moral character. It would seem rather strange to oppose the killing of children in the name of a God that demands child sacrifice.
Now, onto the actual points:
-Sure, you need extra context. But it seems pretty clear that the context *is* one of sacrifice. After all, it's directly following a command "“Do not hold back offerings from your granaries or your vats." So, right next to a command to offer the first-fruit sacrifice from one's fields. And what exactly do you think "giving your cattle and sheep to God" would mean? Putting them in a holy petting zoo? No, it seems pretty clear that they're intended to be given as burnt offerings. Further context for the kind of thing we're talking about comes from Numbers 18:17:
"But the firstborn of a cow or the firstborn of a sheep or the firstborn of a goat you shall not redeem; they are holy. You shall dash their blood on the altar and turn their fat into smoke as an offering by fire[b] for a pleasing odor to the Lord"
So, an animal that *wasn't* redeemed (bought back from God) was to have its blood shed on the altar and its fat burned as a sacrifice. Yet further context is found in the very chapter you cited, Exodus 13. Just before the bit you quoted, it says (Ex 13: 12-13):
"12 you shall set apart to the Lord all that first opens the womb. All the firstborn offspring of your livestock that are males shall be the Lord’s. 13 But every firstborn donkey you shall redeem with a sheep; if you do not redeem it, you must break its neck."
This is because the donkey is an unclean animal according to ritual law, having a cloven hoof but not chewing the cud. Because of this, it is not suitable for sacrifice, yet its firstborn is still God's property. Therefore, if not redeemed, it must be put to death. The logic is quite clear - being "set apart to the Lord" inevitably requires being killed. If not, why does the unredeemed firstborn of a donkey need to be put to death?
Granted, there are alternative theories about the Covenant Code not being the earliest legislative code in the Bible, but those are fringe views. This doesn't automatically make them wrong, I'll grant - consensus doesn't mean correct. But it does mean that the majority of scholars who've made it their life's work to study this stuff aren't convinced by it. It seems to me that we should take very seriously the idea that it is in fact older than most of the Bible, as that seems more likely given what we know.
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DeleteI'm going to combine this response with a response to your paragraph further down regarding the "whole of the Pentateuch". I strongly reject any notion that you can appeal to such a thing, whether regarding the Bible as a whole or just the Pentateuch. That's the Presupposition of Univocality - the assumption that the Bible (or the Pentateuch, in this case) has one unified worldview and authorial position that can be appealed to. It quite clearly does not, being a patchwork composite of a huge variety of oral traditions, the product of hundreds of authors and possibly thousands of editors and redactors. I presume that you must believe in Mosaic Authorship if you view the Pentateuch as a unity? If so, hoo boy, you're in an extreme minority there. Correct me if I'm mistaken. Either way, unless you can somehow establish from something other than religious dogma that the Pentateuch possesses a unified character, there is no reason for anyone to accept the idea that it has an "overall view" to appeal to.
You *could* read the logic of the firstborn offering that way if you liked, I suppose. I think it's at least as plausible to read it as YHWH demanding his payment for liberating the Hebrews from slavery. He seems to be fond of payment in blood, what with all the talk of being pleased by fragrant offerings. I guess it depends on whether or not the Covenant Code is indeed older than the rest of Exodus. If so, then the strange circumlocutions in the rest of Exodus are most plausibly understood as attempts to get around the command to sacrifice your children without having to delete it from the Bible. On the other hand, if your view is correct, you need to explain why the instructions are so confusingly worded. Why is there a command that is most plainly interpreted as "kill your firstborn", and whose true intent cannot be understood without keeping in mind other instructions several chapters over, or even in different books? Hence my comment about God being incompetent at communication, because this is a very poor way to communicate anything. If I read a TTRPG sourcebook that was organized so poorly, I'd assume White Wolf had published it (which, in case you're not a turbo-nerd, means it gets a failing grade! :p)
(3/2 - turns out I needed three parts!!! oops!)
DeleteWhile we're touching on the Binding of Isaac, I'd suggest that it actually supports my position, rather than yours. Abraham is praised *for being willing to do the deed*, for *assenting* to child sacrifice. Notice that when God tells Abraham to sacrifice his firstborn, Abraham displays no horror or shock - indeed he doesn't even seem surprised, almost as if this is exactly the kind of thing that he expects God to demand of him. Furthermore, there are serious hints that Isaac actually *was* sacrificed, and that the scene with the ram at the peak is a later retcon intended to preserve the character of a cultural hero-ancestor whose actions were now incompatible with later moral developments. (Remember that we're dealing with a work that's been subject to literal generations of redactions and edits). Notice that during the narrative, every act is "and they went up", "and they did this", "and they did that". Then, after the scene at the summit, it says (Gn 22:19):
"19 So ***Abraham*** returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beer-sheba, and Abraham lived at Beer-sheba." (emphasis added)
Abraham returns, with no mention of Isaac, even though every prior action in the story clearly specified that they were traveling together. Almost as if Abraham returned from the mountaintop *alone*. In fact, Isaac drops out of the story completely for many chapters at this point, until a later tradition picks him up again. I'm not alone in this, there are Medieval Jewish traditions that actually do suggest the same thing (granted they add in a bunch of stuff about Isaac living in Heaven for years until being reconstituted from the dust of the Earth or something, but the point is that this viewpoint is not only plausible but precedented).
True, Numbers 18 is not commanding human sacrifice. That wasn't my point, my point was that Numbers 18 is yet another attempt to explain away the "give me your firstborn" command in a way that is not monstrous. I believe that the later Hebrews found this passage abhorrent but could not bring themselves to simply delete it, and so instead tried to build elaborate rationalizations around it to neutralize its effect.
Yes, Jeremiah is very insistent in stating that God didn't command child sacrifice. TOO insistent. Put it this way, if you were walking with a man and he said, unprompted, "Can you believe a man murdered a prostitute in this city last week? Which is something I've never done. Never crossed my mind, I swear!" you would be perfectly justified in thinking that he had murdered a prostitute before and was being compelled by a guilty conscience. *Especially* if he tripled down, insisting the same thing twice more in the next ten minutes. Besides, even if you ignore this, Jeremiah flatly contradicts Exodus in claiming that God *never* gave any commands regarding sacrifice when leading the Israelites out of Egypt (a fact that versions like the NIV try to obscure through deliberate mistranslation - that's also not the only such case in the NIV, but we don't have time to get into that).
I don't *need* to establish any 1-1 mapping between Ezekiel and precise events in the Pentateuch. Ezekiel is speaking in broad terms, and he is *unambiguous* that God did in fact command the Israelites to "pass their children through the fire". He just tries to justify it as a righteous punishment. This is an alternative approach, alongside Jeremiah's denial and the renegotiation/reinterpretation of the other books of the Pentateuch. No 1-1 mapping is present or necessary. Ezekiel says "God ordered you to sacrifice your children". It's as simple as that. It's an attempt to confront and justify Exodus 22. What else could it even *be*? At what other point in the Bible is there anything that could even be interpreted as a command to sacrifice your firstborn, especially connected to the time when God brought Israel out of Egypt?
@EXE
DeleteThanks for your answers. I see where you're coming from, but I'm still unconvinced.
Your main argument about Exodus 22:28-30 seems to be that, since the action "to give" applies to firsfruits, firstborn male and firstborn animals, then it must be the same action to all of them, i.e. sacrifice. But that does not follow. The verb "to give" means "transferring ownership to God": it has a cultic meaning, but it could be dedication/consecration, not necessarily sacrifice or burning.
Indeed I would say that different provisions are applied to the 3 categories above: 1) Firstfruits are offered, not "sacrificed". Maybe a small portion is burnt, as indicated in Leviticus 2. But if you say that Covenant Code is earlier and Pentateuch is not a unity then maybe we should ignore this, according to your method? In which case nothing is burnt at all. 2) Firstborn sons are consecrated and redeemed as indicated in Exodus 13 which is an earlier chapter in the same book. Provided that you accept the unity of Exodus at least! 3) Firstborn pure animals are sacrificed on the 8th day. The presence of an "8th day" provision hints that different provisions/modalities are applied i.e. there is a distinction between fruits/humans/animals.
About the "whole of the Pentateuch": no, I'm not particularly attached to "single authorship" thesis. Nevertheless, we don't know for sure how many sources are there and what is the chronology of all these sources so we can't completely disregard the rest of Exodus or the rest of Pentateuch either.
God does not seem incompetent to communication at all to me in Exodus 13. I notice that you didn't engage with the actual content of the whole chapter: the Egyptians were killing firstborn sons; God saved the Jews from Egypt; if it were not for God, now all your firstborns would be killed by the Egyptians; therefore, you "owe" them to God; an important ritual is instituted to give thanks to God and remember across generations that you wouldn't have your firstborn now if it weren't for God, hence make an offering to thank God. That is also the reason why the whole ritual is made at all. That's why firstfruits are offered unleavened, to remember how you escaped from Egypt, etc...
At this point you could say that you don't believe in the unity of Exodus, or that the child sacrifice existed first and then the Jews invented the whole story of Exodus only to justify it etc... but that would start sounding like a circular argument where only Exodus 22:29 exists and nothing else matters, so I won't follow you if you go there.
About Genesis 22: I reckon it is not just a way to show faith and extreme obedience to God, but also a shocking and impressive lesson to drive home the message that you shall not sacrifice your firstborn sons. That is more memorable that just giving a command. The single verse of Genesis 22:19 is not a sufficient proof of your thesis.
You say that "Isaac drops out of the story completely for many chapters at this point"?!? Isaac marries Rebekah in chapter 24! He disappears for only 1 chapter ;)
Jeremiah is very insistent because he's a prophet. That's their job. And Jeremiah's book is big.
Ezekiel 20:25-26 is not "unambiguous" about God "commanding" child sacrifice, in my opinion, but I admit that that would require another big discussion. But if you don't accept the unity of the Pentateuch or the Bible anyway, then I don't know if it's worth expanding on Ezekiel 20 that would require another big argument.
@EXE: you've been posting some interesting thoughts. A suggestion: consider as well how a proponent of classical theism might push back against your application of the term, "moral," to God. Thomists like Brian Davies maintain that God is not a moral agent, so the Problem of Evil disappears.
Deleteficinio4ml:
DeleteWell, I have a couple of thoughts about that. Firstly, if the classical theist wants to maintain Christianity specifically as opposed to simply "generic" classical theism, then that's definitely not gonna fly. There is no plausible way whatsoever to read the Bible and come away with the notion that the God described therein is "not a moral agent". Thinking otherwise requires you to allegorize practically every single description of God in the Bible, and I can't think of a valid reason why we should do that (and no, "we need to do so in order to make Christian Classical Theism work" is not a valid reason. Such an answer would be pure motivated reasoning).
But even if you were content to throw out Christianity, this solution seems to be mostly an attempt to just redefine the problem out of existence. In normal-person-speak, "not a moral agent" means that the subject cannot choose between right and wrong, either because they have no will/mind at all and therefore cannot be said to make choices of any kind (like an impersonal process) or that even if they do have a mind, they do not have free will in any sense, to the point that they could not have chosen other than they did (some religious traditions do view God this way, but Christianity has traditionally been very hostile to such schools of thought). I'm pretty sure that Classical Theism is not willing to admit either of these faults in its deity, and I am deeply skeptical that it is coherent to suggest anything could be "not a moral agent" in some third sense. It seems like an attempt to gerrymander/rules lawyer your way out of the problem rather than actually solving it. Why should anyone accept the definitions being used?
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DeleteRaffaele
Sure, the two *could*, hypothetically, be meant to be treated differently. But that's an incredibly awkward and unlikely reading of the text. If one thing were to happen to children and another to livestock, then it would make sense to *separate* the two actions and clearly distinguish them from each other, like, say, with two different verbs? It can't even really be a case of wordplay, because it doesn't even bother to repeat the verb, it's not said "give to me your children and also give to me your livestock", it literally just says "do the same with your livestock". It's extremely unusual to read one verb, applied to cover two different subjects in the same sentence, and interpret it as referring to two different actions. That's just not how normal speech works, or has ever worked.
I'l roll several points into one response - whether or not Exodus has "unity" depends on what you mean. There's a broad overarching narrative, but it's also very much a composite work. It's a piecemeal text patched together from multiple different oral traditions that covered a cultural legend that probably had lots of regional variations. In fact, the account of the Red Sea Crossing is so clearly two different stories being stitched together that it's one of the key bits of evidence that initially *proved* that the Bible was a composite work. The point I'm getting at is this; Exodus 13 being placed before Exodus 22 in the chapter list has nothing to do with it being written beforehand. It probably wasn't. The chapter numbers were decided (added, in fact) by later scribes and editors who were trying to organize the whole thing. Exodus 13 could very easily have been added later as a response to get around Exodus 22. No, I'm not suggesting the *entire story* was created just for this purpose, what I'm saying is that this commandment was either part of the original story or part of an ancient law collection that ended up getting thrown into the old story (much like the Tale of the Adulterous Woman wasn't part of the original Gospel of John but got thrown in there because people didn't want to throw it away and couldn't find anywhere else to put it). Later Hebrews found this part of the story to be offensive, but couldn't just delete the passage because it was too well-known, so they instead inserted new chapters into the story that allowed them to re-negotiate the meaning of that commandment into something less offensive.
Funny that you should mention the 8th day sacrifice as setting animals apart from humans. It sure would be inconvenient for your argument if there were some special ritual that you were mandated to perform on your newborn sons on the 8th day after they're born, wouldn't it?
In case anyone doesn't know what I'm referring to, this is the exact day that ritual circumcision is supposed to take place. I'm not the first person to suggest that in ancient times, the act of circumcision (at least within a Canaanite context) might very plausibly have originated as a kind of "substitute" for child sacrifice. IE, instead of cutting the child, you just cut off part of the penis and spill the blood that way. For arguments, see this page (search for the words "child sacrifice" and it'll take you to the part where it cites sources arguing this point):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brit_milah
(2/2) (I really gotta stop leaving such long comments...)
DeleteThere is additional support for this theory in the story of Zipporah at the Inn, a notoriously obscure passage that no apologist would touch with a ten-foot pole. This is Exodus 4:24-26, and occurs immediately after YHWH orders Moses to go and warn Pharaoh to let his people go.
"24 On the way, at a place where they spent the night, Yahweh met him and tried to kill him. 25 But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, touched his feet with it, and said, “Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!” 26 So he let him alone. It was then that she said “a bridegroom of blood,” because of the circumcision."
This passage is notorious because nobody has any clue what the heck it's talking about, and also for how utterly bizarre it seems to show Yahweh immediately trying to murder Moses in his bed for no apparent reason right after commissioning him and sending him away. Also, the grammar and pronouns are chopped up to hell and back, it's so badly written that it's unclear who is doing what to who. There's an extensive tradition of Rabbinic interpretation about this, but most of that relies on making dogmatic assumptions not found in the text. However, some modern scholars interpret this as yet another nugget of an ancient oral tradition that ended up being preserved in the text despite being weirdly at odds with what would later become Standard Judaism. In this argument, this passage is an ancient memory or explanation for the practice of circumcision and how it came to be used as a substitute for child sacrifice.
EXE,
Delete"(I really gotta stop leaving such long comments...)"
The problem is not that they are long, the problem is that they are cra-cra-crap. The blog owner probably experiences anxiety after reading so much inanities.
@EXE: I think the Thomist who follows thinkers like Brian Davies would say that God is not a moral agent because the aseity of God rules it out that there be standards of right and wrong independent of God, as there are for creatures. They might go on with Anscombe (who was not a Thomist in a strict sense) to say that morality is a degraded, post-Enlightenment notion trying unsuccessfully to do the work done in earlier centuries by the notion of law, i.e. divine or natural law. But God is subject to no law outside Himself. That's not true of creatures. So the Thomist would be bringing in, as often, the premise that we predicate predicates of God analogically not univocally.
DeleteI could have this wrong, though. I'm not a professional Thomist!
@EXE
DeleteI knew about circumcision and I suspected you would bring it up... but it applies to all males, not just to firstborn, doesn't it? But that would be yet another detour. Let's try to wrap up the discussion.
In short: I think you're overplaying the "antiquity of the Covenant Code" card to conclude "Exodus 22:29 commanded child sacrifice".
Firstly, I know that a big part of academia treats the Covenant Code as an ancient or independent legal block, but that does not entail that you can detach it completely from the Exodus narrative. Scholars disagree about the chronological and compositional relationship between the Covenant Code and the narrative, because there are a lot of things to explain. Why is the bread unleavened in Exodus 23:15, 18? Why the firstborn? Why a Covenant at all? The narrative about leaving Egypt in haste, saving firstborns from Egypt, etc... is hard to ignore.
Second, what's the deal with "firstborn"? Even embracing compositional views like Documentary model, JEDP, etc... the "firstborn" theme is so big across the whole Pentateuch. Was it all invented just to cope with Exodus 22:29? Or maybe there was already a wider "firstborn" tradition and Exodus 22:29 is just part of it? But then that tradition could also explain why the firstborn are redeemed? There's a lot of explanatory work to do here.
Third, the Hebrew verb natan ("give") does not itself mean "sacrifice." Exodus 22:29 does not say "slaughter," "sacrifice," "burn," or otherwise specify a procedure for the human firstborn. You need some positive evidence: silence is not enough. The Covenant Code is a terse, concise legal text where we can't expect to find too many details about execution and ritual. You're just dismissing all positive evidence that "natan" means "dedicating" in the rest of the Pentateuch as "later addition", but you have nothing positive to support your case. Lack of evidence usually means that an argument starts becoming circular.
Fourth, the Covenant Code itself distinguishes "giving" from explicit sacrificial terminology and gives cultic regulations in Exodus 23:15–19 without saying anything about humans. So... how were these firstborn children cooked exactly? Where's the corresponding sacrifical procedure? Probably you'll say that the verse was removed by later editors because too embarrassing... but this diachronic reconstruction of yours requires independent evidence and cannot be used to prove that "natan" = killing.
In conclusion: I kind of understand what you're trying to do. You are proposing something akin to reconstructing a diachronic history behind Exodus 22:29. But at the end all you've got is: the antiquity of the Covenant Code, the ambiguity of "natan" and an argument from silence. That's not enough evidence for an interpretation as highly specific as yours.
Appreciate your effort, Raffaele. I too agree that we're not likely to get much further here. To meaningfully progress would likely require the kind of professional scholarship chops that I, at least, certainly don't possess. I'll direct you to scholar Dan Mclellan's video compiling the evidence to take this position seriously, although he admits it is not at present the majority view. I strongly encourage you to watch it, it's very interesting:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGal4Q3ID0Y
There's a lot I could say, but to keep this simple, I'll just give my single strongest argument for why it should be interpreted this way: because every other author in the Bible who references this passage seems to believe that it *did* refer to a command of child sacrifice. Whether they're trying to justify it, deny it, or add things to it to reinterpret it, literally every author who has anything to say about it seems to start from the position that that's what it means.
Anyway, peace to you. I gotta go to bed.
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Deleteficino4ml,
Hmm. Interesting to think about. I've got a couple of issues with this (outside the obvious "I have no reason to think any of it is true"). Firstly, I reject out of hand any attempt to put God in this special category where He can both be "not a moral agent" and simultaneously have intellect, will, etc. I do not think it is even coherent to speak of such a thing. This just seems like another attempt to define away the problem. If God can think, make choices, and recognize good and evil, then He is a moral agent, and I don't think the vast majority of philosophers would disagree with that statement.
This all seems to fundamentally stem from a single issue: Thomism's understanding of "Goodness" is broken, and utterly divorced from the moral realities that we encounter as human beings every day. And this tension arises from the need to combine the Absolute Transcendence of the Thomist God with the properties that Catholic doctrine requires Him to possess (Goodness being the one that matters here). Any concept of "goodness" that we might have has to be derived from our own experience - we see things in the world that we experience as "good" (a father comforting us, or a friend helping us, or a beautiful painting, a delicious meal, etc) and derive our understanding of "Goodness" from that. "Good" means "like those things in some way". But since God is utterly transcendent and does not exist in the world at all, we can never have such an experience of God's nature (at least not in this life). But then there is no reason at all to suspect that our ideas of "goodness" map onto God *at all*. God's "Goodness" might mean something completely unlike all the things that we experience as good in this world. It might be something disgusting, agonizing, and terrifying. Why not? It has absolutely nothing to do with OUR experiences in the world, so it doesn't have to be anything like the things we call good. It could be instead like the things that we call evil, painful, horrifying, etc. We have no way of knowing either way.
(Cut for length, in Part 2 I will look at Aquinas' attempts to solve this issue)
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Deleteficino4ml
Aquinas attempts to bridge this gap through the idea of "Formal Participation", which is what the Fourth Way is about. In fact, the Fourth Way (or at least the general idea put forward in it) is crucial to the project of *natural* theology, because without it, it ends up being pretty much impossible to say anything about God's nature without appealing to Divine Revelation. Cliff's Notes version, Aquinas argues that everything that exists does so by virtue of being in some way like the thing that causes it. That is, to cause something involves a kind of "transfer" of form from one to the other, so we can reason backwards from the properties things have to conclude that God must be like that in some way. This is a funny way to think about causal interactions. It kinda sorta almost works if you squint a bit. Think about, say, a fender-bender. One car slams on its brakes unexpectedly, and another rear ends it. There’s a sudden stop, some paint scraping, and a big dent left behind on one of the vehicles. Where in this do we see an agent cause imparting its “form” to something receiving an effect?**
Maybe you might say that the "form" imparted in this case is more like the momentum or shape of the car or something. Maybe the car-shaped dent in the second car is what we're looking for? But it probably doesn't really look that much like the first car, so was the form really transferred or not? A Thomist might respond with "quidquid recipitur, ad modum recipientis recipitur" - "Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver". In other words, if the car didn't communicate its form very well to the other car, maybe that was just because the other car wasn't primed to receive it.
But taking this route has a fatal problem. The quidquid is a cop-out, because it absolves the Thomist of having to explain all the times where the theory doesn't work. If we analyze a causal interaction and formal participation explains it well, then good, evidence for the theory. If we analyze an interaction and formal participation DOESN'T explain it well, uh, well, that's just because the recipient wasn't "primed" to receive the form. This is an explanatory loophole, an excuse. "The theory works perfectly except when it doesn't". You can just handwave away all the evidence of the theory not working or describing reality. And that's BS. But without Formal Participation, then Aquinas' explanation fails, and we're back to square one again.
**Now before anyone jumps up and tries to say something like "cars are artifacts, they don't have substantial forms!", that doesn't matter. They have accidental forms (height, mass, etc) and that's all they need for this point. *All* causation needs to work this way, not just causing things to exist.
Also, ficino, might I suggest looking into Toni Alimi's Problem of Divine Domination? It's an interesting new problem proposed for Classical Theism, seeking to question how the Classical Theist God's relationship with humanity can ever be anything other than a relationship of Domination.
DeleteEXE,
DeleteTo meaningfully progress would likely require the kind of professional scholarship chops that I, at least, certainly don't possess.
You always admit that you're not equipped to engage in meaningful debate. Hilarious!
I don't think the vast majority of philosophers would disagree with that statement.
You have a weird, childish obsession with "majorities." Truth isn't any more or less "true" depending on how many people support it. Truth stands by itself.
You're philosophically immature.
EXE seems to be having diarrhea of the keyboard all over this blog. Will he/she never shut up??
ReplyDeleteEXE makes interesting points, often in opposition to the consensus on the thread, which others are free to read and reply to ( or not ) as the inclination takes them. Long may this continue.
DeleteYou however simply hurl abuse. Has it occurred to you that you are under no obligation yo read EXE's contributions, ley alone reply to them?
DeleteEXE is not interesting, just a standard purveyor of Woke1, something that even AOC pretends now to disavow. EXE happens to have a couple of things in common with the Thomas Massie/Margorie Taylor Green wing of the Republican party eulogized by Sohram Ahmari and perhaps some other postliberals. That wing represents very few conservatives.
It's nice to be appreciated :)
DeleteWow, all these Anonymi, my head is spinning. How many are there? Or is one dude playing us all? /s
DeleteI realize that some people don't want to comment under a screen name/handle, but it would make the interchange of views more patent if there were a way to distinguish more of the commentators from each other.
Man, Anon, for someone who finds me uninteresting, you sure do seem to think about me a lot! Thanks! Luv u bby <3
DeleteNo, EXE does not make interesting points. I will gladly hurl abuse at anyone who does not bother to educate themselves on the basic issues.
DeleteToo bad, Anon, you're outvoted. Two to one!
DeleteI don't have any sophisticated philosophical or theological arguments to add to the pro-life view. I did, however, see both my kids on sonogram, about three decades ago, at various stages of development. The earliest was at the one-month mark. They were, without a doubt, human and living at that point. I guess I'll invoke the "I know it when I see it" argument.
ReplyDelete@EXE: just this morning I happened to reread the passage in Lucretius that describes the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Agamemnon's "princeps," i.e. first-born, who made the king also a father. Such foul deeds, writes Lucretius, are dictated by "religio."
ReplyDeleteI'm coming back to this thread after a few days. Lots of things I'd have said have been said by others, most notably EXE, who, from the way he writes, seems to follow the lectures of the same Biblical scholar I do, Dr. Dan McClellan. So I'm going to add a few additional complements, based on the e-mails I got from Blogger, rather than replying thoroughly.
ReplyDeletea) The Old Testament makes a distinction between different aspects of the human constitution: breathing (nephesh), breath (neshamah) and wind (ruach). These tend to be translated by analogy as life, soul and spirit, but the connotation in Hebrew is very weird if we start from a Greek philosophical perspective, as they don't quite match.
Breathing (nephesh) is understood as a physical thing that exists in the blood, is part of it, and can be physically used, spent, given away (yes, one can become depleted of it, then regain later on), consumed as food, and the person may even become mentally ill if they consume excessive amounts of it. That's the stuff that gets formed together and as part of the body at conception, and kind of corresponds to what Aristotle is talking about as the "form of the body", though not exactly. In particular, it is *not* distinct from its equivalent in animals, and it dies with the death of the body.
Breath (neshama) is what makes a human, human. It's inserted by God, from without, into a human body that already has the basic in-the-blood breathing (nephesh) of animality. This bit is *not* part of whatever automatically happens in the womb, it's an active divine action, and is what makes the in-the-blood breathing a properly living breathing. While the human being is alive this part, which is *also* physical, resides on the nostrils. When the human being *who has it* dies, it leaves the body upon death and goes back to God, but it's distinct from God proper.
Wind (ruach) is the divine something that is imparting the in-the-nostrils breath (neshama) into the in-the-blood breathing (nephesh) body. It's the divine aspect that's lent to the person and allows them to perceive and interact with the divine, plus other things such as having a moral understanding of things. Like the breath (neshama), it goes back to God upon death, with the difference that, since the ruach (wind) is itself part of God, this gets reintegrated into God.
So, from a vetero-testamentary perspective, when Christians argue from an Aristotelian perspective, they fundamentally confuse breathing, breath and wind in ways that go against what the Biblical text itself says, as that one admits of a human body having only in-the-blood breathing (nephesh), both in-the-blood breathing plus the in-the-nostrils breath (neshama) that makes the first truly living, or all three, with the divine wind (ruach) making the in-the-blood plus in-the-nostrils breathing being a fully image-of-God person.
Small apart: post-Biblical Judaism developed the concept of additional levels beyond these three. Differently from the first three layers they don't come into the human person automatically, and acquiring/developing them require focused spiritual practice. The first three, though, are strictly from the Bible itself.
I cannot write more right now, and there are still a few dozen replies to read. I'll continue as soon as possible.
Yeah, Dan's a national treasure. I liked what I read of his monograph *YHWH'S Divine Images*, but I struggled to get beyond the first chapter. Attention issues suck -.-
DeleteYou have not remotely established that we should accept as normative the anthropology of Hebrew Bible.
ReplyDeleteSure, but assuming that you believe that the Hebrew Bible is a Divine Communication from the Supreme Creator of the Universe, it's kind of absurd to think that it wouldn't be normative, right? If you just view the Bible as a book written by people, like any other, then that's fine. But if it's the message of a loving and all-knowing God to those He cares about, why the blue hells does it have a false anthropology? Or cosmology, for that matter? If you deliberately taught your kids a grossly incorrect picture of how human beings and the world in general worked, you would rightfully be criticized for it. So why is God's Revelation limited to the scientific, cultural, and moral knowledge of the people and times that it first emerged in? That's what we would expect if *atheism* were true, not Christianity. On the other hand, if it contained provably true information that could not plausibly have been obtained via natural means at that time (say, highly advanced ethics, or technology, or even just an accurate description of the cosmos), that would be strong evidence for it being of Divine origin. In fact, Christians typically claim that is has in fact done so, in the form of prophecies of future events, so it's not as if they don't accept the basic idea I'm proposing here.
DeleteRemarkable. So many words for so many false assumptions. If Augustine of Hippo can say “yeah the Bible doesn’t literally describe the cosmos” a millennium and a half before the development of scientific criticism, I think we’re in good hands.
DeleteCan you provide a quote from Augustine for what you claim he said, please? I'd like to check. Can you explain what reasons Augustine gives for his opinion? Otherwise, this is just "Augustine thought so, so I don't need to understand or justify my position". That seems like nothing more than an excuse not to think.
DeleteAlso, didn't Augustine believe in a literal reading of Genesis? One where he applied some strange idea that God created all of reality instantly in eternity and then they just temporally "manifested" it progressively in six days? An idea which is literally just something he made up, with zero basis in the actual text at all.
EXE,
DeleteYou are contradicting yourself within the last paragraph, assuming that you meant "didn't Augustine believe in a literal reading of Genesis?" was a rhetorical question asserting that Augustine did believe in a literal reading of Genesis, which is the natural way of reading what you wrote. If Augustine did believe in a literal reading of Genesis, then it cannot have been "an idea which is literally just something he made up, with zero basis in the actual text at all," can it?
Bruh, Augustine's "literal" reading of Genesis is itself an allegory. It's "literal" in the sense of "ad litteram," based on the letter of the text. This is basic stuff. Would you also be amazed to learn that Origen said that anyone who took Genesis literally (in the modern sense) was simple-minded? Or that the Church Fathers frequently speak of the literal meaning of the Old Testament as a "disguise" (Gregory of Nyssa) or "curtain" (Maximus) that must be pulled back by the spirit (that is, by reading allegorically)? Or that Augustine himself said that, "Whatever there is in the word of God that cannot, when taken literally, be referred either to purity of life or soundness of doctrine, you may set down as metaphorical?" Or that the Apostle Paul says that "scripture slays but spirit makes alive?" What about Jesus's claim that the Law of Moses was accomodated to the hardness of human hearts? Yes, the fundamentalist understanding of inspiration makes Christianity a much easier target. But if you're too scared to play in the big leagues, just admit it. Because right now, you're playing tee ball and then declaring that you've won the World Series.
Delete..."and after killing thousands, inflicting enormous economic damage on the U.S. and the world, shredding American prestige, and likely destroying his own party."
ReplyDeleteI have to say Prof though as someone who often seconds your positions, You seem to talk about a democrat ruled America as if it were a livable reality.
I agree with your tweet, but I think, you should add things like, And as such will further culminate in the destruction of America under the democrats.
That would atleast point towards your understanding of how destructive the democrats are.
And for what it's worth, the fact that Trump has heavily pushed back on radical gender theory, and allowed conservatives to have a voice in places like the corporate sphere is to be appreciated and something that's worth preserving. Maybe you don't realise it because you are a professor and that job is not on the line for your mere opinions but for a lot it is and the republicans are their only hope (I am not saying Trump)
If the Dems come into power, it will be mayhem, they will pack the court, go after free speech rights, look at how Lila Rose is being attacked by organisations for speaking the truth.
I agree with all your critiques like getting hit by two nuclear bombs is not that much better then getting hit by one, and we shouldn't let Trump off the hook.
But while the republicans deserve to be punished, America ought to still be able to have some hope of continuing which might be possible only if there's a party that retains at least some connection to the ideal of God, Family and Country.
Don't you think so ?
Do you think America will continue to exist in the way it has if the Democrats come to power completely, if the republican party is destroyed.
If it is your view that even if Democrats come to power, it will just be that they may come for another 8 years and then there will be another change. And that the USA or whatever comes to be after the democrats are done with it, would still be inhabitable for conservatives and catholics. You are just wrong. They are targetting Lila Rose when conservatives are in power, imagine what the Dems would do. And they are living up.
If your view is instead that America will indeed be destroyed by the democrats but it is just the inevitable fate of liberal democratic societies, then I would say you should make that clear in your post and that you understand the gravity of it and you have just managed to come to terms with it.
That they will target and arrest pro lifers, kill even more babies, their main presidential candidate just froze her eggs for IVF, further the LGBTQ agenda, destroy all dissent and free speech rights, destroy the economy with their socialist policies, pack the courts, further the globalist agenda, spread abortion and the erosion of the family around the world, further the division in the country, refund the police, push conservatives towards red states, and fermenting the seeds of eventual civil war by hounding conservatives to the brink, then I feel you should just be forthcoming about it. And obviously Trump will in part be to blame for a lot of it. But it is sad.
Even I tend towards the latter view but I would approach it with a solemn acknowledgement of it's gravity ,not as nonchalantly as you often do, Prof. The literal death of a nation. If America is dying under Trump, the democrats will seal it.
And as I mentioned before you could temper this sobering truth with the promise of the next life.
@Norm: steady on, old chap!
DeleteYikes, bro. Imagine being this delulu. Seriously? ICE are murdering innocent people and locking people in concentration camps without due process, and you think YOUR SIDE is the one being persecuted? Lila Rose printed defamatory statements about random women, ones which got them harassed with death threats. One of the women, for instance, learned that her fetus had a terminal condition that would ensure it would not survive long, so she decided to have labor induced at 22 weeks, knowing but not intending that it wouldn't survive. By Wisconsin law, any ending of pregnancy after 20 weeks and before viability is legally considered an abortion, even though the mother did not intend to get an abortion. Lila Rose publicly called this woman a murderer. If you think being sued for this is "persecution", then you are bugnuts crazy. And screaming about how Dems will persecute you and put you all in prison - gods, I *wish* I had half the faith in the Democratic Party that you do. Personally, I want to see Trump and his entire gangster administration handed over to the Hague to stand trial for their war crimes (maybe their sex crimes too, if we have time left over). I'd even be willing to make an exception to my opposition to the death penalty in that instance.
DeleteGood comment Norm.
DeletePeople often think things couldn't get worse. They can and will if you don't take the wins you can and work toward more wins without undoing the wins you have.
"And screaming about how Dems will persecute you and put you all in prison - gods, I *wish* I had half the faith in the Democratic Party that you do."
DeleteI have had many a amicable discussion with many people who vehemently disagreed with me. And the exhanges could get fierce. Never have I encountered someone who wants to arrest me for it... This is a first
EXE,
Delete"Knowing but not intending that it wouldn't survive."
If you induce labor *knowing* that the foetus will die, how could you not 'intend' for it to die??
1. B1 (Oxford dictionary) "Intend'": [intransitive, transitive] to have a plan, *result* or purpose in your mind when you do something.
If you *know* the result, you can't 'not intend' for it. They both go hand in hand.
Your brain is a dumpster, bro! A typical product of evolution. Wow!
Well, Norm, I can clearly see that you're scared and paranoid, and I don't think anything I could ever say would change that. I could point out that Dems have been in power plenty of times before without destroying everything, in fact they usually fix the economies that Republicans break. I could point out that most Democrats would still fight to defend your right to spew the hate they disagree with fiercely. But hey, who cares, y'aint ever gonna accept that. So instead let me just tell you that you're right to be scared. Clearly you can see the writing on the wall and are shaking in your boots. Good. The Socialists are on the rise, and this Second Gilded Age is going to lead to a backlash of a magnitude not seen since the FDR Era. Your bloated, corpulent Orange God is not long for this world, given his extreme age, poor health, and mental decline. When he dies, the Cult of Personality that the GOP has become will dissolve with him. What will you do then, poor soul, lost without your Living God? I'll tell you what will happen. The Socialists will take power, and they will fix the colossal mess that you and your kind have made, and then they will set about building a better world for everyone, yes, even for you and yours who hate them. But you will not be happy, because your "freedom" to oppress other people will be taken away, and you can't very well live without that. The GOP will be unelectable for a generation at least, much as they were after the New Deal. They will either change or go extinct, I know not which. At the same time, your backwards ideology will gradually become more and more unpopular, making anyone still willing to hold to it even more of a social pariah. Your children will move away from it, as the younger generations regard it as increasingly weird and bizarre. Even the conservatives of tomorrow will be arguing that we should support trans folk, they will just draw the line at some other arbitrary point (maybe transhumanism or something). Point is - buckle up, buttercup. It's all downhill from here (for you, anyway).
DeleteIf you have read what I wrote, I precisely mentioned that what is gone wrong in the country is precisely because of Trump, And you would notice that I agree with a lot of Prof's criticism's.
DeleteFrom where would you get the idea that I worship him beats me.
It is clearly you who are paranoid and it looks like I am living rent free in your head given your off topic vile responses towards people who have been nothing but charitable in responding to you on the blog and your desire to seek the law on me.
Get some help EXE.
Even if the future is dystopian as I mentioned above, we have eternal life to look forward to.
That is why your authoritarian impulses will never break our spirits and that is why a lot of us still try to engage with you in charity because no matter how vile you get, we can still appeal to your rationality in hopes that you may be saved. I will pray for you.
Bye EXE.
All very true. I would ask one question of CS Lewis though: couldn't the "extra dislike of the one error," namely this Democrat Maura Healey signing a horrendous law- actually lead us to fight the other error too- Trump's concessions to the pro-abortion side?
ReplyDeleteHi again, all. It's unfortunate that I'm overwhelmed with work and cannot reply to the individual messages making interesting points. I'll continue with some more general remarks then.
ReplyDeleteb) The verse in Exodus about miscarriage during a fight *can* be forcefully interpreted in a way that means a woman giving premature birth due to trauma but the baby surviving. This is a very unlikely interpretation because premature births at the time had an almost 100% chance of the baby dying. Besides, that one verse would go counter the then breathing/breath/wind worldview common to the entire Middle East, and shared by the early Hebrews, plus the quite evident fact this law is copied (badly translated in fact) from surrounding law codes, and in those it's clearer.
Also, due to the somewhat garbled Hebrew version, when that verse was in turn translated into Greek, that translation became further divorced from the original due to two main factors: first, the influence of Greek philosophy, with its similar but not quite compatible concepts of psyche/pneuma substituting for those of traditional Semitic nephesh/neshama/ruach and, second, that of Hebrew "ason" (usually injury, mischief, but in context miscarriage) being taken as a related to the Greek "soma" (body), from which resulted, after some creative interpretation by the LXX translators, "exeikonismenon", "completely formed", rather than the proper miscarried. This then fed back into Hellenistic Judaism further passing things through the lens of Greek philosophy, into the adoption of the quickening criteria.
And from that sequence of mistakes one compounding into the next resulted the Christian concept of a fetus not needing first to breathe to then become, through divine imparting, a... not "ensouled", since that *isn't* what the Bible talks about, but rather properly *enruached* being, thus a person, thus someone capable of being murdered, since before their enruaching they are mere property.
Now, that doesn't mean abortion was acceptable. A living (nephesh-ed) human body without a living (neshama-ed) wind (ruach) was still a human body capable of being enruached, and depriving God of his act of enruaching it by allowing it to be born and breathe in his ruach was definitely a no-no. Still, it was a minor sin, different from the major one of forcefully taking the life/breathing (neshama) of someone *already* enruached.
And here it's worth making a comment on the differences between the Greek-derived and the old-Semitic views on this. The Greek-derived view puts a lot of emphasis on the potential for something "to become" as "already being". The Semitic view recognizes the potential, but it places way more emphasis on the "being". In the abortion discussion this shows quite clearly. For Christians, an embryo/fetus having the potential to become a fully developed human being means it *is* a fully developed human being, it's just that this full development already is there in potency, not in act, and the eventual transition from potency into act is a minor side detail. In contrast, the Semitic view is that *when* that becomes act, *then* it's valued as act, not before.
Will continue with "b2".
Indeed. That's not the only example either - the LXX's choice to render Isaiah 7:4's "almah" as "virgin" rather than the far more likely "young woman" is arguably responsible for the entire tradition of the Virgin Birth. Hebrew already had a more specific word for virgin ("betulah"), so it's very unlikely that Isaiah is trying to say that the woman is virginal. Which means that a core Christian doctrine is based on a mistranslation!
DeleteGood grief, will you never learn?? The fact that there was no visible anticipation of the virginal conception in the Hebrew Scriptures is one of the strongest pieces of evidence in favor of the credibility of the tradition when it appears in Christian writings.
DeleteSo, an idea having *no* basis in prior Jewish tradition makes it *more* likely to be true, rather than simply being something the New Testament Authors made up? How's that work? Don't you guys usually make the opposite claim, that being prophetically foreseen is proof that it's true?
DeleteAnd no, the point is that there *is* anticipation of it in the Hebrew Bible...but *only* if you read the Septuagint specifically. Which is the only version of it that the writers of the NT would have been familiar with. The fact that they made a mistake that you would only make if you knew the Septuagint but not the original Hebrew is *evidence that they were not divinely inspired*. Unless you think the Greek translation is the True Word Of God and the Hebrew is corrupt (this ridiculous position was actually quite popular among people like Justin Martyr, who seriously tried to argue that the Jews had mutilated the Torah in order to cut out verses that prophesied Jesus. Funnily enough, this is exactly the same claim Muslims make against Christianity!)
Continuing from "b1":
ReplyDeleteb2) What I find most interesting in this is that the old-Semitic view is more compatible with modern biology than the Greek-derived one. Modern biology shows there are no essences, only accidents (processes). Everything is in constant flux, and essences can only be discerned as slices of those processes, abstracted from the processes themselves, taken as real in themselves, then applied back to the processes as if they were at their root. Developing this would take more time than I have, so I'll leave it at this for now. Hopefully I'll be able to add more later or another day.
Two minor comments before closing part "b":
@EXE: Despite the command in Genesis commanding child sacrifices to Yahweh, there's no archeological evidence of child sacrifices having ever been practiced among the Hebrews. It'd seem this commandment was a traditional left-over from a time way before the Hebrew people existed as such, and pretty quickly reinterpreted and overruled during their earlier days.
As for the appendix, over the last several years its function was discovered. It functions as a reservoir of healthy bacteria for when something destroys the bacteria the gut depends on. After the illness passes, it releases the good bacteria and those quickly fix the issue, repopulating the intestine. Hence, referring to it doesn't provide a good example of evolution producing faulty effects. In fact, evolution is quite efficient. In a constrained way, but efficient all the same, even when it doesn't look like it at first.
@Alexander Gieg: you wrote, "Modern biology shows there are no essences, only accidents (processes)."
DeleteI am waiting to see whether you get pushback to your denial of essences. The generality of commentators on here, as well as Prof. Feser (if I understand him aright) would reply that if you deny essences, your worldview (or whatever we call the bundle of propositions you hold) collapses into incoherence. They might add that your view about essences is not established as true by biology but is a philosophical position. But maybe you are a Heraclitean.
"Modern biology shows there are no essences, only accidents (processes). Everything is in constant flux, and essences can only be discerned as slices of those processes, abstracted from the processes themselves, taken as real in themselves, then applied back to the processes as if they were at their root."
DeleteAppreciate you finally discarding the sophistic camouflage and just confessing the hidden premises your previous statements rested on.
Huh. I wasn't aware that we'd discovered that the appendix had a useful purpose. Interesting! OK, so that's no longer a good example. But that doesn't negate the fact that we're still full of things which, if they were deliberately designed, would be bad designs - or at the very least, things that we would want to change. I would consider something that makes the individual human's life worse to be bad, even if it somehow was a net positive for the survival of the species as a whole.
DeleteGood point about the lack of direct archaeological evidence of child sacrifice. That might suggest that the practice was not actually very common. However, there is still a lot of academic debate about, say, whether the Tophet sacrifices were offered to YHWH, as well as pointers to an old tradition of this in various places. The Binding of Isaac, obviously, but also Jephthah's willingness to sacrifice his daughter, and Micah 6:6-7, where the author is rhetorically wondering what kind of sacrifice he could possibly offer to make up for his sins. The author's actual solution is to not do so and to instead do good, but the list of sacrifices starts with ordinary offerings (a year-old calf), gets progressively more lavish (thousands of rams, 10,000 rivers of oil), and then culminates with the author's own firstborn son. Obviously in Micah's case this is rhetoric, meant to show that good deeds are far more important than extravagant offerings, but it still shows a firstborn sacrifice as *the same kind of thing* as the offering of a calf of great quantities of oil. A *good* act, albeit an extreme one. Given the rhetorical purpose that Micah is aiming at here, it would make no sense to conclude the list with something that he regards as a great evil. It would make no sense to suggest, even as rhetoric, that one might be able to atone for sins by doing something evil, nor would it make sense to conclude a list of increasingly extreme but all morally valid sacrifices with something the author would regard as an abomination. Thus, this might well point at an ancient tradition of human sacrifice to YHWH, albeit one that probably would not have been done regularly and only in extremis.
I finished reading all the comments so far, and I have a little bit of free time at work now, so here go a few direct replies:
Delete@ficino4ml: As you can see from @Vini Tadeo's reply, the pushback arrived right on mark. :-)
I've studied enough of Eastern-based meontologies that my own perception is that lack of essences is inconsequential: things keep working consistently exactly as much either way. Adopt one set of premises, this world results. Adopt the other set of premises, this world results. Hence, as far as I'm concerned at least, meontological and ontological arguments cancel out, making the choosing one or the other a matter of personal preference and style.
But that's not the point I'm making. From contemporaneous biology's perspective, "life" is a process that started at the onset of the first set of self-replicating clump of matter, whose self-replicating was subject to selective pressures. It started and then keept carrying on in the form of replicants giving rise to other replicants giving rise to other replicants. And that's it: there's nothing carrying the process forward other than the process itself.
You and me are thick slices taken from within this big process. If we have descendants, they carry on the process at a certain level of complexity. If we don't, the animals and plants that eat us after our deaths carry it on at a lower level of complexity. The process itself keeps going. If at some point Earth is sterilized, then the process ends.
Zoom in enough, and you see at the base level DNA and RNA molecules taking non-stop part of the process. Zoom out enough, and you see the entire biosphere as this process in action. Zoom somewhere in middle, and we bigger and smaller slices we give practical names to: species, individuals, civilizations, cultures. All so many slices of the replication process.
Attributing reified essences to any part of it, from a current scientific perspective, doesn't add anything useful to it, as they cannot deal with statistical distributions and transitional events within the process. They're seen as fat that, when cut, doesn't change anything.
Nothing of that means essences don't exist. It's just that arguing for them on the basis of old concepts of nature, as Thomists do, doesn't work anymore.
Arguably one might, maybe, re-develop them, or something akin to them, from Platonically reifying statistical analysis, but I'm not aware of this having been attempted yet.
For the record, processes are present in all contemporaneous sciences, from physics upwards. It's a common feature. Biology is simply the area on which people feel the most resistance to it when they learn of it.
@Vini Tadeo: A troll reply is characterized by two core traits:
1. It's short, frequently much shorter, than the original post the troll is replying to.
2. It attempts to induce an emotional reaction on the person being replied to, so as to induce them to react emotionally.
Needless to say, it doesn't work on me. In fact, this reply of mine isn't directed at you, rather, it's to teach others how they, too, can start easily detecting trolling.
@EXE: Agreed. In regard to examples, a good one are the blind spots caused by our optic nerves crossing our retinas, followed by our brains actively hiding their existence from us.
Weird, almost everyone in the modern world denies the existence of "essences" in the Thomistic sense, and they seem perfectly capable of creating coherent worldviews. So, I guess they mustn't have gotten the memo that their worldviews totally collapse into incoherence. Strangely, these worldviews still seem perfectly capable of describing the world - much better than the Thomistic one, actually, because they are able to actually predict things and have those predictions be tested. They work surprisingly often!
DeleteModern biology just does not accept essences. They are not useful ways of categorizing the world. You can be as angry as you like about this fact, but that's not gonna convince even one single biologist that they ought to be a Thomist. Now, how can this be? Is everyone except the Thomists stupid? Or...maybe, just maybe, the Thomists are *wrong* about something? Nah, impossible. Millions of scientists and philosophers must all just be idiots.
EXE,
Delete[Huh. I wasn't aware that we'd discovered that the appendix had a useful purpose.]
Before trying to use biology to support your flimsy philosophy, you should verify that your assertions are backed up.
That's what intelligent people do.
@Alexander Gieg
DeleteIt was not a troll comment. It was a compliment. It spared us the labor of wading through the logorrhea you produced while casting yourself as a superior intellect—an image you fall conspicuously short of sustaining.
A word of counsel for the future: refrain from burdening others with extended discourse that merely assumes a metaphysical position rather than defending it. One must first argue for a claim before elevating it to the status of metaphysical reliability. Simply invoking “modern science says” ex nihilo does not constitute an argument.
This is among the most elementary requirements of philosophical practice—one you have, regrettably, failed to meet.
Incidentally, I regret that my earlier remark proved so unsettling to you.
EXE(cute)
Deleteirony
noun
iro·ny ˈī-rə-nē also
ˈī(-ə)r-nē
plural ironies
the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning
EXE,
DeleteWeird, almost everyone in the modern world denies the existence of "essences" in the Thomistic sense,
Weird, almost everyone in the ''modern'' world doesn't have a clue about Thomism and know next to nothing about the tradition. Weird, almost everyone who tries to "debunk" Thomism ends up attacking some strawmanned version of the arguments ("hey dude, if everything has a cause, what caused dah Gawd?") Weird, almost everyone who denies the existence of "essences" in the Thomistic sense doesn't even know what they're "denying." You being a prime example of said "almost everyone."
But hey, you could try to impress us by putting forward an argument as to why essences in the Thomistic sense aren't real.
A friendly hint: "cos' everyone says so" isn't a valid rebuttal. "Cos' it's an old idea and old ideas are automatically wrong" isn't one, either. Good luck, kid!
Attributing reified essences to any part of it, from a current scientific perspective, doesn't add anything useful to it,
DeleteIf species depend on how we think about them or “carve up” them (instead of depending on their own intrinsic configurations), then this makes "species" a mind-dependent rather than a real feature of nature.
And something that isn't real in nature, can't "evolve", just as unicorns can't "evolve", because they aren't real entities.
And that's damaging for science, because then evolutionary theory is more of a psychological enterprise than a science of "what happens out there."
So, yes, grounding biological science and making it a coherent enterprise does a lot for it.
Unfortunately, the Trump/Vance position is an inevitable result of Conservatism, as proclaimed by Burke, Scruton and Kirk. For all of them, natural law is either non-existent, represents a state of savagery, or must not determine social conventions. Instead, society is all. Conservatism's claim to differ from liberals and revolutionaries is that it insists on its social change being evolutionary and determined by society, not by reason or universal principles. Given time, therefore, Conservatism will arrive, not only at unrestricted abortion, but gender ideology.
ReplyDeleteConservatism as practiced by those who conserve the dogma, tradition, practice, theology and philosophy of the Church (like Aquinas, Bellarmine, Vianney, etc) believed in natural law as established by God through forming human nature. And that society (including its conventions) is a necessary outflow of that nature, in which some aspects are accidents of history and other aspects are necessary from the seed of human nature itself. They still insist on social conventions being sometimes changeable, but discern that many conventions must not be changed, and others must not be changed except for overwhelming necessity, which usually is not present, while others may be changeable according to society's preference. Given time, this Conservatism will defeat both left and right liberalism.
DeleteMy third set of comments.
ReplyDeletec1) One common aspect of the pro-life vs pro-choice argument, in this long thread and elsewhere, are appeals, by both sides, to rational arguments for why a unborn human being is or isn't a moral person with rights on par with born human beings.
What I notice is that, for both sides, their side's argument is based on a strong moral intuition that the arguments put forward merely make explicit and confirm, whereas the other side's reasoning is either a set os misguided faulty reasonings that clouded the other's self-evident moral intuitions, or bad-faith arguments rationalizing malignant intentions the other side deliberately refuses to acknowledge.
Both are incorrect in this. The matter of fact is that there are two different sets of moral intuitions powering the two sets of arguments.
For one side, it's obvious fetuses are full human beings, and everything else follows from this. If they're neither socio- nor psychopathic, they then are outraged at the obvious murdering of obviously human beings, and cannot understand why someone would want to do something so horrible as allowing such a free-for-all murdering. Those who defend this murdering or, worse, commit it, cannot but be evil beyond measure!
For the other side, it's obvious fetuses aren't full human beings, and the same applies. Those with this moral intuition who are neither socio- nor psychopathic are in turn outraged at the obvious injustice involved in the severe oppression and punishing actual human beings all the way into imprisonment if not the death penalty, for doing something as harmless and inconsequential as dissolving a piece of non-essential tissue. Those who defend these disproportionate injustices or, worse, commit them, cannot but be evil beyond measure!
No *argument* from one side can convince someone with the other moral intuition, because moral arguments divorced from their sustaining moral intuitions always sound like meaningless verbiage. The words and the sentences are clear enough, sure, and the concepts can be understood, but they don't *mean* anything. What carries meaning is *only* that which agrees with, and draws from, one's pre-existing moral intuitions.
However, there's a second phenomena involved in this in that nurture can cause one to develop quasi-intuitions as second nature. Someone from the first group may, if they live in an environment of the second type, come to accept that fetuses aren't "really" human beings. They will still be somewhat disgusted by abortion, but they will feel this disgust is somehow incorrect, and decide that they won't practice abortion themselves. Conversely, someone from the second group may develop, when living in an environment of the first type, accept that yes, abortion is murder, but not truly feel it, in which case they won't personally care that much regardless, but express opposition if asked due to social conformity.
This leads to an interesting observation about what happens if people are left to develop their first nature's moral intuition unhindered. The way acceptance of abortion spreads and become normalized when not actively blocked by those of the opposite moral intuition, plus historical precedent going back millennia, plus results of trolley-style tests (example below), suggests to me the second type are the most numerous by far, that is, the default moral intuition is that fetuses aren't full human beings.
Continues.
I'm capturing an above quote here for response to this because it's closely related:
DeleteBut that's not the point I'm making. From contemporaneous biology's perspective, "life" is a process that started at the onset of the first set of self-replicating clump of matter, whose self-replicating was subject to selective pressures.
You need to separate biology hypothesis from what biological science has proven. There is no clear and uncontroverted evidence that "life started" the way you suggest, it's a hypothesis, (and even that hypothesis cannot exclude that it might have started independently many times). Many biologists NOW are stepping back from that hypothesis as being less plausible than it was when first proposed.
Secondly, no typical biologist, even ones that strongly affirm the hypothesis, hold that just because "life" started way back and all current living things descended from that primordial start, that this implies one way or another whether there are DISTINCT living beings. Nobody thinks that Child A and Child B are parts of a single living being, parts of the parental being. From this fact, it becomes necessary to at least think about the process by which parents engender a new being that is a DISTINCT being from themselves, and when the "distinction" is real and definite. While there was plenty of debate about it before microscopes, biologists do not any more dispute that a egg + sperm fully integrated cell with its unique DNA and genes is a distinct biological being. Certainly doctors don't carry on any dispute about that, for humans.
You can have all the remaining arguments you want about whether that conceived cell / zygote is a "person" with moral or political "rights", that's fine. You can have 2 sides claiming all sorts of reasons for and against - both from their intuitions and from their philosophies or theologies, OK. But there isn't any dispute about the bare biological fact that the new one-celled thing is neither parent, and is human, and has all of the information needed to become a mature human being without new parental DNA input, and when mature it will retain the same DNA and genes that it had as a 1-celled thing. To refrain from calling it a "human" because it's not a finished human gets you into so many basic logical problems that refusing to call it a human basically forces people to end up not calling born babies "human" either (as we have seen happen) - and trends towards trying to dissolve the idea of "human" altogether. There are plenty of pro-choice people who say that the logic of calling it "a human" is sound, they just deny it has the rights asserted for it by pro-life side.
You have a point about first intuitions versus secondary (developed) intuitions, but your conclusion from it is problematic. I agree that without some kind of "nurture", most people would not view the death of a 1-month fetus with the same tragic horror as that of a 1-year old baby.
But it is bad moral reasoning to RELY on unaided first intuition. First, many aspects of our moral sense NEED to be developed by nurture, (if only because we need more facts than we are born with). But more, many generally acclaimed moral truths require developed thinking, like (just to pick 2) (a) that we should view outsiders as part of our (extended) family, not as aliens to be enslaved or killed. And (b) do not do moral evil that good should come of it (the ends does not by itself justify the means). The errors for both of these had persuaded most peoples, for millennia. Given that we know moral correctness of intuition takes nurture, we can't rely on "but most peoples have felt this way" as anything more than a starting point for discussion.
Continuing, as the full reply was too long.
ReplyDeletec2) Trolley-style tests show this by overcoming instances of second nature moral quasi-intuitions. One I read about a while ago asks the person to imagine they're in front of a medical building on fire. The building is almost collapsing, but there's still time to enter the building to save something. They have time to run into it and save one, and only one, of these: either an IVF cryogenic cylinder with frozen embryos in it which, if saved, would allow anywhere from 10 to 100 children to be born, or a baby who's crying on a hospital cradle. Almost all respondents, even those explicitly pro-life, answered they'd leave the IVF cylinder behind and save the crying baby instead. In ancient terms: for most human beings, one *breathing* human being is worth more than hundreds of human beings who aren't, the exact same moral intuition underlying the Old Testament view on breathing/breath/wind.
A part "d" may follow.
This trolleys-style problem can also be interpreted the other way. The fact that many people would choose to save the baby other than the cylinder with frozen embryos shows a baby is a natural object of concern while the frozen cylinder does not register as strongly. In other words, frozen embryos are unnatural and should never have been frozen in the first place.
DeleteJust like the trolley problem the issue is with the setup. It is a choice that is attempting to show something, but why must that choice be accepted as given?
@NLR That's how moral research is done. Psychologists present people with conceptual situations, or observe them taking part in them, and record what they say.
DeleteThere are subtle aspects on this. In addition to "what" they answer to a question, it's also usual to record "why" they answered it like that, and to observe "how" they answer it (for example, the depth of the reasoning provided). From this what constitutes morality for humanity as a whole emerges: average positions, average level of complexity, the distributions of divergences around the averages, long tails, clusters of positions, common themes crossing such clusters, etc.
In the case of embryos vs born babies, everything I've looked points to a common denominator of born babies being seen as way, way more important than unborn ones, though the difference in status blurs the closer the unborn one gets to birth.
From this perspective, the radical pro-life position that considers even a recently fertilized egg as being on the same level of importance as a newborn baby, no distinction whatsoever, is on a long tail, way away from the average. The other long tail would be something like, say, considering a 5yo old as no more valuable than a dog given it's only as intelligent as the smartest dog.
Interestingly horrifying side note:
Baby sacrifices seem to have arisen, in the societies that practiced them, as an attempt, by those on the second long tail of the above curve, to reduce infant mortality rates.
The idea, as discussed by modern scholars, seems to have been that, as everyone experienced extreme levels of miscarriages and infant mortality rates (many cultures didn't even give them names before they survived past some threshold), those were attributed to the gods' wrath. So, they reasoned, if a couple were to voluntarily give up their firstborn in sacrifice to a miscarriage-inducing/infanticidal god, the god might be placated enough to allow the couple to have more surviving children than typical. They lost one so the next fifteen might live.
To follow on NLR's comment: it is problematic to present a problem like this as if it were proof that the people saying they would "save the child" (for the hospital example) are clearly saying they would act that way in spite of what their principles say, because "that's not pro-life". but if some principled pro-lifers would argue rather that there is sound principle to save the child rather than the embryos, then the "example" shows nothing of importance. And it doesn't really matter that many of those people have some trouble articulating exactly how the principle says "save the child", most people aren't moral philosophers but they still have a (correct) sense of many of the principles anyway.
DeleteAnd even more, people can have a (correct) moral sense of the principles, and simply apply them incorrectly because of faulty thinking, either WITH or WITHOUT that fault arising due to emotional input. Some of the interactions of principles are rather difficult to sort through, and it's not hard to make a mistake that says nothing about the quality of your basic moral intuitions.
I cannot believe that so many days have passed and people are still wasting their ruach making arguments that rest on the fallacious assumption that Christians are somehow bound by the primitive metaphysics of the Old Testament. I know there's a cottage industry of Biblical scholars who spend far too much time making "gotcha" arguments aimed at fundamentalists about whether YHWH has (checks notes) a body or a wife or would have voted Republican, but not all Christians are fundamentalists or Republicans, and if any aspect of Christian belief actually stands or falls on whether the ancient Hebrews would have agreed with its underlying metaphysics, there are much bigger fish to fry than abortion. Y'know, like the fact that Old Testament theology is, taken from a historical-critical perspective, incompatible with classical theism and Nicene Christianity. Again, though, big whoop. Nobody denies that the fundamentalists are easy targets, but nobody would assume they're a great shot just because they would hit a sitting duck at five paces.
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