This is one I started writing two weeks ago, so it's a bit anachronistic.
I've taken this time of having two hernias as an opportunity to slow down a bit and start working up my barefoot chops. I'll be referencing the book given to me buy my brother and sister-in-law on the subject more frequently. I did a barefoot 5k on Wednesday and this little four-miler today:
View 16/03/2012 17:22 in a larger map
I mostly kept to the sidewalks on Wednesday, but today's excursion around the football stadium on asphalt wasn't as easy on the soles.
One of the reasons I like running is because it gives me time to think. If I'm stressed or need to work something out in my brain, I find a run usually helps.
Today I didn't need to think about anything, in fact I was thinking about how uncomfortable the asphalt was, when another thought popped into my head. At this point, if I were blog savvy enough, I'd put a dancing, singing, light-up marquee around the following disclaimer:
I'll even put a fun picture here so you don't have to read any of it.
All disinterested parties gone?
Okay.
I've taken this time of having two hernias as an opportunity to slow down a bit and start working up my barefoot chops. I'll be referencing the book given to me buy my brother and sister-in-law on the subject more frequently. I did a barefoot 5k on Wednesday and this little four-miler today:
View 16/03/2012 17:22 in a larger map
I mostly kept to the sidewalks on Wednesday, but today's excursion around the football stadium on asphalt wasn't as easy on the soles.
One of the reasons I like running is because it gives me time to think. If I'm stressed or need to work something out in my brain, I find a run usually helps.
Today I didn't need to think about anything, in fact I was thinking about how uncomfortable the asphalt was, when another thought popped into my head. At this point, if I were blog savvy enough, I'd put a dancing, singing, light-up marquee around the following disclaimer:
I'll even put a fun picture here so you don't have to read any of it.
 |
All disinterested parties gone?
Okay.
For the sake of argument, let's just assume there's a God concerned with our lives who reveals Himself to us through, say, the Bible. While running, it occurred to me that God is not pro-life in the contemporary debate's sense of the phrase.
God allows--through direct intervention, impotence, error, or indifference--abortions to happen. I hope this is not a false tetralemma, and if anyone has another option please let me know. Let's explore these four options, shall we?
Impotence. God is unable to intervene. Perhaps this is the result of being a deistic deity. This does not appear to be the God of the Bible, so I shan't concern myself much with it. It would seem bizarre that He's able to give birth to Himself to take on the sins of the world without being able to affect other goings on in other wombs.
Error. God makes mistakes but is quick enough on the turnaround with some fetuses to abort them before birth. This might account for why some children are stillborn or born afflicted with birth defects. Perhaps this is plausible...my Sunday School teachers taught us that the reason God sent the great deluge was to fix an error, and that the rainbow afterwards was an apology/covenant not to kill everyone a second time. Granted, that may have been an incorrect interpretation or a dumbed down version of the Bible (irony notwithstanding) in order to make it more palatable to us poor seven-year-olds. But, if God makes errors and doesn't always catch them, wouldn't it be okay for us to correct mistakes for Him? Humans do plenty of other stuff in His name. War comes to mind. However, most Biblical apologists will tell you that God is perfect, omnipotent, and inerrant, so this again seems an inadequate answer.
Indifference. This is like the watchmaker theory of impotence, only that He's able to intervene and chooses not to. He just can't be bothered with it. Yet again, if God is concerned with our lives and amenable to prayer, this simply cannot be the case. If it were the case, why would he be indifferent to his own natural abortions but dead-set against artificial miscarriages? Is it because we're "playing God" and he finds that an affront to His grand designs? This would be selective indifference, which would be indistinguishable from our last option...
Direct intervention. God causes miscarraiges to happen for some ineffable reason, usually passed off as someone learning a valuable lesson at the expense of some poor fetus/and or its parents. And apparently, due to the same ineffable reasons, only He is able to pick which miscarriages will have the desired affect and abortions cannot have this affect.
This is the only possible option in the Biblical sense (irony notwithstanding). Therefore, God is the biggest abortionist of all time.
The point is, if miscarriages just happen there's no need to invoke the inexplicable. They just happen. If they happen because God willed it, then apologists have to suspend all the functions of higher reasoning God was nice enough to give them to ignore in order to keep him from being one of the pro-choice monsters they deplore.
"God has a reason for causing miscarriages. It's really good, too. Much better than your reason to get an abortion. It's so good you can't even possible conceive it. That's how I know it's better."
Are you certain that these are the only lemmas available to you?
ReplyDeleteI can postulate a lemma wherein God never intervenes for any reason in order to avoid violating free will. In this case, God has no involvement at all, not in abortions, not in harvests, not in anything. He can do this while remaining a caring God.
Your argument uses a reductio ad absurdum strategy, which is only going to work if you can prove that your lemmas are, in fact, the only four choices.
If I can create even one more lemma, then your argument becomes a logical fallacy.
Please note that I have sidestepped the entire abortion discussion and focused solely on attempting to shore up your logic in order to help you reach a defensible conclusion.
John, to support Emerson's point: if you accept the idea of an interventionist God, you also have to take with that the God that not only does good things, but bad things and lets bad things happen to good people as much as good things happen to bad people. Thus Emerson's argument is not reductio ad absurdum.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/First-I-d-like-to-blame-the-Lord-for-causing-us-to-lose-today-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i8672941_.htm
Nice comic, Tyson =)
DeleteJohn - No, I'm not certain. However, I think your example would fall into the category of an impotent god who designed himself to be such, or a selectively indifferent god (choosing to remain indifferent regardless of his caring or uncaring nature). In either case, he allows abortions to happen. Additionally, you have to call upon something like Process Theology to explain that type of god, which a typical biblical apologist would not. I did qualify at the beginning that this particular god I'm talking about reveals himself through the bible.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's true that my tetralemma would be invalidated by another choice. But then we'd just have to see if the new option makes any difference.