Abortion debate: a secular case against legalized abortion

Unborn baby scheming about being only two months old

Note: this post has a twin! Its companion post on a secular case against gay marriage is here.

Now, you may think that the view that the unborn deserve protection during pregnancy is something that you either take on faith or not. But I want to explain how you can make a case for the right to life of the unborn, just by using reason and evidence.

To defend the pro-life position, I think you need to sustain 3 arguments:

1. The unborn is a living being with human DNA, and is therefore human.
2. There is no morally-relevant difference between an unborn baby, and one already born.
3. None of the justifications given for terminating an unborn baby are morally adequate.

Now, the pro-abortion debater may object to point 1, perhaps by claiming that the unborn baby is either not living, or not human, or not distinct from the mother.

Defending point 1: Well, it is pretty obvious that the unborn child is not inanimate matter. It is definitely living and growing through all 9 months of pregnancy. (Click here for a video that shows what a baby looks like through all 9 months of pregnancy). Since it has human DNA, that makes it a human. And its DNA is different from either its mother or father, so it clearly not just a tissue growth of the father or the mother. More on this point at Christian Cadre, here. An unborn child cannot be the woman’s own body, because then the woman would have four arms, four legs, two heads, four eyes and two different DNA signatures. When you have two different human DNA signatures, you have two different humans.

Secondly, the pro-abortion debater may try to identify a characteristic of the unborn that is not yet present or developed while it is still in the womb, and then argue that because the unborn does not have that characteristic, it does not deserve the protection of the law.

Defending point 2: You need to show that the unborn are not different from the already-born in any meaningful way. The main differences between them are: size, level of development, environment and degree of dependence. Once these characteristics are identified, you can explain that none of these differences provide moral justification for terminating a life. For example, babies inside and outside the womb have the same value, because location does not change a human’s intrinsic value. More at Stand to Reason, here.

Additionally, the pro-abortion debater may try to identify a characteristic of the already-born that is not yet present or developed in the unborn, and then argue that because the unborn does not have that characteristic, that it does not deserve protection, (e.g. – sentience). Most of the these objections that you may encounter are refuted in this essay by Francis Beckwith. Usually these objections fall apart because they assume the thing they are trying to prove, namely, that the unborn deserves less protection than the already born.

Finally, the pro-abortion debater may conceded your points 1 and 2, and admit that the unborn is fully human. But they may then try to provide a moral justification for terminating the life of the unborn, regardless.

Defending point 3: I fully grant that it is sometimes justifiable to terminate an innocent human life, if there is a moral justification. Is there such a justification for abortion? One of the best known attempts to justify abortion is Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “violinist” argument. This argument is summarized by Paul Manata, one of the experts over at Triablogue:

Briefly, this argument goes like this: Say a world-famous violinist developed a fatal kidney ailment and the Society of Music Lovers found that only you had the right blood-type to help. So, they therefore have you kidnapped and then attach you to the violinist’s circulatory system so that your kidneys can be used to extract the poison from his. To unplug yourself from the violinist would be to kill him; therefore, pro-lifers would say a person has to stay attached against her will to the violinist for 9 months. Thompson says that it would be morally virtuous to stay plugged-in. But she asks, “Do you have to?” She appeals to our intuitions and answers, “No.”

Manata then goes on to defeat Thomson’s proposal here, with a short, memorable illustration, which I highly recommend that you check out. More info on how to respond to similar arguments is here.

The best book for beginners on the pro-life view is this book:

For those looking for advanced resources, Francis Beckwith, a professor at Baylor University, published the book Defending Life, with Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Learn about the pro-life case

• How to take an incremental approach to the abortion problem
• Videos from academic debate on abortion at the University of Victoria
• Audio: Scott Klusendorf’s 35-minute case for the pro-life position
• Audio: A 55-minute discussion featuring Greg Koukl and Scott Klusendorf
• A comparison of embryonic and adult stem cell research
• Video: 12-year old girl makes the pro-life case in a short speech
• Video:10-year old girl makes the pro-life case in a short speech
• Objective truth in the abortion debate – a pro-life training video
• Alan Shlemon explains a classification system for pro-abortion arguments
• What is the best single book on the pro-life position?

And some posts motivating Christians and conservatives to take abortion seriously:

• Why Christians should focus on cultural issues as well as evangelism
• Republicans introduce House and Senate bills to establish that life begins at conception
• House Republicans introduce ban on taxpayer funding of abortion
• Are Christians too involved in politics?
• What did the early church fathers think about abortion?
• Scott Klusendorf confronts a “pro-life” nun who voted for Obama

Filed under: Polemics, Abortion, Adult Stem Cells, ASCR, Barack Obama, Big Government, Boy, Children, China, Christianity, Civilian Casualties, Collateral Damage, Conscience, Demcorat, Embryonic Stem Cells, ESCR, Family, Feminism, Feminist, Feminist Theory, Fewer Abortions, Funding Abortion, Girl, Greg Koukl, Health-care, India, Law, Moral Relativism, Planned Parenthood, Politics, Pro-Abortion, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, Reduce Abortions, Republican, Republican Party, Root Causes, Scot Klusendorf, Sex-Selection, Social Justice, Social Programs, Socialism, Stem Cells, Unborn, Women's Issues, Women's Studies

Self-refuting statements defined and some common examples

A fine article by Aaron, who writes at Please Convince Me.

Excerpt:

A self-defeating (or self-refuting) statement is one that fails to meet its own standard. In other words, it is a statement that cannot live up to its own criteria. Imagine if I were to say,

I cannot speak a word in English.

You intuitively see a problem here. I told you in English that I cannot speak a word in English. This statement is self-refuting. It does not meet its own standard or criteria. It self-destructs.

The important thing to remember with self-defeating statements is that they are necessarily false. In other words, there is no possible way for them to be true. This is because they violate a very fundamental law of logic, the law of non-contradiction. This law states that A and non-A cannot both be true at the same time and in the same sense. For example, it is not possible for God to exist and not exist at the same time and in the same sense. This would violate the law of non-contradiction. So if I were to say, “God told me He doesn’t exist” you would see intuitively the obvious self-refuting nature of this statement.

Aaron goes on to explain how to deal with self-refuting statements in the article.

Here are 20 examples of self-refutation, just to encourage you to click through and read it:

1. There is no truth.

2. You can’t know truth.

3. No one has the truth.

4. All truth is relative.

5. It’s true for you but not for me.

6. There are no absolutes.

7. No one can know any truth about religion.

8. You can’t know anything for sure.

9. You should doubt everything.

10. Only science can give us truth.

11. You can only know truth through experience.

12. All truth depends on your perspective.

13. You shouldn’t judge.

14. You shouldn’t force your morality on people.

15. You should live and let live.

16. God doesn’t take sides.

17. You shouldn’t try to convert people.

18. That’s just your view.

19. You should be tolerant of all views.

20. It is arrogant to claim to have the truth.

Aaron explains how to respond to each of those! Read them all – it’s important to know, because you hear these all the time. Like from that Susan Stone person who comments here.

By the way, anyone with a Twitter account, the best person to follow on Twitter is J Warner Wallace (@plsconvinceme). He tweets about 10-15 apologetics items per day.

Filed under: Polemics, Anthropology, Apologetics, Argument, Belief, Bhuddism, Bhuddist, Blind Faith, Burden of Proof, Catchphrase, Christian, Christianity, Comparative Religion, Correspondence Theory of Truth, Creative Anti-Realism, Culture, Deconstuctionism, Evidence, Faith, Hindu, Hinduism, India, Interpretation, Intolerance, Irrational, Irrationality, Laws of Logic, Logic, Naturalism, Paul Copan, People, Pluralism, Pop Culture, Postmodernism, Pragmatism, Reason, Self Refutation, Self-Deception, Skepticism, Slogan, Subjectivism, Tolerance, Truth, Universalism, World, World Religions

How to respond to postmodernism, relativism, subjectivism, pluralism and skepticism

Four articles from Paul Copan over at the UK site “BeThinking”. Each article responds to a different slogan that you might hear if you’re dealing with non-Christians on the street.

“That’s just your interpretation!”

Some of his possible responses:

• Gently ask, ‘Do you mean that your interpretation should be preferred over mine? If so, I’d like to know why you have chosen your interpretation over mine. You must have a good reason.’
• Remind your friend that you are willing to give reasons for your position and that you are not simply taking a particular viewpoint arbitrarily.
• Try to discern if people toss out this slogan because they don’t like your interpretation. Remind them that there are many truths we have to accept even if we don’t like them.
• ‘There are no facts, only interpretations’ is a statement that is presented as a fact. If it is just an interpretation, then there is no reason to take it seriously.

More responses are here.

“You Christians are intolerant!”

Some of his possible responses:

• If you say that the Christian view is bad because it is exclusive, then you are also at that exact moment doing the very thing that you are saying is bad. You have to be exclusive to say that something is bad, since you exclude it from being good by calling it bad.
• There is a difference, a clear difference between tolerance and truth. They are often confused. We should hold to what we believe with integrity but also support the rights of others to disagree with our viewpoint.
• Sincerely believing something doesn’t make it true. You can be sincere, but sincerely wrong. If I get onto a plane and sincerely believe that it won’t crash then it does, then my sincerity is quite hopeless. It won’t change the facts. Our beliefs, regardless of how deeply they are held, have no effect on reality.

More responses are here.

“That’s true for you, but not for me!”

Some of his possible responses:

• If my belief is only true for me, then why isn’t your belief only true for you? Aren’t you saying you want me to believe the same thing you do?
• You say that no belief is true for everyone, but you want everyone to believe what you do.
• You’re making universal claims that relativism is true and absolutism is false. You can’t in the same breath say, ‘Nothing is universally true’ and ‘My view is universally true.’ Relativism falsifies itself. It claims there is one position that is true – relativism!

More responses are here.

“If you were born in India, you’d be a Hindu!”

Some of his possible responses:

• Just because there are many different religious answers and systems doesn’t automatically mean pluralism is correct.
• If we are culturally conditioned regarding our religious beliefs, then why should the religious pluralist think his view is less arbitrary or conditioned than the exclusivist’s?
• If the Christian needs to justify Christianity’s claims, the pluralist’s views need just as much substantiation.

More responses are here.

And a bonus: “How do you know you’re not wrong?“.

Being a Christian is fun because you get to think about things at the same deep level that you think about anything else in life. Christianity isn’t about rituals, community and feelings. It’s about truth.

In case you want to see this in action with yours truly, check this out.

Filed under: Polemics, Anthropology, Apologetics, Argument, Belief, Bhuddist, Bhudism, Blind Faith, Burden of Proof, Catchphrase, Christian, Christianity, Comparative Religion, Correspondence Theory of Truth, Creative Anti-Realism, Culture, Deconstuctionism, Evidence, Faith, Hindu, Hinduism, India, Interpretation, Intolerance, Irrational, Irrationality, Laws of Logic, Logic, Naturalism, Paul Copan, People, Pluralism, Pop Culture, Postmodernism, Pragmatism, Reason, Self Refutation, Self-Deception, Skepticism, Slogan, Subjectivism, Tolerance, Truth, Universalism, World, World Religions

Is the accelerating universe compatible with Hinduism?

First, a news story – and then we’ll see how the accelerating universe relates to the existence of God.

Excerpt:

Three astrophysicists who discovered that the universe’s expansion is accelerating rather than decelerating, as had been expected, win the Nobel Prize in physics.

Adam Riess was sure he’d spotted a blatant error in his results. It was 1997, and the young post-doc’s measurements of distant, exploding stars implied that the universe was expanding at a faster and faster rate, instead of slowing down, as he had expected.

It wasn’t an error at all. Instead, what was at fault were some basic assumptions about the workings of the universe.

On Tuesday, the Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist received the Nobel Prize in physics for the revolutionary discovery and its implications, along with team leader Brian Schmidt of Australian National University and astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter of UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who had reached the same conclusion independently.

At the time of their work, astrophysicists believed that the rate of expansion of the universe — set in motion by the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago — would be slowing down as matter was pulled together by gravity. The goal at the time was to figure out how rapid the deceleration was.

What the two teams found instead was that the expansion of the universe was accelerating — an observation that could best be explained by the existence of a mysterious “dark energy” that pushes matter farther and farther apart.

Many scientists had thought that, just as the universe started with the Big Bang, it would end with a Big Crunch — with gravity pulling all the matter in the universe inward.

Does anyone remember that week that I wrote those posts about “Why I am not a… <insert some religion here>”? I explained why I was not all kinds of different religions and denominations, including Roman Catholicism, Calvinism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, etc. Everyone was offended and we fought about it. Ah, I remember it well.

Now let’s apply science to the Hindu religion and see if they go together, especially this new discovery about the expansion of the universe.

Why I am not a Hindu

1. Hindu cosmology teaches that the universe cycles between creation and destruction, through infinite time.
2. The closest cosmological model conforming to Hindu Scriptures is the eternally “oscillating” model of the universe.
3. The “oscillating” model requires that the universe exist eternally into the past.
4. But the evidence today shows the the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the big bang.
5. The “oscillating” model requires that the expansion of the universe reverse into a collapse, (= crunch).
6. In 1998, the discovery of the year was that the universe would expand forever. There will be no crunch.
7. Therefore, the oscillating model is disconfirmed by observations.
8. The oscillating model also faces theoretical problems with the “bounce” mechanism.

So that’s one reason why I am not a Hindu. And now we have more scientific confirmation that there is no cycle of universes coming into being and going out of being.

The absolute origin of the universe out of nothing is also incompatible with Buddhism and Mormonism and maybe other religions. They also require an eternally existing universe.

And modern cosmology disagrees with atheism, too

I think it’s important for all of you to be familiar with the scientific evidence for the Big Bang. It will help you with your cosmological argument, and it will help you to refute many, many other religions that require eternal universes, including atheism.

I wrote about how the Big Bang theory falsifies atheism before.

Excerpt:

According to the Secular Humanist Manifesto, atheism is committed to an eternally existing universe, (See the first item: “Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.”). If something non-material brought all existing matter into being, that would be a supernatural cause, and atheists deny that anything supernatural exists. The standard Big Bang theory requires that all the matter in the universe come into being out of nothing. The Big Bang has been confirmed by experimental evidence such as redshift measurements, light element abundances and the cosmic microwave background radiation. This falsifies eternal models of the universe, which are required by atheist Scriptures.

The experimental evidence that confirms the Big Bang creation out of nothing falsifies many worldviews. Those who care about evidence will have to choose some other religion that is compatible with what we know from science today.

Filed under: News, Abundance, Accelerating Universe, Age of the Universe, Apologetics, Big Crunch, Bounce, Bouncing Universe, Brahma, Brahmanda Purana, Carl Sagan, COBE, Collapse, Cosmic Microwave Background Radiiation, Cosmology, Curve, Cyclical Model, Debate, Einstein, Equations, Expansion, Flat, General Relativity, Helium, Hinduism, History, Hydrogen, India, Indisputable Fact, Jew, Jewish, Koran, Light Elements, Muslim, Nobel Prize, Oscillating Model, Physics, Predictions, Purana, Quran, Red Shift, Religion, Rig Veda, Rigveda, Sanskrit, Shiva, Static, Surah, Universe, Universes, Vedas, Vishnu, WMAP

A secular case against legalized abortion

Unborn baby scheming about being only two months old

Note: this post has a twin! Its companion post on a secular case against gay marriage is here.

Now, you may think that the view that the unborn deserve protection during pregnancy is something that you either take on faith or not. But I want to explain how you can make a case for the right to life of the unborn, just by using reason and evidence.

To defend the pro-life position, I think you need to sustain 3 arguments:

1. The unborn is a living being with human DNA, and is therefore human.
2. There is no morally-relevant difference between an unborn baby, and one already born.
3. None of the justifications given for terminating an unborn baby are morally adequate.

Now, the pro-abortion debater may object to point 1, perhaps by claiming that the unborn baby is either not living, or not human, or not distinct from the mother.

Defending point 1: Well, it is pretty obvious that the unborn child is not inanimate matter. It is definitely living and growing through all 9 months of pregnancy. (Click here for a video that shows what a baby looks like through all 9 months of pregnancy). Since it has human DNA, that makes it a human. And its DNA is different from either its mother or father, so it clearly not just a tissue growth of the father or the mother. More on this point at Christian Cadre, here. An unborn child cannot be the woman’s own body, because then the woman would have four arms, four legs, two heads, four eyes and two different DNA signatures. When you have two different human DNA signatures, you have two different humans.

Secondly, the pro-abortion debater may try to identify a characteristic of the unborn that is not yet present or developed while it is still in the womb, and then argue that because the unborn does not have that characteristic, it does not deserve the protection of the law.

Defending point 2: You need to show that the unborn are not different from the already-born in any meaningful way. The main differences between them are: size, level of development, environment and degree of dependence. Once these characteristics are identified, you can explain that none of these differences provide moral justification for terminating a life. For example, babies inside and outside the womb have the same value, because location does not change a human’s intrinsic value. More at Stand to Reason, here.

Additionally, the pro-abortion debater may try to identify a characteristic of the already-born that is not yet present or developed in the unborn, and then argue that because the unborn does not have that characteristic, that it does not deserve protection, (e.g. – sentience). Most of the these objections that you may encounter are refuted in this essay by Francis Beckwith. Usually these objections fall apart because they assume the thing they are trying to prove, namely, that the unborn deserves less protection than the already born.

Finally, the pro-abortion debater may conceded your points 1 and 2, and admit that the unborn is fully human. But they may then try to provide a moral justification for terminating the life of the unborn, regardless.

Defending point 3: I fully grant that it is sometimes justifiable to terminate an innocent human life, if there is a moral justification. Is there such a justification for abortion? One of the best known attempts to justify abortion is Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “violinist” argument. This argument is summarized by Paul Manata, one of the experts over at Triablogue:

Briefly, this argument goes like this: Say a world-famous violinist developed a fatal kidney ailment and the Society of Music Lovers found that only you had the right blood-type to help. So, they therefore have you kidnapped and then attach you to the violinist’s circulatory system so that your kidneys can be used to extract the poison from his. To unplug yourself from the violinist would be to kill him; therefore, pro-lifers would say a person has to stay attached against her will to the violinist for 9 months. Thompson says that it would be morally virtuous to stay plugged-in. But she asks, “Do you have to?” She appeals to our intuitions and answers, “No.”

Manata then goes on to defeat Thomson’s proposal here, with a short, memorable illustration, which I highly recommend that you check out. More info on how to respond to similar arguments is here.

The best book for beginners on the pro-life view is this book:

For those looking for advanced resources, Francis Beckwith, a professor at Baylor University, published the book Defending Life, with Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Learn about the pro-life case

• How to take an incremental approach to the abortion problem
• Videos from academic debate on abortion at the University of Victoria
• Audio: Scott Klusendorf’s 35-minute case for the pro-life position
• Audio: A 55-minute discussion featuring Greg Koukl and Scott Klusendorf
• A comparison of embryonic and adult stem cell research
• Video: 12-year old girl makes the pro-life case in a short speech
• Video:10-year old girl makes the pro-life case in a short speech
• Objective truth in the abortion debate – a pro-life training video
• Alan Shlemon explains a classification system for pro-abortion arguments
• What is the best single book on the pro-life position?

And some posts motivating Christians and conservatives to take abortion seriously:

• Why Christians should focus on cultural issues as well as evangelism
• Republicans introduce House and Senate bills to establish that life begins at conception
• House Republicans introduce ban on taxpayer funding of abortion
• Are Christians too involved in politics?
• What did the early church fathers think about abortion?
• Scott Klusendorf confronts a “pro-life” nun who voted for Obama

Filed under: Polemics, Abortion, Adult Stem Cells, ASCR, Barack Obama, Big Government, Boy, Children, China, Christianity, Civilian Casualties, Collateral Damage, Conscience, Demcorat, Embryonic Stem Cells, ESCR, Family, Feminism, Feminist, Feminist Theory, Fewer Abortions, Funding Abortion, Girl, Greg Koukl, Health-care, India, Law, Moral Relativism, Planned Parenthood, Politics, Pro-Abortion, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, Reduce Abortions, Republican, Republican Party, Root Causes, Scot Klusendorf, Sex-Selection, Social Justice, Social Programs, Socialism, Stem Cells, Unborn, Women's Issues, Women's Studies