Christianity

D’Souza on "An Absentee God?"

Calvin Freiburger atheism, Christianity, d'souza, debate, God, Hitchens, religion
During this debate, Christopher Hitchens actually raised an intriguing challenge to God’s existence (good points from atheists are so hard to find these days). Now, Dinesh D’Souza has an answer:
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What happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay in Vegas. On Friday July 11 the libertarian conference FreedomFest will have, as its featured event, a debate on “Christianity, Islam and the War on Terror” between Christopher Hitchens and me. The media will be there, and the organizers also expect to have the debate up on the web. (Just in case Richard Dawkins is listening, I’ll have to remember not to use Hitler-style shrieks and yells.)
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In thinking about this debate, I’m reminded of an argument that Hitchens made in our New York debate last October. At that time I did not know how to answer his point. So I employed an old debating strategy: I ignored it and answered other issues. But Hitchens’ argument bothered me.
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Here’s what Hitchens said. Homo sapiens has been on the planet for a long time, let’s say 100,000 years. Apparently for 95,000 years God sat idly by, watching and perhaps enjoying man’s horrible condition. After all, cave-man’s plight was a miserable one: infant mortality, brutal massacres, horrible toothaches, and an early death. Evidently God didn’t really care.
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Then, a few thousand years ago, God said, “It’s time to get involved.” Even so God did not intervene in one of the civilized parts of the world. He didn’t bother with China or India or Persia or Egypt. Rather, he decided to get his message to a group of nomadic people in the middle of nowhere. It took another thousand years or more for this message to get to places like India and China.
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Here is the thrust of Hitchens’ point: God seems to have been napping for 98 percent of human history, finally getting his act together only for the most recent 2 percent? What kind of a bizarre God acts like this?
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I’m going to answer this argument in two ways. First, in this blog I’m going to show that Hitchens has his math precisely inverted. Second, in a future blog I’ll reveal how Hitchens’ argument backfires completely on atheism. For today’s argument I’m indebted to Erik Kreps of the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research.
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An adept numbers guy, Kreps noters that it is not the number of years but the levels of human population that are the issue here. The Population Reference Bureau estimates that the number of people who have ever been born is approximately 105 billion. Of this number, about 2 percent were born before Christ came to earth.
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“So in a sense,” Kreps notes, “God’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect. If He’d come earlier in human history, how reliable would the records of his relationship with man be? But He showed up just before the exponential explosion in the world’s population, so even though 98 percent of humanity’s timeline had passed, only 2 percent of humanity had previously been born, so 98 percent of us have walked the earth since the Redemption.”
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I have to agree with Kreps’s conclusion: “Sorry Hitchens. And Hallelujah.”
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Part 2 of his response:
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Here I want to show how Hitchens’ argument completely backfires on atheism. Let’s apply an entirely secular analysis and go with Hitchens’ premise that there is no God and man is an evolved primate. Well, biology tells us that man’s basic frame and brain size haven’t substantially changed throughout his terrestrial existence.
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So here is the problem. Homo sapiens has been on the planet for 100,000 years, but apparently for more than 95,000 of those years he accomplished virtually nothing. No real art, no writing, no inventions, no culture, no civilization. How is this possible? Were our ancestors, otherwise physically and mentally undistinguishable from us, such blithering idiots that they couldn’t figure out anything other than the arts of primitive warfare?
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Then, a few thousand years ago, everything changes. Suddenly savage man gives way to historical man. Suddenly the naked ape gets his act together. We see civilizations sprouting in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and elsewhere. Suddenly there are wheels and agriculture and art and culture. Soon we have dramatic plays and philosophy and an explosion of inventions and novel forms of government and social organization.
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So how did Homo sapiens, heretofore such a slacker, suddenly get so smart? Scholars have made strenuous efforts to account for this but no one has offered a persuasive account. If we compare man’s trajectory on earth to an airplane, we see a long, long stretch of the airplane faltering on the ground, and then suddenly, a few thousand years ago, takeoff!
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Well, there is one obvious way to account for this historical miracle. It seems as if some transcendent being or force reached down and breathed some kind of a spirit or soul into man, because after accomplishing virtually nothing for 98 percent of our existence, we have in the past 2 percent of human history produced everything from the pyramids to Proust, from Socrates to computer software.
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So paradoxically Hitchens’ argument becomes a boomerang. Hitchens has raised a problem that atheism cannot easily explain and one that seems better accounted for by the Book of Genesis.
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UPDATE: A reader posed a few challenges to D’Souza’s argument (if he wants to know why I’m not publishing his comments, he’s free to ask here). I want to address them, though, since they strike me as common areas of misunderstanding.
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Humanity’s “takeoff” provides no evidence that God was involved. It could have been coincidence, or the invention of something like the written alphabet or mathematics or several such developments at once.
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But this is precisely the issue: mankind had a whopping 95,000 years in which none of it happened. Then “several such developments at once”? Granted, it’s not material evidence, and it’s not proof, but you’ve gotta admit, it’s certainly intriguing circumstantial evidence.
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It also provides no evidence that it was Christ or Christianity specifically that is the answer. Advancements took place before Christ…maybe the Greek Gods get credit for Ancient Greece?
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This complaint gets the two arguments mixed up. D’Souza does not tie human advancement to the coming of Christ at all, but to the endowment of man with a soul. The only point Christ pertains to is the percentage of the human race that lived before Him as opposed to after.
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It’s also interesting that technology has advanced exponentially in recent history, despite no known input from Allah or God or Zeus.
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That’s because the input we’re talking about—the soul transforming an animal called human into a man, giving him a true mind rather than a brain—already happened. According to D’Souza’s theory, human reason and creativity flow from this singular change.

Atheists Crying Wolf, Part 2

Calvin Freiburger Alonzo Fyfe, America, atheism, bigotry, Christianity, Founding Fathers, history, religion
This is the second post in a series addressing common complaints of so-called “anti-atheist bigotry,” as characterized by atheist blogger Alonzo Fyfe:
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(2 & 3) Next we have two familiar bones of liberal contention: “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” on our currency. Fyfe argues that these are unjust and demeaning to atheists by implying they cannot be good Americans.
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In Part 1, I explained how God was vital to America’s founding principles. The nation also has a long tradition of turning to God in times of crisis and recognizing His hand in the course of history, such as Abraham Lincoln’s speculation that the terrible devastation of the Civil War was divine punishment for slavery, and his declaration that the United States’ “new birth of freedom” would come “under God.” Even the scientifically-minded Benjamin Franklin argued:
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I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings that “except the Lord build they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel: We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall be become a reproach and a bye word down to future age. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing Governments by Human Wisdom, and leave it to chance, war, and conquest.
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This is the true motivation behind “Under God” and “In God We Trust”: first, to remind the people of America’s philosophical roots to preserve the sacred status of individual liberty; and second, to honor this tradition and keep it alive in the hopes that God will continue to steer us through troubled waters and bestow His blessings upon the land.
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To infer from these phrases a malicious intent to ostracize atheist citizens and impugn their love of country is fantasy, and smacks of paranoia. (This is not to say nobody wishes to denigrate atheists, or tries to do so via these phrases. But to take individual examples of intolerance and extrapolate from them conclusions about all, or even most, people who support them is a classic logical fallacy that indicates either weak thinking or rank demagoguery.)
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Admittedly, this conclusion begs two questions: (1) What about the offense some atheists take at the implications, even if they are unintentional? (2) Just because something is tradition doesn’t make it right, so why does tradition matter in this case?
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(1) Does the Pledge of Allegiance impugn the patriotism of atheists? Does it imply that “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” is an all-or-nothing deal, that rejecting God means rejecting the rest? No—it is a matter of historical record that America is “one nation under God.” Granted, nobody should expect atheists to say the country is literally under “God” in the sense of an omnipotent being who created and surveys the universe. However, there is no reason an intellectually-honest atheist cannot acknowledge that our society is under “God” in the sense of a set of philosophical assumptions about the source of human rights, reflected in our founding documents and the men who wrote them and fought for them. Likewise, “In God We Trust” was true of our Framers, and has been true of the overwhelming majority of Americans who have lived throughout our history. True, atheists don’t trust in God, but frankly, it isn’t a case of the nation not valuing atheists, but of atheists not valuing a particular element of the American fabric. As long as we’re the same nation we were in 1776, atheists should resign themselves to the fact that they’ve chosen a worldview that is, in part, simply incompatible with their nation’s identity. Which leads us to…
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(2) A nation’s identity isn’t automatically a good thing; why should the mere fact that something is tradition be persuasive? Alone, it shouldn’t be (a point jovially-yet-morbidly demonstrated in a line from this song). But every society has a basic right to keep its foundations alive through ceremony and tradition, and as long as that foundation is sound (as I’ve argued the founding’s religious component is), the tradition should stand. It seems to me that, in order for one to advocate abandoning such a tradition, one must also argue that the foundational element it reflects is flawed, and should be rejected.

The Atheist Ethicist: Just Another Propagandist

Calvin Freiburger Alonzo Fyfe, atheism, blogosphere, Christianity, dishonesty, homosexuality, propaganda, religion, shellfish, stupidity
We interrupt Atheists Crying Wolf (no, I haven’t forgotten it; I promise Part II is coming!) for a special bulletin: the “Atheist Ethicist’s” credibility has hit rock-bottom.
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In this post, Alonzo Fyfe peddles a number of anti-Bible talking points, including the “abomination” of eating shellfish:
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The eating of shellfish is an abomination because – well, have you ever looked at a shellfish? They’re disgusting. My wife has a hard time with peel-and-eat shrimp. So, of course, eating those things must be considered an abomination…
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Current bigotry against homosexuals is not something that people get out of the Bible – something that people disapprove of because the Bible calls it an abomination. If people got their morality out of the Bible then they would be just as intent on protesting the eating of shrimp as they would homosexual sex.
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It doesn’t take much to find out Fyfe hasn’t a clue what he’s talking about here. Neil at Eternity Matters explains the issue very well in a detailed-yet-accessible post. You should read it all, but here’s his quick summary:
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The short version: There were different Hebrew words translated as abomination. They were used differently in the individual verses and were used very differently in broader contexts. The associated sins had radically different consequences and had 100% different treatments in the New Testament.
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Curious about how he’d spin his way out of this, I posed the question to him in the comments section (yeah, that’s me under “Anonymous”). In response, not only did he refuse to defend his own claims, he actually argued that the original context was meaningless. After all, it only gives Christians “room for rationalization and self-deception.” Pot, meet kettle.
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The exchange is stunning in how completely Fyfe dismisses the basic legwork that any reputable commentator, philosopher, historian, or theologian would do before making serious claims about serious subjects. He speaks without any regard for the truth. His writings will continue to satisfy his hardcore secular groupies, but I don’t think many other people are going to recognize him for the ethicist he isn’t.

Hating Religious Expression

Calvin Freiburger atheism, bigotry, Christianity, God, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, letters, religion, reporter, stupidity
In today’s Reporter, Rachel Diech whines:
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Is it just me or is it every time I read The Reporter’s editorial section, there’s always someone spewing rants about God?
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It’s just you. God and religious values are a recurring topic every now and then, but you’ll need more than that if you want to characterize them as “spewing rants.”
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I’m so sick of Christians forcing their beliefs down my throat. Can we just give a little bit of a rest when it comes to religion, please!
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What the heck were you expecting from a page labeled “Opinion”? Its entire point is for people to express their OPINIONS. Religion is something people have OPINIONS about, for and against. Disagree with specific beliefs? Write about it. But unless you’re willing and able to offer more than vague crap, your complaints are nothing more than bigotry.
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If I wanted to be preached at about God, I would go to church. I don’t want to read it in my newspaper.
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Get off your high horse and grow up. Maybe church would do you some good…

What’s So Great about Christianity?

Calvin Freiburger atheism, books, Christianity, d'souza, debate, religion
Currently I’m about halfway through Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book, What’s So Great about Christianity, and it’s outstanding. Arguing from history, science, philosophy, and reason, D’Souza promises to beat the secularists on their own terms—and he does with flying colors. For Christians who want to defend their faith, atheists willing to put their beliefs to the test, or agnostics on a search for truth, I cannot recommend it highly enough. (For more, check out D’Souza’s debates with atheists Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens.)

Dobson Rejects the Hype

Calvin Freiburger 2008, Christianity, conservatism, Dobson, Fred Thompson, gay marriage, GOP
I guess James Dobson ain’t with Fred:
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Isn’t Thompson the candidate who is opposed to a Constitutional amendment to protect marriage, believes there should be 50 different definitions of marriage in the U.S., favors McCain-Feingold, won’t talk at all about what he believes, and can’t speak his way out of a paper bag on the campaign trail? He has no passion, no zeal, and no apparent ‘want to.’ And yet he is apparently the Great Hope that burns in the breasts of many conservative Christians? Well, not for me, my brothers. Not for me!
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Ouch.

The Case for Life – Part I

Calvin Freiburger abortion, Christianity, evil, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, morality, pro-life, science
WHEN DOES LIFE BEGIN?
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What Are We Protecting?
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First, let’s lay a ground rule. By “life” we refer to any individual organism which is a member of the human species—not individual cells, sperm or eggs, hair follicles, skin, etc. (though a seemingly-needless distinction, these comparisons actually come up in debate—the pro-life movement is sometimes characterized as some strange mission to prevent the destruction of mere organic matter, a straw man which is then “discredited” with challenges like “You kill life every time you get a haircut!”) The latter are merely parts of other organisms, not organisms themselves. Nor are embryonic & fetal humans sacred because they are “potential life;” we seek to prevent their destruction because their lives already exist.
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Theologically Speaking, When Does Life Begin?
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If you claim to believe in the Old Testament or Torah’s veracity as the Word of God and absolute Truth, then the answer is simple. God told Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” Before we have a physical form we have a soul, an identity which God can and does know.
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The Bible has many such references to children within the womb as human and spiritual, and the Catholic Church has recognized this for the majority of its history. Many of these references obviously apply to Judaism as well, but as a Christian I defer to Bonnie Chernin Rogoff, founder of Jews for Life:
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Judaism does not believe in the Christian concept of ensoulment, that at the time of conception the soul enters the embryo making that new life equivalent with a born person. In the earliest stages of pregnancy, up to 40 days post-conception, the fetus is considered “mere fluid” (Mishnah Niddah 3:7). However, after 40 days the fetus is considered formed and a woman who miscarries or aborts has to undergo the ritual cleansing process (mikveh) just as she would if a living child were born (Mishnah Kritot 1:3-6). In the Talmud Arakin 7a-b, the passage indicates it is permissible to desecrate the Shabbat to save the life of an unborn child. Further, while a traditional Jew is forbidden from carrying a knife on the Shabbat, a Jewish surgeon may do so, and use it, to save an unborn child’s life […]
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The view of Judaism is that abortion, while not considered murder, should be strongly discouraged. While the fetus is not accorded full human status, it is still considered a developing life with value, that must be protected and saved whenever possible, unless the life of the mother is in danger. In that case, it is permissible to abort the fetus. The Mishnah Oholoth 7:6 along with Rashi’s commentaries in Talmud Sanhedrin 72b make it very clear that the life (and not the ‘choice’ or ‘health’ of the mother) is the only permissible reason for abortion. Had abortion been performed in Rashi’s time for birth control, convenience, or economic reasons there would have been an outcry from rabbis and the religious community and the practice would have been condemned. Under no circumstances should abortion performed for frivolous reasons be given a stamp of approval by rabbis, under the pretext of “health.”
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Life is a precious, priceless gift from our Creator. Believers have a moral duty to recognize life from the beginning and to stand in defense of lives that cannot defend themselves…but some on the Left would have us believe otherwise.
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Even the Devil Can Quote Scripture
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Abortion is sometimes defended from a theological standpoint, with claims such as:
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Exodus 21: “If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.” Violence against a pregnant woman causing premature birth is punished monetarily rather than with death; therefore, we are told, killing pre-birth is less grievous than killing post-birth. But what abortion defenders leave out is that the phrase “and yet no mischief follow” means, quite simply, “if the baby survives the attack.” The lines immediately following the passage make this clear: “And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye…” In this regard, the fetus’s death is no different than an adult’s.
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The description of Adam’s creation in Genesis says “God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” This supposedly indicates that life does not begin until the first breath is taken. But there are two problems with this view. 1.) As the first humans, Adam & Eve could not have resulted from a pregnancy, so the process by which God created them would likely be different. It seems plausible to assume that He created their bodies and souls separately, then put them together, and once they were in place, our God-given system of sexual reproduction took care of the physical self and God created the spiritual self earlier in development for all of His subsequent children. Subsequent references to humans in the womb suggest this, especially verses 13-16 of Psalm 139. 2.) Like all bodily functions, breathing starts prior to birth. Pro-choicers who define life in this way have themselves inadvertently rendered many abortions unacceptable—near the end of the second trimester, the baby is, in fact, breathing.
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Genesis 38 recounts the tale of Judah and his widowed daughter-in-law, Tamar. Upon discovering her out-of-wedlock pregnancy, Judah orders Tamar to be burnt to death—a punishment he cancels upon discovering that he is the father (he slept with her, mistaking her for a prostitute when she was disguised). Pro-choicers note that the sentence would also have killed Tamar’s unborn twins; therefore, the unborn must have less moral worth than a person. But this theory fails immediately: considering that Judah has “married outside the faith, raised [at least] two wicked sons, wrongfully accused his daughter-in-law of his sons’ deaths, lied to his daughter-in-law, refused to keep the law of levirate marriage and, of course, had sex with a prostitute;” he’s not exactly a moral compass! “But nobody other than Tamar prevented him from carrying it out, did they?” True, but that only means people deferred to his judgment & authority; it doesn’t say those people were right to do so. Since the primary message of the story concerns Judah’s wickedness and redemption, not babies, it can hardly be seen as a barometer to treatment of the unborn.
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“Jesus never mentioned [abortion] even once.” Jesus never mentioned drive-by shootings, either. But (obviously) he did mention murder. Value systems such as Christianity don’t need to list off every conceivable method of doing wrong as long as there is a clear set of moral principles in place to determine whether or not particular actions constitute sin. Since “thou shalt not murder” is about as unequivocally Christian as possible, one need only show that the unborn have lives of their own to establish that Jesus would forbid their deliberate destruction.
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When faced with contrary interpretations of Scripture, it is important to do two things: first, examine the context of the quotation in question, and second, weigh it against the entirety of the Biblical evidence. In the final analysis, Judeo-Christian teaching firmly sides with the sanctity of life.
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Religious Convictions in Politics
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“Even if God wants us to personally recognize life from conception onward, we can’t apply a personal religious belief to public policy.” Wrong again.
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The First Amendment guarantees that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Thomas Jefferson famously referred to this as a “wall of separation between Church & State.” Fashionable though it may be to “evolve” the Constitution’s meaning over time, here we’ll stick to a literal read of its actual text, as understood by the Founding Fathers.
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The Founding Fathers understood “establishment of religion” to mean what it did under “the Church of England: a formal union of political and ecclesiastical authority in the hands of the state,” as Dr. Mark Levin writes in the excellent Men in Black (hardcover, p. 36). In other words, the Amendment prevents a church from imposing enforced regulations or punishments upon people, such as ineligibility from public office, taxation of minority sects, and jailing or executing heretics; as well as the converse: preventing the state from suppressing the religious activities of churches and private citizens. Hence, it is a rather straightforward separation of two organizations.
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Separating religious principles from politics is very different. There is nothing in the Constitution that dictates what values, ideas, or motivations are allowed to animate people. Indeed, such a restriction—regulating the intellectual or moral criteria by which American citizens are allowed to judge candidates & policies—would be un-American to the core.
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Consider the 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Written by Thomas Jefferson, it is rightly hailed as a prime example of American enlightenment. But its actual text would surprise many who only hear it mentioned in passing as a victory for church-state separation. Jefferson wrote (emphasis added):
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“Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others…”
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In Jefferson’s mind, freedom of thought was God’s will, and he had no qualms about positing that the country should follow such a Judeo-Christian value. The Constitution allows us to make such judgments; the only limitation is that in doing so, we cannot infringe upon the other rights outlined in the Constitution (“But I thought abortion was a constitutional right!” Patience; we won’t forget to address that one.).
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(There is a lot of eye-opening reading on the Founding Father’s true religious intentions for America; William J. Federer’s America’s God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations is a great resource to start with.)
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“I still think opposing abortion is a religious teaching, so we can’t legislate it.” Consider that prohibitions against murder, theft and lying in the Ten Commandments are among the most explicit religious teachings of all, more so than those against abortion. Does that mean our laws against homicide, theft, slander, libel, or perjury are unconstitutional because they force people to abide by the Ten Commandments? While religious belief must not infringe upon our natural rights in public policy, there is nothing unconstitutional about accepting religious advice on how best to protect those rights. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Democrat Sen. John Kerry cited his religious convictions as “why I fight against poverty. That’s why I fight to clean up the environment and protect this earth. That’s why I fight for equality and justice.” In other words, he wanted to “impose” his religious beliefs about poverty, nature, etc. upon the American people. Until Kerry’s stances infringe upon actual rights, he is entitled to persuade a majority of his fellow Americans of their merits. The same holds true for marriage activists (on both sides), for pro-lifers, and for the aforementioned “Christians for choice.”
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Think of it this way: protecting innocent people is a goal that transcends belief, one that all believers and unbelievers ought to agree upon. Believers simply accept religious insight to help determine whether or not the unborn fit into the category of innocent people. Right or wrong, it’s a proposition that is fully appropriate for public discourse and the will of the people—not censorship or disqualification.
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Scientifically Speaking, When Does Life Begin?
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Of course, the religion-out-of-politics line is little more than a ploy to disqualify rather than debate pro-lifers, or to avoid taking a firm stand. In fact, if there is one truth that must be driven home, it is this: the question of life’s beginning is not by any means exclusive to religion. Science can answer it—and it has.
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In his magnificent The Party of Death, Ramesh Ponnuru writes:
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We have developed ways of talking that enable us to pretend that the point can be blinked away. In the case of abortion and embryo research, the main technique is to suggest that there is some great mystery about “when life begins,” and that this alleged question is a religious or philosophical one. Yet science has since solved the mystery. From conception onward, what exists is a distinct organism of the human species. The philosophical question is what we make of that fact. To jumble these issues together—the essentially scientific question of categorizing an embryo as human and living, and the moral question of whether it follows from that categorization that it has a right to life—is a logical error. Justice Blackmun, of course, proceeded in just this erroneous fashion in Roe. And if we are not careful, talking in terms of “meaningful life,” or, as [author Ronald] Dworkin does, of “life in earnest,” can lead us into this error as well.
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All of us who read this page were once human embryos. The history of our bodies began with the formation of an embryo. We were those embryos, just as we were once fetuses, infants, children, and adolescents. But we were never a sperm cell and an egg cell. (Those cells were genetically and functionally parts of other human beings.) The formation of the embryo marks the beginning of a new human life: a new and complete organism that belongs to the human species. Embryology textbooks say so, with no glimmer of uncertainty or ambiguity.
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That new organism is alive rather than dead or inanimate. It is human rather than a member of some other species. It is an organism distinct from all others. It is not a functional part of a larger organism (the way a kidney is part of a larger organism). It maintains its own organic unity over time. It directs its own development, according to its genetic template, through the embryonic, fetal, and subsequent stages. Such terms as “blastocyst,” “newborn,” and “adolescent” denote different stages of development in a being of the same type, not different types of beings. At each of our earlier stages of life, we have been, as we are now, whole living members of the species Homo sapiens. (hardcover, p. 77-78)
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And medical textbooks do indeed say so:
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Human Embryology, 3rd Edition by William Larsen, Lawrence Sherman, S. Steven Potter, & William Scott: “In this text, we begin our description of the developing human with the formation and differentiation of the male and female sex cells or gametes, which will unite at fertilization to initiate the embryonic development of a new individual.” (p. 1)
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The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology, 7th Edition by Keith Moore & TVN. Persaud: “Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm (spermatozoon) unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.” (p. 18)
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Human Embryology & Teratology, 3rd Edition by Ronan O’Rahilly & Fabiola Muller: “Although life is a continuous process, fertilization (which, incidentally, is not a ‘moment’) is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is formed when the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte.” (p. 8)
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Developmental Biology, 6th Edition by Scott Gilbert: “Fertilization is the process whereby two sex cells (gametes) fuse together to create a new individual with genetic potentials derived from both parents.” (p. 185)
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Van Nostrand’s Scientific Encyclopedia, 7th Edition by Douglas Considine: “At the moment the sperm cell of the human male meets the ovum of the female and the union results in a fertilized ovum (zygote), a new life has begun.” (p. 943)
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Langman’s Medical Embryology, 7th Edition by TW Sadler: “The development of a human begins with fertilization, a process by which the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote.” (p. 3)
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Patten’s Foundations of Embryology, 6th Edition by Bruce Carlson: “Almost all higher animals start their lives from a single cell, the fertilized ovum (zygote)… The time of fertilization represents the starting point in the life history, or ontogeny, of the individual.” (p. 3)
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It doesn’t take much to see the common pro-choice line “clumps of cells” is empty, simplistic propaganda: Eye-opening information about fetal development is no secret, we know that preborn children are capable of feeling pain (note: link is a PDF file) at approximately 20 weeks, and the latest ultrasound technology shows us these “clumps” are surprisingly familiar.
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So where does all this leave us? The life of a human being does, in fact, begin at conception; so every abortion, every embryo discarding (either via stem-cell research or in-vitro fertilization), and some types of birth control destroy a human being. Yet when faced with this reality, pro-choicers have developed new criteria for human rights, which are designed to deny them protection based upon factors other than their biological humanity…factors which will be explored in Part II: The Value of Life.
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The Case for Life – Introduction & Index

Calvin Freiburger abortion, Christianity, evil, morality, pro-life, science
The First Right
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We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—US Declaration of Independence
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So reads the founding document of our nation. The unalienable right to life can be thought of as the First Right of our Republic, because without it, no other right can be exercised. Thus, protecting that right is the paramount duty of our government and society. And in order to best fulfill that duty, we must carefully determine exactly what constitutes life, and when we have it.
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In this troubled age, when respect for life remains in doubt even within the Republican Party, there is no more important cause than standing up for America’s soul and turning back the callous disregard for the innocent which has infected our nation like a cancer in the past decades. In this upcoming five-part essay, I shall attempt to articulate both the case for life and its proper role in the GOP & conservative movement as comprehensively as possible.
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Part I: When Does Life Begin?
Part II: The Value of Life
Part III: Life and Public Policy
Part IV: Life and the Constitution
Part V: Pro-Life Strategies
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Part I examines when life begins & why it deserves protection, and will be posted shortly after this Introduction.

Another God Debate

Calvin Freiburger atheism, Christianity, debate, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Newsweek, religion, Rick Warren
Sam Harris vs. Rick Warren. I’ve never exactly been wowed by, or paid much attention to, Rick Warren, but it is fascinating to see how Harris’ numerous logical fallacies still stick out like a sore thumb, even against one of Christianity’s less powerful defenders. For example:
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“There is so much about us that is not in the Bible. Every specific science from cosmology to psychology to economics has surpassed and superseded what the Bible tells us is true about our world.”
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Who ever said the Bible was supposed to be a science textbook? Its concerns lie primarily with what God did and why he did it, not how he did it. And I have a hard time believing anyone truly familiar with the Bible would be so quick to dismiss the truths “about us” and “our world” within its pages.
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“We know that human beings have a terrible sense of probability. There are many things we believe that confirm our prejudices about the world, and we believe this only by noticing the confirmations, and not keeping track of the disconfirmations. You could prove to the satisfaction of every scientist that intercessory prayer works if you set up a simple experiment. Get a billion Christians to pray for a single amputee. Get them to pray that God regrow that missing limb. This happens to salamanders every day, presumably without prayer; this is within the capacity of God. I find it interesting that people of faith only tend to pray for conditions that are self-limiting.”
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Two points here: First, it’s hard not to laugh at Harris’ “simple experiment.” It’s a bit like moving the goalpost to maximize your odds. While I believe prayer is powerful, I don’t think it’s a simple matter of placing an order, then God handing you your Big Mac at the drive-thru. Moreover, it’s not “self-limiting” conditions we pray for; it’s conditions that are scientifically possible (God working through the laws of science He authored). Just think of how different Judaism or Christianity would be if prayer was as simple as “ask God to give you things/do things for you, and He will.” What kind of message would that send?
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Second, I do think Harris has touched upon one mistake believers tend to make: just as unanswered prayers don’t disprove God, answered prayers are not sufficient to prove His existence. We don’t have a way of knowing whether or not the turnout of any event is due to divine intervention. The Lord is weighing a myriad of earthly conditions and factors that would make the most brilliant mortal manager’s head spin, not the least of which is what we truly need in life, rather than what we want. While I wasn’t fully satisfied with his response, Warren offered an important point: “God sometimes says yes, God sometimes says no and God sometimes says wait. I’ve had to learn the difference between no and not yet.”
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That’s a powerful difference. Indeed, I’ve experienced it. I’ve pleaded with God for dreams to come true, and I’ve been angry & confused when they didn’t—until I realized those dreams were based on incomplete facts and serious misconceptions. Had my dream come true, I later found, it would not have been the blessing I envisioned. The “mysterious ways” in which God works only seem mysterious to us because, again, we cannot possibly fathom all the factors in play, not the least of which is the fact that God knows us and our neighbors better than we know ourselves. To Him, there’s nothing mysterious about it.
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“This really is one of the great canards of religious discourse, the idea that the greatest crimes of the 20th century were perpetrated because of atheism… The killing fields and the gulag were not the product of people being too reluctant to believe things on insufficient evidence. They were not the product of people requiring too much evidence and too much argument in favor of their beliefs. We have people flying planes in our buildings because they have theological grievances against the West. I’m noticing Christians doing terrible things explicitly for religious reasons—for instance, not fund-ing [embryonic] stem-cell research. The motive is always paramount for me. No society in human history has ever suffered because it has become too reasonable.”
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First, notice how, in distancing atheism from historic horrors, he posits “atheism = reason & careful skepticism” as a given. Here Harris displays a classic trait of bias: the inability to compartmentalize separate elements of an overall issue—in this case, “Is God real?” and “Is God good for society?” Try to focus on the second one right here, Sam. Second, the crux of the question (and Sam “I’m-doing-my-PhD-in-neuroscience” Harris is smart enough to know this) is not skepticism, naiveté, reverence for the Sabbath, or any of the benign differences between belief and unbelief. It’s all about the belief that human rights are non-negotiable because they come from an authority higher than man. The danger atheism poses to society is not an automatic leap to death camps (indeed, every believer I’ve ever heard or read concedes that atheists are fully capable of morality, and applaud the moral clarity Harris and Christopher Hitchens display on some issues, most notably Islamofascism); it’s that national atheism is a vacuum in which all manner of “divisive dogmatism[s],” as Harris puts it, can thrive. And how can anybody possibly bemoan opposition to embryo-killing stem-cell experimentation in the same breath as 9/11? I guess it’s easy…if you’re inclined toward dishonesty.
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“The idea that somehow we are getting our morality out of the Judeo-Christian tradition is bad history and bad science.”
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Uh, no.
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“[Y]ou see a variety of claims there that aren’t backed up by sufficient evidence. If the evidence were sufficient, you would be compelled to be Muslim.”
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Sam likes to deploy varieties of the idea that the large number of incompatible claims about God’s nature somehow suggests we should dismiss all of them in favor of atheism. In fact, here’s another example of failing to compartmentalize an issue. “Is there a higher power?” is a separate question from “What form does that higher power take?” Answering “yes” to the first question still leaves us with many possibilities: one God, many gods, a good God, an evil God, an indifferent God, God of Abraham, Allah, a God who’s real yet different from known religious descriptions…all possibilities that deserve consideration, but disproving one certainly doesn’t lead to disproving all.