Abortion as a "form" of killing

Randomly browsing the net one day, undoubtedly because I had little to do, I came across an article from Matt Walsh, speaking on the Daily Wire Youtube site, which, I think, best summarizes the pro-abortion pro-choice argument. Walsh claims that most pro-abortion arguments are smoke screens for the real arguments, and I believe he’s correct. Sophie Lewis, feminist and author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (a quite revealing title) is his subject to prove that point. In an interview Walsh features, Lewis honestly says abortion is a form of killing that we need to defend. That, I think, is the substance of every pro-choice pro-abortion argument. As I watched this video, I thought that, in fact, those who are pro-choice can’t say they want to defend killing so they must mask what they want in the form of arguments about the “personhood” of the fetus, for instance. In essence, they must mask their desire to kill something with metaphysical argument while biology clearly shows the fetus is a living human being. What they really want is moral permission to kill a living being they do not want to keep or support.

I found it interesting that she has to say abortion is a “form” of killing. We never say killing a house fly or a tumor is a “form” of killing. We use words like this to mask underlying uncomfortable feelings. Even in this interview it seems her moral sense is bothering her, but she wants to coax her moral sense over to the other side hoping to feed it enough lies to keep it quiet. I feel she’s trying to talk herself into a moral stance she can’t yet defend.

The pic is from Walsh’s video and here is the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J2xLCxZ4JE

In addition, she does appear elsewhere on the net. Here’s a more detailed interview with her on abortion where she echoes the thoughts that Walsh talks about. Here she calls being pregnant “gestational work” – another euphemism to undoubtedly calm her moral sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMGptJXz618

I should mention that I did an article on the claim that the liberal left is immoral when it comes to life and death and the post is at https://thesecularleftcritique.wordpress.com/when-it-comes-to-life-and-death-the-liberal-left-is-immoral/. 

"What liberalism does, in this case, is teach people to be irresponsible. It also damages the family structure because neither the mother or father considers the needs of the child.  The funny thing about liberalism is that on the one hand Hillary Clinton can opine that it takes a village to raise a child while on the other hand her secular philosophy denies that parents should even care about their children and can kill them if their autonomy is threatened. Apparently, it takes a village assuming the village cares."

Review of Book Atheist's Fatal Flaw

Among Christians, the moral argument is one of the most popular philosophical arguments for God’s existence. The arguments goes something like this:

Real moral obligation is a fact. We are really, truly, objectively obligated to do good and avoid evil.

Either the atheistic view of reality is correct or the “religious” one.

But the atheistic one is incompatible with there being moral obligation.

Therefore the “religious” view of reality is correct.[1]

The atheist’s answer to using moral precepts to argue for God’s existence is to argue that God can’t possibly exist. All you have to do is look at the evil in the world. If God does exist, He would never tolerate this evil. Former atheist Antony Flew cited this problem as one of the reasons he became an atheist so early in his life. [2] Bertrand Russell also argues similarly:

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years.  I really cannot believe it.  Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?[3]

            A frequent Christian response to this objection is that the atheist actually reaffirms the validity of the Christian argument. Why are atheists sure they are actually referring to objective precepts not to do evil? For instance, is genocide or bigotry objectively evil and morally wrong or is that mere opinion? Atheists can only object to the evil in the world if there is an objective moral code that transcends humans. Such a source for that can only come from a divine source.

            An interesting different approach to this problem has been recently undertaken by Norman Geisler and Daniel McCoy in their book The Atheist’s Fatal Flaw.[4]They explain that the atheist position contains a fatal contradiction in that atheist philosophy does not allow God to act to contain the very moral evil atheists want prevented.

            Geisler and McCoy explain there are three ways God can prevent moral evil. Method A posits God could prevent all moral evil. Method B posits God could intervene to prevent only the worst moral evil. Method C posits God could intervene only in the area of one’s conscience.

            Preventing moral evil, then, must involve in some capacity the ruling of other people’s actions – whether taking away all free will and making people nothing but robots or causing indirect control over people using guilt that results from sinful actions. However, as Geisler and McCoy explain, atheists value autonomy above everything else in five areas that define one’s worldview: origin, identity, meaning, morality, and destiny.  Let me explain each. Atheists do not need or want God to be involved in creating because humans, they believe, sprang from a purposeless process of evolution. We got here without God’s help. Atheists also demand they decide for themselves what their purpose in life is or their value. Atheists also want to choose what moral codes to follow. Atheists and humanists both explain that our moral codes were a result of social evolution over millions of years. We learned proper moral behavior, but proper behavior is always subject to change. This is what Christian philosophers call moral relativism. Lastly, atheists often state that whatever problems exist in humans their fix does not in any way depend on faith in or acceptance of God’s existence or anything God demands of us. Rather, faith in science will allow us to fix these problems. Again, I cite atheist Bertrand Russell whose hopeful formula is echoed in Humanist Manifestos I and II as well. 

Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generation. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.[5]

            Chapter three of their book begins explaining, in my opinion, a much-ignored area of philosophy: the ways God controls moral evil while allowing for personal freedom. As Geisler and McCoy explain, in each of these areas the atheist prefers freedom to God having any control over our actions. For instance, God wants us to submit to Him, but atheists believe God is a tyrant for demanding such obedience and McCoy quote Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as suggesting that humans don’t need policing. God works through our conscience, but atheists often say that humans do not possess responsibility for their actions or they posit that they have done nothing immoral at all. This, I believe, is one of the main reasons atheists believe in materialism; they want to eliminate any chance of humans being responsible for their actions. If humans are merely physical automatons controlled by nothing but material substances, they can no more control what they do than a rock can control whether it rolls down a hill. Death is allowed by God because it limits human evil a person can do, but atheists claim God is immoral for allowing that as well.

            Reading their book, it’s obvious that atheists want to have their cake and eat it too. Actually, they are more like the child who demands the keys to a parent’s car even though they cannot drive, get in an accident, and then blame the parent for giving them the keys. Such a child is rebellious and refuses to accept any parental control. In regards to what God wants us, this is sinful rebellion which is how we would expect unbelievers to act if Christianity is true – which is one more reason I believe it.

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[1] Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 1994), 72.

[2] Antony Flew, There is a God (New  York: HarperCollins, 2007).

[3] Bertrand Russell, Why I am Not a Christian (New York: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1975), 10.

[4] Norman Geisler and Daniel McCoy, The Atheist’s Fatal Flaw (Grand Rapids: Baker House, 2014). All citations from this essay are from this book unless otherwise stated.

[5] Russell, 22.

James Tour demolishes secular origin of life talk

I have been doing some avid watching of IDist (intelligent design theorist) Stephen Meyer lately and came across someone else, James Tour, who is even more explicit and blunt in his assessment that the problem of the origin of life has never been solved. He’s a synthetic organic chemist so he has credibility. The first video I came upon is very short but succinct at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4sP1E1Jd_Y&t=1s

However, thereafter, I came across yet another longer speech by him which would be rare because he says he doesn’t normally do speeches. He concentrates more on journal articles. He doesn’t talk about God or religion or anything in this talk and sticks strictly to the scientific aspect of this issue, and people can draw their own metaphysical conclusions from what he says.  It’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU7Lww-sBPg&t=2363s

What I found most notable – and reasonable to believe – is how scientists (and scientists speaking toward reporters who cover them) is how they misrepresent the origin of life controversy. It occurs in the second link I provided above. Essentially what they do is mix a bunch of chemicals together, find some kind of reaction that they claim is close to providing the kind of reaction necessary to start life, and then proclaim they have solved the origin-of-life problem. But they haven’t even came close to doing it.

That brings me to Richard Dawkins who I have covered in some detail in much of my writing. I recently, in one of my writings, argued that reality is difficult for evolutionists to face particularly regarding the origin of life. It’s at https://thesecularleftcritique.wordpress.com/reality-is-tough-on-evolution-or-when-the-data-doesnt-fit-your-theory-the-data-must-be-wrong/ Here’s part of what I said on him:

Evolutionists don’t admit defeat, and to cope with a perilous situation they rely on continued agnosticism. This can continue for years without the realization that at one point they should admit they are wrong. Dawkins’ writing on the origin of life is a case in point. In 1986, Dawkins noted that “chemists have failed in their attempts to duplicate the spontaneous origin of life in the laboratory.” He has also noted that “We still don’t know exactly how natural selection began on Earth.”[xii] In 2006, not much changed. Dawkins says “The origin of life is a flourishing, if speculative, subject for research . . . I shall not be surprised if, within the next few years, chemists report that they have successfully midwifed a new origin of life in the laboratory.” It hasn’t happened yet, he says, and he maintains that the probability of it happening is extremely low although we can, he says, have confidence it happened at least once.[xiii] Perhaps the reason that life is so improbable and that researchers can’t create life is that there is something missing in these attempts that make it impossible to do so. Maybe intelligence is needed; perhaps even divine intelligence.

Greetings. This blog continues the work I have begun as the author of the book The Vast Wastelands of Unbelief which I have henceforth edited and republished as the Wastelands of Unbelief via Wordpress.at https://wastelandsofunbelief.wordpress.com/

I also started a Wordpress site devoted to subsequent essays critical of secular left thought - whether it be secular humanism, atheism, liberalism, or evolutionism at https://thesecularleftcritique.wordpress.com/table-of-contents/

This blog is for shorter entries and updates on material I find on a daily basis that have an impact on the type of material I write about.