A post by Glenn caught my eye the other day and I have not been able to stop thinking about it as despite knowing that Glenn knows what he is talking about in this field, I just am struggling to believe his numbers. It really is proof-positive of the socialist extent of Labour's policies in practice and should serve as a warning to anyone tempted to vote Labour because they think the criticims levelled at Labour's attempts to turn as many working people into beneficiaries dependant on the state as possible are exaggerated.

I have reproduced some of it below as it warrants further exposure.

Extract from New Zealand: Land of greed, envy and political stupidity (the election blog, part 1)

Wealth re-distribution is at an almost unbelievable level at present. Take a family with one income earner. At current taxation levels, with an annual income of $40,000, that income earner will pay $7770.00 in PAYE (“pay as you earn”). This includes income tax plus 1.4% ACC (socialised accident compensation insurance). On the whole, that’s about 19.43%. If the earner works more hours or gets a more skilled job that pays more and the income is $70,000, the total PAYE is $18,090. That’s about 25.84%. It gets worse if you earn more than that.

But it does not end there. Let’s add this to the mix: This family has four children below the age of 12. This means that this family will qualify for state welfare for those children. Use the calculators at www.workingforfamilies.govt.nz to check the figures for yourselves. Let’s imagine that there are two families with one earner in each, one earning 40K and the other earning 70K. I’ll be taking into account the payments received from the “working for families” welfare scheme as well as the accommodation supplement each of these families will qualify for. I’ve arbitrarily hypothesised that these two different families live in the same city that I live in, and pay the same amount of rent that my family pays. Taking all of the above into account, here is the weekly combined income from all sources – after tax – for these two families.

Family 1, earning $40,000:
Total after tax weekly income (including welfare payments) of $1018.27
This family will pay $7770 in PAYE and receive $19,916 in state welfare. No, that is not a typo. Nineteen thousand, nine hundred and sixteen dollars of untaxed welfare payments.

Family 2, earning $70,000:
Total after tax income of $1208.27
This family will pay $18,090 in PAYE and receive $10,920 in state welfare.

Take a few moments to take this in: Family 2 earns $576.92 more than family 1 each week. For their extra effort or skill, they end up just $190 better off each week.

The level of wealth re-distribution to minimise the difference in income between these two families is staggering. And yet, each of these families is a recipient of a sizable chunk of the re-distributed wealth of others. The first family effectively pays no tax at all and then receives a further cash bonus of $12,146. But even the higher earning family still receives well over half of the earner’s PAYE payments back.

Who are the benefactors here? The benefactors are those without children who are trying to get by on $30,000 per year and not receiving a penny from working for families (but still qualifying for an accommodation supplement of about $60 per week). The other benefactors are those who receive none of these taxpayer funded handouts but who fund a huge proportion of them: those who contribute more tax because they earn more.

Essentially, the financial landscape this creates is one where a family on a low to medium income with several children has little incentive to increase their salary/wages beyond around $36,000 (the level at which state handouts start to decrease). Even if they had a salary of $70,000, the difference in financial positions would not reflect this increase in earnings.

That’s what I’m talking about when I talk about statism and wealth redistribution. It’s not just rhetoric without substance. It’s a real system that demonstrably penalises the high achievers, and for everyone else it serves as the great equaliser, making it seem like nobody’s earning more than anyone else. When everyone gets ahead – nobody gets ahead, nor is there any incentive to do so.

In my previous post, Is Abortion Liberal? Part 1, I argued that liberals who support the non-initiation of force principle can support abortion only on two grounds;

(a) the fetus is a person but its existence inside the mother without her consent constitutes a form aggression, and hence, the mother’s action of killing it is defensive; or,
(b) a fetus is not a person.

I will now address each of these in turn.

Is the Fetus an Aggressor?
Consider first (a), the contention that a fetus can be considered an aggressor because it is intruding upon a woman’s body without her consent; an intrusion grave enough to justify the use of lethal force. In this respect then, being subject to an unplanned pregnancy would be on par with being the recipient of a serious assault such as being raped or severely beaten.

Frank Beckwith and Steve Thomas in Consent, Sex and the Pre-Natal Rapist, have demonstrated several problems with this claim. It leads to the conclusion that, in certain circumstances abortion is justified without the consent of the woman.

Consider the following scenario. A young woman is involved in a car accident and is rendered unconscious by her injuries. She is brought to a hospital where, still comatose, she is examined by a doctor. While performing some tests, the doctor determines that the woman has been pregnant for several weeks. Furthermore, suppose that evidence comes to light to suggest that the woman is unaware of her pregnancy, perhaps her close friends know nothing of the pregnancy, her diary shows no knowledge of being pregnant, and so on.

Adopting McDonagh's understanding of pregnancy as morally equivalent to rape or assault, what is the doctor's obligation to this unconscious patient? It would seem that, under these conditions, the doctor is morally required to perform an abortion to rid his patient of the 'massive intrusion' being imposed upon her by her unborn offspring. After regaining consciousness, the woman would have to be told that she's undergone an abortion for a pregnancy of which she was not aware, for there was good evidence that no consent had been given and that she was under assault.[i]

Beckwith’s point is that if the fetus is morally or legally on par with an aggressor who intrudes upon a woman’s body without her consent, such as a assailant or rapist then it would follow that in the case sketched above the doctor would be justified (and arguably would have an obligation) to abort despite the fact that no consent from the women had been obtained.

Consider, that if one saw a person having sex with an unconscious woman and one knew the woman had not consented, it would be absurd to wait for the woman to wake up to see if she wanted to consent to sex. One would be obligated to intervene. “[T]he doctor in the midst of the situation, aware of the pregnancy in the absence of consent, must see it as the rape-in-progress of his unconscious patient. How could he do anything else but end the assault?”[ii]

Now I assume that liberals would oppose the idea that any woman who both does not know she is pregnant and is unconscious should be subjected to an abortion without her consent. If this is the case then it is clear that they do not think that an unconsented to pregnancy constitutes an act of serious aggression.

If the fetus is an unjust aggressor then liberals are committed to coercive abortions. If coercive abortions are not liberal then the fetus is not an unjust aggressor.

Is the Fetus a Person?
If the fetus is not an unjust aggressor then a liberal defense of abortion must be based upon (b), the idea that a fetus is not a person, a being that possesses the rights to life, liberty and property that liberals believe the state exists to protect.

Now a fetus is clearly a human organism. After 14 days at least, it is an individual living being that is a member of the species homo sapiens. To justify abortion via (b), the liberal needs to tell us what property a human being possesses that grounds the right to not be subjected to the initiation of force, to not be killed. Further a liberal must also be able to plausibly maintain that a human organism does not acquire this property until after the fetal stage.

Peter Creswell takes the view,

[T]he foetus is not yet a human being, but a part of a human being – the mother – who has rights over it. To be an actual, rather than merely potential, human being is, among other things, to be physically separate, which a foetus is not.[iii]

This claim is erroneous. First the “parts of” relationship is transitive; if a brick is part of a wall and the wall part of a house then the brick is part of the house. If a fetus is part of a woman’s body it follows then that any organ that is part of the fetus will be part of the mother. A woman pregnant at eight weeks then possesses four arms, four legs and two brains. If the fetus is male, she will have both a vagina and a penis and be both male and female. Conclusions that are even more bizarre follow if the woman is pregnant with twins. She could have three faces, three brains, six arms, two penises and a vagina, three hearts, six kidneys and so on.[iv]

Moreover, PC’s contention that “to be an actual human” one must be “physically separate” entails that conjoined twins are not human. Consider conjoined twins Bob and Scott. If Bob is a human being then since Scott cannot live independently of Bob, Scott must not be a human person (the converse is equally true).

Yet it is difficult to see what property Bob has that Scott lacks which would justify considering one of them human and the other not simply because neither is dependant of the other. It appears then, that one would be forced to conclude that they both are and are not, human. Perhaps PC is simply giving a poorly worded defence of the viability criteria, which I have previously critiqued here.

However, the usual liberal response is to ground the right to not be subjected to the initiation of force, to not be killed, in certain psychological capacities that human beings typically display; such things as sentience, rationality, self-awareness, autonomy, etc.

Despite the pervasive appeal of this approach, it faces serious problems. Boonin notes that those who attempt to ground humanity in the amount of brain development an organism has face a dilemma. “Any appeal to what a brain can do at various stages of development would seem to have to appeal to what the brain can already do. Or to what the brain has the potential to do in the future.”[v]

Either option leads to problems for a defender of the permissibility of abortion who does not also want to endorse infanticide. This is because “by any plausible measure dogs, and cats, cows and pigs, chickens and ducks or more intellectually developed than a new born infant.”[vi] Suppose, then, one takes the first horn and appeals to what the brain can already do. However, unless one wishes to affirm that cats, dogs and chickens are human beings, “appeals to what the brain can already do” will “be unable to account for the presumed wrongness of killing toddlers or infants.”[vii] Suppose, then, one takes up the second horn of the dilemma and appeals to “what the brain has the potential to do in the future;”[viii] Boonin notes that this will entail that feticide is homicide. “If [such an account] allows appeals to what the brain has the potential to do in the future, then it will have to include fetuses as soon as their brains begin to emerge, during the first few weeks of gestation.”[ix]

A couple of examples will illustrate this. Suppose the liberal appeals to sentience, the capacity for consciousness and the ability to perceive pleasure and pain. This criterion will mean abortion is permissible up to 24 weeks.[x] The problem is that this criterion also catches cats, dogs, cows, and chickens as well all. All of which are as sentient if not more sentient than new born infants and post-24 week fetuses.

If the liberal draws the line at sentience, he/she will have to hold that farming, butchers shops, McDonald’s restaurants, Kentucky fried Chicken restaurants all engage in unjustified aggression against people because they kill sentient beings without their consent. Further, to remain consistent, the liberal will have to maintain a policy of outlawing all these industries and prosecuting those who engage in them for murder and cannibalism.

Suppose the liberal appeals to more advanced psychological states such as self-awareness, rationality or autonomy. Such accounts of the grounding of rights will exclude the animals mentioned above and will exclude human fetuses. The problem is, according to this account, newborn infants are not persons either.

In a definitive study of infanticide, Michael Tooley compiles an impressive array of neurological and physiological data that demonstrates that infants are not persons in this sense until some time after birth.[xi] The price of this line of inference is the reduction of newborn infants to the ethical level of cows. A newborn cow, and certainly a mature cow, is more person-like than an infant is. It is difficult to understand by this view why killing and eating infants is any more problematic than consuming a Big Mac.

Of course the liberal can avoid this by claiming that it is the potential to acquire properties such as rationality, self-awareness, autonomy, not their actuality that matters. This will enable one to claim infants are protected by the non-initiation of force principle and will exclude animals. But the problem of course is that foetuses will also be protected by the non-initiation of force principle because fetuses also have the potential to possess these properties.

In summation, liberal proponents of the non-initiation of force principle can only support abortion if they are willing to be inconsistent and arbitrary in their application of the principle or if they are willing to endorse not just infanticide but the eating of newborn infants or state mandated vegetarianism or coercive abortions. These policies are an anathema to most liberals; as such, abortion is not liberal.

UPDATE: In response to comments below see Sentience Part 1 and Sentience Part 2.

[i] Francis J. Beckwith & Stephen Thomas, “Consent, Sex, and the Prenatal Rapist; A Brief Reply to McDonagh’s Suggested Revision of Roe v Wade,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 17: 3 (2003): 4.
[ii] Ibid, 6.
[iii] Peter Creswell, “Not PC: Cue Card Libertarianism – Abortion”, http://pc.blogspot.com/2005/05/cue-card-libertarianism-abortion.html.
[iv] Here I am influenced by Peter Kreeft, The Unaborted Socrates (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1983), 45-47 and Francis J Beckwith, Politically Correct Death, 124.
[v] David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 125.
[vi] Ibid, 121.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Ibid.
[x] It is generally accepted that sentience occurs around 24 week’s gestation. There is some dispute over this and some scientists date sentience in the first 10 weeks of gestation.
[xi] Michael Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) Ch. 11.5.


RELATED POSTS:
Is Abortion Liberal? Part 1
Sentience Part 1
Sentience Part 2
Viability
Abortion and Child Abuse: Another Response to Farrar
Abortion and Brain Death: A Response to Farrar
Abortion and Capital Punishment: No Contradiction
Imposing You Beliefs Onto Others: A Defence
Published: Boonin's Defense of the Sentience Criteria - A Critique
Published: Abortion and Capital Punishment - No Contradiction

Laws permitting abortion on demand are often deemed to be liberal. Further, political liberals are frequently ardent defenders of such laws. I think these conclusions are mistaken. In a series of two posts I will provide some reasons why.

Most contemporary liberals advocate a form of the harm principle, famously articulated by Mill in On Liberty,

The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.[i] [Emphasis added]

Mill here draws a distinction between other-regarding actions, actions that harm other people, and self-regarding actions, those that harm oneself. He argues that society, either by law or by social pressure, cannot justly regulate any action a person performs unless it is other-regarding; that is, it harms people other than the agent him/herself. As Mill’s position is typically interpreted harm is understood to be governed by the principle volenti non fit injuria (where there is consent, there is no injury) and hence refers to things done to other people without their consent. On this interpretation, self-regarding actions are those that people consent to and that harm no non-consenting, third party. As Mill himself notes, a self-regarding action is that “which affects only himself, or affects others with their free and voluntary, and undeceived consent”.[ii]

The most common version of the harm principle is known as the non-initiation of force principle; Rothbard sums it up well,

The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the “nonaggression axiom.” “Aggression” is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion.[iii]

I do not subscribe to the harm principle or the non-initiation of force interpretation of it (I give some reasons why here). However, in this series of posts I will adopt it for the sake of argument so as to examine what follows for abortion. Abortion involves killing a fetus, usually by dismembering it. Moreover, the fetus does not consent to it. Hence if a Liberal is to support abortion he/she must do so for only one of two reasons. Either,

(a) the fetus is a person but its existence inside the mother without her consent constitutes a form aggression, and hence, the mother’s action of killing it is defensive; or,
(b) a fetus is not a person.

My last lecture of the year was taped yesterday, my first final exam in 8 years is on Thursday (whatever happened to study week?) so I am signing out of the blogosphere until my last exam on 5 November. My Labour weekend will be nothing but intense study.

I am not stressed though as I got my final essay grade yesterday and it was the highest mark I have pulled since studying at University: 97.5%!!!!! - yay! totally made my day ! With all my grades in I now know I am going into exams sitting higher than the class average in both subjects (not bad given I have had an 8 year break from study, have completed the year pretty much absent from class due to my injury, have battled said injury and have 4 kids, a job, a blog, etc). Anyway, I would have to bomb in a spectacularly bad way to pull a fail overall - which I know I won't.

Speaking of things that made my day yesterday, we climbed 15 spots on the NZ blog rankings for September.

If Tim had had our correct uniques for September we would have officially climbed 26 spots to the number 69 spot (conservatively) but I recently upgraded our stats counter, so I could not provide him the data in the correct form; hence, we got guestimated - such are the rules. Tim does a great job so I won't complain. The new position moves us to the number 4 spot of blogs formally identifed as Christian.

So, I will leave the blog to Matt to manage, try to avoid the news, the computer and generally talking to people so I can focus purely on the books!

Extrapolating from Tumeke's Semptember 2008 stats, the top 10 Christian Blogs* in New Zealand are:

1. NZ Conservative (24)
2. The Briefing Room (30)
3. Something Should Go Here, Maybe Later (36)
4. MandM (77)
5. Samuel Dennis (80)
6. Gavin Knight (91)
7. Contra Celsum (94)
8. Put up Thy Sword (115)
9. Say Hello to my Little Friend (a.k.a Beretta Blog) (128)
10. Section 59 Blog (147)

(Numbers in brackets show the overall NZ ranking of each blog)

*This list does not include Christians who blog but whose blogs are not identifiably Christian and is based on Tumeke's classification and ranking methods.

If you think your blog should be on the rankings click here.

Increasingly so of late, I find myself in conversations, in the receipt of email requests or blog comments asking where to begin and how to expand one’s Christian philosophical understanding. I have been asked to recommend books and places to study and to share my own journey in this area.

I started my studies at Waikato University in 1993. I was advised by the leadership at the church I attended, a church with some 300 student members I might add, to not study philosophy. I was told that this subject was one Christians should avoid or risk being led astray. However, for the reasons of timetabling, I was left with no option but to study Introduction to Philosophy.

At that time the only apologists I was familiar with were Josh McDowell and Steve Kumar, who had spoken to our youth group. In Kumar’s book, Christian Apologetics: Think Why You Believe, there was a bibliography and for some reason I decided to go to the University library and follow these books up. I did not end up following the bibliography exactly as the first book that stood out on the shelf when I went into philosophy of religion section of the library was a book called God, Freedom and Evil by Alvin Plantinga and something prompted me to pick it up. I had never heard of Alvin Plantinga and had no idea that I had just picked up the definitive discussion of the logical problem of evil. As a first year student, with no background in philosophy, I actually managed to read it from cover to cover.

This is not where I recommend people to start, as Plantinga is hard going, but it did give me one advantage. I had not been captivated by a superficial treatment of the issue but by arguably the best treatment of that issue in the literature. Plantinga opened my eyes to the possibilities of Christian theorising.

I began devouring other authors. I stumbled on Richard Swinburne’s The Existence of God, one of the most rigorous arguments for the existence of God written in the last century. I read Paul Helm’s discussion Eternal God: A Study of God Without Time and Reichenbach’s defence of the cosmological argument in Cosmological Argument: A Reassessment. Following up a footnote in Helm’s book, I came across another author I had never heard of, William Lane Craig and read his book The Kalam Cosmological Argument. I discovered Thomas Morris’s The Logic of the God Incarnate (I don't know why more theologians don't read Morris) and began reading various anthologies on Philosophy of Religion.

At the same time I was studying religious studies under Doug Pratt, someone very sympathetic to Lloyd Geering, and we covered the rationality of theism in our Introduction to Philosophy course. I can honestly say the sceptical focus of these courses had absolutely no effect except to teach me how superficial the scepticism I was being subjected to was. To be told by Geering that no intelligent person can believe in God with only brief justification and then be informed that Christianity must be completely re-worked alongside contrasted by the detailed point by point rebuttal of arguments for atheism in my extra-curricula reading by Plantinga and Swinburne meant there was no contest.

By my second year, I had read Plantinga’s God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God. This book was absolutely brilliant. Plantinga demolished several common arguments for atheism; however, he also made some astutely critical points against the standard Christian arguments for God’s existence. Two thirds through the book he concluded that the arguments for and the arguments against were inconclusive, he the made what seemed to be a bizarre move and turned to the problem of other minds, he pointed out that the arguments for and against the existence of other people were equally inconclusive and in some cases the arguments failed for reasons very similar to the arguments for the existence of God. Yet, belief in other minds was clearly rational, so why wasn’t belief in God?

This struck me as odd. Surely belief in God was totally different to belief in other minds. Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God edited by Plantinga and Wolterstorff changed my stance. Until then I had been devouring books by Craig and Swinburne arguing for the existence of God. Plantinga, however, suggested that there was a flawed method behind the demand for evidence. Many discussions on the existence of God tacitly assumed that there was a neutral body of propositions assented to by believer and non-believer alike. All other propositions were rational only if they followed from this original body by evidence. Plantinga’s radical suggestion was that Christians and non-Christians started with a different body of evidence to each other. The idea of a neutral agreed upon starting point was a fiction and usually incoherent. Frequently assumptions that made sense only from a naturalistic viewpoint were smuggled in to the ‘neutral’ starting point, subtly rigging the debate.

This opened my eyes, particularly in the area of ethics. I started seeing why people came to the conclusions they did and Christians seemed unable to combat them despite perceiving that there was something wrong with their argument. The idea that religion had no place in public life or scholarship and people had to bracket their faith commitments when answering normative questions meant that the fundamental premises Christians relied on for their conclusions were discounted from the outset. Christians were being forced to justify their conclusions from a perspective that was really hostilely secular but was taken for granted as the neutral starting point that nobody could question.

I went on to write my Masters thesis in Philosophy on Plantinga’s ideas on faith and reason. I took the lessons I learned into my PhD in Theology and extended them into ethics. At no point, at any institution I studied in, was I ever taught these things in class. The textbooks used contained superficial treatments of Christian ethics that had been shredded by Christian Philosophers. The lecturers hadn’t read Christian Philosophy or if they had, they had only dabbled in it and had a superficial understanding or were unaware of the extent it went focussing on minor players. I had no choice but to teach myself by reading widely.

So in summation, in New Zealand, there is nowhere (yet) where I could recommend people to study Christian Philosophy. If you want to become proficient in this field you are probably best to enrol in a secular philosophy degree program, and hunt down and read all the counter arguments from the high-level Christian philosophers as you progress.

As a starting point, accessible to anyone without a background in Philosophy, I would recommend the book Reason for the Hope Within: Alvin Plantinga edited by Michael Murray. This book is hands down, the best introduction to Christian Philosophy and Apologetics as it combines rigour with accessibility to the lay person. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Further, in conjunction with Thinking Matters Tauranga, we are developing a critical thinking course for lay people to teach the basics of logical analysis of arguments, some intro to Christian Philosophy and how to approach common objections to the faith. This will initially be launched in Tauranga early next year but we intend to bring it to Auckland and hopefully make it available more widely from there.

Taken from Thinking Matters - Events & Announcements:

Answering the New Atheism

Dr Steve Kumar Dip Theo, BA, M Div, PhD

When: Tuesday 28 October
Time: 7.30 - 9.30pm
Where: Bethlehem Community Church Center - 183 Moffat Rd, Bethlehem
Cost: Free
Event Format: Live Presentation followed by Q&A and discussions

In this presentation, Dr Kumar will examine the objections to religion put forward by the New Atheists, showing how they fail the tests of reason, history and common sense. He will then weigh Christianity against the atheist view of the world and show how Christianity better accounts for the source of morality, meaning and truth.

Dr Kumar has been speaking and writing about questions of religion and philosophy for over twenty five years. He is a frequent debater and guest speaker at universities and conferences throughout Europe, Asia and the Pacific and is the author of many books, including Christianity for Skeptics.

Thinking Matters
Thinking Matters is an inter-denominational group where you can come to analyse and discuss some of the deeper issues of the Christian faith in the areas of Philosophy, Science and Apologetics (see definitions here).

The purpose is to make Christian truth claims more relevant to an increasingly sceptical and secular culture, showing the reasons why we believe what we believe and providing answers that simply make sense.

Who is Welcome?
It’s open to Christian and Non-Christian alike – anyone who is seeking the truth in philosophy, science and scripture. You don't need a philosophy or a theology degree to be able to understand the speakers.

More on Thinking Matters Tauranga

More on Thinking Matters

RELATED POST: The Point of Intellectual Engagement: Why Thinking Matters

Some weeks ago I wrote a review on the launch of Laidlaw College. I commented on the new vision for the future and my own reflections and frustrations of studying at its previous incarnation, Bible College of New Zealand.

The comments section of this post saw the eruption of strong sentiment and criticism of Laidlaw College. The level of tension evident in what was said and the volume of readers concerned about the issue was quite surprising; our site stats record that this entry is one of our most read and most commonly Googled-for blog posts. Under fire was the seriousness of Laidlaw’s commitment to its new stated vision, its ability to commit to it and the employment process around the appointment of one of the new heads of department.

As we are not party to the hiring practices of Laidlaw and as I was an unsuccessful candidate for the position that came under fire, we did not feel it appropriate to participate in the discussion. However, given the nature of some of the claims made, we have granted Dr Mark Strom, Principal of Laidlaw College, a right of reply.

Matt

Recently I have been reading Timothy Keller's book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. (This is not like me because I don't typically read popular apologetics books, and it is even more rare that I would lead a blog entry with one.)

One thing that interested me is that when Keller examines the objections to the Christian faith he addresses first, not the problem of evil, but rather the claim that it is arbitrary, dogmatic, irrational, bigoted, etc to claim that Christianity is true in the face of pervasive religious pluralism. The fact that affirming Christianity involves adopting an epistemic stance that contradicts the stance taken by so many people, is seen as arbitrary and dogmatic.

This is particularly so if one believes, as I do, that certain Christian beliefs are properly basic, that is, one can rationally assert them independently of any proof of their veracity. Doesn't the fact that so many other people do not hold these beliefs and often hold contrary beliefs, make faith of this sort some kind of arrogant bluster? Isn't it arbitrary for me to assume that my particular faith is true and everyone else is incorrect? I do not think so and in this blog I will sketch some of my reasons why.

The first thing to note about this objection is that it is based on a claim that it is arbitrary to believe a proposition in the absence of proof if numerous other people do not hold that proposition.

Now a little reflection should demonstrate the problem with this claim; the claim itself is one many people do not hold, hence, if the claim is true it is arbitrary to believe it without proof. As none has been offered, I am inclined to take the proponent of this view's word and reject it. Moreover, as the proponent himself has not offered a proof it must be irrational for him to accept this proposition. In fact, there is an obvious incoherence in this kind of objection; the objector proposes that I reject Christian belief on the basis of the above claim, however, I can only do that if I accept the above claim. But if I accept the above claim, I am in the very epistemic situation the claim says I should avoid. It is hard to see how any coherent or sensible objection of this sort can be raised.

There is another problem with this objection. Suppose, for the sake of example, I accept the objector's advice, presumably then I should cease to believe in the Christian faith. But if I do this, aren't I adopting an epistemic stance that is contrary to that held by many people? What about the many Christians, for example, who do not reject the Christian faith? By rejecting Christianity I am taking up an epistemic stance that differs from them and hence, am taking up a stance contrary to that held by many people.

One needs to bear in mind too that the pluralist mindset, the concern so pervasive in our culture today, that all religions are equal and it is wrong to say one is incorrect and another is right is a peculiar western phenomena. Many religions reject this mindset, most religions claim that they are true. People generally don't believe things that they think are false; to believe a proposition is to affirm it. Once this is realised it is clear that pluralism itself is one religious perspective, one that is contrary to most, if not all others. Until the pluralist can provide compelling proof of his position, it would be silly and outright irrational, to become a pluralist on the grounds that one shouldn't adopt views widely rejected by others unless one can prove them.

[At a later date I hope to review Keller's book for this blog. It is a very interesting book as although it is popular, it draws on some fairly high level Christian Philosophers such as Plantinga, Alston, Swinburne, etc and for that reason alone is worth reading. It is interesting to see how a pastor can take these writings and ideas and make them accessible to a lay congregation. I am not so impressed with the second half of the book but I have not finished it yet. Reason for the Hope Within is, I think, a better introduction to apologetics, for those who have never studied it but who want to find a starting point, but this is, so far, a good second.]

I finally got a date for my impending cervical disc replacement surgery:

9 December 2008.

I promptly changed my hair and went blonde - its one thing I get to control I guess.

And no, I won't be arguing the case for the rationality of changing one's hair when faced with life changing events!

Recently, Patrick left the following comment in response Madeleine’s post on the Role of the State.

“[L]ogic and reason are secular, even humanistic processes. Faith is neither of
those. Logic and faith can be in conflict, I think. From a humanist viewpoint
there is nothing particularly logical about believing in an invisible God.”

Apologies to Patrick for whom I have great respect for and whom I have known for years but his statements are sufficiently common amongst evangelicals that they warrant some treatment.

Essentially Patrick makes three claims:

1) Logic and reason are secular, humanistic processes.
2) Faith can be in conflict with logic.
3) There is nothing logical about belief in an invisible God if you are a humanist.

Starting with 3). Even if it is true that from a humanist view point there is nothing logical about believing in an invisible God it does not follow that in fact there is nothing logical about believing in an invisible God. This latter claim follows only if a humanist perspective is true.

Now Patrick, I know, does not believe the humanist perspective is correct and neither do I so it is hard to see what the relevance of this is supposed to be. The fact that a perspective he and I think is mistaken has a particular view does not provide either of us for a reason for affirming the view.

Further, the claim that it is “illogical” to believe in an “invisible” God is simply false. Patrick here seems to be speaking of the confusion that some Humanists espouse between the question of whether something is logical with whether something is visible. These are quite different matters. Affirming the existence of something is logical if the proposition is logically possible; that is, it does not entail a contradiction.

However, there are many things that although logically possible, are not visible. In fact, there are many things that though logically possible are in fact false. Possibility after all is not actuality. A couple of examples may help illustrate this point. The claim that there exists promiscuous virgins, or married bachelors is illogical. This is because a person is promiscuous only if he or she has sex and a person is a virgin if they have not had sex. Similarly, a person is a bachelor if they are unmarried and can only be married if they are not unmarried. Hence, the claim that promiscuous virgins or married bachelors exist entails that a person both is and is not married and has and has not had sex. This is a contradiction and so violates a fundamental rule of logic.

The claim that there is a field of red grass in my back yard on the other hand is false yet not illogical. There is nothing illogical about the concept of a red field of grass in my back yard; if I painted the grass in my yard this possibility would be actual, however, as a matter of fact the grass in my yard is green, but that is not because of any impossibility of it occurring.

So the fact that God is invisible does not mean it is illogical. If one accepts that the only source of basic knowledge about the world is our five senses, one could argue that belief in an invisible God is unwarranted but this is different from saying it is illogical. I don’t think that the five senses are our only source of basic knowledge about the world (in fact I am inclined to think it is an incoherent claim, after all the claim “the only source of basic knowledge is our five senses” is itself something one can’t prove by hearing, touching, tasting or smelling and hence if this claim were true one could not be warranted in believing it).

Turning now to 1); that logic is a secular or humanistic process. This is mistaken. Logic is simply a set of rules, most of which are intuitively obvious to properly functioning cognisers, by which one can infer conclusions from premises. Note this last point, logic simply gets one proposition, the conclusion, from other propositions, the premises.

It in and of itself tells us nothing about what those premises are except that they cannot be premises from which one can infer a contradiction. The premises could be drawn from information gleaned from the five senses, or they could be drawn from revelation, or from memory or some other basic source of information. Nothing about logic rules out having premises that a person believes on the basis of faith. If faith is a basic source of information about God and the world then one can, and should, use logic to draw conclusions from premises obtained via this source.

Perhaps Patrick things that logic is an unreliable method of inferring conclusions from premises. Christianity is true (and Patrick holds this) yet he thinks that logic and the Christian faith conflict. That seems to suggest that logic cannot be reliable.

I think this position is problematic; for starters Patrick’s post was, after all, a reply to Madeleine’s. Madeleine had affirmed something and he was attempting to defend the negation of this affirmation. But if logic is unreliable this whole process makes no sense. Negation and affirmation assume the law of non-contradiction, a fundamental rule of logic. In fact without logic human language and discourse would break down and be impossible. Words can have meaning because they refer to something and not to something else and they do so consistently. If a term can mean one thing one day and the opposite the next with no basis or predictability one would never understand anything.

Patrick also suggests that reason and logic are secular. In one sense he is correct; the word secular comes from the latin word which means temporal or of this world and it is true that logic is a process utilised in this world and for purposes in this world. This is not limited to reason and logic, in this sense of use theology is also secular at least when it is telling us about things of this world and how to live in this world.

However, I don’t think that Patrick intends this, he is using secular in the modern sense of the word where it means, godless or “practical atheism,” a view which either affirms the non-existence of God or acts for practical purposes as if God does not exist. In this sense, I think Patrick is clearly mistaken; as I noted above, logic simply gets one from a premise to a conclusion there is nothing in logic that entails an assumption that God does not exist. To claim that logic and reason are secular is like claiming that eyesight is secular or that memory is secular as these like and logic and reason are simply methods that human beings naturally use to gain information and understanding about reality. I think that God is part of reality. Just as we use our eyes to read scripture or we use our ears to hear a sermon and we use our memory to recall these things we can use logic and reason to infer conclusions from them.

The medievals called this process faith seeking understanding. One starts with what one knows by faith and reasons from it to gain a comprehensive, coherent and accurate understanding of reality and answers to the fundamental and philosophical existential questions that we face. It is this project that the evangelical church needs to reclaim.

If someone says that some aspect of Christianity is illogical they have merely stated it. To prove that it is illogical then they would need to provide us with a proposition or propositions that:

a) are essential to Christianity;
b) can be demonstrated to entail a logical contradiction by a valid argument form; and,
c) utilise premises that Christians are rationally required to accept.

In the literature some people claim to have done this but such claims are highly controversial and I have yet to come across one that has not been refuted. In light of this, it frustrates me many in the Church uncritically accept this claim and retreat without a single fight and then hide in a false, anti-intellectual pietism.

Glenn is advertising for a partner in crime:

SITUATION VACANT

Are you the straight shooter that I’m looking for? I’m looking for someone to join the Beretta team - a team currently consisting of one.

You’ll become an author here at Say Hello to my Little Friend, you’ll be an occasional co-host on the SHTMLF podcast too. You’ll have at least a Master’s degree in theology or philosophy, or be working towards one, and basically I have to like your style and you can’t be someone who thinks all the material at this site is crazy. I don’t ask much, do I? Here’s another thing: I’m not part of any EEO agreement, so I can say this: I’d actually prefer a female to come on board (but that’s not an ironclad rule). Basically I think a woman would make a great addition to the podcast show, and I don’t want to encourage the outlook that conservative and serious theology or philosophy are men’s territory. If you’d be interested in being involved, or you know someone who you think would be great for this, let me know!

Oh, and I promise: You’ll get paid twice the amount I do.

Well he doesn't ask for much and the pay sucks but Glenn is pretty cool and his blog is almost as cool as ours.

After officially going private on Thursday and re-directing our blogspot URL to a shiny new domain I have hit some snags with our Alexa Stats.

On Thursday our Alexa Stats showed our reach had increased by 279% over the last 3 months and our traffic rank had increased some 6,000,000 over the same period - 72 hours and one new domain name later our reach is down to 149% and our traffic rank has dropped to a 4,000,000 increase. Our 1 week averages are showing up as blank which I suspect is what caused the drop.

I changed us to a domain on Thursday and then we hit the weekend and a new week rolled over and suddenly we had no stats. I submitted our new domain to Alexa on Thursday but it is still showing no stats at all.

I am wondering whether because of the fact we still do essentially have two URL's (there are existing links that still point to our blogspot URL so we have to keep the re-direct permanently set up) Alexa will from here on in split our stats over both domains. I am not sure that there is a way to get Alexa to read both results together. I have googled and searched the web and even submitted a question to Alexa but I still don't have the answer.

Can anyone who started out with a blogspot URL and upgraded to a private domain tell me how this works? Will it all settle down? If so, how long will it take? Is there something I should do to expedite things?

Whilst ranking stats are not everything, and are certainly nothing to do with what motivates us to blog, I think it is smart to have one eye on the stats and now we have semi-respectable stats it would be a shame to lose them for a technichal problem and as someone who dabbles at being a web-master I would like to understand how Alexa works better.

The blogosphere is abuzz with the Greens new Family Policy which

"proposes setting a level of population New Zealand could sustain and leaving room within that for climate change refugees from Pacific Islands.

They also want parents educated about the impacts of population growth when they are planning their family size and how far apart to have children."

The myraid of problems that scream from those two sentences is so large I am not sure where to begin.

National, ACT and the Maori Party are declaring it a step in the direction of China's one child policy.

Rodney Hide, making a carbon credits joke, said "that perhaps if parents planted a field of trees, they might be able to have twins."

David Farrar makes the point that New Zealand already has a declining population rate and has done for some time anyway which makes one wonder why issue the policy?

Zen Tiger quotes from Frog Blog "Do we as humans have a 'right to breed'?" this reminded me of other crazy lefty ideas like Jim Flynn's Thoughts on Contraception.

Keith Locke, at a loss to understand why most New Zealanders would react negatively to the policy, claims they have been misinterpreted:

"There is no way the Green Party would ever dictate to any parent how many children they should have, ... Every child is a loved and wanted child. It would also be racist to try to dictate family size, given that the various ethnic groups in our society have different birthrates."

There are two problems in the above quote that are not being criticised about the blogosphere that I will highlight here.

The every child is a loved and wanted slogan is ambiguous. It could mean that every child that comes into existence, no matter how it comes into existence, is loved and wanted, or, it could mean that every child that is unwanted should be taken out of existence. Both these situations would lead to every child being wanted.

The statement is a eugenicist slogan promoted primarily by family planning movement which advocate the latter interpretation and promote the latter interpretation via abortion, contraception and sterilisation, campaigning against unplanned pregnancy. Now, I am not opposed to contraception or sterilisation or people knowing how to prevent unplanned pregnancy. My problem is that this organisation is opposed to all and every unplanned pregnancy, even those within stable, married, well-positioned-to-provide families. Dig a little on Family Planning and you find they are a sinister organisation whose roots are in eugenics, we have posted previously on the odiousness of family planning here.

So when Keith Locke used this statement which interpretation did he mean? Given the context of the policy, I think we can safely assume the latter.

The second issue is the Green's definition of racism the reasons they cite for why if they were in fact dictating how many kids families should have it would be wrong. Lets have a closer look at Keith Locke's statement:

"It would also be racist to try to dictate family size, given that the various
ethnic groups in our society have different birthrates."

His argument essentially is that ethnic groups have different birth-rates so to impose one birth-rate, to disagree or be at odds with another ethnicity's viewpoint on this subject, is racist. Racism according to the Greens is defined as disagreeing with the cultural values of another. I don't agree with the cannibalism practices of some ethnicities - guess I am a racist.

Further, the only reason he offers as to why "the Green Party would ever dictate to any parent how many children they should have" is that to do so would be racist. The fact that such a dictum would be nanny-statist, eugenicist and is so far out of the realm of the proper role of the state that it is just plain, outright, wrong seems to be lost on him; but why am I not surprised?

According to proponents of the Euthyphro Objection, defenders of a Divine Command Theory of Ethics face a dilemma, actions are morally-required either because:

(i) God commands them;

or,

(ii) God commands them because they are morally-required.

The latter (ii) entails that actions are right and wrong independently of God’s commands and as such, a Divine Command Theory of Ethics is false. The former (i), however, is said to be problematic for two reasons: [a] if things are morally-required because God prohibits them, then God’s commands are arbitrary; if God commanded gratuitous torture then gratuitous torture would be morally-required. Moreover [b], the claim that God is good is emptied of any substantive content; to say God is good is simply to say God does what He wills.

I am unimpressed with this argument. In previous posts I have argued why. Despite the popularity of this line of argument (seen by its repetition in almost every first year ethics text book I have read) I think these two arguments are not powerful at all. On a Judeo-Christian concept of God, God is understood to have a certain type of character and to possess certain virtues. As the Westminister Confession states, God is:

[M]ost loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him; and withal, most just, and terrible in His judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty.

Once this is realised, one can take (i) and avoid the problems [a] and [b] that are supposed to afflict the affirmation of this horn of the dilemma that the Euthyphro Objection raises. One can avoid [a] because it is not coherent to claim that a being with certain virtues would command actions like gratuitous torture. Likewise, one can avoid [b] because claiming God possesses certain character traits does not commit one to the claim that his goodness consists merely in doing as he wills, and these traits provide substantive content to the claim that God is good.

In the discussion here Mark V posted an astute response:

“You say that God is good because he posseses certain character traits that we regard as good. But why do we regard them as good? Is it because God possesses these traits or because they conform to some external standard of goodness?”

If I understand Mark’s objection here, he is suggesting that even if my solution to the Euthyphro Objection is successful, the same problem arises again on another level, now we are faced with the same dilemma all over again with regard to the goodness of God’s character traits. Either they are good because God possesses them or God possesses them because they are good.

Although Mark doesn’t say so, I think he means to suggest that the same problems with each option of the Euthyphro Objection also apply to this new issue. If a person claims that God possesses these traits because they are good then goodness exists independently of, and prior to God, which appears to compromise the doctrine of divine aseity. However, if a person claims that God’s traits are good because he possesses them then analogues to the arbitrariness [a] and emptiness [b] objections apply. Let’s call this line of argument the Meta-Euthyphro Objection.

I want to suggest that neither option Mark suggests is quite right. It is not the case that God’s character traits are good because he possesses them, neither is it the case that they are possessed by God because they are good. Instead I want to suggest that these traits are good because God prefers himself to have them.

An obvious rejoinder to this claim is that it really avoids the issue. Whether God’s character is good because he prefers himself to have it instead of it being good because he possesses it does not make an iota of difference. I am still faced with analogues of [a] the arbitrariness and [b] the emptiness objections aren’t I?

Actually I think the answer to this is no. To see why, note that when Mark asks:

“You say that God is good because he posseses certain character traits that we
regard as good. But why do we regard them as good?”

He grants there is nothing problematic about God having these traits but rather that the question is what makes Him having them a good thing? But this fact disarms both the arbitrariness [a] and emptiness [b] objections.

Turning to [a], the arbitrariness objection, when this objection is applied to the claim that God’s character traits are good because God prefers to have them, the [a] contends that God’s preference of the traits in question is arbitrary; after all, he could just as well have preferred to be vicious and cruel, and if he did, it would be good to be vicious and cruel.

The problem is that this is based on a false assumption. If God has the character traits in question then it is not true that he could have preferred just any traits; a person who has the following traits will not desire to be a vicious or cruel person "loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in ... truth, forgiving..." Holding these traits means that there are certain things that one does not desire or want to see happen. That is part of what having such traits means.

Similar things apply to the emptiness charge [b]. Just as before, one could say that when we say that God is good, we mean that he possesses certain character traits which are normally recognised as paradigmatic examples of goodness. Now the suggestion that a trait is good because a being who displays paradigmatically good character traits prefers it does not seem trivial at all.

I conclude then that the Meta-Euthyphro Objection does not fair any better than its predecessor; one can meaningfully attribute goodness to God and say that God’s duties constitute our obligations, and we can do so without making goodness independent of God. I maintain then that the standard textbook objections remain unsound.

Two years on from our very first post, In Remembrance of the Religious Right, the MandM blog has come to a place where it is officially grown up enough to warrant its own domain name.

Our readership has grown considerably since we started. We now feature on the top 100 New Zealand blogs - we moved up 8 places last time and I expect us to improve on that in the next lot of stats due out soon.

Despite the claims in this comment:

"this blog is in the top 100 most read New Zealand blogs and ranks as the the
most read (non-Catholic) and best Christian blog in the country"

It is not correct that we are the most read (non-Catholic) Christian blog in New Zealand as The Briefing Room deserves that honour, however, we have been increasingly climbing the alexa stats; we are up 279% in our global reach in the past 3 months.

[Since moving to our own domain Alexa is counting our stats seperately so the real figure is a combination of mandmandmandm.blogspot.com stats and mandm.org.nz stats - I am not sure how long it will take to truly transition to the new domain only.]

We are increasingly gaining speaking engagements and being contacted by journalists for comment purely from this blog.

We actually get stopped occaisionally by strangers who hear our names and say "do you write for the MandM blog?"

In the past year the average numbers of comments per blog post has steadily climbed as more people interact with our points of view which we love - keep commenting!

The number and range of blogs that link to us steadily grows. Please consider linking to us, you don't have to agree with us to link, one blog which links to us under the heading Philosophy (we are the only Christian blog under this heading) has this caveat:

"I don't like what they have to say but I might be prepared to defend some of
the sentiments they express"

Finally, despite two years of blogging neither of us have managed to memorise our blogspot url. When people ask what's the address of your blog? We have to reply, go to google and type in MandM Flannagan - which has worn kinda thin.

Anyway, our new url is: http://www.mandm.org.nz/

Old links will continue to work as we will run a permanent re-direction from our old blogspot address.