Normalizing the Inconceivable: A Philosophical Problem?
(This post is part two in a series of articles that bear the heading, “Normalizing the Inconceivable,” dealing with the issue of abortion. Click here to access: Normalizing the Inconceivable [part one]; Normalizing the Inconceivable: A Scientific Problem of Being and Personhood? [part three]; Normalizing the Inconceivable: A Lack of Biblical Clarity? [part four]; Normalizing the Inconceivable: Abominating Abortion (Living the Implications) [part five].)
In the first part of this article, “Normalizing the Inconceivable,” I made the claim that Western culture is in a stupor regarding the nature and facts of abortion and its debated morality. After recalling part of a speech made by President Obama on the 38thanniversary of Roe v. Wade about the perceived right of families to make the abortion decision for themselves in private, I quoted a story from a nurse in Los Angeles who described in chilling detail what happens to babies at her hospital who do not meet the nurses’ subjective criteria for medical “savability.” This story brought me to the point of raising a series of questions about the abortion debate, the first of which this current post seeks to answer: Is the abortion debate and its subsequent legalization a philosophical problem of truth and morality? Is it a scientific problem of being and personhood? And for those who debate the issue on both sides from a biblical perspective, is it a problem of lack of clear biblical evidence?
When it comes to judging whether abortion is ethical or unethical, these three questions must form the lens through which the Christian thinker evaluates the situation. (For the non-Christian thinker, only the first two functionally apply.) What I mean is, if we can determine that the act of aborting human life at any point from conception (as I will discuss in the next post) is an impermissible, unethical action – then it cannot be pursued with integrity. In fact, if the abortion debate is ethically discerned, then the only way to prove the morality of abortion is by proving both that the fetus being aborted is not truly human, and that the Bible says nothing to contradict this. Here, I will examine the nature of truth and morality, and after the next two posts, draw the conclusion that abortion is a fundamentally moral issue that is definitively, universally wrong.
A Philosophical Problem of Truth and Morality?
image obtained from http://www.jenniesbev.com/
It seems appropriate to begin examining the abortion debate by considering the dual concepts of philosophical and moral relativism. As a Christian, I do not normally tend to begin here in approaching moral issues in my life. This is because the nature of biblical revelation is such that I prefer to defer to the clear, declarative Word that God has spoken. It is sufficient and unquestionable. However, in aiming to reach a broader readership than those with a Christ-centered worldview, I am aware that how the question of truth and morality gets answered either lends support to this biblical submission or cuts the legs out from under it. So I start by considering whether the abortion problem is one that arises primarily from the philosophical nature of truth and morality.
I would reasonably estimate that if you polled ten random people on almost any major street in the United States, England, France, or Canada (among other Western countries) and asked them whether abortion is right or wrong, about nine (and in many cases ten) of those people would respond that it’s up to the person. They would probably go so far as to say that it’s up to the woman (to the exclusion of the man), since it’s her body that is primarily involved. In effect, I suspect that most people would agree with President Obama’s January 23rd, 2011 statement that the abortion decision is “a private family matter;” not to say anything about the morality of it. If you were to ask them whether we ought to legalize it, they would laugh you off as a neanderthal just for asking the question! Nevertheless, we must ask the question if we are to go ahead with any shred of cogency, because the undeniable reality is that no one lives as if matters of morality are exclusively a private family matter.
Oh, the details of whether or not something qualifies as a “moral issue” may vary depending on who you ask. Yet, if there is an intrinsic morality that is discoverable rather than inventible, then it is hardly possible to believe that any given person’s beliefs about what counts as a “moral issue” has any final bearing on the discussion at all. What matters is whether something is or is not moral, not whether someone believes it is so. Relativity – the “what’s good for you is good for you and what’s good for me is good for me” way of thinking – requires that we abandon any real guiding principle as to whether or not something is intrinsically good. For example, if you don’t believe in a discoverable morality that is universally true and not simply invented by you or me, then you cannot tell me that it is absolutely wrong to walk into your daughter’s preschool classroom and take her life. But you do believe that such an action would be absolutely wrong, and therefore you believe in objective moral truth. And as we will see more clearly in a moment (in the discussion of Leff’s article below), this belief necessitates an unquestionable moral Judge, in order that He may speak into existence an objective morality. (I capitalize the terms Judge and He, because the only One Who fits such a description is – you guessed it – God.) Both theists, deists, agnostics, and atheists alike realize this, because no one can avoid the problems inherent in holding adhering to relativism.
Bertrand Russell argued in his book, The Problems of Philosophy, “Minds do not create truth or falsehood. They create beliefs, but when once the beliefs are created, the mind cannot make them true or false…. What makes a belief true is a fact, and this fact does not… in any way involve the mind of the person who has the belief.”4 Russell, an outspoken atheist noted worldwide for his brilliant philosophical and mathematical mind, seems to have seen what so many contemporary philosophers fail to see: no one can make a meaningful decision without a guiding ethic. It is as John Patrick of Augustine College in Ottawa pointed out: the moment a person acts, she has made a judgment and therefore acts as if something were true; there is no such thing as a consistent agnostic for more than a moment or two.5 Indeed, if I were to make romantic advances toward your wife, you would not hesitate to aggressively tell me of my moral transgression. And if I were to say that your morality was not binding on me, you would knock me out cold to convince me otherwise! Because there is such a thing as truth, goodness, and beauty, and to take the life of a preschooler or romantically pursue someone else’s wife are false, wicked, and ugly things to do.
The professing relativist at this point would say that I have just demonstrated two things: (1) relative cultural (not objective) morals are instituted for the sake of maintaining civility within a culture of morally self-determining people, and (2) “might makes right.” They would tell me that this is proof that it doesn’t have so much to do with the universal morality of a thing so much as the need for some moral standard in order for people to not kill each other (and that the moral standard that’s instituted is basically that of the strongest competitor). And I would tell the relativist that they have just made two definitive moral judgments, namely that civility is good and worth pursuing, and that killing each other is bad (or on the flip side, life is good). To state the point more plainly, consider Professor Norman Geisler’s observation: “Most relativists believe that relativism is absolutely true and that everyone should be a relativist. Therein lies the self-destructive nature of relativism. The relativist stands on the pinnacle of an absolute truth and wants to relativize everything else.”6
To wrap up the discussion, let’s look at a famous article that appeared in the prestigious Duke Law Journal in December 1979. The author, Arthur Allen Leff (1935-1981), was a highly regarded professor of law at Yale Law School, and delivered a form of his article, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” as a lecture at Duke Law School earlier that year. One of the major aims of his article was “to prove… that there cannot be any normative system [of law, or morality] ultimately based on anything except human will.”7 He spends a majority of his article carefully demonstrating the nature of law, and particularly that “a legal system based upon perceived normative propositions – oughts - which are absolutely binding, wholly unquestionable… [requires the presence of an] evaluator [to prescribe such propositions].” He then concludes, “If it is to fulfill its role, the evaluator must be the unjudged judge, the unruled legislator, the premise maker who rests on no premises, the uncreated creator of values.”8
In short, if any objective morality exists, it is grounded in the nature and character of God. Without God or an equivalent (there is no equivalent without the equivalent also being God), there is no meaningful way to test the real rightness or wrongness of a thing, for this would require us to transcend ourselves; and this we cannot do. Unless the declarer of morality is by nature absolute, an absolute judgment cannot be authoritatively made.9 As an atheist, Leff’s whole point is that because (in his view) God does not exist, there is no ultimately authoritative moral foundation; rather, it is created by people. He understood that “If [God] does not exist, there is no metaphoric equivalent…. The so-called death of God turns out not to have been just His funeral; it also seems to have effected the total elimination of any coherent, or even more-than-momentarily convincing, ethical or legal system dependent upon finally authoritative extrasystemic premises.”10
You may ask, “So what? If Leff makes a valid point, maybe there is no such thing as universal right or wrong.” I’ve directed attention to Leff’s argument in some detail because he makes his point more consistently than most, and has done a better job of honestly and skillfully laying out his arguments. It is profound how he begins the entire argument:
I want to believe – and so do you – in a complete, transcendent, and immanent set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live righteously. I also want to believe – and so do you – in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do, but to decide for ourselves, individually and as a species, what we ought to be. What we want, Heaven help us, is simultaneously to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free, that is, at the same time to discover the right and the good and to create it.11
Leff has nailed down not just the American Dream, but the Human Dream. That is, we want to know not only that we have the right to decide that the things we pursue are good and right for us to pursue, but we want to know that they are actually good and right for us to pursue. Or, to strip it down to the vernacular, we want to have our cake and eat it too. Unfortunately for us, we learned well from our mothers and grandmothers that this could simply not be the case. Which is why when it comes to intrinsically moral issues such as abortion, marital fidelity, murder, honesty, and any host of others, we cannot claim relativity and believe that anything we deem wrong is actually wrong (that is, absolutely) – we would just look foolish. And this is the best that any abortionist approaching the issue from the standpoint of relativity (or atheist, or professing relativist) can come up with. This is Leff’s entire conclusion:
All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked in making us “good,” and worse than that, there is no reason why anything should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable to us, could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things now stand, everything is up for grabs.
Nevertheless:
Napalming babies is bad.
Starving the poor is wicked.
Buying and selling each other is depraved.
Those who stood up to and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin, and Pol Pot – and General Custer too – have earned salvation.
Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.
There is in the world such a thing as evil.
[All together now:] Sez who?
God help us.12
Exactly. And He has, thank Him! Which is why in two posts from now I am going to consider the biblical evidence that professing Christian abortionists claim is fuzzy, because if God has definitively spoken on the matter of abortion, as He has on all moral matters, then we are left with one valid option: obedience. Now, I realize that there will be more than a few objectors who would label me supremely arrogant for (1) assuming, as I seem to, that the trinitarian God of the Christian Bible is the one, true, absolute One, and (2) that a human being can know and conclusively discuss God’s will. My answer would be twofold. (1) I do not have the space – nor is it my aim – to discuss the reason and evidence for the validity of the exclusive claims of Jesus Christ; others have capably done this.13 Unfortunately due to the constraints of the topic at hand, this must simply be assumed. (However, my hope is that this post and the next will be sufficient to make the point to those abortionists who do not profess belief in Christ.) (2) Just as the evidence for the exclusive legitimacy of the Christian claim is persuasive and comprehensive, so too is the evidence for the knowability and clarity of the Bible, which God has given His creation to know and understand Him and His will. Leff asserts that only if ethics were something unspeakable and yet discoverable could we have a normative standard for evaluating moral decisions. And it seems that we can! Theologian William Edgar put it well: “God’s will is the very definition of what is good, pleasing, and perfect. The good is the will of God. The pleasing is the will of God. The perfect is the will of God. The will of God is nothing less than His character, shaped into laws for our conduct. We can never change that…. But we can discover His will in its marvelous breadth and beauty.“14
To sum up the discussion, so far as I can see, we only have two options. The first is that we can believe that truth and morality (including the rightness or wrongness of abortion, to keep to the issue at hand) are personally defined and not transcendent. To do this, as we have seen, is to consign ourselves to lives of inconsistency, because it is impossible to live as though there were not objective moral standards that govern (or ought to govern) all people. Or we must believe that there is a transcendent Being that has given such knowable things as truth and moral code, and therefore judges perfectly; this alone is the coherent option. The end conclusion of the matter must therefore be this: Sorry, President Obama – the issue of abortion cannot be a private family matter of self-determined rightness or wrongness. It cannot, because there is no such thing as defensible moral relativism. We simply cannot arrive at the morality of abortion by claiming ambiguity and confusion about the nature of truth and ethics.
Notes
4Bertrand Russel, The Problems of Philosophy, (New York: Oxford University, 1959); quoted in Josh McDowell, The New Evidence That Demands A Verdict (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1999), 590-91. [Footnotes will continue numerically where the previous post left off.]
5John Patrick, “Agnosticism”, (Ottawa: Augustine College, n.d.), http://www.augustinecollege.org/media_centre.html (accessed June 7, 2011).
6Norman L. Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1998); quoted in Josh McDowell, The New Evidence That Demands A Verdict (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1999), 593.
7Arthur Allen Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law”, Duke Law Journal 6 (December 1979): 1229-1230. Credit must be given to Dr. John Patrick for directing my attention to this article in his talks on abortion and ethics.
8Ibid., 1230.
9Someone may object, “Aren’t you trying to make an authoritative moral judgment regarding the issue of abortion? Are you claiming absolute authority?” It is true that none but an absolute Being may authoritatively make an absolute moral prescription or unquestionable moral declaration; that’s Leff’s point. Yet, someone who is only restating the revealed moral declarations of such a One could rightly make an absolute moral declaration, but it would not be on her own authority, but God’s. In making an absolute moral judgment, it can only be valid to do so if the judgment is consistent with and grounded in the clear declaration(s) of the absolute One. In seeking to prove the absolute immorality of abortion, I could do so if – and only if – I prove it from the authority of God, as revealed in His Scriptures (which I hope I am working toward, particular two posts from now).
10Leff, 1232.
11Leff, 1229.
12Leff, 1249.
13Not least among them are C. S. Lewis, Norman L. Geisler, Gregory Koukl, and Josh McDowell.
14William Edgar, “Worship in All of Life,” in Give Praise to God, ed. Philip Graham Ryken and others (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2003), 349.
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