A Divine Materialism

I've been reading the articles for the Institute for the Study of Nature's Summer Seminar. Certainly one of the most provocative that I've read so far is "Protein Folds as Platonic Forms," a 2002 paper by New Zealanders Michael Denton, Craig Marshall, and Michael Legge.

The article begins with an historical overview: biologists before Darwin believed organic forms to be eternal givens of nature: "Form came first and function was viewed as a secondary and derived adaptive feature" (326).

In contrast, the Darwinians (ironically) adopted Paley's watch metaphor: the organism as a machine, i.e., contingent order imposed from without. While the creationists emphasized God's work in imposing order on matter, the Darwinists replaced the Divine Designer with chance mutation and natural selection.

It's difficult to imagine a proto-lifeform reproducing itself before the cell, so chance locked in by reproduction isn't plausible in the case of life's original coming-to-be (the progenitor of the first cell):

The only area of modern biology where a strong deterministic and naturalistic element is still evident is the ‘‘origin of life’’ with many researchers viewing life’s origin as an inevitable and determined end of planetary and cosmic evolution (Kenyon & Steinman, 1969; Lehninger, 1982; De Duve, 1991; Morowitz et al., 2000; Sowerby et al., 2001). (329-330)

The Denton group's project is to extend this determinism beyond the origin of life, to show that the forms of proteins are determined by the natural laws of physics and chemistry, and not by the Darwinian mechanism of random mutation and selection:

Here we argue that in another important area of modern biology, one related to the origin of life, that involves the evolution and origin of one of the most important classes of complex biological forms—the basic protein folds — the pre-Darwinian concept of organic forms as ‘‘built-in’’ intrinsic features of nature determined by natural law provides a more powerful explanatory framework than its selectionist successor.¹ (330)

The data show that proteins folds come in only about 1000 different natural kinds. These forms are determined from within, not from outside by the contingent choice of an intelligence or natural selection. In other words, the folding motions of proteins are natural to their materials, not artificially or violently imposed.

So you can see where this is going, I'll cut to the "money quote" from further on in the paper:

For the lawful nature of the [protein] folds provides for the first time evidence that the laws of nature may not only be fine tuned to generate an environment fit for life (the stage) but may also be fine tuned to generate the organic forms (the actors) as well, in other words that the cosmos may be even more biocentric than is currently envisaged! (338)

In other words, matter is pre-determined to bring forth life; the living order of the universe was front-loaded.

More Details

There's a lot more in this paper to recommend it, much more than I can capture in a single post. Here's a great quotation: "Natural forms are robust, contingent artificial forms are fragile." (333) The authors contrast a polypeptide's natural gravitation to its energy minimum with the contigent order of a watch or a Lego construction. While a perturbed natural form settles back into its minimum like a marbel settles into the bottom of a bowl, a perturbed artificial form usually loses its function.

The authors also note that that protein forms have a degree of independence from what they're made of:

The fact that in many cases where the same fold is adapted to different functions, no trace of homology [sameness] can be detected in the amino acid sequences [that compose it], suggesting multiple separate discoveries of the same basic structure during the course of evolution, further reinforces the conclusion that the folds are a finite set of ahistoric physical forms. (332)

This manifests what Robert Laughlin calls "protection": that the behavior of macro-phenomenon is unaffected by its particular micro-dynamics.

A Telling Contrast

It's interesting to contrast this conclusion with the divided Intelligent Design approach of Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards in The Privileged Planet. Gonzalez and Richards tried to show that while the universe is "fine-tuned for life and discovery," life's organization didn't arise by necessity. They are walking a fine line: on the one hand, they want to show how God created the world to be good for life, but on the other hand, they don't want life to be the natural outcome of creation: "for a pattern to reliably indicate design, it will need to be relatively independent of the event or structure in question" (299).

But why do they trouble to walk this line? A passage from the book explains their fear:

Objection 13: You haven't really challenged naturalism. You've just challenged the idea that nature doesn't exhibit purpose or design.

It's possible to be both a naturalist and to admit design in nature. In fact, in the ancient world, both Aristotelians and Stoics did just that. Perhaps, for instance, design is somehow an inextricable part of an eternal cosmos, like matter and energy. We can't conclusively rule this out. The problem in our modern setting is that this strategy would require an essentially pantheistic view of nature that most naturalists deny. A cosmos that includes design and purpose—as well as chance, matter, and natural law—is quite different from "nature" as most modern naturalists understand it.

So they're afraid of "pantheism." Notice that they don't and can't rule out what they call "pantheism"; they just say that it's not a concern in today's world. It's unfortunate that they're too busy responding to exigent concerns to look more deeply into the full truth of the matter.² And of course, pantheism is basically what Carl Sagan's Cosmos advocates, albeit without an explicit belief in purpose or design³. Furthermore, why do they oppose design and purpose with natural law? Doesn't natural law express purpose? The second paragraph of the passage is a little better, but still goes astray:

Moreover, current Big Bang cosmology discourages the view that the cosmos is eternal, which is necessary if design is coextensive with matter, time, and natural law (note also that law is not iself a material entity, nor is it a causal agent). A causal agent that somehow transcends the cosmos is a much more natural explanation for the Big Bang and the resulting physical universe we know than are purely immanent patterns of design. But either is a better explanation than the currently popular view that the physical universe is all there is, was, or ever shall be [opening line of Sagan's Cosmos!], and that chance and impersonal necessity exclusively explain its existence. (329, emphasis added)

The first sentence about law not being a causal agent is excellent. The highlighted sentence, on the other hand, shows a profound ignorance of philosophy. The use of the word "natural" is wrong on a couple levels. First, nature is an immanent source of motion and rest. Second, they make it sound as if God were a natural agent, when the whole philosophical point of invoking God is that the Existence of everything requires a source in a Agent that derives its Being from nothing else—in other words, a cause so completely unlike the changing world we see because it doesn't receive its being or motion from outside itself. Of course they're using "natural" loosely to mean reasonable. They fail to realize that even if the universe is eternal and all of its order completely immanent, it still requires a God to explain that order, as well as the existence of the universe in general. Philosophically speaking, the God (of the philosophers, not necessarily of revelation) is the only explanation possible.

In sum, ID proponents are afraid of pantheism, though it's not clear that they even understand what it is well enough to distinguish it from natural law, or purpose and design for that matter.

Conclusion

Three different views discussed here can be separated by the source of order:
1. From chance (Darwinism)
2. From intenvention by an intelligent agent (ID)
3. From within (Denton, et al.)

As we've already seen, all three of these require an Intelligent Designer, one who truly transcends nature. The ID folks are afraid of attributing too much self-organization to nature because they are frightened of pantheism—as if God wouldn't have to be responsible for whatever order the universe has through whatever mechanism! Contrary to the ID claim, there is no opposition between intelligence and law; laws require a Lawgiver. Contrary to the Darwinist claim, "chance" operates according to a law, which also requires an intelligence.

As Francis Bacon wrote so wisely in one of his Essays, "A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." It is only the philosophical ignorance of the Darwinists that allows them to claim that chance obviates the need for God. The irony is that the ID approach feeds off this philosophical ignorance that "inclineth man's mind to atheism."

The Darwinists deny that God is necessary to make the "watch" of creation (Hence Dawkins's blind watchmaker). The ID crowd repudiates the deniers, but in doing so, they've imbibed the atheistic materialists' rather diminutive definition of God: a god who doesn't so much create matter as manipulate already existent matter.

When it comes down to it, it's impossible to devise a scientific scenario that doesn't need a Creator (science can't say anything about Being in itself). Intelligent design says that the order in the universe that can't be attributed to chance or law should really be attributed to an Intelligent Designer (God). There's nothing wrong with this belief in itself, but by denying that God can work through chance or law it sections off an unnecessarily small territory for theism—a territory that actual experience of the world seems to be chipping away.

The work of Michael Denton and his collaborators shows that at least some of the order of living things is native to the matter that constitutes them. Science cannot speak to the ultimate source of this order, but natural philosophy tells us that the source cannot be natural, but what men call God.

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Notes

1. I've omitted references from this and all subsequent quotations.

2. It is sad that an organization like Discovery Institute with such a noble purpose tends to take such short-sighted approaches.

3. There's actually a whole Wikipedia discussion on Sagan and pantheism.

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Michael J. Denton, Craig J. Marshall and Michael Legge, "Protein Folds as Platonic Forms," Journal of Theoretical Biology 219 (2002), 325–342

Michael J. Denton, et al., "Physical law not natural selection as the major determinant of biological complexity in the subcellular realm," BioSystems 71 (2003), 297-303.

Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards, The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2004).

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Note: Next week I'll be traveling. I don't know what my network access will be like, but I may be unable to post.

Brownback on Faith and Reason

In case you missed it, Senator Brownback wrote an excellent op-ed in the New York Times. The piece is called "What I Think About Evolution" and the Senator has an appropriately thoughtful take on the subject. But I think especially good the first couple paragraphs on the lack of thought in the current debate on the issue (and in our media culture in general):

In our sound-bite political culture, it is unrealistic to expect that every complicated issue will be addressed with the nuance or subtlety it deserves. So I suppose I should not have been surprised earlier this month when, during the first Republican presidential debate, the candidates on stage were asked to raise their hands if they did not 'believe' in evolution. As one of those who raised his hand, I think it would be helpful to discuss the issue in a bit more detail and with the seriousness it demands.

The premise behind the question seems to be that if one does not unhesitatingly assert belief in evolution, then one must necessarily believe that God created the world and everything in it in six 24-hour days. But limiting this question to a stark choice between evolution and [young earth] creationism does a disservice to the complexity of the interaction between science, faith and reason.

It's also worth noting the superb job the Senator does defending the value of the human person against the materialism implicit in so much Darwinian propaganda¹. This erroneous philosophy cuts directly against the notion of human rights, as Walker Percy describes so well in this selection.

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1. Stephen M. Barr points out in First Things (e.g., this article, which requires a subscription to access) that Darwinism need not be materialistic.

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Sam Brownback, "What I Think About Evolution," New York Times (May 31, 2007).

Global Warming and "Scientific" Consensus

Michael Griffin, Administrator of NASA, is taking a load of flak for questioning in an NPR interview the "fact" that climate change is a bad thing. Here's a selection from the interview:

I have no doubt that … a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change. First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings.¹ I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take.

Of course NPR paraded through a number of scientists to give the "correct" word and of course all of the scientists interviewed for the story disagreed with Griffin's evaluation. The firestorm that these remarks have stirred up signal a radical misunderstanding of science. Science only tells us about the world; it doesn't decide what's good and what's bad. Ethics and political philosophy tell us what's good and bad in human action, and the arts (in the broad sense) tell us what's good in production. The proper understanding of science as purely speculative (descriptional) is reflected in NASA's charter, as Griffin describes it:

Nowhere in NASA's authorization, which of course governs what we do, is there anything at all telling us that we should take actions to affect climate change in either one way or another. We study global climate change, that is in our authorization, we think we do it rather well. I'm proud of that, but NASA is not an agency chartered to, quote, battle climate change.

NASA's authorization is to do science, that is, only to tell us the actual fact of the matter, and not evaluate what's good or the bad. Scientists too easily forget that while as human beings (all of whom are implicitly philosophers) they can speak about the good and bad, when they do so, it is outside their expertise, and not as scientists. To claim special expertise in the good and the bad is like a lawyer claiming expertise in medicine.

Michael Crichton has been a consistent and articulate opponent of the global warming fad. His 2003 speech "Aliens Cause Global Warming" upholds his tradition. I recommend reading the full speech for his insightful words on climate change, but the remarks on "consensus science" are of particular interest to this forum, as they have much broader applicability:

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of. Let's review a few cases.

In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth . One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent "skeptics" around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.

There is no shortage of other examples. In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the "pellagra germ." The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory. Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called "Goldberger's filth parties." Nobody contracted pellagra. The consensus continued to disagree with him. There was, in addition, a social factor-southern States disliked the idea of poor diet as the cause, because it meant that social reform was required. They continued to deny it until the 1920s. Result-despite a twentieth century epidemic, the consensus took years to see the light.

Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology-until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees.

And shall we go on? The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy…the list of consensus errors goes on and on.

Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc². Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

But back to our main subject.

In other words, a lack of scientific evidence hides behind the plea of "consensus." "Consensus" tells us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, but (to mix media quotations) there is a truth out there and honesty demands we find it.

Notes

1. Of course one might wonder whether or not it's arrogant for people to decide virtually—as a by-product of their actions—what the climate will be, assuming the climate scare is apt.

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"NASA Chief Questions Urgency of Global Warming," Morning Edition (May 31, 2007).

Michael Crichton, "Aliens Cause Global Warming" (Caltech, Pasadena, CA, January 17, 2003). (I emailed Crichton's rights department some time ago and never heard back. Silence implies consent, so I assume it's okay to reproduce part of his speech here.)

Scientific Ignorance on Display

A review article titled "Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science" in the latest issue of Science displays an illustrative sample of modern scientists' ignorance and presumption—ignorance of philosophy and presumption that science is sufficient for understanding the world.

Take this sentence for starters:

Many of the undergraduates retained a common-sense Aristotelian theory of object motion; they predicted that the ball would continue to move in a curved motion, choosing B over A in Fig. 1. [Figure 1A shows the path of a ball leaving a curved tube as a straight line; figure 1B shows the ball's path as curved.¹]

I'm pretty sure that Aristotle doesn't discuss the motion out of curved tubes. Why is he referenced here?

The ignorance and prejudice in the rest of the article is more profound. Take the assumed unreality of purpose in the world:²

The examples so far concern people’s common-sense understanding of the physical world, but their intuitive psychology also contributes to their resistance to science. One important bias is that children naturally see the world in terms of design and purpose. For instance, 4-year-olds insist that everything has a purpose, including lions (“to go in the zoo”) and clouds (“for raining”), a propensity called “promiscuous teleology”. Additionally, when asked about the origin of animals and people, children spontaneously tend to provide and prefer creationist explanations. Just as children’s intuitions about the physical world make it difficult for them to accept that Earth is a sphere, their psychological intuitions about agency and design make it difficult for them to accept the processes of evolution.

Did you notice also the parallel the authors draw between denial of evolution and denial of the Earth's sphericity? Of course these statements are about children, not adults,³ though there's still the implied equation of evolution doubters with flat-earthers. Then again, perhaps we should simply be glad the author's refrained from unnecessarily impugning Aristotle here.⁴

Next, the article goes on to assume that belief in an immaterial soul is obviously erroneous:

Another consequence of people’s commonsense psychology is dualism, the belief that the mind is fundamentally different from the brain.... The strong intuitive pull of dualism makes it difficult for people to accept what Francis Crick called “the astonishing hypothesis”: Dualism is mistaken—mental life emerges from physical processes. People resist the astonishing hypothesis in ways that can have considerable social implications. For one thing, debates about the moral status of embryos, fetuses, stem cells, and nonhuman animals are sometimes framed in terms of whether or not these entities possess immaterial souls [endnote].

If "hypothesis" means unproven assumption, then Crick is correct (and then scientists complain about the public's misunderstanding of the word "hypothesis"!). The presumption is that there is no such thing as an immaterial soul. The authors seem perfectly unaware that science has absolutely no competence to pronounce on the existence or non-existence of anything immaterial. The presumption in beginning any scientific investigation is that we will only consider material influences. You can't disprove something by assuming its contrary. Science by defintion deals only with material things. To disprove immaterial things requires philosophy.

The endnote ices the cake:

This belief in souls also holds for some expert ethicists. For instance, in their 2003 report Being Human: Readings from the President's Council on Bioethics, the President’s Council described people as follows: “We have both corporeal and noncorporeal aspects. We are embodied spirits and inspirited bodies (or, if you will, embodied minds and minded bodies)”

Implicit in this comment is that ethics, as understood by ethicists for millennia, is meaningless, and that only science, as conceived by doctrinaire materialists for two centuries, truly describes the universe. In reality, a little education in philosophy would have told them that the presumption that mental processes are purely physical is in fact inconsistent with the fact of a scientist's discovering truth about the world. Intellectual activity requires an immaterial intellect. (How can materialistic science reason about itself? Is science itself material?)

The article is a bit fairer with regard to the scientific reliance on experts.

If the source is deemed trustworthy, people will believe the claim, often without really understanding it. Consider, for example, that many Americans who claim to believe in natural selection are unable to accurately describe how natural selection works.

As the article notes in its next paragraph, people's reliance on authorities isn't unique to scientific knowledge. But, unlike many other fields, such reliance is inseparable from science.⁵ In a paper in The Thomist, Michael Augros discusses how science needs experts because it relies on specialized experience (i.e., experiment). Philosophy, including ethics, on the other hand relies on common experience, so, while experts may be needed to guide our philosophical considerations, every man can in principle verify the conclusions in terms of his own experience. Dr. Augros writes,

No scientist can personally verify in his own experience all the scientific theories and results upon which his own efforts depend. The philosopher, on the other hand, who does not descend to the more particular experiences of the scientist, is restricted to the investigation of those mysteries to which nature itself has seen fit to give us clues; he begins only from things that are naturally experienced by everyone. His advantage is that he need not put his faith in anyone to know his conclusions, since they rely upon no one's experience but his own. Once more, then, we have a reason that scientific knowledge of nature cannot replace a philosophical knowledge of it: a knowledge that relies on trusting someone else cannot replace a knowledge that does not.

Science requires experts. Scientists have expertise in one narrow (powerful but superficial) way of understanding the world. It's a shame when they use their expertise to demand that everyone bow to their authority about everything else.

Augros concludes his article with a worthy hope that the example of the Science article's attitude amply justifies:

We are right to laugh at the legendary philosophers with a predilection for the abstract who, out of their loyalty to obsolete theories, refused to look at the world through a telescope [i.e., Galileo's]. One hopes the day might arrive when we will find equally amusing the scientific type who refuses to remember what the world looks like without one.

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Notes

1. Presumably A is intended as the correct choice because it reflects inertial motion (an abstraction from real motion: nothing really moved in a straight line, because nothing is removed from the influence of all forces). Perhaps the original article specifies the tubes' orientation in a vertical or horizontal plane (were the tubes oriented vertically in a gravitational field and presented upside-down, the curved path represented by B would clearly be correct.) But I would be surprised if it specified scale or anything else about them. What would be the answer if scale were Planck scale? What would be the answer were the tubes wrapped around the Earth's equator?

2. Were the authors purposeful in writing this article? Or are they unwitting dualists?

3. The subtext is that we scientists can stifle adult resistance to science by better indoctrinating children. Perhaps "resistance" as in "resistance is futile."

4. I debunk the idea that ancients and medievals believed in a flat earth here.

5. In fact, it's pretty clear that the authors of this paper take their knowledge of Aristotle, purpose, and the soul from "authorities." It would be welcome if they relied on authorities who actually have some expertise in these subjects.

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Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg, "Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science," Science 316:5827 (May 18, 2007), 996-997. Subscription required for access.

Michael Augros, "Reconciling Science with Natural Philosophy," The Thomist 68 (2004): 105-41; 114. Available here.

The Illiberality of Abortion

Is the left rethinking its position on abortion? The Times on Sunday featured a thought-provoking review article questioning the morality of using prenatal genetic testing to select whether to abort an unborn child.¹

The questions may only become murkier if testing extends to traits like homosexuality or intelligence.

But Kirsten Moore, president of the pro-choice Reproductive Health Technologies Project, said that when members of her staff recently discussed whether to recommend that any prenatal tests be banned, they found it impossible to draw a line — even at sex selection, which almost all found morally repugnant. “We all had our own zones of discomfort but still couldn’t quite bring ourselves to say, ‘Here’s the line, firm and clear’ because that is the core of the pro-choice philosophy,” she said. “You can never make that decision for someone else.”

The rhetoric of “choice,” however, can take on a more troubling resonance when it comes to selecting children with new reproductive technologies, disabilities rights advocates say. “It so buys into this consumer perspective on our children,” said Marsha Saxton, a senior researcher at the World Institute on Disability in Oakland, Calif., who is an abortion rights supporter.

The article concludes with an appropriate question:

“Some religious conservatives say that they trust God to give them the child that is meant to be,” wrote Ann Althouse, a law professor in Madison, Wis., who identifies herself as an abortion rights supporter on her legal blog. “But isn’t there something equivalent for social liberals? Shouldn’t they have moral standards about what reasons are acceptable for an abortion?”

It is sad that our ruling elites long ago moved our society across the line from being liberal and welcoming to being intolerant of those who don't meet certain powerful peoples' criteria. (In the case of abortion the powerful person is often a boyfriend or husband who wants to avoid the responsibility of a child.) A truly liberal society doesn't shut the weak and defenseless out in the darkness of non-being (even non-homosexuals). A truly liberal society doesn't pick and choose whom to include and whom to exclude.

The equality of dignity that we all bear and on which our social order is premised requires that we regard every person as worthy of full protection.² The idea that we can somehow recapture (or regain) moral rectitude while allowing the barbarity of arbitrary killing of humans is wishful thinking.

The Times allowing the appearance of some questioning of abortion orthodoxy is a welcome development. But it is extremely unlikely that these midnight doubts will produce any concrete change in the policies of abortion advocates. The real problem is that once we allow abortion on demand, there is no real criterion for whom to allow to be born and whom to allow to be aborted. The hard-core abortion supporters ("aborters"?) realize this, which is why they automatically reject any limitations on abortion (often including common-sense medical measures to protect mothers' lives): they see clearly that it's all or nothing.

Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus distilled the politically correct principles from some previous Times stories, and his evaluation retains its salience:

To abort a child who might have Down syndrome is a social duty, and the ability to detect the problem early is hailed as a medical advance. To abort a child because of a hair lip or because she is a girl may be distasteful to some but is a constitutionally guaranteed right. To abort a child because he or she might have a genetic disposition to homosexuality, however, is an act of intolerable discrimination. If morality finally comes down to drawing a line, it would seem that the line with respect to abortion license is homosexuality. As Orwell observed, all human beings [sic] are equal but some are more equal than others.

At least there's one case that stimulates some reflection on the left. It's a shame that all the endangered unborn can't claim to be homosexuals until they've safely passed the birth canal.

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Notes

1. Notice the reassurance at every turn that each of the people quoted support "reproductive choice" and "abortion rights"—to make clear to the readership that these people are sane and not rabid conservatives (!) or anything.

2. This Walker Percy selection explains the confluence of two conflicting worldviews behind this radical contradiction in our elites' thought. Darwinism, of course, is proof of philosophical materialism to many people's minds.

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Amy Harmon, "Genetic Testing + Abortion = ???" New York Times (May 13, 2007).

Richard J. Neuhaus, "The Public Square," First Things (April 2007), 68-69.

More on Civil Unions

One claim of proponents of civil unions is that this legal institution will provide for greater equality. Yet their practice shows that equality is not their goal. Take for example the case of two elderly sisters who petitioned for a civil union:

Joyce and Sybil Burden, age 88 and 80 respectively, have been living together in a home built on land inherited from their parents for the past thirty years. The land and house have so appreciated in value that they fear if one died first the other would have to sell in order to meet the rather stiff inheritance tax that the U.K. imposes on inherited property. Surviving legal spouses and civil partners are not subject to inheritance tax in such circumstances.

Until December 2005, the Burden sisters had no grounds for a discrimination complaint, since all unmarried cohabitants faced the same concern and the European Convention allows governments to grant special rights and exemptions to married couples. But on December 5 of last year, the U.K’s new Civil Partnership Law went into effect, allowing same-sex couples to form partnerships having the same inheritance and tax status as married couples, providing a basis for the Burden sisters to mount a discrimination claim.

Sadly, the European Court ruled against the sisters, signaling that it too is party to discrimination to promote the homosexual agenda. Advocates of civil unions desire not equality, but an ersatz marriage in order to subvert monogamy. As Stanley Kurtz describes gay-marriage advocate Andrew Sullivan's position, "Once gay marriage is legalized, says Sullivan, the monogamous ethos of traditional marriage will be transformed by the sexual 'openness' of gay unions. And that, Sullivan argued at the time, will be a good thing." (Kurtz's excellent piece draws an insightful parallel between how the infiltration of the homosexual ethos over a generation has wrecked the Roman Catholic priesthood and how gay "marriage" will wreck marriage and family.)

In the April Touchstone, Amanda Witt's "Distant Neighbors" paints a poignant portrait of her children's conversation the girl who moves in next door:

My son nodded in the direction of the house across the street, where two women were shifting around furniture and boxes in the garage. “I was going to guess your mom,” he said.

“That’s right,” the girl said despondently. “She’s a lesbian. But I am not a lesbian. No way. But listen—don’t tell your Mom until tonight, okay?”

“Why not?”

“Because then she won’t be able to go yell at my Mom until tomorrow, so we can be friends for the rest of today.”

My kids looked at each other. Here, finally, was a topic my son completely understood.

“Um, listen,” he said to the new girl. “I don’t know much about lesbians, but I know my mother. She is not going to go yell at your mother.”

“But she won’t let us be friends.”

“Why not? The girl who used to live in your house—her parents were divorced, and divorce isn’t a good thing, either, but we were friends with her anyway. And my mother was friends with her mother.”

“It isn’t the same thing. Everybody gets divorced—I mean, like duh, my parents are divorced. It’s not a big deal. But nobody likes lesbians.” We live, mind you, in the left-leaning, religion-shunning Pacific Northwest.

Then the girl began to cry. “Goodbye,” she said. “Nice knowing you. Have a good life.” My children came home, bewildered and upset.

It probably does need to be said that Mrs. Witt allowed her children to play with the new girl:

“Of course you can be friends,” I said. “But you’ll have to agree to disagree about this. Tell her you can be friends, but she cannot keep trying to persuade you that her mother’s behavior is acceptable.” They nodded.

Hopefully the Witt family provides some light to this poor child. But her prospects are unpromising.

So some of [her son's] innocence has been preserved, though a good bit of it has gone for good. I grieve for that. And I grieve for the girl who brought this unwelcome knowledge into his life, for “what chance,” as a Christian friend of mine said, “does she have?” She’s not bright, nor is she pretty; she’s from a broken home, is living with lesbians, is discontented, and “specializing,” as she herself puts it, “in being bored.” She has a lot of strikes against her and, making matters worse, is willing to embrace the role of victim.

It is all too apparent that what this girl needs above all is a father to tell her that she is lovable. Two moms don't make up for an absentee dad.

Apart from the readily apparent damage to the institution of marriage, the invisible victims of same-sex civil unions are the children. As with the Stockholm syndrome, many of these children will seek to justify their the behavior of their "parents", but many more will see the violence done to them in the name of satisfying adult preferences. The hurt won't be apparent for decades.

And then all will see how today's adults abandoned them.

Francis Schaeffer's Misplaced Antagonism

A good friend of mine, an Evangelical, lent me his VHS tapes of Francis A. Schaeffer's How Should We Then Live?.

I got a lot out of the tapes. Dr. Schaeffer's diagnosis of modern society's illness is largely correct: humanism's denial of the God-given order of the universe has indeed led to despair in the power of reason as a guide to truth and happiness. Modern man has no recourse but "flight to non-reason."

After watching all ten episodes twice, some aspects of Dr. Schaeffer's outlook still don't seem to quite fit together. The tragedy is that he fails to recognize St. Thomas Aquinas as a partner in demonstrating the reasonableness of the Christian Faith.

Dr. Schaeffer's mistake is to attribute the unraveling of the "Christian consensus" to Aquinas's philosophy and theology. He charges that Aquinas "opened the flood gates" to humanism. To a limited extent, Schaeffer is correct: Aquinas helped paved the way for intellectual inquiry and for the modern academy, which have in a very general sense led to modern humanism—that's not saying much, though: in the same general sense the invention of movable type paved the way for pornographic novels.

In particular Schaeffer charges that Aquinas taught that while the Fall damaged the human will, the intellect escaped unscathed. It's difficult to know why Schaeffer would believe this, let alone teach it: Aquinas is the standard reference for Catholic theology, and Catholic Christians have always believed the Fall's damage to the intellect. Every Catholic schoolkid knows (or used to know before the post-Conciliar crisis of catechesis) the Catechism answer of the effects of Original Sin:

Our nature was corrupted by the sin of our first parents, which darkened our understanding, weakened our will, and left in us a strong inclination to evil. (Baltimore Catechism, no. 2, q. 46)

Aquinas himself quite clearly teaches in the Summa that the intellect also suffered damage:

Accordingly these are the four wounds inflicted on the whole of human nature as a result of our first parent's sin. But since the inclination to the good of virtue is diminished in each individual on account of actual sin, as was explained above (1, 2), these four wounds are also the result of other sins, in so far as, through sin, the reason is obscured, especially in practical matters, the will hardened to evil, good actions become more difficult and concupiscence more impetuous. (ST I-II 85.1.3)

Even more peculiar is Schaeffer's insistence that Aristotle and Aquinas's focus on particular things at the expense of universals robbed the cosmos of meaning, and hindered man's ability to discover "how we should then live." When one considers that it is the disciples of Aristotle, including Aquinas and his disciples, who have been the strongest champions of natural law, Schaeffer's position appears untenable. Contrary to Schaeffer's claim, the ability of the intellect to formulate universals from sensible particulars is the cornerstone of Aristotelian philosophy.

Schaeffer is confusing Aquinas with the late Scholastics. In reality, it was these late Scholastics or nominalists who shattered the world into particulars.¹ Nominalism says that the group of things I call "cats," for example, are simply a class of things the mind groups together, but that these things possess no common essence: in other words that since the intellect cannot access essences, names are simply conventions: labels lacking any real connection to essences. William Ockham in particular was notorious for exalting the power of the human will over the intellect. Ockham's voluntarism destroys any possibility of the intellect discovering the common essences of sensible things.

Schaeffer protests Aquinas's commandeering of Aristotle's pagan philosophy and his protest is not without merit: for a Christian, non-Christian reasoning is suspect, and at very least requires some purification. Aristotle's distinction is that he begins from universally accessible sensible reality and his reasoning from these dependable premises is quite sound (as a close examination proves). That Aquinas was able to defend Christian truth with Aristotle shows his general compatibility with Christian thought. Not that it is Schaeffer's position, but to deny absolutely the possibility of using non-Christian philosophy for Christian ends would be a radical disbelief in reason indeed—a decided "flight to non-reason."

Some Christians prefer to base their reasoning exclusively on revelation. This is a fine tact among believers (i.e., doing theology). The problem is that such arguments have no traction with non-believers, of which there are many in our pluralistic society. To be persuasive, public reasoning has to be based on public facts available to everyone, whereas every Christian acknowledges that faith is a gift (not given to everyone). To a non-believer, the explanation "because it's in the Bible" sounds little better than "because I said so" (the humanist position). Meanwhile, the facts of nature, such as the structure of the human person and the human family, are universally accessible, as well as agreeable to Biblical morality. This is why the people of the world could agree on the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights—a very sane document, despite the typical insanity of the body to which it is connected. The greatest ally of secular humanism is the tendency to forget our common human nature, not to mention the tendency of many right-thinking people to neutralize the power of their own arguments by insisting that all reasoning begin from revelation.

So, it's a shame that Francis Schaeffer insisted on disagreeing with Thomas Aquinas, who should be his natural ally. When allies refuse to work together their cause is necessarily weakened.

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Notes

1. The major complication of modern thought is that the philosophy of many of the progenitors of modern science (like Buridan and Oresme) suffered from nominalism.

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John Paul II, Faith and Reason (Encyclical Letter, September 15, 1998). "Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves."

Louis Bouyer, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism trans. A.V. Littledale (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1957). Among its many virtues, this book contains a penetrating analysis of the surprising relationship between late Scholasticism and the thought of the Protestant Reformers.