withallyourmind.net

Johnny-Dee of Fides Quaerens Intellectum recently complemented this blog by naming us one of the ” 5 blogs that make you think”. He described withallyourmind as…

A father-son team of bloggers. Almost everything they blog gives you a solid argument with which to wrestle. Anyone who is looking for intelligent evangelical Christians should check them out.

We appreciate the kind words!

In my last post I began evaluating the arguments of Kent Vrana in support of ESCR (see the last post for a link to the article). Vrana’s first argument:

Reason one has to do with what he and many other scientists see as a logical incoherency in the Bush administration’s position. Vrana gives about six public talks on stem cells every year, mostly to non-scientific audiences, and at every talk, he starts by asking for a show of hands: “How many of you are in favor of helping infertile couples by using in vitro fertilization technologies?” Almost every hand shoots up. “Well,” Vrana tells the crowd, “we destroy as many as 12 embryos to make one pregnancy.”

Vrana is right to point out a logical incoherency in Bush’s position of ESCR. It is incoherent to oppose the federal funding of ESCR on new lines of ESC’s but to allow it on established lines. Either ESCR is experimentation on and the destruction of human beings or it is not. Either ESCR should be funded in all cases or not at all. Many who oppose ESCR pointing out this incoherency and were unhappy that Bush did not oppose federal funding of all ESCR. Politics often produces incoherent policies based on the principle that it is better to achieve a partial goal when achievement of a full goal is unattainable. The incoherence proposed by Vrana, however, is one of opposing ESCR and approving of IVF (in-vitro fertilization). But, there is nothing inherently incoherent in opposing ESCR and approving of IVF in that ESCR involves the experimentation on and destruction of human beings and IVF does not. Those who understand what is immoral about ESCR also oppose the destruction of extra embryos in IVF. there is nothing incoherent about such a position.

Vrana’s second argument:

The second reason Vrana supports further embryonic research is that he believes it would be risky not to. Sure, he says—only using adult stem cells, parthenotes, and cells taken from amniotic fluid “has a certain ethical attractiveness.” But it’s not yet clear that these cells can do everything embryonic stem cells can do… “It would be like saying, ‘I’m going to fix up your car with a hammer and a screwdriver, but no, I’m not allowed to use a crescent wrench.’ You gotta use all the tools in the toolbox.”

Vrana once again totally misses the point. If ESCR involves the destruction of and experimentation on innocent human life, one cannot justify this by appealing to the benefit others might receive. The tool analogy is misguided. Not all things which can be done in the name of science is ethically allowable. Because medicine has the technology and ability to do a thing does not make it morally acceptable. It is morally reprehensible to experiment on and destroy some innocent human lives so that others may be benefitted.

He also mentions, but downplays the fact that there is no evidence that ESC’s can cure or effectively treat any disease while adult stem cells have already been used to treat a number of diseases.

The article speaks of Vrana’s many public speaking appearances on the subject of ESCR:

If all goes well, the audience, by the end of the talk, hasn’t been persuaded so much as provoked. When people get all the facts, Vrana says, “it stops being a black-and-white issue. And that’s what I strive for.” Anyway, we have to get used to batting this issue around, Vrana says, because it’s not going away anytime soon.

It is appropriate that the title of this article is “How Not to Play God”. It illustrates how not to think correctly about the morality of ESCR. Instead of helping us think more clearly about what is right and wrong about ESCR, Vrana just muddies the water with his poor ethical reasoning.

Jason Fagone, in the Penn State Magazine (my alma mater, I graduated from Penn State Medical School), discusses the work of and interviews Kent Vrana, a brain biochemist and stem-cell expert at Penn State. The article, How Not to Play God, is primarily concerned with the ethical status of Ebryonic Stem Cell Research (ESCR). The article, although on the surface attempting to appear neutral, obviously leaned heavily toward allowing, even promoting, ESCR.

Vrana described himself as a church-going Methodist and a “pretty conservative guy” who has voted for Bush in the past two elections. He seems to be an intelligent, thoughtful and articulate man. I continue to be amazed, however, how very intelligent people make very simple mistakes when it comes to thinking about issues of morality and ethics. The author of the article gives Vrana’s view of abortion:

He’s against abortion (though he wouldn’t legislate away a woman’s right to have one).

One would have to know why he is against abortion to make a complete reply to this remark. The article gives Vrana’s reasons why he supports ESCR, but not his views on abortion. Nonetheless, the above stance on abortion is morally incoherent to me. The most important question in the ethics of abortion is, “What is the fetus?” If it is not a human, I’m not sure what grounds one might have to oppose abortion. If the fetus is a human, I’m not sure what grounds one might have to support abortion (except in rare cases). To say that the fetus is human and abortion therefore takes an innocent human life, but that this shouldn’t be illegal, doesn’t make any sense at all.

Vrana gives two reasons why he supports ESCR. I will look at these and respond in my next post.

One of my philosophical interests is the philosophy of mind, especially consciousness and the dualism/physicalism debate. By ‘interest,’ I mean something that I would someday like to study in depth and be knowledgeable about. I have also just finished reading through Peter van Inwagen’s Metaphysics, in which he dedicates two chapters to the debate between dualists and physicalists. Although van Inwagen is a Christian, he is also a physicalist and he gives several arguments against dualism that he thinks favor physicalism. These got me thinking about a couple of options to which dualists could appeal to answer the most common arguments against dualism, but to which they rarely do. Of course, it may just be that because I have done so little reading in this area, I am simply unaware either of the total number of people who do appeal to these or of some obvious reasons these won’t work. Nevertheless, they seem reasonable enough to me to at least merit further discussion.

Anyone who has done any philosophy knows that dualism is obviously false because of the question of interaction - How could something non-material causally interact with something material? Of course, such a simple question is not an argument, but this is about all one is usually likely to find on the interaction problem. One philosopher who has tried to make explicit what the interaction problem actually is is Jaegwon Kim. His argument, greatly simplified, is that in order for a causal relation to hold between two things, there must be some relation that “pairs” them, and that this “pairing relation” is necessarily spacial. Since immaterial souls have no spacial location, they cannot be relata of a pairing relation, and therefore cannot be relata of a causal relation.

I’m not sure what to think of this pairing relation, but granted that Kim’s argument is sound, one option for the dualist is to deny that souls have no spacial location. There does not seem (to me anyway) to be anything incoherent about supposing that something can be both immaterial and in space. Think of our folk ideas about ghosts and disembodied existence. A promising option for the dualist, then, might be to claim that the immaterial soul can interact with its material body precisely because they occupy exactly the same space (or perhaps the soul occupies exactly the same space as the brain - hence G.E. Moore’s claim “I’m closer to my head than to my feet”). This is something I plan to spend some time thinking about eventually. (See this post by Andrew Bailey for a more indepth treatment of this topic).

The argument that van Inwagen finds most persuasive against dualism is based on a thought experiment about a duplicating machine. This machine is one that can make exact physical duplicates of anything that is put into it. Suppose that a man, Abob, walked into this machine and beside him appears an exact physical duplicate of Abob as he was a few seconds ago. Our intuitions about this duplicate indicate that we would expect him to be fully functional, having all of the same memories, beliefs, and intelligence of Abob. We would expect the duplicate to think himself to be Abob, and to go on to enjoy exactly the same type of varied mental and conscious life that Abob is able to experience. But these intuitions, according to van Inwagen, count against dualism. If all that the machine did was make an exact physical copy of Abob, then presumably his soul wasn’t copied. But if no soul was copied into the duplicate, how could the duplicate have the conscious experience and mental life that we expect him to have? The only options for the dualist appear to be to either deny that the duplicate would have any conscious mental life, or to go to the extreme to claim that whenever a fully formed human body comes into existence, God instantaneously creates a soul to go along with it.

An option not discussed by van Inwagen is to claim that the soul is not something directly created by God, but something that emerges from particular highly complex arrangements of matter. Presumably, God would have had to build this capability into matter during creation. Emergence is something that is being hotly discussed by philosophers these days, and many think there are metaphysical problems for any sort of strong emergence. I do not know enough about these difficulties to comment here. However, the approach seems promising and even intuitive to me, and if emergence of any kind is possible, it isn’t obvious that a different type of substance could emerge. Some dualists who are theists (are there any who aren’t?) might have theological problems with this view, and it may be tricky to reconcile it with life after death. Nevertheless, if the soul is something that emerges from certain complex arrangements of matter, that would explain why Abob’s duplicate was conscious, as well as explain how it is that humans came to be conscious - at some point during evolution, our ancestors reached the right state of physical complexity to give rise to souls (assuming both that evolution occurred and that human beings are the products of evolution (which I have tentatively come to accept)).

There are some things that would need to be worked out with both of these options, but, as I said earlier, they seem at least initially reasonable and worth some further consideration.

I can see why one might want to hold such a position. After all, there seem to be many good, moral people in many religions in the world. To think that a Christian, for example, possesses the only true way of salvation, seems intolerant and unacceptable to modern minds. However there is a real problem with holding a view that all major religions are equally valid or that they are equally true. Reason and common sense demand that we reject such a statement.

It is an accepted law of thinking that two contradictory propositions cannot both be true. If two religions make contradictory claims about reality, there are three possibilities. First, they could both be wrong in their claims about reality. Second, religion A could be right while religion B is wrong. Third, religion B’s beliefs could match up with reality while religion A’s could be in error.

One assessment of these religious claims that is not possible is that both are equally valid and true. This contradicts one of the basic laws of thinking called the law of non-contradiction. For example, if I claim that I have a Mazda MX5 in my garage and you claim that there is no Mazda MX5 in my garage, we cannot both be right. In order to evaluate and determine which claim accurately reflects reality we would have to compare the two claims with reality by opening the garage door and seeing what is the case concerning an MX5 in my garage.

Religions make such contradictory claims. Christianity states that the problem with man is his sinful nature and the only cure for the problem, the only way to receive salvation, is to accept the free gift of salvation from God made possible by the death of God’s Son on the cross. No other way will lead to salvation. A Buddhist might say that this is not true at all. The real problem is that we are unaware that all is an illusion and to achieve “salvation” (nirvana) we need to realize this and escape the cycle of death and rebirth. They deny that one must accept the Christian doctrine of salvation in order to achieve nirvana. Many more examples could be produced, but the point is that all religions cannot be right because they make contradictory claims.

Now, some may feel that we are unable to determine whether or not one religion more accurately understands reality than the other, but that is a different claim than the claim that all religions are equally true or valid. If we could not have access to my garage, the question of whether an MX5 is in the garage may be difficult to answer. However, the reality is that either there is an MX5 in the garage or there is not. My inability to confirm this does not make both beliefs true or equally valid.

So, should we throw up our hands and give up on all religious claims? Some choose to do this, but I do not think this is the right response. After all, religious claims deal with extremely important issues. There is nothing any different in religious claims about reality and other claims about reality (such as the MX5 in the garage). Either they accurately reflect reality or they do not. If certain claims are true and we choose to ignore them, we do so to our own potential harm. It is possible to investigate the claims which different religions make and see how they match up with reality, much like opening the garage door to see if there is an MX5 in the garage. I have a number of good reasons I believe that the truth claims of Christianity are superior to those of other religions. That is why I am a Christian.

Most, by now, have no doubt heard of the very important Supreme Court decision handed down this week on the partial birth abortion ban. The decision was 5-4 to uphold the government’s right to ban this especially gruesome procedure which had been voted into law and signed by President Bush in 2003. I have not commented on this, but many others in the blogosphere have. I would recommend a couple of analyses that I’ve read.

Al Mohler provides his helpful analysis here. On the significance of this decision, Mohler writes that it…

… acknowledged that, for many, even the most common abortion procedure is “a procedure itself laden with the power to devalue human life.” This is rather amazing language in itself, but Justice Kennedy then argued that the partial birth procedure “implicates additional ethical and moral concerns that justify a special prohibition.”

The explicit inclusion of this moral language marks a great achievement in this decision. So is the decision’s acknowledgement that “it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.”

April 18, 2007 will go down in history as a landmark day in the struggle to recover human dignity and the sanctity of human life. This ruling is an important step toward that recovery — and we still have a very long way to go. There is reason to believe that this decision may be even more important than might first appear. After all, the majority opinion does recognize that for many citizens, any abortion is “a procedure laden with the power to devalue human life.”

Richard John Neuhas, of First Things, discusses the decision here. He echoes Mohler’s assessment of the significance of the ruling:

Justice Kennedy’s 5-4 majority opinion is notable for accenting the society’s legitimate, indeed imperative, interest in protecting innocent human life. That interest had received lip service in Roe and its judicial offspring, but this time it is an operative, albeit not a controlling, concern. President Bush hailed Carhart as bringing us closer to the goal of “a society in which every child is welcomed in life and protected in law.” A very little bit closer to a goal still painfully far away.

Neuhaus provides sharp insight in this excerpt in which he discusses law and morality:

I expect it is in the minds of many, but so far there has been only marginal public comment on the fact that all five in the Carhart majority are Catholics. What can one say? Know-Nothings of the world unite? It is not a peculiarly Catholic perception, but it is an emphatically Catholic perception, that legitimate law cannot be divorced from morality. And in this constitutional order of representative democracy, the relationship between moral judgment and law is best expressed by the legislature. Almost a century ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. declared that the realm of law should be entirely purged of moral judgment or vocabulary.

That, of course, is itself a moral dictate. But over the past fifty years, the Court has followed that dictate on numerous issues, thus reinforcing what has been called the naked public square. The Ginsburg dissent is right: In previous decisions, especially those dealing with abortion, the Court said there was no place in law for the “imposing” of moral judgments. Carhart, by way of contrast, evidences a respect for moral discernment, especially as expressed by the legislature. Every law of consequence reflects a moral judgment. The abortion license imposed by Roe previously enjoyed a most particular exemption from moral inquiry. Carhart quite clearly says that that exemption is now expiring.

Many of the other blog’s we frequent have already commented on Reasonable Faith, the new website by the well-respected Christian philosopher William Lane Craig. There may be readers of this blog which do not visit these other sites. If so, I highly recommend Craig’s website. To take full advantage of the site, a free registration is required.

One of the topics addressed by Craig at this time is his take on the Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion. He examines what Dawkins calls a summary of the central argument of the book and illustrates how weak the argument actually is. I present an excerpt of Craig’s analysis here where he addresses the well-worn “who designed the designer?” retort:

This rejoinder is flawed on at least two counts. First, in order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn’t have an explanation of the explanation. This is an elementary point concerning inference to the best explanation as practiced in the philosophy of science. If archaeologists digging in the earth were to discover things looking like arrowheads and hatchet heads and pottery shards, they would be justified in inferring that these artifacts are not the chance result of sedimentation and metamorphosis, but products of some unknown group of people, even though they had no explanation of who these people were or where they came from. Similarly, if astronauts were to come upon a pile of machinery on the back side of the moon, they would be justified in inferring that it was the product of intelligent, extra-terrestrial agents, even if they had no idea whatsoever who these extra-terrestrial agents were or how they got there. In order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn’t be able to explain the explanation. In fact, so requiring would lead to an infinite regress of explanations, so that nothing could ever be explained and science would be destroyed. So in the case at hand, in order to recognize that intelligent design is the best explanation of the appearance of design in the universe, one needn’t be able to explain the designer.

Mary Jo, at Confident Christianity, puts competing theories of the resurrection to the test against the minimal facts which are granted by even the most liberal biblical scholars. The swoon theory, the hallucination theory, the myth theory, and the legend theory are all found wanting when compared to the only theory which adequately accounts for all the minimal facts: Jesus of Nazareth was actually resurrected! She does a great job in her explanation.

I presented a series of posts on the minimal facts of the resurrection here.

David Brooks, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, recently published a column which I read in The Lakeland Ledger called Darwin’s Place in the Grand Narrative. There is much distaste these days for “grand narratives,” unifying stories which explain and order all of our experience. Popular postmodern thought denies the existence of a grand narrative. We can never get outside of our own vantage point to see reality as it is.

Brooks argues that, although many grand narratives (such as that offered by Orthodox Christianity) have been rejected, one particular grand narrative has quietly crept in to establish itself as the story which explains and shapes all that we do.

It occurred to me that while we postmoderns say we detest all-explaining narratives, in fact a newish grand narrative has crept upon us willy-nilly and is now all around. Once the Bible shaped all conversation, then Marx, then Freud, but today Darwin is everywhere.

Scarcely a month goes by when Time or newsweek doesn’t have a cover article on how our genes shape everything from our exercise habits to our moods… Confident and exhilarated, evolutionary theorists believe they have a universal framework to explain human behavior.

Brooks rightly observes that this grand narrative is shockingly different from those narratives which it has replaced:

The people who set the cultural tone today have coalesced around a shared understanding of humanity and its history that would have astonished people in earlier epochs. According to this view, human beings, like all other creatures, are machines for passing along genetic code… Reason is not separate from emotion and the soul cannot be detached from the electrical and chemical pulses of the body. We are tools of mental processes we are not even aware of.

Despite the postmodern influence in our culture today, I agree with Brooks that America is not a postmodern society. He states:

We have a grand narrative that explains behavior and gives shape to history. We have a central cosmology to embrace, argue with or unconsciously submit to.

This is a saddeningly accurate description of the world from a Darwinian perspective. It is not God who shapes history, but undirected processes acting on molecules and matter. Humans are mere “machines” whose purpose is to perpetuate ourselves and our species.

It’s been an extremely long time since I’ve posted anything to this blog, and I’m not sure how many regular viewers we have, so it may be that no one remembers me. At any rate, if there are any such people, perhaps they will remember that I have been in the process of applying to PhD programs in philosophy. Well, out of the 12 departments to which I applied, I was admitted at four, and I have officially decided to pursue graduate study at the University of California at Berkeley starting next fall. They have a great program and one which will definitely increase my chances of being able to secure an academic job upon graduation. It’s obviously a great opportunity for me, and one about which I am both excited and nervous. The school is statistically more secular than most others, which may make things difficult from time to time, but which also opens up good opportunities for a person who wants to defend Christianity in the public realm of ideas. The move and getting used to the new environment will also be difficult, and so, naturally, any prayers offered on my behalf would be appreciated. All things going according to plan, in five years there will be a second Dr. Carey in the family!