There also seem to be some other counter-intuitive implications of the Cartesian view.  Since the body is the property of an immaterial soul, and since property can be bought and sold, prostitution and selling oneself into slavery would seem to be morally permissible.  Moreover, just as one’s stereo, car, and house are his property, debt-collectors and the government may seize one’s body and force him into slavery, given that they have a sufficient reason for doing so.

A better approach (And this happens to be my own view) would be to defend a form of hylomorphism in which one’s body and soul are seen as interconnected.  This view is defended by scholars such as Robert P. George, Francis Beckwith (I think), and J. P. Moreland.

Good God & Evil World (in 18 Minutes) from Paul Copan on Vimeo.

Let’s say that we had a photo album which chronicled your development from infant to adult (If you’re not an adult, then substitute your current age).  It’s sensible to say that throughout those developmental stages, it was you who developed — the very idea was implicitly assumed when I said the photo album was of your development.   Each photo, therefore, is of you at various stages in life.  Say we turn to the front page, and we see a sonogram image of a fetus.  Are you the fetus present in that sonogram image?  Evidently so, as there seems to be no essential difference between the fully grown you and the unborn fetus.  After all, every other image in the album is of you, so why wouldn’t you be the individual depicted by the sonogram image?  Just as you were once a teenager, a preteen, a toddler, and an infant, you were once a fetus.

If the point isn’t obvious enough, look at your mother.  Is she not your mother who gave birth to you? Weren’t you the individual that she was pregnant with X years ago? She didn’t give birth to your body, she gave birth to you. The same point is true of your father.  He is your father, not merely just the father of your body.  They’re both your parents, not the parents of your body.

Moving on, is it wrong to murder you now?  Obviously!  But why?  Well, because you are a human person, and human persons have a right to life.  This point is relatively uncontroversial, one that most proponents of abortion choice would grant.  Now would it have been wrong if I murdered you a year ago or a year from now?  Yes, because you are still a human person with a right to life.  Consequently, if you are a human person, and if you are the same individual that was depicted in the sonogram image, then it follows that the fetus is a human person with a right to life.  Therefore, if it is wrong to kill you now, it would have been wrong to kill you then.  Abortion, therefore, is prima facie morally wrong.  We can state the argument as follows:

1. Human persons have a right to life
2. The grown counterpart of a fetus is a human person
3. Fetuses are identical to their grown counterparts
4. Therefore, fetuses are human persons  (from 2, 3)
5. Therefore, fetuses have a right to life (from 1-4)

The first two premises are uncontroversial, and are granted by nearly all pro-choice advocates.  The third premise, as we have seen, is also an obvious truth.  To deny that premise would be to deny that you have parents!  They wouldn’t be your parents, they would be your body’s parents. But it is obviously true that the individual whom you call “your mother” gave birth to you and that the individual whom you call “your father” fathered you.  Finally, the fourth and fifth premises follow logically from the first three.

Most people, be them pro-choice or not, will tend to affirm that they were once a fetus.  Yet they are unaware of the logical entailments of this belief.  Sometimes, they will attempt to bite the bullet and deny that they were ever a fetus.  But the chances are, if this point had nothing to do with abortion, then they would have no difficulty in asserting that they were once a fetus.  So it seems to me to be rather ad hoc and contrived.

For further reading, see this paper by Patrick Lee and this paper by Alexander Pruss.  Also worth reading is Francis Beckwith’s Defending Life (Cambridge University Press) and Scott Klusendorf’s The Case for Life (Crossway).

Capitalism’s reputation has taken a beating in light of the recent financial crisis.  According to politicians and pundits from both sides of the spectrum, capitalism is to blame.  Not so, say Austin Hill and Scott Rae, who argue in their new book The Virtues of Capitalism that capitalism is our best bet.  In fact, according to Hill and Rae, capitalism “remains the preferred economic system, even the necessary economic system, for any society that upholds a true sense of human rights.”

Hill and Rae approach economics from a distinctly Christian perspective, showing capitalism to be both consistent with and supported by the Bible’s teachings.  Contrary to some, the sharing of goods as described in Acts does not advocate socialism.   The sharing of goods was voluntary, as opposed to forced.  Moreover, the authors show that economics itself is deeply intertwined with moral issues.  Economic conditions can act as a powerful motivator either to encourage or discourage virtuous conduct. “[B]e honest and ask yourself: Is it ever more difficult to be the kind of spouse or parent that one aspires to be, when the economy is slow and personal finances are scarce? … [W]hen finances are plentiful, can the enjoyment of material goods enable a person to avoid or neglect other important areas of their relationships?  And a final question… can economics impact one’s relationship with their God.”

Several misconceptions about capitalism are also dealt with.  These include myths such as “The rich get richer at the expense of the poor,” “Capitalism is based on greed,” and “Capitalism leads to overconsumption and materialism.”  Economics is not a zero-sum game, argue Hill and Rae, and is based on self-interest rather than greed (There’s an important distinction between the two).  They explicitly reject Ayn Rand’s response to the greed objection, which recognizes greed to be good.

Then, in plain and lucid language, Hill and Rae explain why the financial markets failed as they did.   They go all the back to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990′s and trace the events which led up to the housing bubble. The markets failed not because of capitalism, but chiefly because of  excessive government regulations, and the the reckless behavior that results when government intervenes to shield people from accountability.  In another chapter, Hill and Rae make the case that government intervention in free-markets is more of a hindrance than a help.  ”Generally speaking, government does not use resources as efficiently as do individual citizens and private enterprises.”

Still, the authors recognize that capitalism has its limits.  While it not may be the perfect system, it’s the best out of all we have.  ”Capitalism,” said Winston Churchill “is surely the worst economic system, except for all the others that have been tried.”  There are several pre-requisites that a society must fill before capitalism can flourish.  These are what Hill and Rae mean by the virtues of capitalism.  They list five such virtues, these being: creativity, initiative, cooperation, civility, and responsibility. Most important, however, is a stable moral system, which “is the sine qua non of the political system and the economic system. It reinforces the incentives provided by the political system, as it provides a moral foundation for personal habits and behaviors necessary for prosperity.”

Overall, it’s a great and easy to understand book.  One drawback, however, is that it’s a bit shallow.  For a deeper resource, I would recommend Jay W. Richard’s Money, Greed and God: Why Capitalism Is The Solution and Not The Problem.

So even if I grant this pro-choice argument, it ends up proving nothing.  If anything, it backfires.  As it turns out, it is more of a rhetorical jab than a factually based argument.

The idea that things have natural purposes or proper functions is not a truth that can be known only through special revelation.  Following Thomas Aquinas, it is a truth that can be known through both faith and reason.  The difference between articles of faith and articles of reason lies not in their status as truths (There is no such things as degrees of truths — something is either true or not true), but in how they are known. “A reason does not gain more or less truth by being ‘secular.’  For ‘secular,’ like ‘tall,’ ‘fat,’ ‘stinky’ or ‘sexy,’ has no bearing on the quality of the reason one may offer in an argument.”¹ The objector who argues that the concept of proper function has no place in ethical or political discussions because it is an article of faith is thus confusing the order of knowing with the order of being.

Something is functioning properly and according to its natural purpose² if it is operating in the way that it was intended to.  The purpose of eyes is thus to see and of planes to fly.  Eyes which see well and planes which fly well are thus properly functioning; by the same token, eyes which cannot see and planes which cannot fly are not properly functioning.

Are these natural purposes imagined?  Evidently not.  Does it not seem right to say that nutrition is the purpose of eating, that mobility is the function of our legs, that filtration is the purpose of our kidneys, and that protection is the purpose of our immune system?  To deny this, I think, is pure absurdity.  Writes J. Budziszewski:

Take the power of breathing.  When we say that its purpose — viewed from another angle, its meaning — is to oxygenate the blood, are we making it up?  Plainly not.  The purpose isn’t in the eye of the beholder; it is an inference from the design of the lungs.  To say that the purpose of P is to bring about Q, two conditions must be satisfied. First, P must actually bring about Q. [Emphasis mine] This condition is satisfied because breathing does oxygenate the blood. Second, it must be the case that the fact that P brings about Q is necessary for explaining why there is P in the first place. [Emphasis mine] The condition is also satisfied, because apart from the oxygenation of blood there is no way to explain why the power to breath should have developed.  We can ascertain the purposes of the other features of our design in the same way that we ascertain the purpose of breathing.³

The very act of arguing against belief in natural purposes on the basis that it is a false view assumes that natural purposes exist; namely, that the purpose of the mind is to know truth.  The detractor of this position could not urge us, therefore, to believe his position because it is true — for on his own view, the mind does not have the purpose of knowing truth.  We might as well believe in falsehoods.  Rational discourse is thus undermined by denying that natural purposes exist.

Inferring from the biology of our sexual organs, it is evident that their purpose to procreate⁴. Indeed, it is pleasurable, but pleasure is not the purpose of sex.  If pleasure were indeed its purpose, then we could use it to justify acts such as rape, pedophilia, and necrophilia on the basis that they feel good.  Thus, the proper function of our sexual organs is to function in a way which fosters procreation.  Homosexual acts, which go against the natural purpose of our sexual organs, result in their improper function.  Moreover, procreation fulfills the two criteria outlined by Budziszewski (See above), whereas pleasure does not.

The argument, of course, is not merely that homosexual acts result in the improper function of our sexual organs, but that they are immoral because of this. But how might we move from a merely descriptive premise to a prescriptive premise?  After all, “is” does not imply “ought.”  In responding to this charge (Known as the naturalistic fallacy), we need to highlight the distinction between “predicative” and “attributive” adjectives.⁵

A predicative adjective, according to philosopher Peter Geach⁶, is something that means the same no matter what it is applied to. Roundness, for example, would count as an predicative adjective.  No matter what we attribute it to — a round coin, a round marble, a round ball, etc… It still has the same meaning.  An attributive adjective, by contrast, has a meaning that varies depending on what we predicate it of.  So for example, a bright student, a bright light, and a bright future all use different meanings of the adjective “bright.”

Good is most clearly an attributive adjective.  A “good” car is obviously different from a “good” ear.  But what does it mean to say that a car is good or that an ear is good?  According to Geach, something is good if it functions in the way that it should (Proper function).  On this understanding of good, a healthy heart is good because it is properly functioning according to its purpose, which is to pump blood.  A bad heart is thus one that does not accomplish its intended purpose.  This allows us then to generate a prescriptive conclusion from a descriptive premise.  When something functions according to its natural purpose (description), then it is good (prescription).   And because good is something that ought to be pursued, the proper thing to do with a bad heart is to help it be a good heart.  If it were impossible to derive an “ought” from an “is,” the discipline of medicine would make no sense.⁷

It follows from this that because homosexual acts go against the natural purpose of our sexual organs, they are immoral.

1. Francis J. Beckwith, Politics for Christians: Statecraft as Soulcraft (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity. 2010) p.133
2. By natural purpose, I do not mean that something functions properly if it occurs naturally
3. J. Budziszewski, The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction (Wilmington, DE: ISI. 2009) p.12
4. Specifically, it is “the loving procreative partnership of the spouses,” as stated by Budziszewski via email correspondence
5. The following is reproduced and modified from my previous entry
6. Peter Geach, “Good and Evil” Analysis. 1956
7. J. Budziszewski pointed this out to me in email correspondence

I was wondering if you all can give your thoughts on Homosexuality.  I would like to know why you think it is immoral (if you even do), and if ‘Homosexual Christians’ are going to Hell.

Thanks for the question!  The Christian position on homosexuality is certainly a topic which can ruffle the feathers of many people in modern society.  The traditional Christian view on this matter has always been that homosexuality is immoral — a corruption of God’s design plan for humans.  This is enunciated very clearly within the framework of both the Old and New Testaments in the Bible.

Within the Old Testament, we see the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah for their homosexual activities.  The Levitical law is clear in stating that “you shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination.”¹  Likewise, the New Testament is very transparent in its condemnation of homosexuality.  We are told that homosexuals will not inherit the kingdom of God² and that homosexual acts are degrading and unproper³.

The purpose of our sexual organs, moreover, is also clearly stated in Genesis.  Their purpose lends some insight as to why homosexuality is immoral.  Our sexual organs were designed to be complement those of the opposite gender — that is their natural use.  Homosexuality distorts this and uses them in a way that is unnatural. It is precisely for this simple reason that homosexuality is immoral.

Now at this point you might object that this sort of reasoning commits the naturalistic fallacy.  After all, isn’t it wrongheaded to infer a prescription (“Ought”) from a description (“Is”)?  Not so.  In order to respond to this objection, we need to highlight the distinction between “predicative” and “attributive” adjectives.⁴

A predicative adjective, according to philosopher Peter Geach, is something that means the same no matter what it is applied to. Roundness, for example, would count as an example.  No matter what we attribute it to — a round coin, a round marble, a round ball, etc… It still has the same meaning.

By contrast, an attributive adjective has a meaning that varies depending on what we predicate it of.  So for example, a bright student, a bright light, and a bright color all use different meanings of the adjective “bright.”

With this distinction in mind, good is most clearly an attributive adjective.  A “good” car is obviously different from a “good” ear.  But what does it mean to say that a car is good or that an ear is good?  According to Geach, something is good if it functions how in the way that it should.  On this understanding of good, a healthy heart is good because it is properly functioning according to its purpose, which is to pump blood.  A bad heart is thus one that does not accomplish its intended purpose.  This allows us then to generate a prescriptive conclusion from a descriptive premise.  When something functions according to its natural purpose (description), then it is good (prescription).

As outlined before, the purpose of our sexual organs is for procreation.  When homosexuals use their organs in a way which deviates from their natural purpose, then it is immoral because it they are not functioning in a way that they should be.  ”If it really were impossible to derive an ought from the is of the human design, then the practice of medicine would make no sense.”⁵

Now, for the second part of your question — I don’t think that there can be such thing as a homosexual Christian, if by a homosexual Christian you mean one that willingly engages in homosexual practices.  Certainly there are Christians who are tempted with homosexual desires, but one of the fruits of a Christian is that he try to avoid sinful behavior.  Admittedly, Christians still stumble at times, but we have good reasons to doubt the sincerity of a self-proclaimed Christian who willingly continues to engage in sinful activity (Such as homosexuality).  Christians who are tempted with homosexual desires should thus restrain themselves from engaging in them instead of freely and unashamedly indulging in homosexual acts (Such as many self-proclaimed “gay Christians”).

I hope this answers your question, feel free to write back!

________________

Submissions are now open for the next question of the week

1. Lev. 18:22
2. 1 Cor. 6:9-20
3. Romans 1:26-28
4. Many thanks to Professor J. Budziszewski, who pointed out all the following to me in e-mail correspondence
5. J. Budziszewski, The Line Though the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2009) p.13

How are we to define God? A starting definition can be found in the Proslogion of St. Anselm, where he defines God as “that to which no greater can be conceived.”¹ On this view, known as perfect being theology, God is said to have the greatest possible range of compossible great-making properties, where a great-making property is defined as a property whose possession is intrinsically good.² This entails that God must have certain properties, some of which include: omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, benevolence, incorporeality, eternity, and necessity.³ While perfect being theology is certainly useful in providing a canvas to which the Christian can use to develop the concept of God, it alone is not sufficient, for the Christian worldview is founded upon a number of doctrines that are revealed only through special revelation. Thus, while perfect being theology is useful in revealing what God is, it cannot tell us who He is. To do that, we need to venture into the area of special revelation, which is God’s revelation of himself through supernatural means.

The Christian grand story holds that the universe was created ex nihilo (Out of nothing) by God.⁴ This included humans, who were created as free agents and whose exercise of that freedom turned them in rebellion against God; thus damning themselves to eternal separation from God (Hell). In his infinite mercy and grace, God himself became incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ and was crucified as a substitution for the sins of mankind. He then was resurrected and rose bodily. All of this is revealed in the Bible, a compilation of sixty-six books written by different authors which are regarded as divinely inspired and inerrant.

Christians profess belief in a Trinitarian monotheistic conception of God. That is, they hold God to be three persons in one essence. Picture a triangle, in which three angles exist in one shape. God is not, contrary to some popular misconceptions of the Trinity, three persons and one person – an obviously incoherent and contradictory notion. Additionally, the three persons of the Trinity are distinct. The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father.⁵

All this, however, leaves unsettled a more fundamental point: the existence of God. After all, what good is it to talk about God unless we can demonstrate that He exists? There are several methodologies that can be employed in accomplishing this task.⁶ Arguments from natural theology are usually the most common. Natural theology seeks to demonstrate the existence of God through general revelation, which encompasses what God has revealed about himself in nature. Although it cannot specifically demonstrate the truth of Christianity, it is very useful in setting the initial groundwork by demonstrating the existence of a generic conception of deity that is very similar to the Christian conception of God. Once that has been accomplished, the evidential approach can be employed to demonstrate the existence of the Christian conception of God.

Several common arguments from natural theology include the cosmological, ontological, teleological, and axiological arguments. Versions of the cosmological argument rely on a causal principle which seeks to ground the existence of contingent beings in God, who is a necessary being). The kalam variant consists of three simple premises: 1) Whatever begins to exist has cause, 2) The universe began to exist, and 3) Therefore, the universe has a cause. The first premise is usually considered to be the most uncontroversial of the three, as it essentially states that something cannot come from nothing. The second premise is supported by both philosophical and scientific arguments. According to modern big bang cosmology, the past duration of the universe is finite, which implies it began to exist. The denial of the second premise also presupposes the existence of an actually infinite past, which is absurd because the existence of an actual infinite in reality leads to contradictions.⁷ The third premise follows logically from the other two.

The ontological argument is very controversial within modern philosophy of religion, with prominent philosophers taking both sides of the debate. According to modal version of the argument, developed most famously by the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, if it is even possible for God to exist, then He must exist.⁸ This inference is based on the S5 system of modal logic.⁹ If a maximally great being possibly exists exists, then it exists in a possible world W. However, if a maximally great being exists on one possible world, then it must exist on all possible worlds by virtue of being maximally great, since this entails that it is necessary existent. A maximally great being must therefore exist in the actual world. Therefore, God exists. This deceptively simply argument, in all of its different forms, remains hotly debated today.

There are several forms of the teleological argument, of which include the fine-tuning and irreducible complexity arguments. The former argues that the universe as a whole must have been designed by an intelligent Creator because of the fine-tuning of certain cosmological constants such as the gravitational constant, which, if altered to a minute degree would result in a universe which was not life-sustaining.¹⁰ Arguments from irreducible complexity are based on the intricacy of certain biological systems which can only function if all of its parts are present. A common example used by intelligent design proponents would be the bacterial flagellum.¹¹

Commonly known as the moral argument, the axiological argument seeks to ground the existence of objective moral values in a divine lawgiver. Objective moral values are statements of morality which are true for all people and cultures, regardless of their opinion. Examples would be: “Murder is wrong” and “Do unto others as they would do unto you.” We all recognize intuitively that their existence is properly basic beliefs – that is, they are self-evident truths. The belief that it is wrong to torture babies for fun is as evident as the belief that the external world exists. But in who or what are these moral prescriptions grounded in? Because moral values are properties of persons, and because they are true regardless of one’s opinion on the matter, objective moral values are most plausibly grounded in a transcendent lawmaker whom we call God.

1. Anselm, Proslogion chap. III, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/anselm-proslogium.html
2. Thomas V. Morris, Our Idea of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity. 1991) p.37
3. Respectively, these mean: the ability to actualize any metaphysically possible state of affairs, knowledge of all true propositions, being causally active at any point in space, being necessarily good, not being spatially extended or having material composition, timelessness (at least, without creation), and existence in all possible worlds.
4. There is disagreement within Christian circles as to the exact method through which God accomplished this task.  Several prominent views include young-earth creationism, old-earth creationism, and theistic evolution.  This issue, however, is not considered to be one of the essential doctrines and thus there is some room for disagreement without fear of heresy.
5. A common analogy which compares the Trinity to the three states of water fails for this reason, since it erroneously presupposes that the three persons of the Trinity are different modes of each other.  This is in fact a heresy known as Modalism.
6. These include classical, evidential, cumulative case, and presuppositionalist apologetics.
7. See William Lane Craig, Philosophical and Scientific Pointers to Creatio ex Nihilo.” Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation 32 (1980): 5-13. http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1980/JASA3-80Craig.html
8. See Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Eerdmans: 1974) p.85-111 and God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God (New York: Cornell University Press. 1967) p.26-64
9. Modal logic is “a branch of logic that studies arguments whose validity depends on ‘necessary,’ ‘possible,’ and similar notions.” Harry J. Gensler, Introduction to Logic (New York: Routledge. 2002) p.394
10. See Robin Collins, “The Teleological Argument: An Exploration of the Fine-Tuning of the Universe” in William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Blackwell. 2009) 202-281
11. See Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Free Press. 1996