withallyourmind.net

Al Mohler has a post here in which he reflects upon a phenomenon gaining increasing acceptance… eugenic abortion. The impetus for his reflection is the recent birth of Trig Paxson Van Palin to the governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. Trig has Down’s Syndrome, a condition for which prenatal screening is now routine and often leads to the killing of the unborn baby. According to Mohler:

The Palins never considered aborting the baby. That means that Trig Palin is now is a very rare group of very special children, because it is now believed that the vast majority of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome before birth are being aborted.

Modern diagnostic tests are driving a “search and destroy mission” to eliminate babies judged to be inferior, disabled, or deformed. Some experts now believe that up to 90 percent of all pregnancies diagnosed as having a likelihood of Down syndrome end in abortion.

Back in 2005, ethicist George Neumayr commented: “Each year in America fewer and fewer disabled infants are born. The reason is eugenic abortion. Doctors and their patients use prenatal technology to screen unborn children for disabilities, then they use that information to abort a high percentage of them. Without much scrutiny or debate, a eugenics designed to weed out the disabled has become commonplace.”

Of this “defective” baby, Governor Palin states:

I’m looking at him right now, and I see perfection.

Kudos to the Palins for their decision which bucks this disturbing eugenic trend.

I’ve just finished Angus Menuge’s excellent book Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science. I began the book with the ambitious goal of providing reviews of each chapter as I read. This lasted for a couple of chapters. The book is much more rigorously philosophical than many books which are intended for a more popular audience. I found it increasingly difficult to summarize a chapter’s worth of philosophical argument in a quick blog post. So… you’ll just have to read it yourself. It was quite good though and I think he is successful in applying many of the principles of intelligent design as used in the physical and biological sciences to rationality and the mind.

John DePoe states in his Amazon review of the book:

Angus Menuge has written an excellent book defending the concept of “agency” against the most challenging arguments raised by contemporary materialists. Menuge shows that the Christian worldview gives an account of human agency that is not available to the most sophisticated accounts materialism. For example, Menuge engages Dan Dennett, Paul Churchland, Jerry Fodor, and other key figures in contemporary philosophy of mind. The criticisms Menuge brings to light show the breaking points in leading theories of mind. I read this book as a philosophy graduate student taking a philosophy of mind seminar, and I found that Menuge’s criticisms and scholarship can run with the best of them. His carefully documented work of scholarship was a valuable tool for me as a student even in graduate school.

But Menuge’s book is not just a piece of critical scholarship. He also advances some constructive theories that explain crucial features of human agents. A theistic worldview provides tools for maintaining a robust theory of personal agency that are unavailable to materialists, which Menuge brings into focus with rigorous logic and clarity.

Greg Koukl, in the May/June 2008 issue of Solid Ground offers a crash course in critical thinking:

The primary purpose of reason is to help us discover what is true. The primary tool of reason is argument. An argument is a specific kind of thing. Think of it like a simple house, a roof supported by walls. The roof is the conclusion, and the walls are the supporting ideas. If the walls are solid, the conclusion rests securely on its supporting structure. If the walls collapse, the roof comes down, and the argument is defeated.

Looking at some of the arguments of the New Athiests, he shows how to develop a game plan for evaluating any argument. He does so by suggesting we ask 4 basic questions:

1. What is the claim being made?
2. What are the reasons given to support the claim?
3. Which appeals are irrelevant?
4. Does the conclusion follow from the evidence?

I recommend the entire article if you wish to learn to reason more carefully through any argument.

John Mark Reynolds has recently attempted to answer the question, “Should I play Grand Theft Auto?” As a lover of gaming, this is a question he must face. As one who enjoys playing some games, but rarely doing so, this question was not even on my radar screen.

The reason I link to Reynolds’ reflection on the subject is because he is an excellent thinker who provides a template useful for reflection on any such question. A person is often faced with decisions which are not inherently immoral, yet should not flippantly be approved or disapproved. Reading through his thoughts might be helpful and instructive to others as they face similar choices.

Being the economic and social conservative that I am, I will periodically head over to the National Review Online to peruse the offerings. I was disappointed to read John Derbyshire’s flawed review of the recent movie (which he hasn’t even seen) Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I was glad to see David Berlinski, who not only saw but appeared in the movie, respond at NRO today. Berlinski is the author of The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.

The most tragic dimension of all this is that a culture increasingly ready to euthanize the old, infanticize the young, and adamant about a “right” to abort unborn human beings, will now contend for the inherent dignity of plants. Can any culture recover from this?

So concludes Al Mohler his blog post “Plant Rights, Screaming Vegetation, and a ‘Biocentric’ Worldview.” As he points out, it is one thing to honor God by taking good care of his creation, it is another to claim, as some are, a “right to life” for vegetation. Ethicist Wesley Smith states:

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

I received an email a few weeks ago from Marc who asked if I would be willing to answer two main points which ID critics cite when attempting to label ID as unscientific. Today, I’ll take a look at one of the two, that is, “Isn’t ID internally inconsistent because it invokes the existence of something even more complex to explain the complexity of life on earth?” This is an objection that Dawkins refers to in his book The God Delusion. No explanatory advance is made in such a case as now one would be left with an even more complex entity needing explanation.

William Lane Craig addresses this issue in his evaluation of the Dawkins’ central argument of his book which can be found here. Here are a couple of take home points in answering this objection.

First of all, this objection cannot be fully answered without considering how one is to weigh competing explanations for a phenomenon. This is not a simple question and has been the subject of much philosophical reflection. It is implied in this objection that simplicity is the most important criteria. However, there are other important criteria which must be weighed, such as, explanatory power, explanatory scope, and so on.

Second, if one grants that simplicity is the most important criteria in this case, the objection contains a fatal flaw in its assumption that a divine designer (I must interject that ID as a scientific endeavor does not identify the designer as a divine being, but many understand the designer to be divine, and the objection implies the designer is divine.) is an equally complex or more complex entity than the universe. Craig states:

As an unembodied mind, God is a remarkably simple entity. As a non-physical entity, a mind is not composed of parts, and its salient properties, like self-consciousness, rationality, and volition, are essential to it. In contrast to the contingent and variegated universe with all its inexplicable quantities and constants, a divine mind is startlingly simple. Certainly such a mind may have complex ideas—it may be thinking, for example, of the infinitesimal calculus—, but the mind itself is a remarkably simple entity.

So, this objection confuses a mind’s ideas, which may be complex, with a mind itself, which is a simple entity. Therefore, the objection fails since an advance in simplicity is acheived by positing a divine mind.

One of the most controversial aspects of the recent movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is the attention given to the alleged link between Darwinism and the Holocaust. I think that this link is legitimate. No one that I’ve heard, including those interviewed in Expelled, actually believe that all Darwinists are Nazis or that Darwinism inevitably leads to such horrific deeds such as those perpetrated by Hitler. In fact, this point is made clear in the movie. Berlinski, in Expelled, rightly points out that Darwinism was not a sufficient condition for the Nazi atrocities, but it was a necessary one.

Tom Gilson has an excellent discussion of the issue in his post: Darwin-Nazi Link: Fundamentally Wrongheaded? He responds to a charge that this whole linkage is unimportant. He raises a few major points:

1. It is important not to ignore this link because it is important to learn from history. He suggests that the potential for similar consequences are present in a number of contemporary issues.

2. It’s not quite true that there is only a historical link and no philosophical link from Darwin to Hitler.
a. Naturalistic Darwinism, if taken to be the sole explanation for all of life, erases all ethical requirements.
b. There is an ontological implication in Darwinism: humans are the same kind of thing as animals.

Hitler treated humans like animals; Darwinism says that’s what we are.

3. Ideas matter. They have consequences.

4. Influencers certainly can be blamed for the actions of others that follow. In this case, Darwin opened an ideological or ethical door which would not otherwise have been opened.

The Nazbo Rap is the youtube Christian video of the year thus far for Ben Witherington:

Props to all those rappin’ Nazarenes out there in the heartland. Get on up with your Good Self, Kanye and Eminem ain’t got nothin’ on you.

Having attended a Nazarene church for the past few years, it is pretty funny.

Here is Angus Menuge’s powerpoint presentation for his recent debate with P.Z. Meyers. It is titled, “Does Neuroscience Leave Room for God?” It is a nice resource with some interesting quotes pertaining to the subject. Among them is this one which causes one to question the materialistic commitment of many modern scientists:

“[A] rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.” - William James, The Will to Believe.

HT: Dangerous Idea