Stand to Reason Blog

Do Our Prayers Make a Difference?

At STR Place (Stand to Reason's student site), we were asked if it makes sense to pray for things since God has already sovereignly planned history from beginning to end.

This is a thoughtful question, and I think a big part of the answer is that God uses certain means to accomplish His plans in order to bring Himself the most glory. When we pray for something and God gives it, He unquestionably gets the glory. This is why “we have not because we ask not,” as James 4:2 puts it. Were God to always give us what we need apart from our prayers, I guarantee you we would quickly lose sight of Who was behind those gifts. We would either take in the gifts unnoticed or, worse, conclude our own great abilities were responsible for obtaining them.

God uses the means of prayer because He wants us to remain dependent on Him, to remind us that we’re creatures in need and that He’s the giver, and to help us recognize His work in the world (that is, we see and know He’s working when specific prayers are answered, and we know this in a much deeper way than if He were to act behind the scenes without our thinking about it). Our prayers keep us connected with all these things and cause us to rightfully worship and appreciate Him in awe and thanks.

When we say, “But Your will be done,” at the end of a prayer, that’s yet another way of recognizing our place as creatures beneath God, our fallibility even in praying for the right things, and our willingness to see Him glorified in the way He chooses.

So our prayers really do make a difference—not only because they change us and the way we view God, but because they’re the means God uses to intervene in the world. “We have not because we ask not,” therefore God moves when we ask. Our prayers are part of His plan. Yes, I also think the Holy Spirit moves us to ask in accordance with God’s plan, but that’s happening behind the scenes and is not something we need to figure out or try to learn to recognize. Our job is to go ahead and pray about everything, knowing that our prayers are making a difference because that's the way God has chosen to work.

(You can see Brett's video response to this question here.)

Without God, Moral Terms Are Meaningless

In the New York Times blog, Opinionator, Joel Marks explains how he came to his decision to "[exclude] all moral concepts and language from [his] thinking, feeling and actions."

I found myself in the thick of meta-ethics, which looks at the nature of morality, including whether there even is such a thing as right and wrong. I myself had ignored the latter issue for most of my career, since, if there was one thing I knew in this entire universe, it was that some things are morally wrong. It is wrong to toss male chicks, alive and conscious, into a meat grinder, as happens in the egg industry. It is wrong to scorn homosexuals and deny them civil rights. It is wrong to massacre people in death camps. All of these things have met with general approval in one society or another. And yet I knew in my soul, with all of my conviction, with a passion, that they were wrong, wrong, wrong. I knew this with more certainty than I knew that the earth is round.

But suddenly I knew it no more. I was not merely skeptical or agnostic about it; I had come to believe, and do still, that these things are not wrong. But neither are they right; nor are they permissible. The entire set of moral attributions is out the window. Think of this analogy: A tribe of people lives on an isolated island. They have no formal governmental institutions of any kind. In particular they have no legislature. Therefore in that society it would make no sense to say that someone had done something “illegal.” But neither would anything be “legal.” The entire set of legal categories would be inapplicable. In just this way I now view moral categories [emphasis mine].

Marks gets it. If there's no good God we're accountable to, morality is a fiction and the terms "right" and "wrong" are meaningless. Instead, there exists only the way we feel about things. His view is that since we act out of our desires, his method of persuasion will be to try to stir up people's desires in the direction he prefers (though he recognizes it's only a matter of preference):

I now acknowledge that I cannot count on either God or morality to back up my personal preferences or clinch the case in any argument. I am simply no longer in the business of trying to derive an ought from an is. I must accept that other people sometimes have opposed preferences, even when we are agreed on all the relevant facts and are reasoning correctly….

I am no longer giving premises in moral arguments…. I am not attempting to justify anything; I am trying to motivate informed and reflective choices.

Jesus and Astrology (Video)

How would you respond to someone who tries to connect the story of Jesus to the images and idioms associated with astrology?

Correction

My thanks to an alert reader who pointed me to an official translation of the original article I referred to in yesterday's post. Because of that, I've made changes to the original post, including to the title. Denmark does not have an official policy to promote the end of Down syndrome births. The policy begun by Denmark in 2004 was to give all pregnant women free genetic testing for Down syndrome. This is the policy contributing to the disappearance of Down syndrome children. The articles I linked to originally were not accurate and neither was my title, so my apologies for that. I encourage you to read the corrected post here. (Though it reflects the old title, I've kept the original URL so that anyone who linked to the original post will send people to the corrected one.)

Again, I thank Robb and others for letting me know this, and I appreciate the correction.

Down Syndrome Births in Denmark May Disappear by 2030

Whether a Western nation is cleansing itself of a race, an ethnicity, or a disability, the reasoning justifying it is the same: human beings have instrumental, not intrinsic, value. That is, we're not valuable merely because we're human beings; rather, each individual earns his or her value by meeting certain requirements set by society—age, sex, ability, intelligence, race, etc.

In this understanding, only a subset of the human race is valuable, as certain other members of the species are defined out of the group. Then the title of "human being" or "person" is simply denied to those other members, making it psychologically easier for the valuable subset to end the lives of those who didn't make the cut, for the sake of either individual preference or the "good of society."

So there are two closely-related ideas that must be in place for atrocities of this kind to happen: 1) Human value depends on the presence of certain characteristics or abilities, and 2) The real value of a human being is not objective, but is set by the preferences of other human beings (e.g., pregnant mothers are granted the right to declare whether or not the lives of their unborn children are worthy of the protection of the law).

And these same ideas that support abortion are behind this current trend in Denmark:

Since 2004, the government has offered all pregnant women free prenatal screenings to determine if the foetus is afflicted with Down’s syndrome….

[W]hen the free and widespread screenings were introduced, 61 babies with Down’s syndrome were born in Denmark. The following year, the number was reduced by more than half. In each successive year, the number continued to drop by an average annual rate of around 13 percent. The reason for the steady decline is that most of the foetuses that test positive for the defect are aborted.

A medical review from 2002 of elective abortions in the UK and the US found that around 92 percent of all foetuses diagnosed with Down’s syndrome were aborted. In Denmark, medical experts estimate the rate of abortions to be even higher. If the current trend continues, it is predicted that the last Down’s syndrome baby in Denmark could be born in 2030.

The article quotes a professor who expresses some hesitation about the trend:

Niels Uldbjerg, professor of gynaecology and obstetrics at the University of Aarhus, agrees that an ethical problem exists. From the medical perspective, he sees successful screenings and the reduction of babies born with birth defects as a “tremendously great accomplishment”. “But if you ask me as a person, then I would say that I like that there are people among us who are different,” Uldbjerg added.

It's unclear whether the term "ethical problem" is Uldbjerg's or the author's. Uldbjerg's only concern seems to be one of subjective preference—he personally likes having different sorts of people. But preference isn't an ethical issue. It's certainly not enough to stand in the way of a "tremendously great accomplishment."

Even in a quote from the chairman of the Danish Association of Midwives who does have ethical concerns, it's clear she has already accepted the two ideas I described above. She's merely questioning where the line ought to be drawn, not the line itself:

“If the couple learns in this way that there is a good chance that the child will develop a chronic disease, is that then a good reason to abort? I don’t have the definitive answer,” Bondo continued. “But I would like to get as many people as possible talking about where society should draw the line. I don’t want a society where we reject people over trivialities.”

I think what's happening is that these people intuitively know there's something wrong with this, but they're confused as to why, and they can't reason their way to an answer because they're starting with the wrong presuppositions.

At Stand to Reason, we've been saying there's "only one question" that has to be answered when evaluating abortion: "What is it?" But that's not really the case anymore. There's actually another, deeper question: "What is a human being?" If we're merely the evolutionary result of blind, purposeless, unknowing, and uncaring natural processes, with only instrumental value conferred on us by the subjective preferences of the majority of other human beings, then asking if a creature is of the human species won't answer the question of whether or not we can kill it.

The reasoning is now in place in the West to begin to more aggressively separate the valuable humans from the non-valuable ones. If you're okay with this development, you should keep in mind that the line has a funny way of not staying in a place you're comfortable with.

_________________

[Update: Thanks to an alert reader who pointed me to an official translation of the original article. Because of that, I've made some changes to this post's title and to the quotes. Denmark doesn't have an official policy to promote the end of Down syndrome births. The policy begun by Denmark in 2004 was to give all pregnant women free genetic testing for Down syndrome. This is the policy contributing to the disappearance of Down syndrome children. The articles I linked to originally here and here were not accurate, so my apologies for that.]

How Will Those Saved by God's Grace View Hell?

David Clotfelter spends the first third of Sinners in the Hands of a Good God: Reconciling Divine Judgment and Mercy on the subject of hell—establishing what the Bible says about it, responding to alternate interpretations, and discussing the justice of never-ending punishment for our sin.

Regarding the justice issue, Clotfelter offers the explanation given by Anselm and Jonathan Edwards: 

[B]ecause God is a Being of infinite worth, to whom we owe an infinite obligation, sin against God is an infinite evil requiring an infinite punishment. And since the punishments of hell cannot be infinite in intensity, as that would violate the principle that the lost are punished according to their deeds, it must be the case that hell is infinite in duration.

As he explains, the fact that our sins require an infinite punishment makes it necessary for Jesus to pay for those sins. A crime against an infinitely worthy being requires a punishment that a finite person will never finish paying; a punishment paid by an infinitely worthy being pays for that crime.

But sometimes the question comes up of how those who have been forgiven by God will view hell throughout eternity. Will they be saddened forever by its continued existence? Here's what Clotfelter has to say:

[I]f indeed it is just for God to punish the wicked everlastingly, then it is a certainty that the saints in heaven will perceive that justice and will rejoice in its administration, even as they rejoice in all of God’s works and decisions. This does not mean that either they or God will derive glee from watching the torments of the damned. It means that they will agree that God’s decision to punish the wicked is right and good, and that the punishment that He allots to each lost person is precisely what that person deserves. They will realize that it is only God’s grace that stands between them and a similar fate, and so there will be no element of pride or vindictiveness in their joy….

[T]he joy the redeemed in heaven will feel over the punishment of the wicked will in no way derive from sadism or a spirit of revenge, but it will express their gratitude toward God for their own salvation and their clear-eyed understanding of the justice of His judgments.

As fallen creatures, we greatly overestimate our righteousness and vastly underestimate God's. So when the doctrine of hell first brings us face-to-face with the truth about both, we naturally rebel against it emotionally. The temptation is to exchange the Bible's words about hell for something—like universalism (everyone will be saved) or annihilationism (the lost will cease to exist)—that makes more immediate sense to us. But don't give up when you find yourself in tension with the Bible. Instead, dig until you find all the pieces you need to see the complete picture that honors and glorifies the true God.

God is not merely holy; He is infinitely holy. He is not merely good; He is so good as to pay an infinite price for our salvation. He does not merely dislike sin; He hates it with a passion that can be fully expressed only on Calvary or in the depths of an everlasting hell. The Bible’s doctrine of eternal punishment does not only teach us about punishment; it teaches us about the character of God. As John Piper has written, “The infinite horrors of hell are intended by God to be a vivid demonstration of the infinite value of the glory of God.”

Marriage in Polygamy Is Still One Man, One Woman

Sometimes people cite polygamy as evidence that the definition of marriage has changed over time, proving it to be malleable according to the culture.

But even in the case of polygamy, has there really been a change in the definition of marriage?

While I could see someone today wanting to define marriage as one man and multiple women, I don't think that's how people viewed it in the past. That is, they didn't see their situation as one big marriage where everybody was married to everybody else. Rather, marriage was still simply one man and one woman. It's just that the man was allowed to have more than one marriage.

We haven't changed the definition of marriage, we've only limited the number of concurrent marriages a person can have.

God's Free Will (Video)

Do you think God is free in the compatibilist sense or in the libertarian sense? If He's free in the libertarian sense, then why couldn't he act contrary to his nature?

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 @STRtalk Twitter feed:

• The Bible Fast Forward: Piecing Together the Biblical Puzzle by Greg Koukl

• Minds, Bodies, and Persons by Douglas Groothuis

• 4 Good Reasons Not to Read the Bible Literally by David Lose (article critiqued by Greg on the show)

• God of the Gaps by Melinda Penner

Register at str.org and sign in to listen to today's show or download any archived show for free.

Why Do Fetal Reductions Bother Pro-Choicers?

I made a quick comment in yesterday's post about how reductions trouble pro-choicers not because they're morally different from abortions, but because it's easier to see them for what they really are. This piece in Slate by William Saletan explains why:

For some, the issue seems to be a consumer mentality in assisted reproduction. For others, it's the deliberateness of getting pregnant, especially by IVF, without being prepared to accept the consequences. But the main problem with reduction is that it breaches a wall at the center of pro-choice psychology. It exposes the equality between the offspring we raise and the offspring we abort. 

Look up any abortion-related item in Jezebel, and you'll see the developing human referred to as a fetus or pregnancy. But when the same entity appears in a non-abortion item, it gets an upgrade. A blood test could help "women who are concerned that they may be carrying a child with Down's Syndrome." A TV character wonders whether she's "capable of carrying a child to term." Nuclear radiation in Japan "may put unborn children at risk."

This bifurcated mindset permeates pro-choice thinking. Embryos fertilized for procreation are embryos; embryos cloned for research are "activated eggs." A fetus you want is a baby; a fetus you don't want is a pregnancy. Under federal law, anyone who injures or kills a "child in utero" during a violent crime gets the same punishment as if he had injured or killed "the unborn child's mother," but no such penalty applies to "an abortion for which the consent of the pregnant woman … has been obtained."

Reduction destroys this distinction. It combines, in a single pregnancy, a wanted and an unwanted fetus. In the case of identical twins, even their genomes are indistinguishable. You can't pretend that one is precious and the other is just tissue. You're killing the same creature to which you're dedicating your life.

[All links are from original article.]

You can try to hide what abortion is from yourself by manipulating language as much as you want (for example, by using the term "pregnancy" to refer to your child—a term that references only you, succeeding in completely eliminating the final bit of otherness that remained in the word "fetus"), but all the language in the world can't hide the truth when you see your pregnancy's twin sister.