A couple of years ago I wrote a paper called "The Virtuous Case for Christ: How C.S. Lewis's Theological Virtues Should Aid Christians Living in a Postmodern Culture." I presented it first at the "C.S. Lewis: The Man and His Works" conference at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, NC October 27, 2007. I also presented it at "Standing Against the Tide: C.S. Lewis as Philosopher and Critic in the Postmodern Era" conference at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, CA August 9, 2008.

Each time I promised to post the audio from the presentation. Well, six months after the last presentation, I've finally done it:

"The Virtuous Case for Christ: How Lewis's Theological Virtues Should Aid Christians Living in a Postmodern Culture" (9.32 MB)

I'm planning on developing the "Virtue Apologetics" concept for an ETS/EPS paper this year, and eventually into a book. I welcome your feedback.

The videos of all speaker addresses and panel discussions from this year's T4G conference are available online for free at Ligonier.org (for a limited time).  These conferences are amazing, encouraging (and often humorous) and it would be well worth your time to watch the videos (if you don't have a lot of time, just watch the panel discussions!)

Check them out here. 

Thanks to Aaron Gleason for passing this link along to me.

I sure am glad that we Evangelicals have moved on to caring about more important social issues. Because if we still cared about protecting the unborn, we'd be in rough shape right now.

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2008.10.14_George_Robert%20P._Obama's%20Abortion%20Extremism_.xml

Like I said...please pray for Barack Obama. 

Californians have been subject to a variety of ads for and against Proposition 4 over the last few weeks. Since most of the ads I’ve seen are misleading, I thought it might be helpful to shed some light on the arguments that have been made from both sides.

A summary of Prop 4:

Prop 4, also known as “Sarah’s Law,” would amend the California Constitution so that parental notification would be required 48 hours prior to an abortion. If the minor fears parental notification due to potential abuse, the law would allow for certain adult relatives to be notified and require the doctor to report the parents to Child Protection Services. Exceptions are made for cases of medical emergencies, prior parental waivers, or court waivers. Doctors would be required to report statistical information on the abortions they perform to the state of California. If the parents are not notified properly, the law would allow them to file for damages in a civil lawsuit. The law would also allow for minors to appeal to the courts if they believe they are being coerced into having an abortion.

Fact Check #1:

The group behind Prop 4 named it “Sarah’s Law” after a fifteen year old who died from complications resulting from an abortion. What they don’t tell you is that this girl was in a common-law marriage with the father. It is unclear whether or not she would have been required to notify her parents in her specific situation. Furthermore, a representative of the Prop 4 support group said that Prop 4 could have saved “Sarah’s” life. There’s really no reason to believe it would have. While it is hypothetical, given the situation it seems likely she would have gone through with the abortion and would have been equally vulnerable to dying from resulting complications. (source: http://www.lifenews.com/state3440.html)

Fact Check #2:

The most popular argument against Prop 4 is that it would put teens in danger because it requires them to notify potentially abusive parents. A commercial portraying this has been airing constantly and it is all over the “no” group’s website. These commercials mislead the public into believing that Prop 4 requires pregnant minors to report their abortion only to their parents or legal guardians. However, the option of notifying an adult family member is clearly and thoroughly explained in the proposition. This adult family member could be a grandparent, stepparent, foster parent, aunt, uncle, sibling, half-sibling, or first cousin. Furthermore, opponents to Prop 4 have not been able to cite a single case where the minor was victimized as the result of notification in any of the thirty-five states where similar laws currently exist.

Fact Check #3:

Another story cited by supporters of Prop 4 is that of a fourteen-year-old girl who was raped over one hundred times by a thirty-nine year old man. He took her to Planned Parenthood (PP) twice and the supporters imply that PP performed the abortion. The ad faults PP for not reporting the predator and implies that Prop 4 could have lead to the predator being stopped. Only the pregnancy test was performed at PP, not the abortion. PP could have notified authorities regarding the pregnant minor, but they likely had no way of knowing who the predator was to report him. The predator was actually the minor’s stepfather and both the minor and stepfather claimed he was her father to the hospital that performed the abortion. Had Prop 4 been in effect, it would have changed nothing since it appeared that the parent was notified.

Fact Check #4:

The website against Prop 4 claims that, “What we see happening in other states with parental notification laws is that some teens opt for a dangerous alternative – illegal abortion. Teens may even take matters into their own hands (back alley abortions, self abort or worse).” This is a typical slippery-slope argument from pro-choice debaters. Using their logic we could argue that since robbing banks can be dangerous, we should make it legal and banks should make stealing easier. What is the result of Prop 4 on teens who refuse to have a “safe” abortion due to parental notification? The truth is that there is no evidence that this has ever happened in the 35 states that have similar laws to Prop 4.

Conclusion

Both sides have been misleading in some way in arguing for their position. As voters, it is our responsibility to work through the arguments and attempt to make a thoughtful decision based on the facts, not the rhetoric. The “yes” and “no” websites are likely the best places to start sorting fact and fiction:

http://yeson4.net
http://www.noonprop4.org

The problems I point out with the "pro" Prop 4 stories only have to do with their anecdotes. I think the campaign seems to be grasping at any story they can find that can be used to appeal emotionally to voters; to the degree that they misrepresent some of the stories as I pointed out. (There are more stories on their website and I would be surprised if they embellished all of them.) However, the only problems I can find are with their stories; not with the fundamental arguments why the proposition is needed. I think their arguments are sound and compelling, and they do themselves a disservice by the way they appeal to these stories. My criticisms of the "no" side are with their fundamental arguments. They have not provided any good reason to reject the proposition.

S. T. Karnick has written a piece for Salvo Magazine that is worth reading.  It may be the most reasonable appeal to the Same-Sex Marriage camp I've ever read. 



No doubt many will not find this article persuasive.  But consider why.  I have a feeling that it is because Same-Sex Marriage advocates think that Same-Sex Marriage is morally acceptable (even virtuous), and that it is morally obligatory for everyone to recognize it.  But this is not the argument that the "No on 8" crowd is making.  Their argument is based on the premise that gay couples are somehow being barred from marrying (which is untrue) and that the moral issue at stake is one of freedom of choice, tolerance, and liberty.  But as this article adeptly points out, it is the radical Same-Sex agenda that is now threatening true freedom of choice and tolerance. 

Read the rest of the Salvo article here.

During the recent civil forum at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, Senator Obama was asked point blank when he believed an embryo became a human life worthy of the same rights as any other American citizen.  Obama responded that the answer to that question was "above his pay grade." 

Fair enough.  We can't expect the President to be an expert on everything.  That's why he has expert advisers.  In this case, that's why he has an expert in bioethics. 



I'd be fine with Obama's response if it weren't for his promise to support the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA).  According to Family Research Council, "FOCA would obliterate hundreds of state laws that protect women, parents, children, and health care workers, while forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for millions of abortions. It would overturn commonsense laws like parental notification, conscience protections, abortion waiting periods, informed consent, and regulations for women's health. In essence, FOCA would tilt the table for abortion."

Now, it seems to me that if the answer to the question of when a baby's life is worth protecting is above Senator Obama's pay grade, then a decision such as whether or not to sign FOCA into law should be even further above it. 

This isn't even a simple question of whether or not I think one should vote for a pro-choice candidate.  Should one vote for a candidate who strongly supports a position that he admits to not fully understanding?  Should one vote for a candidate who does not think deeply about his decisions, and who will enact policies without truly understanding the important issues?

Can you imagine if one of the candidates had said that they could not answer the question of whether or not the current war in Iraq was a just war, and then went on to promise that he would stay committed to the war and increase the number of troops???  Obama's answer makes no more sense. 

In Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world, women suffering under oppressive leaders are starting to cry out for the right to choose.  A quote from an AP article reveals the anguish of these women:

"How many times have I wished I were a man . . . [When the leader said he would continue to restrict women's choice,] he saddened and hurt me," wrote [a woman in an online forum] who said she listened to the speech 10 times. "I felt that my heart was about to explode in my chest . . . I am powerless."

This is nothing but a power play on the part of these sexist leaders to keep women down by denying them the right to do what they want with their own bodies.  We know, as Americans, how sacred the right to choose is.  This is the most fundamental right necessary to ensure equal participation for women in their communities.  You just heard for yourself in the above quote about the emotional hardships this lack of choice is causing for women.  We can't just sit here and allow this to happen!  Now is the time to stand up and be true to our most precious American value.  We have an obligation to work together to raise the status of these women by removing this barrier to bodily sovereignty because we know that nothing is more important than the right to choose.

At least the women there are starting to wake up and speak for themselves:

A'eeda Dahsheh is a Palestinian mother of four in Lebanon who said she supports al-Zawahri [and his denial of a woman's right to choose al-Qaida] and has chosen to raise children at home as her form of jihad. However, she said, she also supports any woman who chooses instead to take part in terror attacks.

Oh, wait . . . it matters what the choice is about?

    In response to Wielenberg's first argument, it seems perfectly reasonable for the Theist to assert two propositions.  The first being that it is impossible for God’s character to be different than it is, and the second being that it is impossible to actually change the nature of moral perfection, as the evil contestant does in Wielenberg’s story.  The second claim rests on the first.  God’s character simply is the definition of moral perfection, and if His character cannot change, than neither can moral perfection.  But to the first proposition Wielenberg might ask why God’s character cannot change.  The response is simple, because if it did, then He would cease to be morally perfect, and thus cease to be God.  At this point, Wielenberg might accuse the Theist of a contradiction.  If God’s character cannot change without ceasing to be morally perfect, then isn’t there some outside standard to which we are holding God’s character?  To this the Theist may reply that God’s character is indeed the only standard of perfection, and that all things are either good or bad based on their relation to Him alone, but that His character, being what it is, cannot be otherwise.  It is simply a brute fact of the universe.  For God is the ground of all being, the source and foundation for all reality.  He simply is.  And he could not be otherwise.  If Wielenberg still wishes to object to this claim, then the Theist can quickly remind him that this is precisely what he wishes his reader to believe about the brute moral facts of the universe.  Indeed, this is the thesis of his book!  Moral facts such as “it is wrong to torture babies for fun” are, according to Wielenberg, real moral entities that exist and simply cannot be otherwise.  But as far I can tell, there is no reason to believe that brute moral facts cannot change and not believe that God’s character cannot change.  Thus, for Wielenberg to reject the Dependency Thesis for this reason would also be for him to reject his own moral theory.

    For the second argument, I believe that two possible responses are open to the Theist.  First, it can be argued that since a thing’s nature is given to it by God, it is still possible for something to be either good or evil by virtue of its nature, even though God indirectly made it so.  Taking the example of falling in love, a Theist might say that falling in love is most certainly an instance of intrinsic good, its very nature is simply and completely good, but that because its nature was given to it by God, it is ultimately God that has, in a sense, “declared” it to be what it is.  It sounds to me as though Wielenberg’s argument is actually saying, “nothing can be good in virtue of its nature because God gave it its nature.”  But of course that doesn’t follow.  What Wielenberg is really attacking is the notion that falling in love is not good for its own sake, but that it is good because God told us so.  What he overlooks is the simple solution that God “told us so” by giving it a nature that was either good or evil. 
   
    However, there is another response that seems perfectly reasonable to me, namely that the Theist simply accepts that nothing actually is intrinsically good or evil apart from God.  Why is suffering evil?  Because God doesn’t want his creatures to suffer.  Why is falling in love good?  Because God wants us to be happy, and in part because it facilitates the creation of families, children, and society.  Wielenberg is relying on the unshakable intuition that pain is evil in and of itself.  It is better to keep this obvious truth than to accept a theory that rejects it.  But isn’t it just as likely that the unshakable intuition in question is merely that pain is evil, leaving entirely open the question of why or how it is evil?  This seems more plausible to me.

   In Chapter Two of Value And Virtue In A Godless Universe, Erik Wielenberg introduces two theses that he believes implicitly support Divine Command Theory.  The first is the Control Thesis which states that “every logically consistent ethical claim, E, is such that God could make E true.”   The second is the Dependency Thesis which states that “every true ethical claim is true in virtue of some act of will on the part of God.”  Essentially, the great difference between these two is that in the former God creates ethics (by divine fiat we might say), while in the later ethics is based upon and originates from God’s nature or character.  From this, Wielenberg distinguishes between two forms of Divine Command Theory.  The first or “strong” form accepts both the Control and Dependency Thesis, while the “weak” form accepts only the Dependency Thesis.

    It is important to consider Wielenberg’s objection to the strong form of Divine Command Theory first (which is essentially an objection to the Control Thesis), since it will play a role in his objection to the weak form.  He objects to the strong form by way of an illustration.   He asks us to imagine a competition in which the prize is omnipotence.  One contestant is a very good person, while the other is very evil.  Suppose, he says, that the evil person wins the contest and gains omnipotence.  According to the Control Thesis, the evil contestant can now make it such that all of the evil acts he intends to perform (mass slaughter of innocents, torture, etc.) are actually very good.  Moreover, he can make it such he is now a morally perfect being, not by changing himself, but by changing the nature of moral perfection.  Thus, in the end, evil becomes good and the killing and torture of innocent people is morally commendable.  Wielenberg relies primarily on intuition to argue that “there is simply no amount of power that would enable a being to make that true.”   He further argues that “This story seems to get things backwards by making morality subject to power.”  Fair enough.  Our moral intuitions certainly do seem to suggest to us that no amount of power could make such atrocities good.  We want to argue, especially as Christians, that morality is somehow objective and fixed, and that it could not be otherwise.  At least on the surface, Wielenberg’s argument seems to offer convincing reasons to reject the Control Thesis on just such grounds.  And so, for the sake of argument, we will grant him his conclusion.

    Now Wielenberg turns his philosophical gun on the weak form of Divine Command Theory, specifically on the Dependency Thesis, which he states as follows, “It is still divine willing that determines which ethical claims are true, but the scope of divine willing is limited by the divine character.”   In other words, God still retains the prerogative to say what things humans can and cannot do in certain times and places, but contra the Control Thesis He cannot command simply anything, but can only command those things which are in accordance with His own character, which sets the standard of moral goodness.  Wielenberg proposes three objections to this thesis.  First, he suggests that “implicit in the proposal is the notion that God has the power to make any logically consistent ethical claim true.”  In the weak claim, God’s character prevents Him from making evil things good, but Wielenberg seems to be suggesting that the Control Thesis still manages to slip in the back door, and that we are left with the same problem, just moved back a step.  If it were the case that God’s character turned out to be like the evil contestant in Wielenberg’s imaginary story, then even on the Dependency Thesis alone it would still be conceivable that God could make the slaughter of innocents a morally good thing.  But Wielenberg has already refuted such a notion. 

    Wielenberg’s second objection to the Dependency Thesis is even stronger.  He argues that an implication of the Dependency Thesis is that nothing is intrinsically good or evil.  He says, “If an act of will on the part of God bestows value on something distinct from God, that value cannot be intrinsic.”   By intrinsic value he means that a thing is valuable only in virtue of its nature.  As an example of an intrinsic evil, he suggests pain.  Pain is just bad, in and of itself, without reference to anything else.  Conversely, falling in love is intrinsically good; it is simply good for its own sake.  Following Chisholm, who argues that any theory of epistemology that doesn’t allow for obvious instances of knowledge should be rejected, Wielenberg suggests that any theory of morality that rejects something as obvious as the fact that some things are intrinsically good or evil should also be rejected. 

    What might the Christian say in response to these arguments?  Tune in tomorrow!

There's a story in Judges about a man who sends his concubine out to be abused by the men of the town in order to save his own skin.  When he finds her dead in the morning, he sends parts of her body to all the tribes of Israel as a shocking, visual wake-up call revealing the depths of the country's moral depravity.

 

I imagine that the people of Israel who heard of this felt a nausea, horror, and sense of impending judgment similar to what I felt reading this today:

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts [an art student at Yale] will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body . . . "I hope it inspires some sort of discourse," Shvarts said. "Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it, but it's not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone."

There's a detailed description of the exhibit in the article, but there's no way I'm going to post it here.  All I can say is that our country is hurtling down a dark, ugly road if we're producing people like this woman.  How did the creation and destruction of human life become a clever way of "sparking conversation"?  We had better wake up.

Yale now insists that the whole project is a fake, but Shvarts is sticking to her story, saying her purpose was to point out that the "central ambiguity [of not knowing whether or not she was actually pregnant] defies a clear definition of the act [of miscarriage].  The reality of miscarriage is very much a linguistic and political reality, an act of reading constructed by an act of naming--an authorial act."  Second, she meant to "assert that often, normative understandings of biological function are a mythology imposed on form, It is this mythology that creates the sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective, distinguishing what body parts are 'meant' to do from their physical capability."  It was her goal to use her body outside the "narrative of reproduction" in order to shock people into acknowledging that it is the "prerogative of every individual" to explore other uses for his or her body.  (This, of course, would be absolutely true in a postmodern, Darwinist, Creatorless world.)

Connected with the obvious atrociousness of Shvarts sick use of human life is her view of art:

"I believe strongly that art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity," Shvarts said. "I think that I'm creating a project that lives up to the standard of what art is supposed to be."

Art is a medium for politics and ideologies?  Whatever happened to goodness, truth, and beauty?  To uplifting the viewer?  Where did this new grotesque and ugly standard of art come from?  Why is this the only standard she knows of?  It's not hard to figure out that just like in the days of Judges, a country that loses sight of the living, holy, good God will soon be stripped of all beauty, and everything--good or evil--rather than being things to delight in or abhor, will be reduced to mere "statements."

 

Because of God, there is real beauty and it's tragic that so many people in our culture have never tasted it.  It's easy to forget when we're feasting on the glory of God that most people have no idea a banquet like this even exists.  Let this remind us of our responsibility to tell them.

 

(HT:  Steve Wagner)