Recently, Andreas Schueler and myself have been having a debate about abortion, particularly with regards to the context of spontaneous natural abortion. The idea came out of my post God Loves Abortion. Apologist JW Wartick, on his own blog, concluded this:
Therefore, Bonhoeffer’s ingenious argument leads to the inescapable conclusion: no Christian can endorse abortion. The fact of the matter is that God so set up the world that the process of human growth begins at conception. Unless there is a complication in the pregnancy or there is an outside source intervening to terminate the pregnancy, the result of conception is a human being.
All Christians say in chorus: Let God’s Will Be Done!
My point was this:
Of course, the logic of God with regards to abortion is somewhat dubious. It seems rather bizarre to rail against pro-choicers for aborting when God designs a system whereby natural (spontaneous) abortion is so prevalent, and then omits doing anything about it. Thus there is a mix of active and passive will that embryos, foetuses and blastocysts have more chance of perishing than surviving. Ans all this happens unbeknownst to people, invalidating most theodicies, if not all.
God loves abortion.
I was looking to show that it is difficult to take hardline views on abortion and what God wants when it is evident that God terminates the vast majority of pregnancies naturally, and unbeknownst to humans, meaning any theodicy is hard to come by. In the spirit of good, honest debate, Wartick retorted:
Comments like these make me wonder whether the skeptic has any intellectual honesty. Apparently you refuse to acknowledge the robust Christian doctrines of the Fall, original sin, and the like. But hey, being disingenuous is so much easier.
And it was in this vein that Wartick continued, unwilling to expand his views or answer any questions posed. As far as I am concerned, I am more than happy to address difficult questions because I am not worried if I am wrong. The only way of improving my epistemology or the conclusions that my epistemological methods lead me to is by revising and improving how I know things and what I know based on good philosophical arguments and sound evidence.
What followed was a series of demands that I produce a logical syllogism when all I wanted JW to do was to answer a simple question. The demands for a syllogism, I proffer, was a technique to allow JW to concentrate on trying to find logical loopholes in an argument rather than to feel the need to offer a theological answer to a theological issue:
Either God stops these deaths or he doesn’t. He clearly hasn’t stopped them, so therefore he deems them necessary, or deems there enough good reason, to let them continue. This reasoning needs explaining. It’s really that simple.
You are just fluffing around the edges throwing out soundbites to your readers in an attempt, it appears, to seem intellectually superior. But in failing to deal with the core issues, you fail to do so.
“Simple foreknowledge of an event does not somehow entail willing an event.”
Passive and active will. When you design systems, this can be muddled. If I drink beer, actively willingit, I do so to become happy and so on. However, I do not will the hangover. That is a natural byproduct of the beer drinking that I can do nothing about but not drink. Since my will to drink is higher than my will not to drink, I passivley will the hangover. It is far more complex with Go since he designs the system. If he willed to drink, he could just eradicte hangovers, or create perpetual miracles so they never happen, even though they might still be a natural byproduct, and so on. So with fetal deaths, he could design them OUT of the system, or miraculously eradicate them. Neither option seems to be fulfilled. Thus the will to allow them is stronger than in my drinking analogy with humans.
If you have designed everything ex nihilo and know of all possible alternatives and of every outcome, then on Molinism you CHOOSE TO ACTUALISE this particular world over and above any other, weighing up all counterfactuals. So given the foreknowledge of these millions of fetal deaths, God still chooses this world.
Why? What ‘good’ does this contribute, since things need to be measured against God’s omnibenevolence, which I assume you adhere to. God is love and all that.So given that God is love, how do you explain millions of fetal deaths? Forget 1 -4 and getting yourself in a twist, and seeming to want to squirm out of answering this; answer that question.
These deaths are natural, and indeed happen across the animal kindgom. So why does this happen from a God is love perspective?
And next:
You have serially thrown in red herrings and suchlike in order to avoid getting to grips with the question. It seems this is what you have offered:
How do you account for millions of naturally caused unborn foetal deaths within the context of an all-loving deity who designed the world?
Answer: The Christian doctrine of the Fall.
And that is it. That is essentially what all those paragraphs of prose boil down to. It is not an explanation in any meaningful sense. People’s theories on the Fall differ – especially with regards to children and the natural world. Given that many Christians adhere to an age of accountability, and these foetuses will clearly not have reached that, please can you elucidate.
Again, God could stop these foetal deaths but chooses not to. To what end do these deaths millions of ‘potential humans’ serve?
You have done an exemplary job of not answering the question.
As was becoming habit, JW replied:
Jonathan. What is your argument. Please, show it to me. I have asked continually for what your actual argument is. It is you who have dodged the issue. Since presenting your initial “argument”–which is invalid as it stands by your own admission–you have done nothing to defend it. What is the argument?
I then returned:
JW
It is a question to you:
Again, God could stop these foetal deaths but chooses not to. To what end do these deaths millions of ‘potential humans’ serve?
You seem not to want to expand you answer past “The Fall”. I would like you to, in some detail if possible. In other words, this is not about me and picking holes in a formal argument. This is about you and your belief, and how you rationalise what appear to be rather a lot of pointless deaths, whilst also attacking those who are pro-choice (but that can come later).
Cheers.
To which he replied:
You’ve presented a number of premises which you have refused to defend. I feel no inclination to continue a conversation in which you clearly have no interest in defending your points.
Again, JW refused to answer my question, so:
My very first comment did not contain any premises and referred to an offsite piece. You seem to want to dodge the question. I ask a question. That is all.
But I was not the only person who recognised this, as nth_dimension continued:
JW, I have no argument, but am also interested in hearing what your thoughts are on Jonathan’s question.
Interestingly, when someone else asked it, he suddenly felt it was OK to answer it and expand:
Simply put, I don’t think his question is valid. Simply put, God chose a world from among the set of possible worlds. The molinistic perspective (mine) holds that there are three moments of God’s knowledge (not temporal moments): natural knowledge (knowledge of necessary truths, etc), middle knowledge (knowledge of free creaturely counterfactuals), and free knowledge (God’s knowledge of the world[s] He creates). Now possible worlds are part of the natural knowledge of God, so a world with miscarriages is not full of that type of evil because God decided to set it up that way.
Furthermore, the assumption in Jonathan’s question is that I am a ‘greater good’ theodicist, which I am not. Yes, I think that the greater good theodicy works–in a limited sense. I do not think that for every evil God explicitly has a purpose. Richard Swinburne draws this out in great detail when he argues in providence and the problem of evil that there are overarching goods that could not happen without evils. His version of the greater good theodicy is focused upon the notion that there are greater goods that offer overarching reasons for evil, but not that every individual evil has a set of goods to offset it.
So, to put it most simply, the question just doesn’t apply to my view. I reject its very grounding. It assumes that every evil must have an ultimate “end”–that millions of deaths by miscarriages have some explicit end. I think that’s absurd. I don’t follow that reasoning, so I don’t see any need to answer the question that I feel like is confused.
Finally! And I replied:
Why does it take someone else asking the same question for you to actually attempt to answer it?
OK, now we can start talking.
1) “Now possible worlds are part of the natural knowledge of God, so a world with miscarriages is not full of that type of evil because God decided to set it up that way.2 The way I understand Molinism, and correct me if I am wrong, is that necessary truths are that: necessary. In other words logical truths such as logic and maths etc. They are independent of the will of God and must be true. Miscarriages do not have to be true. Are you saying God has no power to stop them in the sam way he cannot square a circle?
2) “the assumption in Jonathan’s question is that I am a ‘greater good’ theodicist, which I am not. .” Believe it or not, this is the point of questions – to find out what you believe. I am not a mind reader, and I apologise for not having read the entirety of your writing.
3) “to put it most simply, the question just doesn’t apply to my view. I reject its very grounding. It assumes that every evil must have an ultimate “end”–that millions of deaths by miscarriages have some explicit end. ” – OK, so they have no end. However, they are not, as you say, necessary truths. I can conceive of a world where they didn’t happen. Also, you are forgetting perpetual miracles. So if God is omnipotent, he can stop them happening on a case by case basis. But doesn’t. SO this DOES need explaining. If it is not for a greater good, what is the reason God does not step in?
Look, you have been nothing but curt and fairly disingenuous with your replies. Fine, it’s your blog. But please do not attempt to take the intellectual high ground and then produce replies like that – you do yourself no favours.
Cheers
JP
Apologist JW Wartick did not reply to this. Just when some good, honest debate could take place, he refused to engage. There were several other conversations going on in this thread: Andy Schueler was giving a good account of how the notion of biological emergence of personhood is incoherent, as well as Russ Rogers getting stuck in to aspects of Christian religiosity. For his efforts, Russ was banned.
I am interested to see what you think of this conversation. I have not included every post here and I hope I am not being disingenuous with my accounting of the conversation. All I want is open and honest debate with religious believers, and I don’t think I got that from him.
