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Sunday, 31 May 2009

Sunday Study: Did Christ Abolish the Old Testament Law? Part I

At the start of the Sermon on the Mount, Christ states,

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.[1]

Some commentators suggest that this passage merely teaches that Christ's life and ministry is the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. This position is based on the first four chapters of Matthew which strongly emphasis this theme. For example, the first chapter of Matthew states that Christ's birth “took place to fulfil what the Lord had said through the prophet:”[2] the text quotes from the LXX version of Isaiah to make the point, “‘The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’—which means, ‘God with us.’”[3] Moreover, the idea that Christ is the fulfilment of Israel’s history, the person who is the seventh king in Israel’s history, is stressed in the genealogies[4] (seven being a number frequently used in the Hebrew bible for completion or perfection).

The problem with this interpretation, however, is that the immediate context suggests otherwise. Matthew's theological agenda in the first four chapters of this biography is to portray Christ as a second Moses. Matthew deliberately stresses parallels between Christ's life to drive this point home. Jesus escaped a plot by a king to kill the first born sons in his area. Jesus went into exile in Egypt; he wandered in the wilderness for 40 days and then he delivered a sermon on ethical injunctions on a mountain to 12 Apostles (Israel had 12 tribes). It is hard to resist the conclusion that Matthew is portraying Christ as the new Moses delivering the law to a reconstituted Israel.

This is further confirmed by the immediately preceding passages. Here Christ alludes to two Old Testament metaphors, that of a city on the hill and a light to the world. In the prophetic literature Israel is portrayed as a city on the hill and a light to the gentiles. The image is further elucidated in terms of the law; that is, the commandments of God being taught to the nations. Moreover, the continual emphasis in this passage is on obedience to and the teaching of God's commandments. Fulfilling the law and prophets is seen not in terms of prophecy but in terms of faithful obedience and teaching of these commandments. Hence, it seems fair to conclude that Christ is here referring, not to Old Testament prophecy but to the commandments, the law, the moral teaching of the Old Testament.

Christ says three things about the law in this passage. First, he states he has not come to abolish it; the phrase “but to fulfil it” uses the Greek word alla, which is the 'but' of strong antithesis. Hence, 'fulfilling' is understood as the opposite of abolishing. What abolishing would constitute is clearly spelt out in the passage; abolishing would involve either breaking the commandments or teaching others to do so. Christ places most of the emphasis in the passage on this; one is not to break the “least” of these commandments or teach others to do the same.

Second, Christ elaborates what he has in mind by fulfilling; it involves “practising and teaching these commands.” Christ goes on to say that obedience and teaching of the law are something that applies, “in the kingdom of heaven.” Hence, Christians, New Testament believers, are supposed to both follow and teach the Old Testament commandments of God.

Third, Christ affirms that the Old Testament commandments are not abrogated; using a Semitic hyperbole, Christ states the smallest details remain binding until “everything is accomplished.” Verse 18 tells us things are accomplished when “heaven and earth pass away.” Christ then, in this passage, is commanding his apostles to fulfil Israel’s mandate to be salt and light to the gentiles by obeying and teaching the law better than the Pharisees do.

This raises an immediate problem because it is fairly standard amongst Christians to hold and believe that the New Testament sets aside Old Testament law. In several places in the New Testament, for example in the book of Galatians, it is taught that Christians do not need to be circumcised or to follow Kosher food laws. In other places it appears to teach that the Mosaic law is not binding on New Testament believers; most contemporary evangelicals follow Paul here and do not conform to the 613 laws of Moses.

However, doesn’t this contradict Christ’s teaching? Moreover, don’t these same Christians faithfully follow and defend some of the precepts laid down in the torah, such as commandments against killing or homosexual conduct or bestiality or idolatry? Richard Mohr states,

What does seem clear is that those who regularly cite the Bible to condemn an activity like homosexuality do so by reading it selectively. Do ministers who cite what they take to be condemnations of homosexuality in Leviticus maintain in their lives all the hygienic and dietary laws of Leviticus?[5]

I think Mohr is mistaken and his comments betray a misunderstanding of the teaching of the Old and New Testaments. To elucidate this, however, one needs to examine both the Old and New Testaments more carefully.

The pivotal New Testament passage comes from Acts 10-11:18. In this passage, Luke refers to a gentile, Cornelius, who is “devout and God-fearing” and “gave generously to those in need and prayed to God regularly.” This then affirms the existence of righteous gentiles; gentiles who worship God and have evident piety. Cornelius is sent to Peter who, prior to his arrival, has a revelation from God. Peter interprets the revelation to affirm how true it is that, “God does not show favouritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right;” and, “so then, God has granted even the Gentiles repentance unto life.” God fearing gentiles, then, can be acceptable to God despite not following the Mosaic Law.

This incident is cited again in Acts 15 where the Apostles respond to the claim that, “Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, [gentiles] cannot be saved.” Following Peters position, they decide that Gentiles do not have to follow the Mosaic Law, instead it is affirmed

It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood. For Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.

Here the Apostles state that gentiles can be saved and do not have to follow the Mosaic law; however, they are required to abstain from certain practices such as sexual immorality, from idolatry, blood laws and meat of strangled animals.

What is interesting is the rationale for this; it is claimed that Gentiles can be required to abstain from these practises because, “Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.” In other words, because the gentiles have heard Moses preached they know they have a duty to abstain from these practices. If a gentile is familiar with Moses then he or she will know that there are some commandments that are binding on him or her, even if he or she does not himself or herself have to follow the law in its entirety. I think this point is the key to understanding much of the Apostles stance on the law of Moses and when it is grasped, it enables us to both see that Paul's statements are not inconsistent with Jesus’ and that Mohr’s claim of selectivity is unfounded.

In my next Sunday post I will attempt to articulate and expound some of these concepts in more detail.

[1] Matthew 5:17-20.
[2] Matt 1:22.
[3] Matt 1:23.
[4] Matt 2:17,18.
[5] Richard Mohr “Gay Basics: Some Questions, Facts, and Values” in Morality in Practice ed James Sterba (Wadsworth).

Saturday, 30 May 2009

How to Insert StumbleUpon into your Blogger Footer

If someone Stumbles your blog it can bring a lot of traffic to your site so it is a good idea to make it easier for visitors to your site to Stumble it.

But have you ever tried to add a StumbleUpon button to your blogger template only to find that the instructions are impossible to follow, you cannot work out where to put the code or your icon sits higher than your text? I have played around with the code provided by StumbleUpon and got it sitting how and where I want it and have now created this simple tutorial so you can too.

Log in to Blogger

Click on 'Layout'

Click on 'edit HTML'

Click on 'download full template' and save a backup of your blog to your hard-drive in case anything goes wrong

Check the 'expand widget templates box' (you are still in 'Layout', 'edit HTML')

Click anywhere in the actual code then press 'ctrl' and 'f' at the same time (which will bring up the find box)

Enter post-footer-line-1; into the find box and click next to find the line of code that should either be identical with or look a lot like:
<p class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>

Make some space under this line by clicking at the end of it and hitting 'enter' a few times then past the following code into your template:

<span style='float: left; background: url(http://cdn.stumble-upon.com/images/16x16_su_round.gif) left no-repeat; padding-left: 20px;'><a expr:href='&quot;http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=&quot;+ data:post.url + &quot;&amp;title=&quot; + data:post.title' target='_blank'>Stumble it! </a></span><br/>

Save your template. Easy peasy. You can change the background url to any button you want to use.

Cross posted at Coping in a Technological World.
If you like this tutorial you could always Stumble this site to say thankyou ;-)

Friday, 29 May 2009

Dr Matthew Flannagan on Moral Relativism

If you enjoyed the video of Matt's talk Apologetics: Answering Objections to the Christian Faith come and hear him live at the next God, Morality and Society Thinking Matters Auckland event:

What: Dr Matthew Flannagan speaking on Moral Relativism
When: Tuesday 9th June – 7:00pm
Where: Lecture Room 2, Laidlaw College, 80 Central Park Drive, Henderson, West Auckland
Format: Talk followed by questions, answers and discussion.
Cost: Free but donations are appreciated
A popular view of ethics holds that actions are right or wrong only if a person or a community believes that they are right or wrong, and that it is inappropriate to apply your own standards to others. This position is known as moral relativism. In this talk Matt will look at the common arguments for relativism, argue that relativism is a mistaken view of ethics and show how relativism fails.

Dr Flannagan holds a PhD in Theology, a Masters degree in Philosophy. His area of expertise is the interface between Philosophy and Theology, Applied Ethics and Worldviews. He lectures in History of Philosophy for Laidlaw College and in Sociological Issues in Education for Bethlehem Tertiary Institute and is currently re-training to be a high school Religious Studies/Philosophy teacher. He writes for MandM and has nearly 15 years experience engaging and challenging secular culture both in New Zealand and internationally.

He has formally debated the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand’s Dr Zoe During and the New Zealand Association of Rationalist Humanist’s Dr Bill Cooke; he has been published in several international journals of philosophy and has a personal reference from the then President of the Evangelical Theological Society in his resume.

Thursday, 28 May 2009

Video of Matthew Flannagan on Apologetics: Answering Objections to the Christian Faith

Matt spoke at the Thinking Matters Auckland Launch on 8 March 2009 on Apologetics: Answering Objections to the Christian Faith. If you missed it or wish to see it again or if you have been thinking about attending a Thinking Matters seminar or booking Matt as a speaker and you are not sure if he will go over your head then grab a cuppa and sit back and enjoy the below video.

This talk is a great intro into the subject of apologetics and addresses some common objections such as:
  • It is irrational to believe things that cannot be proven
  • It is arbitrary to believe that one particular religion is true
  • The existence of evil disproves Christianity
The question and answer section at the end is very good too.


Feel free to pop over to You Tube and rate this video.

RELATED POSTS:
Video of Matthew Flannagan Speaking on Moral Relativism

Wednesday, 27 May 2009

Tooley, Plantinga and the Deontological Argument from Evil Part II

In my last post, Tooley, Plantinga and the Deontological Argument from Evil Part I, I sketched Tooley's distinction between a deontological and an axiological argument from evil and argued that Tooley rejects the axiological version because it rests on controversial ethical claims that are likely to be rejected by many theists. I outlined Tooley's deontological version and explored the moral assumptions it is based on and Plantinga's criticism of these.

"God can do wrong only if he commands himself to do something and then proceeds to disobey his own command."In this post, I will argue that Plantinga's criticisms can be reformulated by appealing to a divine command theory of ethics and when they are, it can be shown that Tooley's argument relies on controversial moral assumptions that many theists do, in fact, reject. Finally I will look at two objections to this line of argument; the claim that, even on a divine command theory, God has obligations and Tooley's critique of the divine command theory. I will argue both objections fail.

To save you having to click back repeatedly to the previous post, I will first re-cite step one of Tooley’s argument,

(12) The property of choosing not to prevent an event that will cause the death of more than 50,000 ordinary people is a wrongmaking property of actions, and very serious one.
(13) The Lisbon earthquake killed approximately 60,000 ordinary people.

Therefore, from (12) and (13):
(14) Any action of choosing not to prevent the Lisbon earthquake has a very serious wrongmaking property.

Tooley then adds as an additional premise,

(15) No rightmaking properties that we know of are such that we are justified in believing both that an action of choosing not to prevent the Lisbon earthquake would have had those rightmaking properties, and that those properties are sufficiently serious to counterbalance the relevant wrongmaking property.[1]

III. Modifying Plantinga's Response : The Divine Command Theory
In a more recent paper, Naturalism, Theism, Obligation and Supervenience, Plantinga makes a comment that suggests he could formulate his objection so that “permitted by God” was taken in the second sense mentioned above. Plantinga writes,

Theists typically think ethical properties are intimately related to what God approves or values or commands. Thus they will often think of moral obligation as a matter of what God commands. What is obligatory are those actions God commands or wills; what is wrong are those actions God prohibits; what is permissible are those actions God does not prohibit.[2]

Plantinga here refers to what has been called the divine command theory of ethics[3]; the position that, “an action or kind of action is right or wrong if and only if and because it is commanded or forbidden by God.”[4] According to a divine command theory of ethics, being permitted by God is a right-making property; actions are right, if and only if, and because, they are permitted by God. I am inclined to think that any theist who accepts a divine command theory of ethics will deny (15) whether or not they “offer a theodicy.” They will also have reasons for denying (12).

This is because, if the divine command theory of ethics is true then (12) is false. Tooley affirms that, “the property of choosing not to prevent an event that will cause the death of more than 50,000 ordinary people is a wrongmaking property of actions, and very serious one.” According to a divine command theory of ethics this is false; there is only one ultimate wrong-making property, that of being contrary to God’s commands. Given that the property of “choosing not to prevent an event that will cause the death of more than 50,000” is not the same property as “being permitted by God,” it follows that the former property is not a right-making property of actions and, as such, (12) is false.

Even if one puts this point to one side, if a divine command theory of ethics is true, there is a further problem with (12); it is ambiguous compare:

[12 a] The property of choosing not to prevent an event that will cause the deaths of more than 50,000 ordinary people is a serious wrongmaking property of actions performed by human beings (or rational creatures relevantly like human beings).

and

[12b] The property of choosing not to prevent an event that will cause the deaths of more than 50,000 ordinary people is a serious wrongmaking property of actions performed by (including God).

For Tooley's argument to be successful he must mean for (12) to be taken as [12b]. Tooley is arguing for the conclusion that if God exists then he has performed actions that it would be wrong for God to perform; which, given that God is good, is an impossible state of affairs.

However, what is an “uncontroversial moral claim” that “does not seem very problematic” is [12a]. If a divine command theory of ethics is true then [12b] is false. This is because one implication of a divine command theory of ethics is that God does not have obligations and hence, strictly speaking, nothing he does can be right or wrong.[5] Craig notes “nor, plausibly, is God bound by moral duties since he does not issue commands to himself.”[6] Similarly Alston, in an article defending the claim that God has no obligations, states “we can hardly suppose that God is obliged to love his creatures because he commands himself to do so.”[7]

Craig and Alston's arguments seem sound. If the divine command theory of ethics is true then a person p is required to do an action a, if and only if, God commands p to do a. It follows then, that God is required to do a, if and only if, God issues commands to himself. Moreover, if divine command theory of ethics is true then a person engages in wrongdoing, if and only if, they disobey a command that God issues to them. Hence, if divine command theory of ethics is true then God can do wrong only if he commands himself to do something and then proceeds to disobey his own command.

Neither of these conditions seems very likely. It seems unlikely that God issues commands to himself. Why would he need to? If he wanted to do something wouldn't he just do it? Moreover, it seems absurd to suggest that even if God issues commands to himself that he would then disobey them. That would suggest that God displays some form of weakness of the will and it is not clear that weakness of the will is compatible with a supremely excellent being such as God.[8]

The divine command theorist will take a similar stance towards (15). If a divine command theory of ethics is true then the property of “being permitted by God” is a right-making property. If God permits an action, in the sense of refraining from prohibiting it, then that makes the action morally permissible. Consider then, “[God's] action of choosing not to prevent the Lisbon earthquake.” For the reasons spelt out above, God did not forbid himself from doing this; hence, this action has a right-making property that a theist, who embraces divine command theory of ethics, knows about.

Similarly, this right-making property outweighs any wrong-making property that the action has. As I mentioned previously, according to a divine command theory of ethics, there is only one ultimate wrong-making property, the property of being contrary to God’s commands. Given that God did not command himself to stop the Lisbon earth quake, the action of allowing the Lisbon earthquake to occur does not have any wrong-making properties and so there can be none that outweigh it.

Consequently, if a divine command theory of ethics is true then both (12) and (15) are false. It is not just theists who offer a theodicy then who would reject (15).

The Significance of this Conclusion
I think this conclusion is significant for two reasons. First, a significant number of contemporary theists embrace and defend the divine command theory of ethics. Those who have defended it include, Robert Adams,[9] John Hare,[10] William Alston,[11] William Lane Craig,[12] Stephen C Evans,[13] Philip Quinn,[14] Edward Wierenga,[15] Janine Marie Idziak,[16] William Wanwright,[17] William Mann,[18] Thomas Carson[19] and more recently Alvin Plantinga.[20] These people are not obscure, marginal representatives of theism; these names include some of the leading defenders of theism in the literature today. Tooley's argument then contains a premise that would be, and in fact is, rejected by many leading theists.

Second, this fact introduces a significant incoherence into Tooley's discussion of the argument from evil. In “Does God Exist?” Tooley rejects an axiological argument from evil on the grounds that it rests on a moral claim that was “within ethical theory deeply controversial, and likely to be rejected by many theists and others.” Tooley's own argument, however, presupposes the denial of a divine command theory of ethics. This is a controversial moral claim and one that is rejected by many theists. His own deontological argument then seems to be no better than the axiological version he rejects.

Finally, it seems in light of these conclusions that Tooley's deontological argument from evil is incomplete. It is not enough for Tooley to simply ask “what rightmaking properties can one point to that one has good reason to believe would be present in the case of an action allowing the Lisbon earthquake and that would be sufficiently serious to counterbalance the property of allowing more than 50,000 to be killed?”[21] The theist can point to such a property. Tooley needs to supplement his argument with a refutation of the divine command theory; specifically, he needs to argue that even if theism is true then this theory is implausible and problematic. Until the divine command theory can be shown to be a rationally untenable option for theists, theists can avoid Tooley's deontological argument from evil.

IV Objections
In this last section I want to anticipate and criticise two lines of argument that Tooley or a defender of Tooley, might make against the above line of critique.

Tooley's Critique of Divine Command Theory
In III I suggested that Tooley's argument was incomplete until he provides the theist with some reason why a divine command theory of ethics cannot be accepted then the theist can reject two crucial premises of his argument. (A defender of Tooley could object here that he has argued for this conclusion. In a debate with William Lane Craig at the University of Colorado Tooley addressed the divine command theory and offered a Euthyphro style argument against it. I agree that a complete defence of my position requires a response to this argument, regular readers, however, will note that I have addressed this argument previously in Tooley, The Euthyphro Objection and Divine Commands.)

Divine Commands and Divine Obligations
My argument in III depended on the claim, made by Craig and Alston, that if a divine command theory is true then God does not have duties. Linda Zagzebski has called this claim into question. In “More Suggestions for Divine Command Theorists,” Zagzebski proposes an account of divine obligations which is compatible with a divine command theory. Zagzebski starts by offering an account of the meaning of obligation, “What we mean by ‘obligation,’ is essentially this: there is no other option compatible with moral goodness.”[22] From this definition she argues that “the metaphysical source of divine obligation” and “the metaphysical source of human obligation are distinct.”[23]

The metaphysical source of the property of an act of a human being which makes it the case that there is no alternative act compatible with goodness is that it is commanded by God. The metaphysical source of the property of an act of God that makes it the case that there is no alternative act compatible with goodness is that that any alternative is incompatible with Gods nature.[24]

Hence, she concludes that it is “metaphysically necessary that an act X is an obligation for a human if and only if X is commanded by God” and “it is metaphysically necessary that an act X is an obligation for God if and only if X is compatible with Gods nature.”[25]

While I am not convinced by Zagzebski's account of divine obligations, even if one grants them for the sake of argument it is clear that it cannot be used to defend Tooley's deontological argument from evil. Consider,

(15) No rightmaking properties that we know of are such that we are justified in believing both that an action of choosing not to prevent the Lisbon earthquake would have had those rightmaking properties, and that those properties are sufficiently serious to counterbalance the relevant wrongmaking property.[26]

If Zagzebski's account of divine obligation is correct then (15) is false. Plantinga's original unreformulated response is rehabilitated. As Plantinga pointed out “God exists and is a perfectly good being. If this is true, then any action that God has in fact performed has the property of being performed by a perfectly good being.”[27] Moreover, “theists believe that God performed the action of permitting the Lisbon earthquake. They therefore believe that the action of performing the Lisbon earthquake has the property of being performed by God, who is a perfectly good person.”[28] But if the Lisbon earthquake was performed by a perfectly good person, performing it must be compatible with the divine nature and hence it has the very right-making property that Zagzebski identifies in her account of divine obligation.

The same is true for (12). Tooley contends,

(12) The property of choosing not to prevent an event that will cause the death of more than 50,000 ordinary people is a wrongmaking property of actions, and very serious one.

On Zagzebski's account (12) is false. There are only two right-making properties that exist. The property of being compatible with God's nature, which is what makes God's actions right, and the property of being permitted by God, which is what makes human actions right. Now the property of “choosing not to prevent an event that will cause the deaths of more than 50,000 people” is neither of these properties and hence, is not a right-making property.

[1] Michael Tooley “Does God Exist?” in The Knowledge of God eds Michael Tooley and Alvin Plantinga (Malden, M A: Blackwell Publishers, 2008) 119; I am following Tooley's enumeration.
[2] Alvin Plantinga “Naturalism, Theism, Obligation and Supervenience” 31 available at http://www.ammonius.org/grant_topics.php#0708 accessed 4 April 2009.
[3] The position is perhaps more correctly known as ethical voluntarism as some proponents of it emphasise the divine will as opposed to divine commands. However, because of the widespread use of the term 'divine command theory' in the literature I will stick with the term.
[4] W K Frankena Ethics 2nd ed (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973) 28.
[5] It should also be noted that the claim that God does not have obligations has been defended on grounds other than a divine command theory. See, for example, William Alston, “Some Suggestions for Divine Command Theorists” in Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy ed. Michael Beaty (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990). Hence, even if one dismisses a divine command theory of ethics it still follows that [12a] is not the obviously uncontroversial statement Tooley thinks it is.
[6] William Lane Craig Philosphical Foundations of a Christian World View (Downers Grover Il: Intervarsity Press, 2003) 529.
[7] William Alston “Response to Zagzebski” Perspectives on the Philosophy of William P. Alston eds Heather D Battaly, Michael P Lynch, William P Alston, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005) 204.
[8] It is worth noting the definition of God that Tooley works with in formulating his argument. For the purposes of his argument, Tooley is defining God as “an appropriate object of worship” as well as an appropriate object of other human concerns such as the desire that good will triumph over evil, and that justice will be done” etc.
[9] Robert Adams “Divine Command Meta-Ethics Modified Again” Journal of Religious Ethics 7:1 (1979); Finite and Infinite Goods (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
[10] John Hare God's Call: Moral Realism, God's Commands and Human Autonomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001); God and Morality: A Philosophical History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007).
[11] William Alston “Some Suggestions for Divine Command Theorists” in Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy ed Michael Beaty (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).
[12] William Lane Craig “This most Gruesome of Guests” in Is Goodness Without God Good Enough? A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics eds Robert K Garcia and Nathan L King (Lanthan: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers Inc, 2009) 172; also Philosphical Foundations of a Christian World View (Downers Grover Il: Intervarsity Press, 2003) 529-532.
[13] C Stephen Evans Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
[14] Philip L Quinn Divine Commands and Moral Requirements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); “An Argument for Divine Command Theory” in Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy ed Michael Beaty (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990) 289-302; “The Recent Revival of Divine Command Ethics” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (Fall 1990) 345-365; “The Primacy of God's Will in Christian Ethics” Philosophical Perspectives 6 (1992) 493-513; “Divine Command Theory” in Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory ed Hugh Lafollette (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 2000) 53-73; “Theological Voluntarism” The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) 63-90.
[15] Edward Weirenga The Nature of God: An Inquiry into the Divine Attributes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989) 215-27. See also, “Utilitarianism and the Divine Command Theory” American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984) 311-318; and “A Defensible Divine Command Theory” Nous 17 (1983) 387-408.
[16] Janine Marie Idziak “Divine Commands Are the Foundation of Morality” Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion (Malden, MA:Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004) 290-298.
[17] William Wrainwright Religion and Morality (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd, 2005).
[18] William Mann “Theism and the Foundations of Ethics” in The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Religion ed William Mann (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).
[19] Thomas Carson Value and the Good Life (Notre Dame IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2000).
[20] Alvin Plantinga “Naturalism, Theism, Obligation and Supervenience”available at
http://www.ammonius.org/grant_topics.php#0708 accessed 4 April 2009.
[21] Michael Tooley “Does God Exist?” in The Knowledge of God eds Michael Tooley and Alvin Plantinga (Malden, M A: Blackwell Publishers, 2008), 122
[22] Linda Zagzebski “More Suggestions for Divine Command Theories” in Perspectives on the Philosophy of William P. Alston eds Heather D Battaly, Michael P Lynch, William P Alston, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005) 189.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Tooley “Does God Exist?” 119.
[27] Alvin Plantinga "Reply to Tooley's Opening Statement" in The Knowledge of God eds Michael Tooley and Alvin Plantinga (Malden, M A: Blackwell Publishers, 2008), 170
[28] Ibid.

RELATED POSTS:
Tooley, Plantinga and the Deontological Argument from Evil Part I

Tuesday, 26 May 2009

Theology Geek NZ

Check out Theology Geek NZ; an online theological community complete with forums and a blog which is largely a syndication of some of New Zealand's best protestant Christian blogs including yours truly. Add it to your blogroll and rss feeds today.

Monday, 25 May 2009

Tuesday Night: The Moral Cosmological Argument

Don't forget tomorrow night's event from the Thinking Matters Auckland series on God, Morality and Society, Trevor Mander speaking on The Moral Cosmological Argument:

tma005-trevor-mander

Bullying Update

For those of you following our bullying issue you will be pleased to know that we have finally withdrawn Christian from his school and today he started at a new school with a very tough bullying policy. It has been a very difficult time as we have navigated the issues and helped Christian, who has Aspergers Syndrome, to come to a place where he felt he could cope with change on top of being serially bullied and often let down by his teachers failure to protect or seek justice for him.

While our preference was that he would come home and be home schooled this was not what he wanted and as he is 14 we felt it was important he got some say in what form his education took. His new school has been really understanding of his fear of change and have allowed him visits to the school to get his head around the concept of moving, so hopefully this is the beginning of a new chapter for him.

This morning after I dropped him off I headed to his old school with his textbooks, his library books and a letter for the principal and a lengthy formal complaint for the Board of Trustees. Thus begins the formal battle - though hopefully it will not be a battle and we will get the refund of his fees that we have asked for and they will formulate an effective bullying strategy for the sake of their current students.

Now that we have the complaint written and Christian installed in his new school, we hope to start picking up the pieces of our lives, including this blog which we have neglected somewhat this month. Apologies for their being no Sunday Study yesterday - Matt just could not get to it as we had so much we had to get done this week for Christian and then Matt had to drive to Tauranga for a one week intensive last night and won't be back until Friday. Hopefully things will be back to normal here at MandM soon!

Saturday, 23 May 2009

Christian Libertarian Blog Carnival

The first Christian Libertarian Blog Carnival is officially on and features some great articles, worth reading including a contribution from MandM. If you are looking for some quality weekend reading, pop on over and check out what is on offer - you never know, you might discover a new second-favourite blog.

Thursday, 21 May 2009

Guest Post: Understanding The Needs of the Hour

The following is authored by John Tertullian of Contra Celsum; a blog worth visiting. JT writes:

The Kingdom of God is gradualist in nature. By this we mean that it comes bit by bit. Whilst in principle and in essence it is utterly revolutionary, in practice and human service it is not. The completely revolutionary nature of the Kingdom is of course alluded to in expressions such as, “if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold all things have become new.” (II Corinthians 5:17). However, the gradual nature of the Kingdom is illustrated in God's appointment of a lifetime process of incremental growth for Christian believers.

This “radical, yet gradual” nature of the Kingdom needs to be understood in two ways. Firstly, when a person is converted out of darkness into the light of Christ, profound and totally radical change occurs, both in heaven and upon earth. His name is indelibly written in the Book of Life. He is born again by the Spirit of God. He is united into Christ. These realities mean that in time he will be transformed totally and made perfectly conformed to the Son of Man. He will end up being like Jesus (I John 3:2).

Yet existential reality is somewhat different. The believer continues to sin; he lives in weakness; he is subject to many temptations; his life is full of ups and downs. He is afflicted with sicknesses. He struggles and suffers. Eventually he dies. Through this process of weakness, struggle and suffering he becomes sanctified. He grows in grace. He is changed from one degree of glory to another until he becomes like Christ. In other words the actualisation of Christlikeness is gradual. This is what theologians call the grace of sanctification. It is a gradual, slow, bit-by-bit transforming into greater holiness.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism defines sanctification as follows:

Sanctification is the work of God's free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin, and live unto righteousness.
Shorter Catechism, Question 35

A good analogy is that of a child growing to maturity. Upon birth, all the potential of the adult is present, nascent within the child. As the child grows and matures, more and more of the potential is realised. But the process is gradual.

The Kingdom of God, similarly, comes upon the earth gradually. It has to be this way, because the Kingdom is not divorced from the elect—their number, degree of understanding of the Word of God, levels of sanctification and obedience, and influence throughout the culture. Even as the Kingdom comes within and upon them gradually, so the Kingdom comes in nations and cultures slowly and gradually, even as the Church and the elect come to greater and greater maturity.

This also implies that sanctification should be to an extent intergenerational. A person brought up in a godly Christian home, instructed and trained by sanctified parents, ordinarily starts off on the process of sanctification well ahead of someone who has just been converted out of the extremes of a dissolute, violent, and drug-enslaved family. (This, of course, does not imply that the one is less intrinsically sinful than the other, for the Scriptures declare that whoever observes the whole Law but slips in one point, is guilty in every respect. However, it does mean that to whom much has been given, much is expected.)

As we seek to extend the Kingdom of God, we are concerned to apply God's Word not only to our own individual lives and responsibilities, but also to corporate and institutional life. We wish to develop sound, biblical Christian schools. We want to see hospitals, voluntary institutions, and businesses acting consistently with biblical precepts and directions. We want to see the rules and constitutions of these structures conformed to Christ's law and commands. We wish to see civil law reflect biblical ethical standards. Part of service in His Kingdom is working to bring these things about in an appropriate fashion. It will only occur as those ruling and working in each respective institution covenant together to serve the Lord in holiness.

We also want to see the government conformed to Christ as His servant, restricted to His mandate, and acting appropriately as His minister. This means that we need to work to see that progressively the law of the land conforms to the commands and directions of the risen Lord.

It is at this point that many Christians become confused. Imbued with a deep conviction of the absolute nature of God's commands, they find themselves unable to accept anything less than complete conformity to God's commands in the public sphere. They think that to work for anything less than the absolute would be to compromise the faith and disobey the Lord.

Take abortion for example. So convicted are many Christians that any and all positive efforts to kill an unborn child is an act of murder, they cannot bring themselves to support measures which would only make abortion relatively more difficult or more restricted. A mere step forward is not just insufficient, it is seen as permissively supporting something that is wicked. The only thing they would be able to support is a total proscription of all abortion, at all times, in all conditions and places. Anything less they would regard as an ungodly compromise.

But this denies the gradualist nature of the Kingdom. It also denies how God deals with them in their own process of sanctification.

John Quincy Adams, a staunch Christian, was for many seventeen years a US Congressman, after having served as President. For all that time he, year after year, sought leave to introduce a Bill into the House to restrict slavery. He was refused year after year. But he kept at it. His Bill was a gradualist measure. It called firstly for the outlawing of all slavery in Washington DC. Secondly, it called for all the children of slaves born in the United States to be freemen. Adams argued that in time (since slave ships were already illegal) these measures would mean that slavery would die out in all the States of the Union.

But his biggest opponents were the Abolitionists who were so committed to opposing slavery as an absolute evil that they could not support any measure that did not immediately and totally end the practice. Adams was a gradualist. The Abolitionists were radicals and revolutionaries. Adams understood the gradualist nature of the Kingdom of God; the Abolitionists did not. Their intransigence indirectly led to the death of 620,000 soldiers, and untold civilians a few years later as a result of the Civil War.

It is an irony that amongst the strongest opponents to gradualist measures introducing partial restrictions upon abortion in our day are Christians. They have not understood the gradualist nature of the Kingdom. They have not understood that supporting of gradual measures is not ungodly compromise. It is rather a programme that is not only entirely consistent with the gradualist nature of the Kingdom of God, but in fact a service demanded by the King Himself.

When Israel went into the land of Palestine, the destruction of the pagan tribes in the land was to be complete. There was to be no compromise. There was to be no mingling of paganism and idolatry with the true and pure worship of God. But, at the same time, the process of taking over the promised land was to be gradual.

I will not drive them out before you in a single year, that the land may not become desolate and the beasts of the field become too numerous for you. I will drive them out before you little by little, until you become fruitful and take possession of the land.
Exodus 24: 29,30

This meant that Israel was to put up with a lot of rubbish in the “hood” until the pagan cultures were finally overcome. “Little by little” is the rubric. Christians are to be radicals in principle, but gradualists in practice. That is the way God deals with every one of His children. It is the way, we, as God's called servants, are to deal with the culture and community around us.

Wednesday, 20 May 2009

Part II of Tooley, Plantinga and the Deontological Argument from Evil Coming...

Matt has given me Part II of his Tooley, Plantinga and the Deontological Argument from Evil to edit and post but I am knee deep in my final assignment of the year which is due Thursday at 4pm. Further, I am having a very bad pain week and I am particularly struggling with mouse use so my computer time has to be assignment only for now. Won't be long!

Tuesday, 19 May 2009

Birthday in the House

Happy Birthday Sherry!

Just thought we'd embarrass you by telling the world you are 17 today!

...hard to believe I have a 17 year old daughter...

Sunday, 17 May 2009

Sunday Study: Sodom and Gomorrah Part II

In my previous Sunday Study post, Sodom and Gomorrah Part I, I argued that it is a mistake to conflate what scriptural narratives describe with what they prescribe. I suggested that often the characters in these narratives do things that The Torah later explicitly condemns and in this context it is plausible to read the narratives as records of people’s failings and errors. Such passages often dramatically highlight the consequences of these failings. I think the example of Lot offering his virgin daughters to a group of men is an example of this. Let me elaborate a bit more on why I am inclined to think this.

After the proto-history of flood, fall, Babel, etc the tale of Israel’s history proper began in chapter 12 with Abram being called by God to leave Ur of the Chaldees and to go to an unknown land (this land is later identified as Canaan which today is Israel or Palestine). Abram was given several promises that ultimately promised the renewal of all nations on earth. The text states that Lot accompanied Abram in this quest.

By chapter 13 Abram and Lot had reached Canaan and Abram had gained considerable wealth. Disagreement over land and resources had lead to in v 7 “quarrelling … between Abram's herdsmen and the herdsmen of Lot.” Abram diplomatically solved the dispute by allowing Lot to take his pick of the land, promising that his men would go elsewhere. Lot’s response was to, rather ungraciously, in v 10 “choose for himself the whole plain of the Jordan and set out toward the east,” land that the text stated was, “well watered like the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt, toward Zoar.”

The reference to the garden of the Lord here is an allusion to the garden of Eden. The narrator added a side comment starting in v 12, “Lot lived among the cities of the plain and pitched his tents near Sodom.13 Now the men of Sodom were wicked and were sinning greatly against the LORD.” Apparently Lot’s response to Abram’s diplomacy was to take the very best of the land for himself, thus forcing Abram to go elsewhere. Moreover, the text implies that Lot, in order to gain the economic resources that his men had been in dispute with Abram over, decided to “pitch his tent” amongst people known to be of corrupt character – he was willing to compromise himself for material gain.

In the next chapter, chapter 14, everything went to custard. Lot’s decision rebounded on him. The inhabitants of Sodom violated a vassal treaty and engaged in a violent uprising. The war that ensued was disastrous; Lot lost all his possessions and was taken hostage. In 14:13-17 Abram rescued Lot and his possessions.

I think a careful reader can detect a clear irony in this account. From the dispute in chapter 13 it seems clear that Lot wanted Abram’s resources. Abram essentially yielded them; Lot then chose to live amongst people known to be corrupt and violent to ensure he got to keep them. However, Lot lost all his resources and his freedom and had to rely on Abram’s men, the very men he had disputed with, to get them resources back. The irony here is perhaps made quite clear at the end of chapter 14,

The king of Sodom said to Abram, "Give me the people and keep the goods for yourself." 22 But Abram said to the king of Sodom, "I have raised my hand to the LORD, God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth, and have taken an oath 23 that I will accept nothing belonging to you, not even a thread or the thong of a sandal, so that you will never be able to say, 'I made Abram rich.' 24 I will accept nothing but what my men have eaten and the share that belongs to the men who went with me—to Aner, Eshcol and Mamre. Let them have their share.

Here Abram’s actions contrast starkly with those of Lot’s. Whereas Lot chose to associate with evil people to gain wealth, Abram refused to seek economic gain from the people of Sodom out of fidelity to a covenant he had with God. Despite all of this, Lot decided to remain with the people of Sodom. We do not hear of Lot again until Gen 19 when he was forced to flee from Sodom, losing all his possessions and his wife. Once again it was Abram’s intervention that saved him.
A careful reading of the Sodom and Gomorrah story in its context shows Lot, not as a paradigm of wisdom but something of a tragic ironic figure. Lot was called by God with Abram and was faithful to that call, he packed up and went to Canaan. However, Lot compromised his integrity to gain the wealth of his kinsman and as a result lost everything. The little he was left with at the end was due to the intervention of the man he tried to deprive.

This kind of irony is not uncommon in Genesis. Perhaps the clearest example is that of Jacob. Jacob conned both his father and brother (the eldest son and his father’s favorite) in an attempt to secure an inheritance. He was forced to leave his home and seek shelter with Laban, who ironically tricked him into marrying Leah instead of Rachel which caused a massive amount of marital and domestic stress which reverberated into the next generations. Jacob retaliated by tricking Laban out of his flocks. He was again forced to flee. Jacob had a strange encounter with God whereby he underwent some kind of conversion symbolised by a name change. However, in his later life as a father, his sons tricked him into believing Joseph, his favorite son, is dead. The grief from this trick almost destroyed Jacob. Once again there is evident irony. A careful reading of the Pentateuch narrative shows this feature repeatedly.

When the story of Lot is picked up again I think one can see similar ironies emerge. Many people read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and note Lot’s comments to the men of Sodom in 19:7-8

"No, my friends. Don't do this wicked thing. Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don't do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof”

However, what is less noticed is what immediately follows this passage. When fleeing Sodom, Lot is promised sanctuary in the nearby town of Zoar. In v 30, however, the text informs us that “Lot and his two daughters left Zoar and settled in the mountains, for he was afraid to stay in Zoar. He and his two daughters lived in a cave.” The man who chose to live in Sodom for the economic gain associated with the cities of the plain became too frightened to live in them. But the irony has not finished yet. The text goes on in v 32,

“One day the older daughter said to the younger, "Our father is old, and there is no man around here to lie with us, as is the custom all over the earth. Let's get our father to drink wine and then lie with him and preserve our family line through our father." That night they got their father to drink wine, and the older daughter went in and lay with him. He was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up. The next day the older daughter said to the younger, "Last night I lay with my father. Let's get him to drink wine again tonight, and you go in and lie with him so we can preserve our family line through our father. So they got their father to drink wine that night also, and the younger daughter went and lay with him. Again he was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up. So both of Lot's daughters became pregnant by their father."

The man who only a few verses earlier offered his daughters to a mob to be raped to save his own skin was drugged and raped by his daughters. The story has come full circle.

Lot was faithful to God’s call to leave Ur and offered kindness, shelter and protection to homeless strangers in a brutal and violent town so for that reason his life was spared. But Lot had to face his own sins and failings which ricocheted back upon him imposing a severe cost. The man who was willing to associate with evil and violent people in order to wrest the economic wealth of the plains from his kinsman, found his decision left him with nothing. He ended up living in a cave in the mountains, not the plains he coveted, afraid of the people in the plains and survived only because of the intercession of his kinsman. He treated his daughters with contempt and tried to have them raped to save his own skin and then found that his daughters were willing to rape him to get children. This is how I read the tragic and insightful tale of Lot.

RELATED POSTS:
Sunday Study: Sodom and Gomorrah Part I

Saturday, 16 May 2009

Trevor Mander on the Moral Cosmological Argument

tma005-trevor-mander

You're invited to a Thinking Matters Auckland, God, Morality and Society, event:

What: Trevor Mander speaking on the Moral Cosmological Argument
When: Tuesday 26 May – 7:00pm
Where: Lecture Room 2, Laidlaw College, 80 Central Park Drive, Henderson, West Auckland
Format: Talk followed by questions, answers and discussion
Cost: Free but donations are appreciated

Trevor will argue that God holds the universe in existence. He is the ground of our very being and is the foundation for all meaning and value. As we come to know God better our understanding of the world around us also becomes clearer.

Trevor Mander holds a Masters of Divinity which he earned studying under Doctor Norman Geisler while studying at the Southern Evangelical Seminary in the United States. Trevor is one of New Zealand's foremost Christian Apologists and has a unique ability to communicate complex concepts making them easy to understand with humour and enthusiasm.

The Illiberality of Abortion

A submission to The Christian Libertarian Blog Carnival.

Laws permitting abortion on demand are often deemed to be liberal. Political liberals are frequently ardent defenders of such laws. My contention is that support for abortion on the grounds of liberality is mistaken for the following reasons.

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]

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.

Only if one of these two options is adopted, can a liberal support the non-initiation of force principle and permissive abortion legislation and remain consistent.

Failed Avoidance Tactics
At this juncture it is worth noting that two very common tactics of avoiding this conclusion fail. The first is to defend abortion, on the basis of the perceived positive social consequences of ‘liberal’ abortion laws. In popular political discourse, and in some feminist writings, abortion is defended on consequentialist grounds; it is argued that abortion prevents unwanted children, children who are likely to be poor, abused, neglected or engage in crime. It is hailed as a solution to over-population and the existence of handicapped people. It prevents adult and teenage women from falling into economic hardship and stress and enables them to complete their education, pursue their careers and so on.

The problem with this line of argument is that this is only cogent for liberals if they assume that abortion does not violate the non-initiation of force principle. If abortion does violate this principle then allowing abortion on these grounds would be tantamount to saying that people can engage in aggression (as Rothbard defines it) they can initiate lethal force against others provided doing so brings about positive consequences, like lower crime rates, less child abuse, lower population rates, access to education and employment, etc. This conclusion contradicts the non-initiation of force principle which states that one cannot justly pursue social utility by violating an individual’s right to life, liberty or property; the very basis of their opposition to socialism.

The second avoidance tactic is to appeal to slogans such as “you can’t force your morality onto others, you can’t legislate morality”. The problem with these claims is that the non-initiation of force principle is itself a moral principle and liberals believe the state should enforce this principle and should defend people against others who would violate it. This forces a dilemma upon liberals who cite this slogan; either the claim “you can’t force your morality onto others” applies to the non-initiation of force principle or it does not. If it does, then abortion involves an unjust imposition of morality onto another only if you assume it is not the initiation of force. If it does not, then liberalism as a doctrine collapses as the state has no duty to protect the life, liberty and property of its citizens from aggression. In fact, it entails the conclusion that acts of aggression such as rape and murder should be decriminalised alongside abortion.

It follows then that the liberal cannot rationally avoid the question. If one is to both support ‘liberal’ abortion laws and hold to the non-initiation of force principle, one must do so either on (a) or (b) above. I think neither is terribly defensible.

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.[iv]

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?”[v]

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.

Prominent New Zealand Libertarian commentator, 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.[vi]

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.[vii]

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.”[viii]

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.”[ix] 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.”[x] 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;”[xi] 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.”[xii]

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.[xiii] 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.[xiv] 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.

[i] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: Penguin Classics, 1985), 69.
[ii] Ibid. 71.
[iii] Murray N Rothbard, For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (New York: Collier Books, 2002) 23.
[iv] 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.
[v] Ibid, 6.
[vi] Peter Creswell “Not PC: Cue Card Libertarianism – Abortion”
http://pc.blogspot.com/2005/05/cue-card-libertarianism-abortion.html.
[vii] 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.
[viii] David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 125.
[ix] Ibid, 121.
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] 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 14 weeks of gestation.
[xiv] Michael Tooley, Abortion and Infanticide (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) Ch. 11.5.

RELATED POSTS:
See our Feticide Label

Friday, 15 May 2009

Guest Post: A Reader Response Theory of Meaning?

The following is authored by Glenn Peoples of Say Hello to my Little Friend: The Beretta Blog and Podcast. Glenn writes:

I take some things for granted. People with a background in theology, biblical studies and hermeneutics or literature will be familiar with theories of meaning, but not everyone has (or wants) this background, and not everyone is familiar with theories of meaning. I thought it might be interesting to some readers to say a few words about it. Think of this as a very introductory post to the subject.

The question has importance for scholarship in general, but as a professing Christian the issue has a special importance to me because I believe that in the Scripture of the Old and New Testament we have something with a unique type of authority, so the way we interpret it is important. The issue centres on the following question: What does a piece of writing mean? To some the questions seems a bit silly. If you want to know what it means you just read it and find out. It means what it says! But strictly speaking, even someone who says this is likely to admit that not everything means exactly what it says. Writing comes in all genres: literal history, biography, poetry, parable, apocalypse and so forth. There are cases where meaning is bound to be unclear to many readers. So what, in principle, does a piece of writing mean? To the unfamiliar reader, I'm going to outline two major alternatives: an authorial intent theory of meaning and a reader response theory of meaning.

"it leads to outrageous consequences that proponents of, say, gay or feminist readings of history and literature would never accept."Easily the most traditional theory of meaning is the authorial intent theory. Authorial intent is just the intent of the writer. According to an authorial intent theory of meaning, the actual meaning of a text is the meaning that the author of the text intended to convey. If we want to find out what a piece of writing means, we need to ask what the author meant to convey when he wrote it. In our day to day life, I submit that everyone holds to the authorial intent meaning. If we get a flier in the mailbox about all ovens being on special at a nearby department store and we want to know whether or not this includes microwave ovens, we would not feel free to decide for ourselves or we may end up being embarrassed in the store. What we do instead is ask a representative of the store whether or not the information in the flier was meant to include microwave ovens. Similarly if we are asked to write an essay for class, we put care into the way we write it because if we don't, the person marking our essay might not realise what we actually know and understand. We assume that if we get the facts right and express them well, the marker will see that we know our stuff, because our intended meaning will be clear and it will express certain pieces of information. We assume the authorial intent theory in many other obvious settings; when reading a weather forecast, when reading an account of a significant battle at sea, when reading directions for finding somebody's house and so forth.

What then is the alternative? What does a reader response theory of meaning propose in place of the above?

An enthusiastic advocate of the reader response theory of meaning, Elizabeth Berg Leer explains:

Because reader-response theorists posit that each reader is actively and individually involved in the construction of meaning, they question the New Critical view that if readers attend closely enough to a text, they should come up with its “correct,” intended meaning. Reader-response critics insist that because individuals bring different backgrounds, cognitive abilities, and reading experiences with them to a given text, one “correct” response to literature cannot exist. According to Louise Rosenblatt (1978), one of the earliest reader-response theorists, objective meaning cannot be found within a given text any more than it can be found exclusively within the reader of that text. Instead, Rosenblatt argues that meaning is derived, or, in her terms, a poem is evoked from the transaction between the reader and the text during a particular act of reading, and therefore meaning is unique to an individual within a specific context and in each successive act of reading. A change in either the reader, the text, or the situation will, in Rosenblatt’s terms, result in “a different event—a different poem.” No two readers will have the exact same response to any text, and no single reader will have the exact same response to a text read multiple times.

Elizabeth Berg Leer, “Reader Response: Learning from Teacher Research,” Minnesota English Journal, 42:1 (2006), 129-130

What has really taken hold as an extension of this thinking is that rather than individual readers determining the meaning of a text, perhaps we should think, not in terms of communal readings. Communities of readers with shared concerns approach the text together and interpret the narrative or thrust of any given text in a way that speaks to them in their unique context. Rather than thinking of “my reading” or “your reading” of a text, perhaps we should think of, for example “a feminist reading” of the New Testament Epistles, or “a homosexual reading” of the Gospels. What arises here is the practice of reading a piece of text “as” something. “Reading Shakespeare as queer theorist,” “The Apostle Paul as feminist critic,” “Moby Dick as sexual metaphor,” and so forth. Using the reader response theory of meaning, whether the authors in question really had those intentions is not the determining factor in asking whether or not these themes are really there to be found.

One telling criticism of this approach (but not the main one), however, is that it leads to outrageous consequences that proponents of, say, gay or feminist readings of history and literature would never accept. One clear example would be a holocaust denier's reading of twentieth century history. It's no secret that there are people (including many white supremacists and Muslims) who deny that the Nazi holocaust against Jews took place, or that it was anything like the travesty that is portrayed in mainstream history. Their reading of history confirms this belief. They deconstruct mainstream accounts of Nazi treatment of European Jews as a Zionist misrepresentation in an effort to seize institutions of power and influence or to drum up support for the Zionist cause in the Middle East.

If a reader response theory of meaning really is the correct one to take, what, precisely, is wrong with this way of interpreting historical accounts? Would it be oppressive, arrogant, condescending or patriarchal to tell these people that they've simply got the facts wrong and they should read history as we do? Even if it is none of these things, are we factually in the right if we tell them that their reading of historical documents is just incorrect? In fact we do not. We do not regard it as a legitimate view of history just because it is a view held by a reading community. On the contrary, we are much more likely to use cases like this as clear cut cases where ideological “group think” can distort the way people in a group do read.

But over and above this I think that there is a much more fundamental flaw with the reader response theory of meaning. How, precisely, are we supposed to tell what it means? If this seems facetious, consider the following dialogue:

Ken: I hold to a reader response theory of meaning.

Barry: Oh? What's that?

Ken: It means that I think the correct meaning of a piece of text is not fixed, but rather is created by the reader in an interaction with the text.

Barry: Wow. So you think that texts have fixed meanings as determined by the author, huh?

Ken: No, that's not what I said. I said that texts do not have fixed meanings, but that meaning is created by the reader in an interaction with the te-

Barry (interrupting): Yes, like I said. You think that texts have fixed meanings determined by the author.

Ken: What? How could you think I said that?

Barry: Well, it's what your statement means, isn't it?

Ken: No! It means the opposite!

Barry: The opposite? Are you sure?

Ken (getting irate): Of course I'm sure!

Barry: Well, I'm just telling you what your words meant to me, that's all. And to me, you reject a reader response theory of meaning. You accept authorial intent. I'm going to tell my friends that you just told me that you accept authorial intent, because that's what you said, as I see it.

Ken: I can't believe this! That's dishonest! I did not say that and I did not mean that!

Barry: How do you know?

Ken: How do I know what my own words meant?

Barry: Yes, how do you know that your words really mean that texts have no fixed meaning, but that meaning is created by the reader in an interaction with the text?

Ken: because they are MY words! I said them! I presented them! I gave them meaning, and you have to right to twist them to mean something else!

Barry: So you're the author, and because of your intentions in using those words, you get to tell me what they mean, and my response is mistaken somehow if I take your words to mean something else altogether? But I thought you advocated the reader response theory of meaning. What happened?

What's ironic is that proponents of the reader response theory of meaning invest time and care into spelling out their position so that the reader will understand precisely what it is, all the while declaring that what an author (or speaker or artist) actually mean is in the eye of the beholder. Stated differently, the problem I am identifying is that if a reader response theory of meaning is correct, then it's not really possible to misunderstand somebody, because whatever meaning you see in the text is the one created by the reader's experience and hence is correct. The only way for a proponent of the reader response theory, therefore, to expect that her readers will understand her theory properly is for her to presuppose that the theory is just not true.

Did you find this blog post interesting? If so, let Glenn know below; he is contemplating writing the occasional post that simply introduces the reader for the first time to an issue in any of the subjects covered in his blog and most of ours.

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