Stand to Reason Blog

Will Right and Wrong Always Be Obvious?

A person doesn’t have to know the Bible in order to know right and wrong, right? Well, yes and no. It all depends on what value system is being fed to that person by society. A society saturated in a Christian understanding of morality will reinforce that understanding, even among its atheists. A society without the background of Christianity behind it will enforce a different understanding of morality. Atheists have the mistaken idea that objective morality is simply obvious to everyone, but the truth is, it’s not. All one has to do is look back through history (and in other cultures today) to see that this is so. Our damaged consciences are malleable.

Is murdering your child right or wrong? Ask these mothers in India, where it’s commonplace in some areas to let your girl die if you prefer a boy. Ask pre-Christian cultures. This is why I think atheists are being far too hasty when they argue that Christianity is expendable—unnecessary for a good society. If we see atrocious moral crimes in cultures not influenced by Christianity, we have no reason to think our current standards will continue in a culture that rejects Christianity.

Case in point:

You might recall that British politician, Colin Brewer, who last year said that disabled children should be killed to save taxpayer money. You might recall that at the time he apologized and stepped down in disgrace. But you probably didn't know that he was re-elected to his old seat this year. And he's at it again.

This time, he reportedly compared disabled children to deformed lambs that need to be culled. In an interview with none other than the Disability News Service, Councillor (yeah, they spell it that way) Brewer said that perhaps we should be treating disabled children like the runt of a litter of lambs which are often disposed of by smashing them against the wall.

‘If they have a misshapen lamb, they get rid of it," he said. "They get rid of it. Bang."

Bang? That's sound fiscal policy, huh? And that's what it is, according to Brewer. He said that disabled people are just too expensive to care for so some may just have to go.

"We are just animals," Brewer continued. "You can’t have lambs running around with five legs and two heads. It would be put down, smashed against the wall and be dealt with."

As I’ve written before, intrinsic human value has to be taught. A society’s view of the human person and its value will affect what that society views as being moral: We are just animals. Imperfect animals aren’t worth the trouble. Therefore, there’s a case to be made for killing them rather than caring for them. That conclusion reasonably follows from the non-Christian premise. As Christianity fades in influence and a different view of the human person gains acceptance, don't expect that our society will continue to recognize that conclusion to be immoral. At that point, people will still consider themselves to be perfectly moral…but only because they’re judging themselves by a different standard of morality.

It’s difficult for us to recognize the depth our depravity when “everyone else is doing it.” Ask Gosnell’s nurses. Only the truth can awaken and sharpen our consciences, and for that to happen, the truth has to be heard and esteemed.

For now, there’s an outcry brewing against this politician in the UK, and that’s a good sign. But it’s not as if he’s a lone voice out there (see Peter Singer). As our belief in intrinsic human value wears away, we should expect to see more like him. Just consider this:

But here's the thing – [Brewer] was just re-elected earlier this month to his old seat. That means that being pro-infanticide and culling the disabled is no longer a deal breaker in European politics.

Scott Klusendorf's Anniversary Greeting

Scott, who is now with Life Training Institute but was with STR for several years, made this video greeting that was played at the Biola Apologetics anniversary conference.  We really appreciated his comments and reflection.  In truth, what he says is due in large part to his time at STR.

 

Links Mentioned on the Show

The following are links that were either mentioned on this week's show or inspired by it, as posted live on the @STRtweets Twitter feed:

• Kermit Gosnell to Get Life Sentence

• 20th Anniversary Conference on-demand video

• Scott Klusendorf's Anniversary Greeting

• The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything by Fred Sanders

• The Bible: Fast Forward by Greg Koukl

•  Five Bad Ways to Argue about Abortion by Scott Klusendorf

• Should Women Teach in Church? by Greg Koukl

Listen to today's show or download any archived show for free. (See past links here.)

To follow the Twitter conversation during the live show (Tuesdays 4:00-7:00 p.m. PT), use the hashtag #STRtalk.

The Morality of Cloning (Video)

What should Christians think about the morality of cloning?

New Pro-Choice Tactic Equivocates on "Life"

As a follow-up to last week’s post on the article arguing that the unborn are human lives “worth sacrificing,” it’s important to note that the latest tactic being used by pro-choicers is to equivocate on the word “life”—using it to refer to both the mother’s life situation and the unborn child’s life—in order to make it appear as if the moral claim of the unborn (to live) is equal to the moral claim of the mother (to have the life she wants).

I’ve noticed people making this move lately—for example, this man from MSNBC: “In some ways that choice [to abort my child] saved my life.” Well, no, it didn’t save his life, he merely thinks it gave him a better life situation. But the same word “life” is used so that we’re left with the impression that it was his life vs. his child’s life—that the moral claims of both human beings were equally strong. 

And more explicitly in last week's article:

Of all the diabolically clever moves the anti-choice lobby has ever pulled, surely one of the greatest has been its consistent co-opting of the word “life”….

[Abortion] saves lives not just in the most medically literal way, but in the roads that women who have choice then get to go down, in the possibilities for them and for their families. And I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time — even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.

She says she puts “the life of a mother over the life of a fetus,” but she doesn’t mean that both the mother's and the child's literal lives are at stake, she simply uses the same word “life” to compare actual life to “quality of life” in an attempt to equalize their moral claims in the mind of the reader. What she’s actually saying is that she puts the mother’s option to save money, or prevent difficulties, or simply to live the life she prefers, over the literal life of another human being.

At first I thought it was just a coincidence that a few people happened to be using language that obscures the moral claims of the two parties (mother and child), but then I came across another article about how Planned Parenthood is leaving behind the term “pro-choice” and trying to come up with something new:

It may be that a change in language frees those who believe in an absolute right to abortion to a more honest wrestling with the issue. Let’s imagine a scenario in which we admit that abortions may involve an obliteration of something that could legitimately be called life but that they are done to protect something that could also be called life. Planned Parenthood is, after all, in the business of protecting women’s lives, their futures, their ability to pursue education, to establish security, to have homes filled with future children, and their freedom to decide how best to use their short time on earth [emphasis mine].

So it’s deliberate. 

What this shows is that we’ve made good progress convincing people that unborn children are live human beings, and that pro-choicers realize that our moral intuition, once we understand that the unborn are live human beings, goes in favor of the unborn child. We know the moral claims to “life” and “the life situation I want” aren’t equal, but if pro-choicers consistently use the same word enough for both, maybe they can reshape our intuition.

Expect to see this rhetorical trick more often, and challenge it when you hear it. Ask the person to define explicitly what he or she means by “life” in the case of the mother and in the case of the child, then examine whether or not those two rights claims are truly morally equal.

Is "Pulling the Plug" Analogous to Abortion?

During the radio show on Sunday, Melinda tweeted a link to a quote from an article by Francis Beckwith in response to this question from a caller (paraphrased): If it’s okay to pull the plug on a brain-dead patient who is no longer sentient, why isn’t it equally okay to abort an unborn child who isn’t sentient?  

Here’s what Beckwith has to say about the folly of basing “personhood” on current or past sentience and why “pulling the plug” is not analogous to abortion:

Some ethicists argue that the unborn becomes fully human sometime after brain development has begun, when it becomes sentient: capable of experiencing sensations such as pain. The reason for choosing sentience as the criterion is that a being that cannot experience anything (i.e., a presentient unborn entity) cannot be harmed. Of course, if this position is correct, then the unborn becomes fully human probably during the second trimester and at least by the third trimester. Therefore, one does not violate anyone's rights when one aborts a nonsentient unborn entity.

There are several problems with this argument. First, it confuses harm with hurt and the experience of harm with the reality of harm. One can be harmed without experiencing the hurt that sometimes follows from that harm, and which we often mistake for the harm itself. For example, a temporarily comatose person who is suffocated to death "experiences no harm," but he is nevertheless harmed. Hence, one does not have to experience harm, which is sometimes manifested in hurt, in order to be truly harmed.

Second, if sentience is the criterion of full humanness, then the reversibly comatose, the momentarily unconscious, and the sleeping would all have to be declared nonpersons. Like the presentient unborn, these individuals are all at the moment nonsentient though they have the natural inherent capacity to be sentient. Yet to countenance their executions would be morally reprehensible. Therefore, one cannot countenance the execution of some unborn entities simply because they are not currently sentient.

Someone may reply that while these objections make important points, there is a problem of false analogy in the second objection: the reversibly comatose, the momentarily unconscious, and the sleeping once functioned as sentient beings, though they are now in a temporary state of nonsentience. The presentient unborn, on the other hand, were never sentient. Hence, one is fully human if one was sentient "in the past" and will probably become sentient again in the future, but this cannot be said of the presentient unborn. 

I need to highlight this part because it’s so key:

There are at least three problems with this response. First, to claim that a person can be sentient, become nonsentient, and then return to sentience is to assume there is some underlying personal unity to this individual that enables us to say that the person who has returned to sentience is the same person who was sentient prior to becoming nonsentient. But this would mean that sentience is not a necessary condition for personhood. (Neither is it a sufficient condition, for that matter, since nonhuman animals are sentient.)

And now we get to the relevant difference between a brain-dead patient and the unborn:

Consequently, it does not make sense to say that a person comes into existence when sentience arises, but it does make sense to say that a fully human entity is a person who has the natural inherent capacity to give rise to sentience. A presentient unborn human entity does have this capacity. Therefore, an ordinary unborn human entity is a person, and hence, fully human.

Second, [A. Chadwick] Ray points out that this attempt to exclude many of the unborn from the class of the fully human is "ad hoc and counterintuitive." He asks us to "consider the treatment of comatose patients. We would not discriminate against one merely for rarely or never having been sentient in the past while another otherwise comparable patient had been sentient....In such cases, potential counts for everything."

Third, why should sentience "in the past" be the decisive factor in deciding whether an entity is fully human when the presentient human being "is one with a natural, inherent capacity for performing personal acts?" Since we have already seen that one does not have to experience harm in order to be harmed, it seems more consistent with our moral sensibilities to assert that what makes it wrong to kill the reversibly comatose, the sleeping, the momentarily unconscious, and the presentient unborn is that they all possess the natural inherent capacity to perform personal acts. And what makes it morally right to kill plants and to pull the plug on the respirator-dependent brain dead, who were sentient "in the past," is that their deaths cannot deprive them of their natural inherent capacity to function as persons, since they do not possess such a capacity.

(HT: Wintery Knight)

Abortion and Slavery: The Same Old Arguments

In an article on Slate, pro-choicer Mary Elizabeth Williams argues that the unborn are living human beings:

I know women who have been relieved at their abortions and grieved over their miscarriages. Why can’t we agree that how they felt about their pregnancies was vastly different, but that it’s pretty silly to pretend that what was growing inside of them wasn’t the same? Fetuses aren’t selective like that. They don’t qualify as human life only if they’re intended to be born.

When we try to act like a pregnancy doesn’t involve human life, we wind up drawing stupid semantic lines in the sand: first trimester abortion vs. second trimester vs. late term, dancing around the issue trying to decide if there’s a single magic moment when a fetus becomes a person. Are you human only when you’re born? Only when you’re viable outside of the womb? Are you less of a human life when you look like a tadpole than when you can suck on your thumb?

But then she says, “So what?”

Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always.

Yesterday I wrote about how our worldview affects our view of human beings, which affects the way we treat human beings. For Williams, the live, unborn human being is, as she says, “a life worth sacrificing”—worth sacrificing if “the boss” wants to get rid of him for the sake of the life she would rather have.

How is this complete power of one human being over another not slavery? For Williams, this isn’t a problem, because in her view, “all life is not equal.” She’s bought the idea of instrumental human value—that is, the idea that human beings are on a scale of worth, according to their characteristics and abilities. And apparently, if you’re higher up on that scale, then your desires trump the natural rights of someone who is lower.

Abraham Lincoln commented on the absurdity and danger of citing instrumental value to justify the use of power to impose one’s will on other human beings (thanks to Scott Klusendorf for pointing to this):

You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.

You do not mean color exactly? You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.

But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest; you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.

The arguments for slavery were the same as the arguments now for abortion: Human beings are only instrumentally valuable. Some people are worth less than others because they lack particular qualities that I have. Therefore, my desires trump their rights.

The arguments against slavery were the same as the arguments now against abortion: All human beings are intrinsically valuable and have equal natural rights, regardless of their characteristics.

The arguments are the same then and now because the two options presenting themselves to us haven’t changed and won’t ever change. Slavery and abortion aren’t just random, unconnected controversial issues, they’re rooted in our view of human beings, and they illustrate the two possible directions in which our country can go as we move forward. Will we embrace intrinsic human value or instrumental human value?

Whatever we decide as a nation, don’t think for a moment that the principle we settle on will only be applied to abortion.

You Don't Care About Children After They're Born

With all the discussion about abortion today, you might be hearing a charge frequently leveled against pro-life activists: “You only care about children in the womb. You don’t care about them after they’re born!”

The problem is that this is really just a slogan (which ultimately, I think is a partisan political slogan meant to promote larger government), and as a slogan, it will take a little work to get past because your friend might not have thought it through very carefully. Ask questions: “What do you mean, I ‘don’t care about them’?” “What actions do you think I would take if I really did care about them?” If the answer is a political solution you disagree with, then: “Are you open to the idea that I think there’s a better way to care for them than your way? Maybe you’ve missed the ways that I and my fellow pro-lifers have been caring for them.”

Sometimes a conversation about this will reveal the objection is just a smoke screen. Greg spoke to a woman on the radio a few years ago about this charge of inconsistency, and when it came down to it, there was nothing Greg could have done that would have been enough for her. The discussion is instructive:

So don’t let this charge neutralize you. Don’t be afraid of it. Dive into it and see if you can work through it with your friend.

And because speaking out for defenseless human beings whose lives are at stake is a worthy cause in itself, here’s a final question to ask: “Do you understand that even though I can’t do everything, saving people’s lives is still a worthy cause to devote myself to?” 

Scott Klusendorf captured this idea well:

Joe found the young girl unconscious in her upstairs closet. By the time he got there, the structure was a raging inferno. No one else dared go inside. Scooping up the girl, he took his only exit, straight out the second story window and into the bushes below. The girl lived. For his part, Joe sustained three cuts and two sprained ankles—and an avalanche of questions. The media wanted to know how he planned to pay for the girl’s food, clothing, and health care now that he’d rescued her. The evangelical pastor asked if the time spent saving the girl from temporal flames might be better spent saving people from eternal ones. The social justice coordinator of the Catholic parish insisted that if Joe truly cared about saving lives, he’d care about all life and spend equal time rescuing poor workers from corrupt corporations. The local Congressman asked if he supported tax hikes aimed at reducing fire risk. Joe just kept looking at the girl.

You Can Change Our Culture's Mind on Abortion

Today is the 40^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. In 2012, over a million human lives were ended through abortion in the United States, bringing the number of abortions up to 55 million since the Supreme Court decision in 1973.

Sanctity of Human Life Sunday—the Sunday closest to the January 22^nd anniversary—was last weekend, and you may have heard your pastor preach on intrinsic human value and the horror of abortion. Maybe you’ve resolved to support pro-life organizations or individuals who you think are making a significant difference. That’s valuable, but I don’t want you to think that the fight is “out there” in the hands of some elite group of influencers and policy makers. When our culture turns around on this issue, it will not be mainly because of big-name activists. The change will occur because of small-scale interactions, through millions of conversations where people like you convince one person at a time to protect the weakest members of our human family.

Making the pro-life case is completely within your ability, I promise you. You just need to arm yourself with some information, a game plan, and some tools to help you get started. So I’ve put together a short list of resources, chosen for their simplicity, clarity, and accessibility. There are no textbooks in this list, and you don’t have to be a philosopher to understand any of this material. There are many resources available that go into greater depth, but I confined my list to a few essentials that cover the basics and will effectively equip anyone wanting to enter into this fight for universal human rights.

• Pro-Life Crash Course: This post gives an overview of how to argue for the pro-life position and includes links to resources that can clarify the points further, if you’d like to learn more. Familiarize yourself with the main points you’ll need to cover. Pro-life arguments are simple—that is, you do not have to learn heaps of information in order to address the most important question: what is the unborn?

• Pro-Life 101: Now that you have the outline in mind, Scott Klusendorf fills in the details in these CDs. The set also includes a debate (so you can hear how he responds to objections) and a booklet, Pro-Life 101: A Step-by-Step Guide to Making Your Case Persuasively.

• Tactics: It doesn’t matter how much you know about abortion if you don’t have the confidence to enter into conversations about controversial topics with people you’d like to persuade. Greg Koukl’s Tactics material (available as a book, CDs, MP3s, or DVD—whichever format works best with your learning style) will teach you how to do this effectively, and it’s the most valuable material I’ve ever encountered as an apologist. And again, the skills taught in Tactics can be learned and used by anyone.

• The Unaborted Socrates: This book is short and brilliant. The best way to describe it is a cross between Pro-Life 101 and Tactics (see above). See what it looks like when you put the material from those two resources together, and learn by example how to use what you learned in Pro-Life 101 in a persuasive, non-threatening conversation. This book is the simple and powerful pro-life arguments spoken with clarity through a fictional dialogue between Socrates, a doctor, a philosopher, and a psychologist.

• This Is Abortion: The ancient Roman poet Horace said, "Less vividly is the mind stirred by what finds entrance through the ears than by what is brought before the trusty eyes...." Abortion is mostly hidden from our eyes, and that makes it easy to forget what we’re talking about—the deaths of young human beings. This video takes the term “choice” out of the dark and truthfully shows us the victims of abortion (but see the next link before you watch).

• How Should We Use Graphic Images?: The graphic images are powerful and painful. If we’re going to respect the people we’re trying to persuade, there’s a right way and a wrong way to introduce these images and the truths they reveal. This short video of Scott Klusendorf serves as a good example of how to compassionately prepare people for what they’re about to see. He also gives a defense of using graphic pictures as a persuasive tool, citing an example of how true, yet brutal, images helped to end human rights abuses in the past.

It’s up to you now. Won’t you join the fight?

They Had Their Entire Lives Ahead of Them

This is why there's only one question that matters: What is the unborn?

 

(HT: Justin Taylor)