Sometimes, the most important questions are the basic ones. Back in 2011, I argued that the most important question in the gay-marriage debate was “What is marriage?” The next year, Robert George, Ryan Anderson, and Sherif Girgis published a book exploring just that question: What Is Marriage?: Man and Woman: A Defense. But in the face of contemporary questions of transgenderism and gender identity, it turns out that we need to ask a yet more-basic question: what are men and women, and what makes them different?

To some of you, that question might seem obvious, even asinine. Nearly all of us have a working understanding of what we mean by “men” and “women.” Ironically, even people who believe that it’s possible to be transgender still affirm this: calling a man a “trans-woman” presupposes that we know what a woman is. In other words, what does it mean to say that a biological male is a woman?

I. Bad Answers to the Men and Women Question

Bear in mind, we’re looking for what it is that makes all men unlike all women. So here are some incorrect answers to the question:

1. Using stereotypes to distinguish men from women: women may tend to be more nurturing and men more abstract-thinking, etc., but there are so many counter-examples to any stereotype that you can come up with that this is obviously not a workable answer.
2. Using social norms to distinguish men from women: things like “women wear dresses, and men wear pants” are both stereotypes (suffering the same flaw as #1) and culturally-contingent: think Scottish kilts or female dress slacks as obvious counter-examples.
3. Using hormones to distinguish men from women: men typically have higher levels of testosterone and lower levels of estrogen, than women do. But testosterone and estrogen levels vary from individual to individual, and change throughout your life.
4. Using sexual organs to distinguish men from women: This is an obvious difference, but it’s not a satisfying answer. A castrated man isn’t less of a man, after all, nor is a woman any less a woman if she’s had a hysterectomy or mastectomy. Plus, a small portion of the human family is born “intersex” (a poor term) with ambiguous genitalia.
5. Denying that such a difference exists: Obviously, the fact that we can speak coherently of men and women means that we’re somehow distinct.

Nevertheless, while all of these answers miss the mark, all of them also have an element of the truth, which makes them attractive. So what would a better answer look like?

II. A Better Answer

Here’s what I think a better answer might look like:

1. The essential distinction between men and women is genetic. All men have a Y chromosome (typically XY, although in some cases XXY or XYY), and no women have Y chromosomes. In other words, men are adult male humans and women are adult female humans.
2. This genetic difference tends to express itself in different sexual organs. In rare cases, something impedes this from happening as it is ought to, or something happens to the sexual organs. But even in the case of those borned “intersexed,” there is a genetic sex: it just may be harder to tell.
3. This genetic difference also tends to express itself in different brain chemistry, different levels of various hormones, and differences (big and small) in cognitive and behavioral development.
4. Society also plays a role, and environmental factors can even impact hormone levels. It is not always easy to determine which social behaviors are attributable to social roles, or environment, or innate genetics. But most societies amplify the differences between the sexes by creating a set of gender roles.

The chief benefits of this definition of men and women are threefold.

First, this is what we have always meant by men and women, even before we knew what genes were. There was a recognition that there were real differences between male and female humans, present from birth, and we expressed these different types of humans with the terms ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ for children and ‘men’ and ‘women’ for adults (and ‘male’ and ‘female’ on the whole). Genes explain why these differences exist (and why unusual things sometimes happen in how the genes express themselves). Second, this is how we speak about non-humans. We can coherently speak of male and female mammals using a similar genetic distinction. Finally, this definition avoids two obviously-false extremes: the idea that men and women are interchangeable, and a sort of “Rambo and Barbie” reductionism.

III. The Implications for the Transgender / Gender Identity Question

The points above are much bigger than contemporary debates over gender identity and transgender issues. A lot of the ink spilled over the last few decades on issues like feminism could be aided by everyone having a clearer understanding of women and men and the differences between them (and especially, of which of those differences are innate and universal, and which of those are socially constructed, etc.). But while it’s not reducible to that question, I think it’s helpful.

We can both affirm that there really are fundamental genetic differences between men and women, and affirm that (for example) some women act and emote in conventionally-masculine ways, and may even have higher-than-average testosterone levels, etc. So it’s no surprise that there are people who don’t “fit” the social expectations for what a man or what a woman is like. That, of itself, is nothing new – terms like “tomboy” exist to describe this reality. And our response ought to be one of compassion and support, particularly if we’re Christians.

But having a coherent definition of “man” and “woman” does show why transgenderism is a non-starter. What I mean is this. If the claim were just “I’m a man who likes feminine things,” that would be a coherent idea. But if a biological male claims to be a woman, what does that person mean by “woman”? They can’t mean that a biological male is biologically female, because that doesn’t make sense. And if their understanding of what it is to be a “woman” is rooted in any of the types of definitions we explored in Part I, you can see why those don’t work.

So there’s something a bit deceptive in all of this. A person who believes in transgenderism cannot say that men and women are the same thing (since there would be nothing to “trans” if the two genders are the same). But they also cannot affirm that men and women are essentially different, since affirming that fact would make their own claim nonsense. So “transgenderism” relies on the language of “man” and “woman,” and even relies on the idea that the two are somehow different, while emptying those words of any actual meaning and refusing to define what this new meaning of “man” and “woman” actually is.

A lot of people online are sharing flow charts that are supposed to show the ridiculousness of opposition to gay marriage. For example (click here to expand):

There are several variations of this theme, almost all of which say the same three things: (1) Leviticus forbids homosexuality, but it also bans a bunch of other stuff, and nobody [a.k.a., no Gentile] actually lives by all those rules; (2) Paul seems to forbid homosexuality, but actually means something like temple prostitution; and (3) Jesus doesn’t mention homosexuality. Let’s look at each in turn:

What Does Leviticus Really Say?

Like every other flowchart I’ve seen on this question, the one above conflates three things found in the Book of Leviticus: (1) expressions of the moral law (like the Ten Commandments, or the prohibition against homosexuality and other forms of sexual immorality); (2) temporal punishments; and (3) the so-called ceremonial law (like the laws on keeping kosher).

The moral law, as an expression of what is good and evil, is timeless. Good doesn’t suddenly become evil, or vice versa, because it’s Tuesday, instead of Monday, or because it’s 2015 A.D. and not 2015 B.C.

But the particular statutory punishments *weren’t* timeless: they were quite explicitly the law books of the nation of Israel. These laws can be illuminating, in that they show the severity of certain sins, but the Church never considered Israel’s statutory punishments to be binding on Christians. And the ceremonial laws were a way of setting apart the Jewish people to signal them as chosen and to prepare them for Christ.

This was literally the first major dispute within the Church: the so-called Judaizers tried to enforce the ceremonial provisions of the Law on new converts, and the Church corrected them. Acts 10 is clear that the food laws aren’t still binding on Christians, and Acts 15 distinguishes between which of the Levitical precepts in ch. 17-18 are still binding on the Christians of the first century (and even these restrictions were later loosened).

So the early Christians clearly grasped that adultery was wrong but eating shellfish wasn’t. It’s remarkable that Christianity’s critics don’t realize this. I suspect that this is because the critics of traditional Christianity assume that we’re (a) all believers in sola Scriptura, and (b) senseless, so they seem to be genuinely ignorant that we might actually have an intelligent interpretive hermeneutic for knowing which parts of the Old Covenant are still applicable to the New Covenant.

What Did Paul Really Say?

The idea that Paul doesn’t really condemn homosexual behavior is based on a selective interpretative of two Greek words that he uses in 1 Corinthians 6:9: pornos (πόρνος) and malakos (μαλακός).

Pornos means:

1. a man who prostitutes his body to another’s lust for hire
2. a male prostitute
3. a man who indulges in unlawful sexual intercourse, a fornicator

And malakos:

1. soft, soft to the touch
2. metaph. in a bad sense
   1. effeminate
      1. of a catamite
      2. of a boy kept for homosexual relations with a man
      3. of a male who submits his body to unnatural lewdness
      4. of a male prostitute

So the Greek terms used in Paul’s day weren’t specific to only adult male-male sexual behavior (since a great deal of it was man-boy), but they certainly included those behaviors. But besides this, Paul and several other parts of the New (and Old) Testament condemn fornication. That’s broader still, but it shows that non-marital sex is sinful… regardless of who the parties are. (This raises the question: what sort of sexual unions are marriage-material? We’ll get to that shortly).

Because he rejects homosexual sex, the chart up top angrily writes St. Paul off as a judgmental xenophobe and chauvinist. This is baseless name-calling. Paul is the Apostle to the Gentiles, and he brought people from all sorts of nationalities and religious backgrounds into the Church, and fought hard to prevent them from being discriminated against or treated as second-class Christians.  Xenophobe? This is the same man who wrote, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

But at least the chart is honest enough to admit that if you actually believe Leviticus and/or the writings of St. Paul, you’re not going to end up favoring same-sex marriage. So instead, they’re just going to mock faithful Jews and Christians as xenophobes and sexists… and then call us judgmental.

What Did Jesus Really Say?

There are two important points here. First, trying to pit Jesus against the Bible is a losing game. Since the people who make this argument like flow charts, I’ll lead with one from Adam4d:

But there’s a second problem with this claim. It assumes that the Bible is essentially a rule book full of Thou Shalt Not’s. That misses that both Jesus and St. Paul present a positive view of marriage. That is, Scripture shows us what marriage is, which is why we can also say what it isn’t.

This is important, because as we saw from the attempts to work around St. Paul’s prohibitions, the same-sex marriage side is essentially arguing: “but here’s an arrangement nobody had thought of back then!” With a positive view of what marriage is, we can easily establish whether some new sexual variation is compatible with marriage or not.

As part of a good Facebook thread on this topic, my friend Peter Ascik (a seminarian for the Diocese of Charlotte) explains:

Jesus does indeed comment directly on the nature of marriage in Matthew 19, and he reaffirms that marriage is founded on the sexual difference of man and woman (Matt 19:4-5), which is itself grounded in God’s creation of humanity in his image (Gen 1:27; Gen 2:24). St. Paul reaffirms the foundation of marriage in the doctrine of creation, again grounding it in the sexual difference of man and woman, (Ephesians 5:31-32), and teaches that it is a symbol of Christ’s union with the Church.
 
Jesus and St. Paul explicitly teach a doctrine of marriage that is incompatible with gay marriage. Even if Leviticus and Romans were silent on the subject of homosexual acts, the New Testament teaching that marriage is founded in the creation of male and female would be enough to reject same-sex marriage.

And Princeton’s Prof. Robert George chimed in to point out that this witness to marriage doesn’t start in the New Testament, and isn’t confined to Christianity:

The Biblical witness to marriage as a conjugal relationship first appears in Genesis 2. It is restated in various places, including in the teaching of Jesus. The same basic idea appears in the thought of Greek and Roman thinkers and even some teachers from the Eastern traditions. What, in fact, makes no sense is the idea of non-conjugal marriage–marriage as mere sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership. That explains why it has no patronage in the great faiths or traditions of philosophy.

George’s contribution is also important because it’s a reminder that even though you can’t be an orthodox Christian or Jew and accept gay marriage, you can reject gay marriage for entirely non-religious reasons. All you have to do is understand what marriage is, or understand that men and women are different, and that children deserve a mother and a father. Believing in Scripture will get you to that point, but you can get there apart from Scripture (or faith) as well.

So the gay marriage view that’s supposed to show that we’re a bunch of Biblical hypocrites more accurately shows that the best argument against Jews, Christians, and anyone holding to any of the great philosophical traditions, is just to shout us down, call us nasty names and, where necessary, to use simplistic and deceptive flow charts.

In a recent post here, I asked, “Do You Need God to Know That Abortion is Wrong?” I was prompted by two things: on the one hand, a series of articles defending the idea that we can be moral without God; and on the other, articles like this one, suggesting that opposition to abortion can only be “because God.” Those two positions don't work together. As I explained in the post,

The pro-life argument is simple: (1) human beings are alive from the moment of fertilization, and (2) it is morally wrong (and ought to be illegal) to intentionally kill innocent human beings. The first point is a scientific one. The second is a moral and legal one, one that science can’t answer. You don’t find human rights under a microscope, and there’s no experiment capable of proving that murder is wrong.

Since the scientific point is clear-cut and settled (it's inescapable that unique human beings are created at the moment of fertilization), everything turns on point (2). But the intentional killing of innocent human beings is what the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe calls the “hard core” of the definition of murder. So to frame the question slightly differently, to say that abortion is okay, you have to say that (a) murder is at least sometimes okay, and that (b) abortion falls within this class of exceptions.

This has sparked a lively debate, as well as a rebuttal from Steven Dillon. I want to address the kind of arguments being raised generally first, and then look at what makes Steven's position frightening.

I. Do we need to believe in God to know that all murder is wrong?

Broadly speaking, there are four major types of responses to this question:

1. Only Theists Can be Anti-Murder: If you argue that abortion is wrong because unborn children have souls, or if you argue that abortion is okay (at least up to a certain point) because they don't, you're making arguments that are inaccessible to atheists. In either case, you're acting as if opposition to murder can only be predicated on the presence of the human soul. If killing someone is only wrong if we're sure they have a soul, why aren't atheists pro-murder?
2. Murder isn't Always Wrong: If you argue that abortion is okay because killing one life can sometimes save two, or because our being pro-abortion is necessary for us to justify euthanasia and organ harvesting, then we've got a slightly different issue. In these case, you don't believe that murder is always wrong. You might have personally-convincing reasons for your views, like utilitarianism or a rejection of impaired human life, but at least own your own convictions. If you don't – if you insist on paying lip service to being uniformly opposed to murder, while holding to these positions – your advocacy will necessarily be incoherent, because you're arguing for two irreconcilable positions.
3. It's Okay to Kill Fetuses: If you argue that abortion is okay because unborn children don't meet the requirements to be protected human life, you're not showing that unborn children aren't scientifically and materially human beings. Instead, you're either saying that they're not really humans, for some immaterial and non-scientific reason (like the first group), or that they are a group of humans that it's okay to intentionally kill (like the second). Here, the clearest way forward would be for you to spell out your presumptions and beliefs: e.g., “I think that murder is only wrong when your victim can feel pain at the time of death.”
4. Abortion is Always Wrong: this fourth group includes those, including both religious pro-lifers and nonreligious pro-lifers like Secular Alliance for Life, who treat the prohibition against murder as absolute. This opposition (most clearly in the case of secular pro-lifers) is not based upon their recognition of a human soul. If you reject the existence of the soul and reject all forms of murder, this is the only camp to which you can rationally adhere.

All of Steven's arguments seem to fall within the first category. He doesn't dispute the biological evidence. Instead, he assumes (but stops short of acknowledging) that abortion is wrong only if the fetus has a human soul. If he's right, and you don't believe that anyone has a human soul, then you've got a problem rationally holding to the prohibition against murder.

II. Do We Need Metaphysics to Settle the Abortion Debate?

In his response, Steven takes issue with my twofold formulation. Specifically, he accuses me of conflating terms, between biological humans in (1) and metaphysical humans in (2). I'm actually doing no such thing: I mean human in the same sense in both (1) and (2), and reject the whole idea of humans who are biological-but-not-metaphysical (or vice versa). It's immoral, and ought to be illegal, to murder those that we recognize, scientifically, as human beings. Furthermore, any sort of metaphysical definition of “human” that fails to capture the entire set of all humans is a bad definition.

If Steven wants to hold that you need metaphysics to know that killing innocent human beings is wrong, or if he wants to carve out an exception to the prohibition against murder for those that (according to a metaphysics of his own making) he considers biologically-but-not-metaphysically human, he's free to make those arguments. But recognize that in each of these cases, he's the one shifting the conversation into metaphysics, and the one creating two classes of human beings.

I mention all of this for a simple reason. The rest of this article will be getting into specific metaphysical questions involving the soul. It would be easy, especially for an atheist or someone who thinks that only the natural sciences produce factual knowledge, to write off this whole inquiry as bunk. I certainly understand. But if you're going to do that, recognize that what you're rejecting is not my original argument, but Steven's attempt to carve out a metaphysical exception to the prohibition against murder.

With that in mind, let's dive into the metaphysics directly.

III. Is the Fetus Metaphysically Human?

This is the meat of Steven's argument. He asks, but doesn't answer, an important question: “What gets aborted?” To the extent that he gives any sort of answer, it's by negation. He denies that the fetus is human or even an animal. Based on his trifold distinction, the answer to his questions seems to be that fetuses are now a type of plant, but (likely, for obvious reasons) he doesn't spell out this conclusion.

He is led to this conclusion by two arguments, one good and one bad. The good argument is that there is a threefold distinction between plants (which have metabolism), animals (which can sense), and humans (who can reason). The bad argument is in how he understands this distinction. When Aristotle first proposed this distinction (In Book II, Chapter III of De Anima), he was looking at types of things. That is, a plant is the type of creature that can metabolize, an animal is the type of creature that can move and sense, and humans are the type of creature that can reason. In each case, the higher creatures also have the powers of the lower ones. By this standard, you're a human even when you're not reasoning, even when you're incapable of reasoning, as long as you're the type of creature that's capable of reasoning (which, of course, you are).

When Steven applies this distinction, in contrast, he's looking at whether you can currently employ these powers. That is, an animal is only an animal if it can sense right now. By this definition, you can't let sleeping dogs lie. Having fallen asleep (temporarily losing control over their powers of sensation), they cease to be animals, and thus cease to be dogs. You, too, lose your humanity every night when you fall asleep, by this analysis. You also cease to be a human if you fall into a coma (either permanently or temporarily), enter a sensory deprivation chamber, or get so drunk that your reason is completely impaired. If you go blind or become infertile, you similarly become less human, because you're less capable of employing your sensory or reproductive powers.

It takes very little to see the problems with such a position. After all, if someone slips Rohypnol into your drink and you pass out, are you still a human being with rights that should be protected? If Steven is right that human rights turn on whether you can currently reason or sense, the answer would seem to be no.

IV. What Is the Soul?

This, I think, suffices to answer his arguments, but there's an additional point worth clearing up. We often think of the soul as a sort of “ghost in the machine,” but that's not a good understanding of the soul. The Latin term for soul is “anima,” because it's the immaterial animating principle of the body. This can be shown easily enough, quite apart from Scripture or even philosophy. Simply envision two identical twins, one of whom suddenly dies. On the level of the matter, they are still identical. The same particles are swirling around, as before, and the dead twin has the same body that existed while he was alive, moments ago.

So whatever distinguishes them, whatever separates living things from dead ones, can't be a material difference... even though we can observe its effects on a material level. This principle of animation, separating the living from the dead, is what we call the anima or the soul. It's the organizational principle of the body, the body's “form.” And this is true whether we're talking about humans, or (to use Kreeft's example) cows, or ferns.

In contrast, Steven's inquiry imagines that you can have an animated human being, growing and developing in the womb of her mother, and that at some point, a soul suddenly enters her body. Not so. If you've got a living human, you've got an ensouled human. So the whole thrust of Steven's investigation is founded upon misunderstanding the soul.

So if the question of abortion boils down to a philosophical inquiry into whether or not the fetus has a human soul, very well: he does. But this still leaves me with my original question: does the question of abortion, or murder more broadly, boil down to whether or not the victim is ensouled? If so, where does that leave atheists?
 
 
(Image credit: India Times)

In his recent article "Do You Need God to Know That Abortion is Wrong?", Joe Heschmeyer shares an argument for why abortion is wrong. Now, the point of his article was not to advance or expound upon this argument, but it affords us with an opportunity to look into a common argument against abortion. As he states it, the argument goes like this:

"The pro-life argument is simple: (1) human beings are alive from the moment of fertilization, and (2) it is morally wrong (and ought to be illegal) to intentionally kill innocent human beings."

He goes on to say that “[t]he first point is a scientific one. The second is a moral and legal one, one that science can’t answer.”

Quibbles about validity aside, this simple argument encapsulates one of the most widely held reasons to be pro-life today: abortion is murder. But, the argument involves a number of problems including a crucial reliance upon an ambiguity which, when exposed, commits the pro-lifer to an untenable position.

You’ll notice that proponents of this sort of argument are adamant that (1) is a deliverance of science. And, indeed, “science” does tell us that the organism which humans produce through sexual intercourse is to be biologically classified as “human.” But, biological classifications do not always map to metaphysical classifications, and this becomes especially clear in the case at hand.

Metaphysically, the human being is an animal with rational powers. Her physical structure reflects the fact that she is an animal, and this is only to be expected since matter reflects whatever corporeal form of being it is in – e.g. solid, liquid, gaseous, sub-atomic, etc. But, as my pro-life interlocutors will agree, rationality is not a corporeal form of being. As such, it is not reflected in the physical structure of the human being.

(It may strike some of the Catholics here as bizarre that the presence or absence of rationality in a body makes no difference to its physical structure, but Catholics have long been committed to the position that human beings cannot, of their own power, reproduce members of their species: only God can create the human soul. As such, the body produced by humans only reflects the corporeal forms of being it is in, not the form of rationality.)

But, biologists classify substances according to the corporeal forms of life they come in. This is why you won’t find any talk of rational powers in Joe’s citation of Sandra Alter’s Biology: Understanding Life. In fact, as she says in the quotation, the cycle of human life she is describing is “representative of all animal life cycles.” So, the standards of humanity set by biology are not the same standards of humanity set by metaphysics, though the latter may include the former.

What all this means is that just because an organism satisfies the biologist’s criteria for being human does not mean that it satisfies the metaphysician’s criteria for being human. It’s not enough for a fetus to have this or that genotype, or whatever epigenetic primordia at whatever stage: such features are only reflective of corporeal forms of being, and the metaphysical human being enjoys more than just corporeal forms of being.

The ambiguity in the initial argument should be apparent at this point: in order to be valid, premises (1) and (2) have to mean the same thing by “human being.” But, premise (2) presents a metaphysical understanding of “human being” whereas (1) does not, being only “a scientific one.” Thus, the argument commits the fallacy of equivocation for using the same term in different ways, and the fallacy of non-sequitur for inferring a metaphysical categorization from a biological one.

However, matters are much worse than just that a premier argument against abortion is fallacious on several counts. As was stated above, metaphysically the human being is a rational animal. But, not just any ol’ parcel of matter can pass for an animal: there are features defining of the animal form of life that must be reflected in the matter. Now, my pro-life interlocutors (here at Strange Notions at least), will agree that, in terms of metaphysics, what is distinctive of the animal form of life is the power of sensation. But, nothing can have this power unless it also has the means by which to exercise that power; namely, sense organs. Just try to imagine having a sensation without having any means by which to sense, such as eyes to see or ears to hear.

The problem I’m raising is that there is at least one point in a biological human’s gestation at which she has no sense organs whatsoever: fertilization. Thus, the human zygote does not reflect any of the forms of animal life it would need to in order to be an animal in metaphysical terms. But, if the human zygote is not an animal, then, a fortiori, it is not a rational animal.

The standard pro-life argument encapsulated in Joe’s remarks therefore falls prey to a number of difficulties, including equivocation and non-sequitur. But, the going only gets tougher when we realize that the human zygote isn’t even an animal, let alone a rational one at that.
 
 
(Image credit: Pregnant Now)

The New Republic’s latest contribution to the abortion debate is remarkable, in that, despite getting virtually everything it says factually wrong, it still raises an interesting problem for pro-choicers and atheists. Here’s the Twitter teaser to the piece that started it all:

How the anti-choice platform is fighting to stay alive: http://t.co/m8kuGANs2Q pic.twitter.com/fxTeRyj444

— The New Republic (@newrepublic) April 17, 2015

According to the author of this piece, New Republic senior editor Jamil Smith, (1) the pro-life movement is struggling to survive; (2) the pro-life movement is fueled by ignorance; and (3) pro-lifers are forced to resort to “because God” in defense of their views. Each of these views is demonstrably false, but the third point actually highlights a potentially devastating problem for pro-choicers and atheists.

Is the Pro-Life Movement Dying or Gaining Ground?

Unlike The New Republic, the pro-life movement isn’t struggling to survive. But you don’t have to take my word for that. Just look at the most recent Gallup poll data on Americans’ positions on abortion:

Here’s how Gallup summarized the overall trends in 2012:

"Gallup began asking Americans to define themselves as pro-choice or pro-life on abortion in 1995, and since then, identification with the labels has shifted from a wide lead for the pro-choice position in the mid-1990s, to a generally narrower lead for 'pro-choice' — from 1998 through 2008 — to a close division between the two positions since 2009. However, in the last period, Gallup has found the pro-life position significantly ahead on two occasions, once in May 2009 and again today [2012]. It remains to be seen whether the pro-life spike found this month proves temporary, as it did in 2009, or is sustained for some period."

It noted further that “the decline in Americans’ self-identification as 'pro-choice' is seen across the three U.S. political groups.” So the last two decades have seen a shift for pro-choicers having a wide lead over pro-lifers to pro-choicers having a narrow lead over pro-lifers, to the present, in which the lead is hotly contested. And from this Smith concludes that the pro-life movement is dying? The data shows the opposite: the pro-life movement is not surviving, it’s gaining ground.

More likely, the problem is that Smith is ignorant: Gallup has also found that most Americans mistakenly believe that a majority of America is pro-choice, and that political moderates and pro-choicers are most likely to get this wrong. So Smith’s description of a political movement that is losing ground but remaining ignorantly deluded is an apt one: he’s just applied it to the wrong side of the debate.

Are Pro-Lifers Promoting Ignorance or Asking Inconvenient Questions?

But let’s talk about ignorance and science. Here’s a larger excerpt from Smith’s piece:

"The anti-choice platform survives by propagating one fundamentally flawed truth above all: Conservative politicians know more about medicine than doctors do, because God. That is an explanation that relies upon the ignorance of the persuaded and coerced.

 

Ignorance—both the kind they embrace and the kind they relentlessly promote—has always been a primary tool for conservatives in their battle against reproductive choice. […] The more of us caught up in speculating when life actually begins and questioning the rights of the fetus, the better."

The pro-life movement is actually very much pro-science, and science is on the pro-life side of the question of when life begins. This is from Sandra Alter’s Biology: Understanding Life, a collegiate-level biology textbook for non-majors. It explains the birds and bees for anyone still confused about how reproduction works

"To illustrate, look at the human life cycle diagrammed in Figure 18.13, which is representative of all animal life cycles. A life cycle is the progression of stages an organism passes through from its conception until it conceives another similar organism. The diploid zygote in the diagram represents that part of the life cycle during which the fusion of gametes, or sex cells, from a male and a female of the same species have produced a new individual. The female gamete is the egg, and the male gamete is the sperm.
 

After a person (or other animal) grows to sexual maturity, the sex organs begin to produce gametes by a type of cell division called meiosis (my-OH-sis). During meiosis, one parent cell produces four sex cells, but these cells are not identical to the parent cell. Each sex cell is haploid; that is, it contains half the amount of hereditary material of the original parent cell. It is a single set of genetic information – one of each chromosome. Because of this reduction in chromosome number, one sex cell from each of two parent organisms can join together in a process called fertilization to form the first cell of a new individual that has a full complement of hereditary material. This new cell is diploid. That is, it contains double the haploid amount – a double set of the genetic information, or two of each chromosome. This type of reproduction, which involves the fusion of gametes to produce the first cell of a new individual, is called sexual reproduction."

New life begins the same way in all animals, not just humans. Two gametes, sperm and egg, fuse to form a diploid. This diploid isn’t part of the mother or the father: it’s a genetically-distinct individual member of the species. That’s how we get new birds, new bees, and new boys and girls. On this point, there’s just no serious scientific question. Scientifically literate people don’t wonder, for example, if chicks are alive (or individuated) before they emerge from their eggs. So science teaches that fertilization produces new beings. In the case of humans, the fusion of sperm and egg produces a new human being.

But this doesn’t answer every question in the abortion debate, which is where we get to the most (inadvertently) interesting part of Smith’s piece.

Is Abortion Only Wrong “Because [of] God” or Can Atheists Know It, Too?

That’s an interesting claim for a few reasons. First, because he doesn’t actually quote a single person citing religion in defense of their position: he just ignores the actual reasons given, saying that their reasons are really “because God.” Second, because (Gallup again): “Americans who profess no religious identity are the most heavily pro-choice, at 80%, with 15% calling themselves pro-life.” How would Smith explain those 15%? Are they just pro-life “because God”? Smith claims that the pro-life justification for its position is simply “because of God.” Well, actually he says that it’s “because God,” and that this is why “conservative politicians” claim to know more about medicine than doctors, but that’s a bit of an incoherent mess. What he’s driving at, as near as I can tell, is that opposition to abortion can only be due to religious reasons.

But the third reason is that if Smith is right, this is a damning critique of atheism.

The pro-life argument is simple: (1) human beings are alive from the moment of fertilization, and (2) it is morally wrong (and ought to be illegal) to intentionally kill innocent human beings. The first point is a scientific one. The second is a moral and legal one, one that science can’t answer. You don’t find human rights under a microscope, and there’s no experiment capable of proving that murder is wrong.

Our scientific knowledge gets us far enough to say that abortion is the intentional killing of a human being, so we can say that if all human beings are entitled to basic human rights, then we must recognize unborn humans as having these rights, as well. But science can’t say if the intentional killing of innocent human beings is murder, or if murder is wrong, or if human rights exist.

So here’s why I say that Smiths’ piece ends up being an inadvertent contribution to the broader debate on abortion, as well as on religion. I frequently see two types of pieces from secular writers:

1. Articles declaring that we can be good without God, that atheists are just as moral as anyone else, etc.
2. Articles like this one, claiming that we can only know that killing people is wrong “because God,” in which case a truly universal respect for human rights can only come from a religious worldview.

"The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: 'If God did not exist, everything would be permitted'; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse. [….]
 
No one can tell what the painting of tomorrow will be like; one cannot judge a painting until it is done. What has that to do with morality? We are in the same creative situation. We never speak of a work of art as irresponsible; when we are discussing a canvas by Picasso, we understand very well that the composition became what it is at the time when he was painting it, and that his works are part and parcel of his entire life. It is the same upon the plane of morality.There is this in common between art and morality, that in both we have to do with creation and invention. We cannot decide a priori what it is that should be done."

The third group of atheists simply try to have la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca (“the barrel full and the wife drunk,” Italy’s colorful take on “to have your cake and eat it, too”). But this third position isn’t tenable.

So in spite of Smith’s gross ignorance of the statistical growth of the pro-life movement, the scientific origins of human beings, and the actual arguments used by pro-lifers, he’s stumbled into something resembling an interesting point. He (apparently) thinks that only God can coherently undergird the opposition to murdering unborn children. Non-believers and pro-choicers, is he right?
 
 
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Gary Gutting is a Notre Dame philosophy professor who thinks that what counts about arguments is whether they “work.” And so his complaint against natural-law arguments for Catholic teachings about sex is that they “no longer work (if they ever did)”. His New York Times “Opinionator” post of March 12th (“Unraveling the Church Ban on Gay Sex”) names us as two people who are “still” exponents of such arguments. For us what counts about an argument is whether it is sound, i.e., whether its premises are true and its logic valid. If a line of thought about the morality of sex is reasonable today, it was reasonable in the time of Jesus or Plato or Abraham or as far back as we find men and women and their children. Whether arguments “work” persuasively in one era but not another is philosophically irrelevant, as any philosopher should take for granted.

Gutting seems to think none of the positions of Judeo-Christian civilization on sex ethics are true, though he mentions only a few acts or practices that his own principles would leave immune from moral objection, carefully stopping short of calling attention to others such as polygamy, polyamory, prostitution, adultery, promiscuity, incest, bestiality and the man-boy sex that Plato’s friends and associates admired (but Plato himself condemned, like his teacher Socrates as Plato depicts him). This is not surprising, since his whole article never mentions, even by implication, the idea that grounds and unifies the whole set of sex-morality teachings, not only for Catholicism but also for Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other great thinkers.

The idea is not “heterosexual union,” nor “shared acts directed towards reproduction,” nor any of the other concepts Gutting refers to and associates with “nature.” Instead, it’s the idea—the intrinsic human value—of marriage.

Even apart from any question of its legal status, marriage is a natural form of human association, with its own basic structure and value. It is the sort of loving union inherently oriented to family life; it is the sort of living bond that by its nature would be fulfilled—extended and enriched—by the bearing and rearing of children. Children by their nature need such familial, parental nurture, support, and guidance; by their coming to be, they make possible the continuance and flourishing of the wider society whose aid and social capital made feasible the wellbeing of their parents and other forebears.

Of course, people sometimes band together in other arrangements with a view to child-rearing, and other forms of association can realize other types of (non-erotic) love. But only a man and woman together can commit to a loving union of the kind inherently oriented to family life and appropriate to being the mother and the father of their children. What this procreative-parental commitment and union require is an especially deep and far-reaching bond: the man and woman’s making the most extensive and permanent of human mutual commitments to sharing of life and earthly destiny, centered upon a permanently exclusive sexual relationship. The shaping end of procreation-and-nurturing thus unifies and explains all the features of marriage as “traditionally” understood: permanent exclusivity, sexual consummation, family life, and a radical union of the persons (in body as well as mind, in the wide-range pursuits of domestic life) that is uniquely extensive across time (“until death us do part”) and at each time (exclusive).

Because marriage is in these ways (i) an especially complete loving union (ii) of the sort oriented to procreation, it is uniquely embodied in sex acts with the same dual nature: acts that are (i) chosen as a seal of their complete (permanently exclusive) marital love-and-commitment (ii) and of the sort apt to make them (where circumstance allows) parents, the mother and father of their children. Only coital acts—chosen with a will to permanently exclusive marital love—can actualize, express, and allow the husband and wife to more fully experience their marriage—the multi-level (physical, emotional, rational-dispositional) sharing of life whose foundation and matrix is the biological unity made uniquely possible by sexual-reproductive complementarity. That explains why historically in our law (and in philosophical accounts of the intelligibility of the pertinent legal norms) only acts of spouses that fulfill the behavioral conditions of procreation have validly consummated marriage—and they do that whether or not the non-behavioral conditions of procreation happen to obtain. In short, only such sex acts are marital.

Moral reasoning is “of a natural law kind,” whether in St. Paul or St. Thomas Aquinas—or in Plato, Aristotle, Musonius Rufus, and others untouched by Jewish or Christian thought—not because it tries to read premises or conclusions off biological or sociological facts. It doesn’t. Instead, it considers what are the basic forms of human flourishing: conditions or activities that are good for us in themselves: friendship, knowledge, life and health, and the like. The identification of these of course takes into account biological and other cause-and-effect facts. But it is focused not on those but on the intrinsic goodness of the various elements of human fulfillment. We can then reason to the moral goodness and badness of types of choice and act by considering which choices are consistent with love and respect for ourselves and all others in regard to each of these basic dimensions of fulfillment. A choice consistent with love and respect for all the goods in all persons is morally upright; one that isn’t, is immoral.

That determination of consistency must take into account the fundamental circumstances of all our choices and acts. The basic goods for which we can act are many and various, so we cannot realize them all at once. But they all remain always goods, and each in its own irreplaceable way. So in pursuing some, we ought not to choose to denigrate or damage any of the others. And as they are goods for all people, we ought not to let our choosing be deflected by prejudice, wayward passion, and the like.

Now one of the basic human goods, as each of the thinkers mentioned above—and not just the Catholics or other Christians—understood, is marriage. So sex ethics unfolds by considering the conditions under which choices to engage in sex acts are consistent with the good of marriage. A few sentences in a short essay such as this one are not enough to show the good sense of this unfolding by defending and deploying its premises in ordered sequence to their conclusions. But one key to understanding it all is to grasp that—aside from obvious forms of injustice and harm-doing involving sex, especially the various forms of rape and some aspects of incest—every conclusion about wrong kinds of sex act is of the form: this kind of choice is wrong because it is unreasonable because it is against the good of marriage that is intrinsic to human fulfillment (of mother, father, their children, and their society). All forms of morally bad sex are against human nature because they are contrary to integral human fulfillment and therefore against reason.

The fact that from a limited perspective they may, as Gutting writes, be experienced or conceptualized as contributing to “meaning, growth and fulfillment” does not show that they truly are—that is, that they can be integrated with human fulfillment considered in a more rationally adequate way. Plato himself exposed the fallacy of thinking otherwise, at the very founding of Professor Gutting’s academic discipline. What satisfies desire or induces pleasure, however good or bad it is in its full reality, will likely be experienced, at least initially, as promising meaning, fulfillment, and even personal growth—the elements of Gutting’s truncated and superficial replacement of natural law theory.

The point of philosophical reflection is to evaluate prospective choices from a critical-rational standpoint in order to assess their compatibility with human fulfilment traced to its ultimate principles in the basic human goods, and considered holistically or integrally. Indeed, the contrary thought, applied to sex—as in Gutting’s post—would make it impossible to justify general moral exclusions of promiscuity, or anonymous sex, each of which can satisfy desire, and in each of which some people report finding meaning or personal satisfaction. (Thus, John Updike extensively expounded in novels and life the “sacrament of [serial] adultery,” and Andrew Sullivan the “spiritual value” of anonymous sex—i.e. intimate relations among strangers who do not even share their names with each other. Can Gutting find grounds consistent with his rejection of our views for denying what Updike, Sullivan, and many others claim? We don’t think so, though he is, of course, welcome to try.)

So Gutting’s arguments to show that homosexual sex acts can be morally right are all beside the point. He has invented a weird straw-man “natural-law” “selfish pleasure” argument against same-sex sex acts, and knocked it down. But it is not an argument either of us has ever endorsed. The natural-law argument against such acts is essentially the same as against any other kind of non-marital sex—from masturbation to fornication to adultery to bestiality. (The last is more degrading than the others, of course, in expressing an equality between persons and beasts; these kinds of act aren’t alike in every morally significant respect and degree—the point is just that there is one morally disqualifying feature they all share.) If popular speech singles out some of these acts—masturbation, same-sex sex acts, or indeed acts with beasts—as “unnatural,” it is because they are especially visibly not of the marital kind, involving behavior visibly not of the procreative sort. But the truly morally significant thing about all non-marital sex acts is that, in diverse forms, they involve disrespect for the basic good of marriage.

There are several ways to see this disrespect. Here, in these next four paragraphs, is one. Adequately respecting any basic good requires, among other things, not setting one’s will directly against any conditions essential and internal to that good. Now if a husband and wife do not reserve sex to their marriage, then even their sex acts with each other can’t really actualize and embody their marital bond: for these acts can’t express a truly exclusive commitment, which marriage inherently is. The husband and wife’s firm will to reserve sex for each other is, then, an essential condition of any sex they have with each other being marital sex. Even just a husband’s conditional willingness to engage in sex with someone else—e.g., “if the circumstances ever ensured that my wife wouldn’t find out…”—disables the marital quality of his sex acts with his wife, whether or not he ever actually cheats; and likewise for a wife.

Similarly, if people are willing to perform a sex act that fails to embody permanent commitment, or a bond that is procreative in type (whether or not it is, or can in the circumstances be, procreative in effect), they disable themselves from willing in such a way that their sexual congress can actualize and express the good of marriage, which is inherently permanent and procreative in type. Even mere approval of anyone’s non-marital sexual conduct implies a conditional willingness to engage in such acts oneself—namely, if one were in relevantly similar circumstances. That is, such approval implies willingness to choose sex under a description (e.g., “simply pleasing to all three of us,” or “simply expressive of affection,” or “simply conducive to my psycho-somatic health”) other than: marital.

Any such willingness vitiates an essential condition internal to any realization of the good of marriage and damages that aspect of ourselves—our human nature—that makes us, to quote Aristotle, conjugal beings. (Aristotle is famous for teaching that the human being is by nature a political animal; what is less often recalled is his teaching that human beings are even more fundamentally conjugal than political.) So it involves a failure to respect that basic human good; so it involves immorality, whether or not one is married or plans to be.

And because this particular basic good is so central to the common good, failures to respect it—forms of willing or willingness at odds with it—are also failures of due respect for the good of one’s whole society. This is not a merely abstract or “merely moral” matter: Such contra-marital attitudes easily spread and cause tremendous and quite visible social harm, as the carnage of the Sexual Revolution makes clear—harm measured in broken hearts and homes, fatherless children, and broader related injustices.

Plato, Aristotle, Paul, and everyone in the tradition understood that everyone unwillingly experiences some disordered tendencies towards some non-marital acts, and that some experience disordered tendencies exclusively to non-marital acts. They also understood that many who choose to engage in same-sex sexual relations do not have such an exclusive tendency. Their moral arguments are valid for both and all kinds of persons, though harder for some to live up to than for others.

Catholic sexual ethics is “still” as fully reasonable today as it was when St Paul expounded it—and identified prostitution and same-sex sex acts as obviously or visibly far out of line with it—as the sort of thing that people would lose their sound judgment about if and only if they or their society were blind to or careless about the omnipresent, invisible reality of divine causation ex nihilo, divine providence, and the possibility of a divinely willed human destiny beyond death. The natural law understanding of human fulfillment is inherently intelligible without adverting to that “theistic” framework. But when reason closes itself off against the real framework as a true whole—in thought decapitating it—other distortions of understanding and judgment will ensue, especially in reason’s practical domain, where desire and satisfaction provide every incentive to rationalization of misjudgment.

The Archbishop of San Francisco wasn’t depending on natural law philosophizing when he said (what Gutting takes his cue from) that homosexual acts are against nature. He was just repeating Paul’s letter to the Romans, where the connections between reason, conscience, natural law, divine existence, and the divine revealed will and promise for human wellbeing are laid out as building blocks of the Catholic faith. But the concordance of this revealed faith with the best philosophy untouched by Hebrew sources, as a higher synthesis of the insights of Plato and Aristotle and many others, is just a sign of its perennial validity. Another equally telling sign is its good fruit—the good fruit of its exclusions and its condemnations of certain kinds of choice. These include the protection of children's rights to have a father and a mother exclusively and devotedly theirs, in fruitful families within a civil society that can fulfill the elementary conditions of sustainability: large numbers of marriages generously welcoming children who are nurtured in dignity and supported in respect for (and willingness to adopt in their turn) this fulfilling, generous, but demanding form of life.
 
 
This article was co-written by Robert P. George and John Finnis. Robert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, at Princeton University. John Finnis is Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy Emeritus in the University of Oxford and the Biolchini Family Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. The article was originally posted at Public Discourse and reprinted here with permission.
 
 
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Let me respond first to the charge of puritanism. Throughout the history of religion and philosophy, a puritanical strain is indeed apparent. Whether it manifests itself as Manichaeism, Gnosticism, or Platonic dualism, the puritanical philosophy teaches that spirit is good and matter is evil or fallen. In most such schemas, the whole purpose of life is to escape from matter, especially from sexuality, which so ties us to the material realm. But authentic Biblical Christianity is not puritanical. The Creator God described in the book of Genesis made the entire panoply of things physical — planets, stars, the moon and sun, animals, fish and even things that creep and crawl upon the earth — and found all of it good, even very good. Accordingly, there is nothing perverse or morally questionable about bodies, sex, sexual longing or the sexual act. In fact, it’s just the contrary. When, in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus himself is asked about marriage and sexuality, he hearkens back to the book of Genesis and the story of creation: “At the beginning of creation God made them male and female; for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and the two shall become as one. They are no longer two but one flesh” (Mk. 10:6-8). That last sentence is, dare I say it, inescapably “sexy.” Plato might have been a puritan, and perhaps John Calvin too, but Jesus most certainly was not.

So given this stress on the goodness of sex and sexual pleasure, what separates the Christian view from, say, the “Playboy” philosophy? The simple answer is that, for Biblical people, sexuality must be placed in the wider context of love, which is to say willing the good of the other. It is fundamental to Catholic spirituality and morality that everything in life must be drawn magnetically toward love, must be conditioned and transfigured by love. Thus, one’s business concerns must be marked by love, lest they devolve into crass materialism; and one’s relationships must be leavened by love, lest they devolve into occasions for self-interested manipulation; even one’s play must be directed toward love, lest it devolve into mere self-indulgence. Sex is no exception to this rule. The goodness of sexual desire is designed, by its very nature, to become ingredient in a program of self-forgetting love and hence to become something rare and life enhancing. If you want to see what happens when this principle is ignored, take a long hard look at the hookup culture prevalent among many young — and not so young — people today. Sex as mere recreation, as contact sport, as a source only of superficial pleasure has produced armies of the desperately sad and anxious, many who have no idea that it is precisely their errant sexuality that has produced such deleterious effects in them. When sexual pleasure is drawn out of itself by the magnetic attraction of love, it is rescued from self-preoccupation.

Now there is a third step as well, for human love must be situated in the context of divine purpose. Once Jesus clarified that male and female are destined to become one flesh, he further specified that “What God has joined together,” no human being should put asunder. When I was working full time as a parish priest, I had the privilege of preparing many young couples for marriage. I would always ask them, “Why do you want to be married in church?” After some hesitation, the young people would invariably respond with some version of “Well, we're in love,” to which I would respond, “I'm delighted that you're in love, but that’s no reason to be married in church!” My point was that entering into a properly sacramental marriage implied that the bride and groom realized that they had been brought together by God and precisely for God’s reasons, that their sexuality and their mutual love were in service of an even higher purpose. To make their vows before a priest and a Catholic community, I would tell them, was tantamount to saying that they knew their relationship was sacramental — a vehicle of God’s grace to the wider world. This final contextualization guaranteed that sexuality — already good in itself and already elevated by love — had now something truly sacred.

Our culture has become increasingly Nietzchean, by which I mean obsessed with the power of self-creation. This is why toleration is the only objective value that many people recognize, and why freedom, especially in the arena of sexuality, is so highly prized. It is furthermore why attempts to contextualize sex within higher frameworks of meaning are so often mocked as puritanism or fussy antiquarianism. Thank God that, amidst the million voices advocating self-indulgent sexuality, there is at least the one voice of the Catholic Church shouting “No,” a no in service of a higher Yes!
 
 
Originally posted at Word on Fire. Text from CNA. Used with author's permission.
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