Human Persons and Equal Rights

By JP Moreland
Scriptorium Daily

It is a cherished belief of most people that human beings simply as such have equal value and rights and that they have significantly greater value than animals. However, this claim is difficult if not impossible to justify given a naturalist worldview. For many naturalists, the best, perhaps only, way to justify the belief that all humans have equal and unique value simply as such is in light of the metaphysical grounding of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the image of God. Such a view depicts humans as substances (a particular thing like a dog that is a simple, indivisible unity of parts and attributes at a time, that remains the same through change, and that has a nature (being a human, being a carbon atom, being a dog) that provides an answer to the question “What kind of thing is this particular object?”) with a human nature, and for at least two reasons, naturalists claim that this framework must be abandoned.

For one thing, the progress of science has regularly shifted entities (e.g., heat) from the category of substance (heat was once viewed as the substance caloric that flowed into or out of objects) to the category of quality (heat is an attribute of warmth, not a thing like caloric), or quantity (heat is not the attribute of being warm, it is the mathematical quantity of mean kinetic energy). Since natures are the essences of substances, if there really are no substances (and, instead, there are just collections or aggregates of atoms and molecules), then we should reject the existence of natures. Thus, there most likely is no such thing as a human nature, and talk of such should be understood solely within the categories of biology, chemistry, and physics and with a view of humans as mere ordered aggregates of parts.

Second, Darwin’s theory of evolution has made belief in human nature, though logically possible, nevertheless, quite implausible. As E. Mayr has said:

The concepts of unchanging essences and of complete discontinuities between every eidos (type) and all others make genuine evolutionary thinking impossible. I agree with those who claim that the essentialist philosophies of Aristotle and Plato are incompatible with evolutionary thinking.

This belief has, in turn, lead thinkers like David Hull to make the following observation:

The implications of moving species from the metaphysical category that can appropriately be characterized in terms of “natures” to a category for which such characterizations are inappropriate are extensive and fundamental. If species evolve in anything like the way that Darwin thought they did, then they cannot possibly have the sort of natures that traditional philosophers claimed they did. If species in general lack natures, then so does Homo sapiens as a biological species. If Homo sapiens lacks a nature, then no reference to biology can be made to support one’s claims about “human nature.” Perhaps all people are persons,” share the same “personhood,” etc., but such claims must be explicated and defended with no reference to biology. Because so many moral, ethical, and political theories depend on some notion or other of human nature, Darwin’s theory brought into question all these theories. The implications are not entailments. One can always dissociate “Homo sapiens” from “human being,” but the result is a much less plausible position.

Finally, this observation has lead a number of thinkers to claim that the traditional sanctity-of-life view of human beings is guilty of speciesism (a racist, unjustified bias towards one’s own biological classification) and to settle on personhood, and not simply on being human, as constituting our locus of value. Thus, value resides in personhood, not humanness. What is a person? A person is anything that satisfies the right list of criteria, e.g., has a self concept, can form meaningful relations with God or others, can use language, can formulate goals and plans, etc.

There are two key implications of this view: 1) There can be human non-persons (e.g., defective newborns, people in comas) and personal non-humans (e.g., orangutans) and the latter have more value than the former. 2) Since the features that constitute personhood can be possessed to a greater or lesser degree, then some individuals can be more of a person and, thus, have more rights and value than other individuals. In my view, 1) is false. Being a person is to being a human as being a color is to being red. There can be non-human persons (angels) but there can be no human non-persons just as there can be colored non-red things (blue things) but no red non-colored things. Proposition 2) is one that naturalists have worked hard, and in my view, unsuccessfully, to avoid. In any case, it should be clear that the high intrinsic and equal value of all human beings is easy to justify given Christian theism, but they are hard to square with naturalism.

One day my daughter, Ashley, came home from sixth grade with a Martin Luther King, Jr. flier that said “All human beings should have equal rights and be treated as having equal value.” I asked her if she believed this statement, and when she answered in the affirmative, I asked her why. Thinking she could get rid of me by giving an answer I wanted, she said it was because of God.

I responded by inviting her to pretend that there was no God. I pointed to a beautiful painting on the wall over our sofa and to a piece of trash on the coffee table I forgot to throw away the night before. I then asked that if the house were burning down and she could save only one of these objects, would she be obligated to save one, or would the two objects be on a par so she could decide which to save by flipping a coin. She responded that the painting should be saved because it was of more value than the trash. I asked the same question about the piece of trash and our dog, KC. Irritated, she affirmed that the dog should be saved, not the trash, because KC is precious.

I then pointed out that we had learned a lesson: Equals ought to be treated equally, and unequals ought to be treated unequally. It would be wrong to flip a coin to decide between the trash and our dog, because that would be to treat two unequal things as though they were of equal value. I then noted that human beings have nothing in common that is equal: some are beautiful, some ugly, some smart, some not, some athletic, some not, some socially useful, some not, and so on. Ashley responded by pointing out that there was, in fact, something we all have in common: belly buttons.

I then noted that some have large and some have small belly buttons. “Should the people with large ones be given greater rights?” I asked. Moreover, if it were in virtue of having a belly button that we had value, if we removed someone’s belly button, could we now use that person as a door stop (since he/she had lost his/her source of value)?

I concluded that if equal rights and value were to be justified, two things were required: (1) We had to have something in common that was equal. (2) Whatever that “something” was, it had to be deep, weighty and important, not silly and trivial like a belly button. If we are made in the image of God as Dr. King argued, then equal rights/value is easy to justify. If not, it may well be impossible to justify. That’s something to ponder, isn’t it?

On Human Things in Education

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

It is easy to forget that science is not the only way, or even the most important way, to learn. Shakespeare can teach us as much as any physics text and on subjects of greater importance.

Knowing what a thing is made of, after all, does not tell us what it is.

Scientists, even those who are Christian can fall into the dangerous trap of worshiping science. If such men can account for the visible world, then they rest content. Monstrous evils done in scientific experimentation, such as human cloning, are justified simply because they are scientific.

Literature, the fine arts, theater, and music teach humans what it is to be good, true, and beautiful. They point to meaning. What does it profit a man to learn all mysteries of matter and energy if he does not have love? Science can only simulate or stimulate the feelings of love, but they cannot create one real passion.

Without the humanities, a queen is just a woman, a husband is just a man, and romance just procreation. Meaning is created by persons, gods and men, and cannot arise like a swamp gas from mindless matter.

Philosophy has always been tempted by two extremes: idealism and materialism. Some thinkers wish to make everything an ideal. Matter is but a dream.

So fundamental is the sense of personhood and meaning, that it is easier to believe that matter and energy are the product of mind than that mind is the product of matter.

Study of the classics, required of all the first scientists in places like Victorian England, is a waste of time. They assume the philosophy of the Bible is somehow self-authenticating. Some even go as far as to believe that only scientific authentication is important. Fortunately, parallel to the Intelligent Design movement has been resurgence in the practice of classical philosophy and apologetics led by scholars such as J.P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and Craig Hazen.

Because the crisis with science has been so pronounced, few apologists and philosophers have failed to account for the relationship of Christianity with the visible world. Sadly, the education of those working in science has not kept pace in the area of humanities. The philosophers of early Greece and Rome used to be the common intellectual property of all college graduates. This is no longer the case, but scientists do not know what they are missing. Shakespeare may be unknown to a scientist, but he feels no sense of shame. However, he would rightly feel distressed by a “well educated” person who had no idea of the history or methods of science.

Nor is it simply that the classical philosophical and literary education will make one a “better person” in some way distinct from the work of science. Better philosophers are better scientists. How many brilliant scientific ideas have been cut short by the ugly and unreflective scientism picked up in graduate school by scientists? One shudders to think. Of course, it is also not a small thing that philosophy and the humanities can make a better citizen. In a republic like the United States, it is not a good thing when influential voters are almost entirely ignorant of soul work.

Christianity is congenial to both the sciences and the humanities without making a god of one or the other. Christianity unites the two parts of the University. It cares about and makes claims about the visible world. Christians are not religious neo-Platonists. This is a philosophy the best of the Fathers rejected, after serious consideration, as sub-Christian. On the other hand, Christians are not mystical Epicureans. The Fathers believe in an invisible world even more important than the visible. Traditional Christianity must unite the sciences and the humanities.

Can science sustain itself without traditional Christianity? In individual cases, it certainly can, but culturally it is unlikely. If a new dark age comes, it will be because barbarians no longer can practice the virtues or understand the humanities that make scientific men and the culture that sustains them possible.

Christopher Hitchens, or any of the new atheists who attack Christianity with more heat than light, is not the main opponent of Christian civilization. Instead, it is the loss of the imagination and hope for something better that infected the church long before Hitchens was born. If we were doing our job, then Hitchens would have no force.

The combination of science and the humanities in the ancient Christian university came from the love of God. If a man loved God, then he had to love the men and the cosmos God made.

Poets like Dante presented the best science of their day in the greatest poetry written up to that point. The failure of Christendom was to maintain that balance. The result was horrific.

On the Middle Ages: Building For Future Greatness

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

When religion, especially Christianity, was dominant didn’t we live in a Dark Age?

Americans are not very good at history. We are a young country where Disneyland’s fiftieth anniversary was marked as an historical event. Safe to say, many of my students’ main ideas about the Middle Ages are like those in Monty Python’s classic movie, Search for the Holy Grail.

What is the secular myth of the Medieval?

As Christianity spread, culture and civilization declined from the secular glories of Greece and Rome to a dark age dominated by priestcraft and superstition. This is the story that secularists tell themselves, but it is false.

Christians did not gain control in Rome until the libertine and spendthrift leadership class had bankrupted the Western Empire morally and financially. In the East, where financially and culturally, the Empire was strongest and where the Christian emperors were most often found, the Empire gained one thousand years of civilization and glory by adopting Christianity. In the West, non-Christian barbarians and semi-Christian heretics destroyed the Empire, which was a shell of its former glory in any case.

Popes, bishops, and missionaries began the hard work of restoring civilization in the West. Monasteries saved what they could and founded the colleges and universities that provided the intellectual space for the birth of the modern world.

This was hard work with many defeats and false starts. Human sin destroyed many promising starts, but the Middle Ages were a time of recovery and development that by the end of the thousand years had surpassed the Romans. Dante, Aquinas, and the universities of Italy, France, and England were ready for even greater things.

Despite constant pressure from Islam, the Eastern Christian Roman Empire (commonly called the Byzantine) maintained a strong educational system and rich cultural heritage. From the great cathedral of the Church of the Holy Wisdom to the marvelous art of the iconographers, it enriched human civilization. Byzantium preserved Hellenistic learning, including the best of paganism, from the ravages of the barbarians. Even at the very end of the Byzantine Empire, when it was tiny and under siege by Moslems, it was educating the Western world and doing interesting intellectual work.

When Constantinople, the great city of Byzantium, fell, the scholars of Byzantium fled with their texts to Christian Italy. There the combination of Eastern and Western Christian learning helped produce the “Renaissance.”

These centuries were not Utopia, especially from a Christian perspective. They were the early stages in the development of Christian civilization. The people living in them did the hard work that developed the basic ideas that allowed for modern science, from physics to physicians to exist, but this was hard labor. They made mistakes along the way. Some of those mistakes had some justification, like the Crusades, and others produced some good, like the Inquisition which helped shape international law, but they were still errors.

The sadistic inquisitor and the greedy and brutal crusader were real. They were great hypocrites, doing evil in the name of the religion of love. Pointing out these moral lepers is perhaps the most effective attack secularists make, but it also demonstrates the success of Christianity in producing civilization.

Hypocrisy is a disease of morality and of success. The only movement that does not attract hypocrites is a failure. Hypocrites are drawn to the great things, because they use them for their own ends. Christians themselves, from the time of the New Testament to the writings of Chaucer, exposed such hypocrites when they could. Perversely the very success of moral men tempts the immoral to try to gain the benefits of virtue without the work. (more)

On California and Marriage

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

The problem with ideologues in politics is their attempt to make a science of something that is an art. Unlike Aristotle and Burke, ideologues forget that politics is inexact and that wisdom has been hard won over centuries of experience and thought. There is, really, no science of politics. Of course, the same difficulties apply to ethics.

Ideologues wish that politics and ethics could be made “scientific” or that bright and perfect lines could be drawn between the moral order and politics, but in doing so they are in error. They mistake an art that is very human (politics) for a science. People are not so simple or tractable as matter or energy . . . and then even these are complex enough! Religious extremists simplify too much by merging church and state. Secular radicals pretend there is a self-evident morality that can be drawn from “reason” alone.

Such secular ideologues have recently attacked the traditional minimal interplay between the moral order and politics called concerning marriage. The considered wisdom of our ancestors is that marriage is vital to producing a civilized life and happy future generations. Like racists who invented new “scientific” categories (such as “race”) in order to justify their desires, so contemporary people also have their blind spots and temptations to deviate from this hard won cultural wisdom.

The chief problem with gay “marriage” is providing state sanction for vice. It is not so much libertarian as libertine. While most Americans see wisdom in allowing some vice to simply be legal, the law need not actively support it either.

Procreation may take place in private, but when it leads to children it is a public act, since the culture depends on it for its very future. Raising children is hard and so the state has wisely given special privileges and benefits to a social structure that will produce and raise the vast majority of the future population.

What is the norm is not always comfortable for individuals. The world is imperfect and many of us cannot live up to what is ideal. But when what is the moral norm is not comfortable for an individual, this becomes a pastoral problem and not a matter for law. People who wish the government out of bedrooms should keep it out by not demanding state sanction for relationships in which the state will usually have no interest.

“Is” does not, of course, equal “ought.” Most of us find it difficult to do what we wish or what society needs of us. It is the case that a desire for vice exists. That does not justify acting on it for any of us.

While ecclesiastical organizations must be separated from the state, morality cannot be. Somebody’s moral vision will prevail in the public square. As a result, public benefits should be handed out with great care. Forcing millions of Americans to provide government approval for actions most of the human race believes to be wrong is imprudent. Hi-jacking a social institution created by one group of people to benefit another is unwise.

Citizens should and must use their religious wisdom to make decisions about what is good and what the state should approve. Of course, this particular religious reasoning should be communicated and defended to others who do not share their opinions with common language and reasoning where possible. It is naïve or irrational ideology to hope that perfect agreement will be found or that all one’s opponents are bigots or fools. Traditionalists know they may be mistaken, so the wise amongst them have retreated from any state sanction for this vice, but the gay “marriage” ideologues cannot be satisfied with tolerance.

They demand full state approval.

Make no mistake. If gay “marriage” receives state sanction, the experience of Western Europe and Canada suggests that intolerance of any dissenting opinions as to its morality will follow.

Proponents of gay “marriage” cannot pretend they are not imposing their morality on the rest of us. Somebody’s morality will prevail. Advocates of this radical change, like all ideologues, claim with prophetic certainty that good will come of it. Such experimentation in economics and government did not work out well in the twentieth century even when it came wrapped in “youth,” the “future,” and promises of happiness.

Facile comparisons of race to sexuality do not advance the argument. Race was unknown to ancients and is not universal in the way sexuality is. As all ideologues do, racists invented weird categories and justified their desires with twisted religion and science. Race based slavery was not part of the received wisdom of the Eastern or Western worlds. America was morally wicked for embracing it for so long.

Most of the world fears that experiments with human life and procreation in the Western world are just such ideological experimentation. Our ancestors gave us great cultural treasures and this has made us the envy of much of the world, but such power does not justify doing whatever we can do.

Some cultural changes are good, but that does not mean all such changes are good. Sometimes cultural change is decay and decadence. The state has an obligation to support marriage, because future generations are vital to survival. It does not have the obligation to give everyone what they want.

A few decadent states in the world are busy pretending redefining words can redefine moral realities. They have yet to show that they can sustain themselves in the future, let alone defend their short term social experimentation. Pope Benedict has spoken with moral clarity on this issue from his global vantage point.

Most Americans hate to disappoint anyone. They may not approve of some behavior, but pity makes them loath to judge it publicly. All of us have our own failings and want to deal with those before throwing any stones. To vote against gay “marriage” in California, they need not throw stones. They must merely decide that there is no good reason to approve this private behavior publicly.

Love Never Fails

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Love does not change and in humans love is, as it always has been, birthed in need . . . a deep poverty in humanity that draws us toward a fount of deeper desire. This deeper desire springs from perfect fulfillment and a desire to see that perfection made universal.

Humans desire God, because we need His goodness. God desires us, not out of any need, but because He longs to see us whole.

We must acknowledge our poverty, but not cling to it.

Some foolishly view the deep longing as the highest possible pleasure. There is pleasure in it, as there is in hunger before a good meal, but it is foolish to reject the food in order to prolong the need. Some moderns want Lent but no Easter.

Do not make a fetish of your particular desires . . . since often our felt needs are not our real needs.

We must also not be satisfied with any initial encounter with the Infinite Love of God. Humans want to build altars where God was . . . and so often miss where God would take us. When our initial encounter with God grows stale, we act as if the problem is with religion or with God, but the problem is with our lack of true passion for the Divine.

Any given “religious experience” is not the answer . . . because the answer is a Person who refuses to be placed in a box or tamed. Like Aslan, He bounds into our lives and upsets our assumptions at every turn.

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God is a person and not merely an experience. He is not merely an object for our manipulation, religious or otherwise. The good news of God’s total sovereignty is that He sets boundaries and acts for our good. He will not be manipulated, used, or ignored.

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God is the End of our heart’s true longings. We are persons and no ideology that does not account for the whole person can be good for us.

Christianity is the great revelation of God to humankind of Himself.

Against this great truth, this noble myth, is arrayed all the lies of the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Materialism says that we are things and that things can meet our needs. This failure of love ends in ugliness.

Secularism says there is nothing in heaven and earth that is not dreamed of in Richard Dawkins’ philosophy. This failure of imagination cannot sustain a culture.

Hedonism denies the need for pain in this life and destroys the possibility of immortal pleasures. It ends with all joys spoilt and all pleasures stale.

Intellectualism argues that the head can make demands without accounting for the heart. It dies like all Gradgrind ideas in cruelty.

Anti-intellectualism pretends that we can follow our heart without accounting for the demands of reason. Our irrational passion too often destroys the very things we love.

These ideologies come between us and God and so are idols. God hates idols not because of some bizarre insecurity on His part, but because we are corrupting some good thing He made by misusing them, missing our real needs, and failing to give appropriate honor to Him.

Instead of these ideologies, we must confront God as seen in the person of Jesus Christ, most perfectly revealed in the pages of inerrant Sacred Scripture. The sign post of Scriptures, miracles, and the witness of Church history can point to Christ, but they too are not Christ.

We must find Him in these good things . . . or these good, holy, and great things will also become idols. We love the physical world, because God made it. We even see it as holy, because God became flesh.

The sacred things are sacred, however, because He exists. We must honor family, country, and church, but we can worship God alone. Love is always urging excess. This is wise, because there is a person for whom extravagance is appropriate.

God alone is where love can never become excessive, but only defective.

We love others out of the superabundance of our love for God. His image in them calls forth love . . . even in our enemies.

When we are children, we cannot understand any of this, though we often feel the truth of it better than we can express. Appropriately, we are in a position of receiving love and rarely of giving it. We need so much and we have so little.

This never changes relative to God. We are children to Him.

But as we mature in Faith, our love for Him should grow to the point where it overflows around us. We serve as slaves to those around us voluntarily . . . because there is so much love within us that we must discharge it or perish.

Childish love wants to own or possess the thing it sees. It makes the mistake of the American tourist who sees the David and wishes to take it home. The absurdity of this Florentine masterpiece bursting through the roof of his thirteen hundred foot tract home never occurs to the childish. Unlike the true lover he can even be satisfied with a cheap copy . . . “better” because he can own it.

The childish think that all beauty exists so they can buy it.

Having found Love- when we keep in relationship with Him- we can only act with virtue in imitation of what we love. (more)

Doubt Your Perception of Suffering

By Jon Bloom
desiringGod Blog

There he sat, the scum of society, a sorry piece of work begging the condescending mercy of pious passersby going in and out of the temple. Enough mercy and he could eat.

The blind man in John 9 didn’t have many vocational options. He had been born blind. And it was his own fault. As a fetus this man sinned in the womb against the Almighty. Either that or his parents had sinned and cursed him. Whichever, he was suffering his just punishment. Those who had been righteous fetuses walked by and sometimes dropped a coin in his hand.

You see, in the law and prophets God had not explained exactly why one person suffers more than another. So theologians surmised that a person’s suffering must result from a specific offense against God. Oddly, this was what Job’s three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, had surmised about Job’s suffering. God’s word to them was, “you have not spoken of me what is right” (Job 42:8). Jesus was about to deliver a similar rebuke.

As Jesus and his disciples passed by this man, the disciples naturally wanted to know who was to blame, the man or his parents. That’s when Jesus threw another wrench into their theological system. He said, “It was not that this man sinned or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (v. 3).

Can you hear the disciples catch their breath? Have you caught yours? Jesus said that God was to blame. The man was blind because God had a purpose in it that hadn’t entered anyone’s mind.

All those years the man and his parents labored under a perception of God’s judgment for an unknown reason. And they had born others’ disdain. Imagine what the man’s childhood must have been like. Imagine the insults, the indignities, the injuries, the poverty, the loneliness, and isolation from other children. No hope for marriage. No hope for education.

Why? Because God had something glorious to say through it. It’s just that up until this day no one saw it coming, least of all the blind man.

Jesus then spat on the ground, made mud with his saliva, put the mud on the man’s eyes, and said, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.” So he went and washed and came back seeing!

In that moment everything changed. The man went from life-long blindness to seeing. But even more revolutionary in its repercussions, he went from being perceived as the object of God’s wrath to being the object of God’s mercy!

This is mind-blowing. God’s purposes in his blindness turned out to be exactly opposite of everyone’s perceptions. All along people believed the man was “born in utter sin” (v. 36). But in fact he was born blind in order that God might show mercy to him and pronounce judgment on the self-righteous religious people. “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind” (v. 39).

Caution: we must be very careful in assessing God’s purposes in suffering—our own or someone else’s. Often we cannot see any redeeming reason for it. The same would have been true of the blind man until the day Jesus passed by. Even here we might be tempted to say, “Well, yes, but how often does that happen?” I know. I have a sister who is severely developmentally disabled. I know very little of God’s purposes in it. He often does not make his purposes public knowledge.

This story reminds us that our perceptions and God’s purposes can be very different, even opposite. If we are going to be skeptical, it’s best to be skeptical of our perceptions.

Conservatism Stands for...

A prejudice for tradition, the protection of private property, skepticism of schemes and ideologies, respect for the rule of law and contempt for the rule of caprice, deference to the authority of God.