Abortion

Alabama and the GOP are discovering what this blog pointed out 15 years ago--if you're going to adopt a policy that embryos are full bearers of moral personhood, then you can't allow in-vitro fertilization (IVF). From my five-part debate with Vocab Malone about abortion in 2009: Once the zygote becomes a blastocyst, it forms into an outer layer of cells, which later becomes the placenta, and an inner cell mass of pluripotent embryonic stem cells, each of which is capable of differentiating into any kind of human cell. Only after this stage does the blastocyst implant in the wall of the uterus, about a week after fertilization, and begin taking nutrients directly from the blood of the mother--a dependency that can itself be of moral significance, as Judith Jarvis Thomson's violinist argument shows. As already mentioned above, a great many fertilized ova do not reach this stage. Further, the percentages of implant failure are higher for in vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure which Vocab's criteria would have to declare unethical, even though it is the only way that many couples can have their own biological offspring. ...

Vocab Malone, with whom I had a blog debate about abortion and personhood last year, recently came across this comment of mine on the Point of Inquiry podcast with Jen Roth, an atheist who argues for the immorality of abortion: Was Jen Roth ultimately arguing that personhood is something that a human organism has for its entire lifecycle? At what starting point? Conception, implantation, or something else? I find it completely implausible that an organism at a life stage with no capacity for perception, let alone reason, counts as a person. Nor that a particular genetic code is either necessary or sufficient for personhood. I think every point that she made was brought up in a debate I had with a Christian blogger on the topic of abortion, who similarly argued for an equation between personhood and human organism. I wonder if she has any better rejoinders. Does she think that IVF and therapeutic cloning are immoral? IUDs?Vocab claimed that my argument was a "Chewbacca argument," a smoke screen, or a slippery slope argument, but in fact it is none of these.  I posted the following comment in response to him: Vocab:The argument I made is not a slippery slope argument, it's a reductio ad absurdum.  Your position is that the human organism is a person and has a right to life from fertilization to death (and presumably beyond), so you've already gone down the "slippery slope" and must of necessity say that IVF, therapeutic cloning, and IUDs are immoral because they result in the destruction and death of fertilized ova.  My position is that it is absurd to think that these things are immoral, and if you were to avoid the slippery slope by agreeing with me, you would have contradicted a logical consequence of your own position--thus, a reductio ad absurdum by being committed to a proposition and its negation.A slippery slope argument is an argument that says your position is committed to some consequence because there is no criterion that you can use to draw a line to avoid.  For example, if I argued that your position committed you to giving a right to life to all animals, and required you to be a vegetarian, or that it required you to give a right to life to every organism with DNA, and required you to hold a position like the Jain religion that all killing is wrong.As it happens, you never did supply an account of just what it is about the human organism that gives it a right to life or personhood--you offered no constitutive account of what properties entail a right to life or personhood, other than a genetic one.  I made the case near the end of our debate that you are probably implicitly assuming that personhood comes from a soul, and that souls are connected to human organisms at the point of fertilization, but there's clearly no evidence for that position, scientific, philosophical, or theological.BTW, my argument is also clearly not a Chewbacca argument or smoke screen, which is a simple non sequitur.  To think that, you would have to fail to understand that the items I identified all result in the destruction of fertilized human ova.It's important to note that not all slippery slope arguments are fallacious--if there really is no criterion to stop the fall down the slope, the argument is valid.  As Vocab never did explain what it is about human organisms that make them rights-bearers, I think he does face the slippery slope argument I presented unless he can offer some criterion for distinguishing human organisms from other organisms with respect to having a right to life. M! (2010-11-17): Let me be concise and clear: I do think *most* forms of IVF (there's a way to do it that hypothetically would be ethical), therapeutic cloning, and IUD's (they act as abortifacients) are unethical. This is the only logically consistent position to take if one understands that the ontology of the human being is such that all humans are persons and all persons have inherent and inalienable rights, the foremost of which is the right to life. ...

Vocab has put up the fifth and final part of his essay on abortion and personhood up at his blog, devoted to Thomson’s violinist argument. I don’t really have much to say about it–we didn’t coordinate our posts in advance, and I’ve already discussed Thomson’s argument myself in my response to part 4. I disagree with Vocab’s claim that Thomson’s argument proves too much and would allow infanticide–her argument only addresses a physically dependent fetus. And, as I already pointed out in my prior response, the argument doesn’t prove as much as it purports to. The violinist case isn’t exactly analogous to pregnancy and abortion in a number of ways, and Vocab is right to point out the differences. I agree that if a pregnancy is allowed to go to term (as well as to some earlier point at which there is plausible evidence for personhood on my standard), then that entails at least tacit consent and a moral duty of care. I would still argue, however, that abortion would be legitimate beyond that point for medically justifiable reasons (e.g., endangered health and life of the mother). This position–like the current position of the courts, which I think is approximately correct despite being based on viability–points out that there are more than two polar opposite positions in this debate. In Vocab’s final part, he talks a bit about the work that he and his wife do in caring for foster children. I commend him for that work, which is all-too-rare among opponents of abortion. Thanks, Vocab, for the debate–and I still would like to hear a response from you in the comments on some of the issues that have been left hanging (e.g., in the comments on part 3). UPDATE: It would probably be better to end this discussion with a summary that I already made in the comments on part 3: We don’t disagree that there is continuity of organism (just as there is continuity of a population of organisms over time)–all life on this planet is connected in that way. But just as we don’t count every species as human, even in our own genetic lineage, we don’t count every life stage of individual human organisms as persons. There’s a sense in which “I” was once a zygote that had my same DNA, but at that stage there was no “me” there yet–there was nothing that it was like to be a zygote, to use Thomas Nagel’s expression. In that same sense that “I” was a zygote, “I” will be a dead body in the future, even though there will at that point be nothing that it is like to be me, and the person that I am will be gone from the world though my body will briefly remain. I think we understand each other’s positions. You think that being a human organism is the same thing as to be a person, while I think personhood is a feature that comes into existence and persists for a subset of the life of an organism, that requires capacities of sentience or self-awareness. But I think I can give reasons to support why my view makes moral, legal, and practical sense, and why human cultures and practices are more consistent with my view than yours. I don’t think you can give such reasons, other than the brute assertion that human organisms are persons from start to finish. Your view has no need of the notion of person, yet it seems to me that there are all sorts of practical, moral, and legal reasons why we do need and use such a notion. ...

Vocab Malone has posted the fourth part of his essay on abortion and personhood, addressing the arguments from viability and wantedness. These are two more arguments that I don’t place a whole lot of stock in, though perhaps some commenters will want to say more about. The viability criterion is significant in that it’s the basis of current federal case law on abortion since Roe v. Wade, but Vocab correctly notes that viability changes with the availability of technology, and that doesn’t seem like a feature that should be relevant to whether one is a person. On the other hand, it is relevant to the notion of dependence–pre-viability is a time where, if you do grant that a fetus is a person, it’s a person that is dependent for its existence upon another person. This raises questions of when it is morally permissible for a person upon whom another is dependent for their life to sever that dependence. Judith Jarvis Thomson’s argument on abortion, which I referred to earlier in my response to part 1 of Vocab’s essay, presents the following scenario: ...

Vocab Malone has posted the third part of his argument against abortion at his blog, focusing on what he calls “the argument from size.” As I don’t think there’s any plausibility to this argument, I won’t spend any time with it, but there are still a few things in his post that I think demand response. The first is the assertion Vocab quotes from “prolific pro-life trainer and speaker Scott Klusendorf” that he always encounters this argument when he speaks at Christian schools. I find this assertion very difficult to believe–I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this argument anywhere, and I suspect that Klusendorf is either intentionally or unintentionally misconstruing some other argument as this argument. (Would he consider Randy Newman’s song, “Short People,” to be an instance of the argument, given its lyric, “short people got no reason to live”?) The instance of the argument Vocab suggests is nothing of the sort, though at least he admits that it is an argument about another subject. Here’s the quote as Vocab presents it: From the other end of things, a recent New York Times article featured a similar argument (although his piece was on a broader topic than abortion): Look at your loved ones. Do you see a hunk of cells or do you see something else? … We do not see cells, simple or complex – we see people, human life. That thing in a petri dish is something else. [2]The quote is from a New York Times editorial by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga about the difference between reproductive and therapeutic cloning. Here’s the quotation in context; it’s the ending of the piece: ...

Vocab Malone has posted a second set of arguments, addressing more directly the argument that some sort of capacity for sentience is a proper criterion for personhood. He begins with a few quotations, none of which address the question of personhood. The first, from Millard Erickson, says that abortion involves “the taking of a human life.” That’s correct. The second, from Jerome Lejeune, says that abortion “kills a member of our species.” That’s also correct. The third, from R.C. Sproul, says, “abortion-on-demand is evil, no one has the moral right to choose it. If it is an offense against life, the government must not permit it.” This doesn’t actually follow, if one thinks that it is possible to morally use lethal force in self-defense, in war time, and as a form of legal punishment. As it happens, Sproul does think that it is legitimate for governments to engage in just war and capital punishment. I’m not certain how he reconciles his views on those topics with the quoted statement, but I suspect he says that these forms of taking human life do not constitute “an offense against life” and are not evil. Vocab gives four arguments that he says he’s seen used to argue for the moral legitimacy of abortion: Sentience makes a person and the unborn are not sentientSize makes a person and the unborn are too smallViability makes a person and the unborn are not viable on their ownWantedness makes a person and the unborn are not wanted#1 is essentially my position. #3 is close to the U.S. Supreme Court’s position, but I don’t think it’s quite accurate. #2 and #4 strike me as completely implausible. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that states may not prohibit abortion for any reason prior to viability, the time at which a fetus can survive on its own independently of the mother (including with artificial assistance), or after viability when abortion is necessary to save the life of the mother. The point of viability is something that has shifted as technology has improved, and could potentially become completely meaningless, so I don’t see it as a plausible ethical criterion. So what does Vocab think is wrong with #1? He writes: “A component of this argument is it implies the pro-life position is weak because abortion is not cruel because the fetus cannot feel pain. Does this mean if I am unconscious or sleeping, I have lost my personhood?" This response misconstrues my position. Sentience is significant not just because it involves the possibility of actual perceptions at a given time, but because it allows for the sort of being that can have beliefs, desires, intentions, and interests. The absence of such a capacity entails that a being cannot have beliefs, desires, intentions, and interests. This doesn’t mean we cease to have those things when we are temporarily unconscious. When I sleep, I may not be conscious of the external world (though I sometimes do perceive external stimuli in lucid dreams), but I still have the capacity for such conscious awareness, and continue to maintain beliefs, desires, intentions and have interests. A better objection to my position would be a case where I sustain some kind of brain damage which puts me into a persistent vegetative state, yet there is still some possibility of recovery. In my opinion, the only way I would have some possibility of recovery and be the same person would be if I continued to have beliefs, desires, and intentions represented in my brain even in the persistent vegetative state. If those were all lost, and biological recovery were still possible–say, through some therapy made possibly by embryonic stem cells transplanted into my brain, which ironically, Vocab’s view would likely make unethical–the person who would then come into being would be starting over afresh as a new person. Vocab quotes Scott Rae observing that a person who has their legs cut off is harmed even if they feel no pain in the process, and even if their legs are not useful for locomotion. That is no objection to my position–I agree that there is harm there, because it is done to a person in conflict with their beliefs, desires, intentions, and interests, without their consent. Next, Vocab says that a fetus is “sensitive to touch at ten weeks and eleven weeks” and “most certainly does feel pain” by the third month. I believe it is a mistake to conflate “sensitive to touch” with “experiences sensations.” Reflexive actions don’t identify experiences. Further, I haven’t identified the ability to experience sensations with personhood, since I’ve already observed that animals can experience pain, but don’t think that necessarily entails the immorality of killing animals for food or other reasons (though I do think it probably entails a moral requirement for humane treatment). Vocab goes on to complain that a “developmental view, in which the basic thesis is humans become persons by some ability they acquire and not by the kind of entity they already are” is rarely “defend[ed] … with any rigor” and asks “Who says they get to lay out the qualification for personhood?” Regarding the first point, Vocab’s view is also one which attributes a right to life at a particular point, when two living haploid cells, a sperm and an egg, meet. He’s defended this by reference to two features, (1) that at this point there is a complete set of DNA and (2) left to itself, it will (if all goes well) develop into what we all would agree is a human being. (1) is clearly insufficient, since any somatic cell sloughed off a person’s skin has that property as well, and (2) only carries any persuasive weight from its appeal to future status rather than present. His subsequent question seems to assume that arguments for a view of personhood are dependent upon a claim to authority or power, rather than for their own intuitive force–and I think that’s just mistaken. He then asks, “Shouldn’t a civilized and ethical society desire to err on the side of life?” In the way this is written, I can’t agree–for the cycle of life requires death. I do agree that we should err on the side of protecting persons and treating humanely creatures that can experience pain, but that gives no reason to think the boundary line is where Vocab draws it. He writes that “It is an artificial and arbitrary distinction with no scientific grounding. One more reason the human/person distinction is artificial is because I have never met a person who is not a human, nor have I ever met a human who is not a person. Is this even possible?” I disagree completely with this description. The question of sentient capacities is one with very strong scientific grounding, though we are uncertain of exactly where the boundary is. The fact that Vocab only recognizes humans as a clear-cut case of persons on earth today just shows that he isn’t taking seriously the ideas that some other contemporary species (such as chimpanzees, dolphins, and whales) might meet reasonable criteria of personhood, some past species (Neandertal) probably did meet reasonable criteria of personhood, and extraterrestrial intelligent life might meet reasonable criteria of personhood. Suppose for a moment that we found out that a subset of human beings turned out to be a different species, incapable of interbreeding with the rest of us. It’s a consequence of Vocab’s view that this subset would not be persons. My intuition is completely to the contrary–creatures that are like us to the extent that they have beliefs, desires, intentions, and interests are persons, regardless of their biological makeup. Vocab’s final argument is his strongest, which is that my view has the potential consequence that some forms of infanticide and euthanasia–namely, those in cases where the conditions for personhood are not met–may be ethical. This is correct, presuming that personhood is the only justification for not permitting killing. I suggest that there are at least two other possibilities. One is just a recognition of the epistemic limits of determining personhood–that is, I believe, a reason for erring on the side of caution, and setting legal limits outside the boundaries of personhood. Another is a consequentialist argument about public policy considerations, which also argues for erring on the side of caution. While policies of permissible infanticide have been not been uncommon in history, they raise possibilities for brutalization or desensitization of the killer, among other negative consequences that go beyond the immediate act. This is itself a possible argument against abortions of fetuses that have recognizable human form. Early on in this post, Vocab wrote “It’s not as if there is a strong consensus, anyway.” On the contrary, I think there is virtually no support for Vocab’s view in history, from religion, from philosophy, or from science. In the United States, complete bans on abortion only became common after the Civil War, with the first post-quickening abortion prohibitions starting earlier, in the 1820s. I don’t think Vocab has come anywhere near making his case. He’s not addressed many of the points I brought up in my prior post, and though he cited Judith Jarvis Thomson, he hasn’t addressed the case of a conflict between two rights-holders, where one is dependent upon the other, which her violinist example brings up in an argument for the moral permissibility of abortion even if the fetus is counted as a person. Nor has he addressed the harm to non-actualized twins, or the case of cloned human beings who might develop without the process of fertilization (though I suspect he would identify them as persons at either the point of nuclear transfer or electric shock, and would probably have some reason for calling the process itself unethical). His view entails that IUDs, morning-after pills, in vitro fertilization, and embryonic stem cell research are immoral. His view suggests that if a building containing frozen embryos and small children were on fire, one should not give any preference to rescuing the children over the embryos. His view entails that a particular genetic makeup, rather than features like having beliefs, desires, intentions, and interests, is what’s relevant to personhood. His view doesn’t make sense of the idea of non-human persons. I see no plausibility to the idea that fertilization is a morally relevant event or that having a particular genetic makeup is the morally important part of being a person. UPDATE (December 14, 2009): Corrected sentence about U.S. abortion laws and added reference link to Wikipedia. UPDATE: It should be noted that Vocab misconstrues Peter Singer’s position on the relative worth of humans and animals; Singer speaks for himself on the subject on an episode of the Ethics Bites podcast: ...

Vocab Malone has put up his first post arguing for the position that “the unborn human embryo is a full person at the moment of conception and should be afforded the full rights due human beings by their very essence." Criteria of Personhood or Humanity He starts by looking at the question of what it is to be human or to be a person, citing a few historical references of individual characteristics–being rational, being “in relationship,” and “the capacity for self-objectification.” He expresses doubt that any single characteristic is appropriate, on the grounds that human beings undergo changes of state such as being asleep or being drugged, or not thinking. I agree with him that the characteristics he has listed won’t do the trick, and I also agree with him that features that go away when we sleep are inadequate. But it doesn’t follow that there is no single feature that can do the trick–if the feature is a capacity that we have, for example, that capacity doesn’t cease to exist when it’s not being used. He goes on to note that lack of personhood doesn’t entail that any treatment is morally permissible, pointing out animals as examples of nonpersons that deserve humane treatment. Again, I agree with him–and observe the converse, that possession of personhood doesn’t mean that there are no cases where it can be moral to kill a person–cases of self-defense, euthanasia, capital punishment, or war come to mind as possibilities. But what makes animals deserve humane treatment is that they have certain capacities and interests, such as an inner mental life that includes at the very least the ability to feel sensations–and note that humane treatment doesn’t necessarily entail a right to life on the part of an animal, or a duty on our part not to kill them. Vocab appears to want to lay the groundwork for rejecting the use of a criterion of personhood in favor of a criterion of humanity as his standard for arguing against abortion, but here he only offers a promissory note and doesn’t provide an argument to that effect. I think this is a mistake, however, because ethical distinctions should be based on morally relevant features, and I don’t believe species membership is any more relevant in and of itself to being the holder of rights or of being the object of duties than is race or gender. If a member of an intelligent alien species capable of language were to make contact with us, my intuition is that we would attribute personhood to that entity and give it the same consideration as a human being. Likewise if we manage to build artificially intelligent, self-directed machines with beliefs, desires, and intentions, though the intuition is not as strong there unless I imagine them to have mental lives similar to our own. Conception: Fertilization Even though Vocab hasn’t yet given a reason to reject a personhood criterion in favor of a human being criterion, the rest of his case is solely about human life rather than personhood, which I think is the wrong issue for the reasons I just gave. He argues that human life begins at conception, and clarifies that he means fertilization rather than implantation. This choice means that 30-50% of human lives are spontaneously aborted due to the failure of the fertilized ova to implant in the uterine wall. If Vocab thinks that this loss of human life is the loss of beings with rights and interests to whom we owe a duty to enable them to live out normal lives, then he has some explaining to do. First of all, why would a loving God create a human reproductive system that resulted in such a Holocaust of lives lost before they get a chance to start? Second, why has no one considered this to be a serious ethical problem that we need to urgently devote medical resources to address? We can call this the problem of natural abortion, which has both a natural evil and human evil component that requires justification. Complete at Fertilization? Vocab says that at conception (by which he means fertilization), “every human is complete and alive.” I agree that a fertilized human ovum is alive–as life is a continuous process, arising from living components, at least until synthetic biology gets to the point of creating life from entirely nonliving components. Sperm and ova are also alive. But it is certainly not complete–zygotes have no brains, no central nervous systems, no organs, no body parts other than undifferentiated, identical cells. An Individual at Fertilization? Vocab also says that at fertilization and pre-implantation, “it is not merely a collection of cells lumped together but an actual individual.” This also need not be the case. At fertilization, a zygote is an undifferentiated cell that undergoes a process of division without changing size for several days, to become a blastocyst by about the fifth day. During this period each of its cells is totipotent, meaning that each individual cell has the potential to become a full human being. Sometimes more than one of the cells does become a separate human being, as in the case of identical twins. In the case of identical twins, if they don’t split completely, they may become conjoined twins or parasitic twins, or one twin may be completely absorbed into the other or otherwise fail to develop and become a vanishing twin. Where a vanishing twin occurs with fraternal twins, the resulting individual can be a chimera, with two sets of DNA. Should we also grieve for those twins who fail to develop, either due to failure to split off or failure to develop? The science fiction scenarios of teleportation that create interesting philosophical puzzles for the notion of personal identity are real puzzles for a view that attributes personhood to zygotes, though without the additional problem of memories and experiences, since zygotes are undifferentiated cells. Blastocysts Once the zygote becomes a blastocyst, it forms into an outer layer of cells, which later becomes the placenta, and an inner cell mass of pluripotent embryonic stem cells, each of which is capable of differentiating into any kind of human cell. Only after this stage does the blastocyst implant in the wall of the uterus, about a week after fertilization, and begin taking nutrients directly from the blood of the mother–a dependency that can itself be of moral significance, as Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist argument shows. As already mentioned above, a great many fertilized ova do not reach this stage. Further, the percentages of implant failure are higher for in vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure which Vocab’s criteria would have to declare unethical, even though it is the only way that many couples can have their own biological offspring. It should also be noted that the process of therapeutic cloning involves taking a female ovum (which Vocab doesn’t seem to indicate he considers to be a bearer of rights on its own), removing its haploid DNA, inserting the nucleus from a (diploid) human somatic cell (this is called somatic cell nuclear transfer), and giving it a shock to cause it to start dividing just like a fertilized egg. This occurs without fertilization by a human sperm. Once it reaches the blastocyst stage, its inner cell mass is harvested for embryonic stem cells, which destroys the blastocyst in the process. The natural process of fertilization never takes place, but there’s little doubt that reproductive human cloning is possible via this process. Vocab’s choice of fertilization as key suggests that there is no moral issue with this process, even though it also has some potential to become a human being. Further, if fertilization is a necessary, not just a sufficient, condition for rights, Vocab’s view suggests that human clones would have no rights. Fully Programmed? Vocab goes on to say that “the embryo is already ‘fully programmed’ (to use computer language). This means the pre-implanted embryo needs no more information input at any further point in its development.” While this was formerly believed to be the case about the individual embryo’s biology, we now know that the environment of development can play a role in the characteristics that will come to be exhibited, such as from mRNA supplied from the mother to a developing embryo after fertilization and prior to zygote formation. But in any case, I would maintain that it’s not our cellular biology that gives us moral value, as opposed to our capacities to have interests, desires, intentions, plans, sensations, and so forth–all capacities that zygotes lack. Vocab ends this piece with some anthropomorphizing of zygotes, which appears to me to be a highly misleading form of argument–his analogies cannot be taken literally, since zygotes have no mental processes. Human and Living = Human Being? I agree with Vocab that a fertilized human ovum is living, that it’s human, and that, if all goes well, it will become one (or more) individual human beings. I don’t agree that it’s yet a person or a “human being,” since it lacks the requisite parts and capacities. To sum up: ...

Local Christian hip-hop artist and slam poet Vocab Malone, who I’ve interacted with online and met when Daniel Dennett spoke at ASU early this year, asked me in January for my thoughts on abortion and personhood. He’s now written a paper on the subject which he’s asked me to critique, and we thought it would be interesting to see how it would work out to do it in a public manner via our respective blogs. The plan is that he will post successive sections of his paper on his blog, and I’ll respond here, with cross-links to share some traffic and discussion. Both of us allow blog comments; it probably makes the most sense to post your comments at the blog for the person you’d like to see a response from. Vocab has posted an introduction and the comments that I originally sent to him on the subject at his blog, Backpack Apologetics. He’s taking a position that I think is very difficult to justify, that full personhood and human rights are acquired at the moment of conception–we’ll have to see which definition of conception he chooses, fertilization or implantation. Just to throw out a little issue I raised this semester in one of my classes–some have argued that climate change raises the ethical issue of a duty to future generations. If we can have moral duties now to people who don’t exist at all yet, what does that imply about duties to embryos? ...

Richard Carrier, an independent scholar with a Ph.D. in Ancient History from Columbia University, gave a talk this morning to the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix titled “Christianity and Science (Ancient and Modern).” He argued that there was a creation/evolution debate in ancient Rome that had interesting similarities and differences to the current creation/evolution debate. He began with Michael Behe and a short description of his irreducibly complexity argument regarding the bacterial flagellum–that since it fails to function if any piece is removed, and it’s too complex to have originated by evolution in a single step, it must have been intelligently designed and created. He observed that 2,000 years ago, Galen made the same argument about the human hand and other aspects of human and animal anatomy. Galen wrote that “the mark of intelligent design is clear in those works in which the removal of any small component brings about the ruin of the whole." Behe, Carrier said, hasn’t done what you’d expect a scientist to do with respect to his theory. He hasn’t looked at the genes that code the flagellum and tried to identify correlate genes in other microbes, for example. In the ancient context, the debate was between those who argued for natural selection on random arrangements of features that were spontaneously generated, such as Anaxagoras and atomists like Democritus and Epicurus, vs. those who argued for some kind of intelligent design, like Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Galen. Carrier set the stage by describing a particular debate about the function of the kidneys between Asclepiades and Galen. Asclepiades thought that the kidneys were either superfluous, with urine forming directly in the bladder, or was an accidental sieve. Galen set out to test this with a public experiment on an anesthetized pig, which had been given water prior to the operation. He opened up the pig, ligated (tied knots in) its ureters, and they started to balloon and the bladder stayed empty. Squeezing the ureter failed to reverse the flow back into the kidney. When one ureter was cut, urine came out. Thus, Galen demonstrated that the kidneys extract urine from the blood and it is transported to the bladder by the ureters. The failure of the flow to operate in reverse showed that the kidneys were not simple sieves, but operated by some power that only allowed it to function in one direction. This, argued Galen, was demonstration of something too complex to have arisen by chance, and refuted the specific claims of Asclepiades. Galen’s 14-volume De Usu Portium (On the Usefulness of Parts) made similar arguments for intelligent design about all aspects of human anatomy–the nerve transport system, biomechanics of arm, hand, and leg movement, the precision of the vocal system, etc. He also asked questions like “How does a fetus know how to build itself?” He allowed for the possibility of some kind of tiny instructions present in the “seed,” on analogy with a mechanical puppet theater, programmed with an arrangement of cogs, wheels, and ropes. Galen also investigated the question of why eyebrows and eyelashes grow to a fixed length and no longer, and found that they grow from a piece of cartilage, the tarsal plate. He concluded that while his evidence required an intelligent designer, they entailed that God is limited and uses only available materials. Galen, a pagan, contrasted his view with that of Christians. For Christians, a pile of ashes could become a horse, because God could will anything to be the case. But for Galen, the evidence supported a God subject to the laws of physics, who was invisibly present but physically interacting to make things happen, and that God realizes the best possible world within constraints. Which intelligent design theory better explains facts like the growth of horses from fetuses, the fact that fetuses sometimes come out wrong, and why we have complex bodies at all, rather than just willing things into existence via magic? If God can do anything, why wouldn’t he just make us as “simple homogenous soul bodies that realize functions by direct will” (or “expedient polymorphism,” to use Carrier’s term)? The difference between Galen’s views and those of the Christians was that Galen thought of theology as a scientific theory that had to be adjusted according to facts, that facts about God are inferred from observations, and those facts entail either divine malice or a limited divinity. What we know about evolution today places even more limits on viable theories of divinity than in Galen’s time. (Carrier gave a brief overview of evolution and in particular a very brief account of the evolution of the bacterial flagellum.) Galen’s views allowed him to investigate, conduct experiments to test the theories of his opponents as well as his own, and make contributions to human knowledge. He supported the scientific values of curiosity as a moral good, empiricism as the primary mode of discovery, and progress as both possible and valuable, while Christianity denigrated or opposes these. The views of early church fathers were such that once Christianity gained power, it not only put a halt to scientific progress, it caused significant losses of knowledge that had already been accumulated. (Carrier later gave many examples.) Tertullian, a contemporary of Galen, asked, “What concern have I with the conceits of natural science?” and “Better not to know what God has not revealed than to know it from man." Thales, from the 6th century B.C., was revered by pagans as the first natural scientist–he discovered the natural causes of eclipses, explained the universe as a system of natural causes, performed observations and developed geometry, made inquiries into useful methods, and subordinated theology to science. There was a story that he was so focused on studying the stars that he fell into a well. Tertullian wrote of this event that Thales had a “vain purpose” and that his fall into the well prefigured his fall into hell. Lactantius, an early Christian writer and tutor of Constantine the Great, denied that the earth was round (as part of a minority faction of Christians at the time), said that only knowledge of good and evil is worthwhile, and argued that “natural science is superfluous, useless, and inane.” This despite overwhelming evidence already accumulated of a round earth (lighthouses sinking below the horizon as seen from ships sailing away, astronomical observations of lunar eclipses starting at different times in different locations, the fact that different stars are visible at different latitudes, and the shadow of the earth on the moon), which Lactantius simply was uninterested in. Eusebius, the first historian of the Christian church, said that all are agreed that only scriptural knowledge is worthwhile, anything contrary to scripture is false, and pursuing scientific explanations is to risk damnation. Armchair speculation in support of scripture, however, is good. Amid factors such as the failure of the pagan system, civil wars in the Roman empire, and a great economic depression, Christianity came to a position of dominance and scientific research came to a halt from about the 4th century to the 12th-14th centuries. Carrier compared these Christian views to specific displays at the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum in Kentucky, which compared “human reason” to “God’s word.” One contrasted Rene Descartes saying “I think therefore I am” to God saying “I am that I am.” Galen wouldn’t have put those into opposition with each other. Another display labeled “The First Attack–Question God’s Word” told the story of Satan tempting Adam to eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which highlights the “questioning” of Satan for criticism, and argues that putting reason first is Satanic. Another diagram comparing “human reason” to “God’s Word” showed evolution as a 14-billion-year winding snake-like shape, compared to the short and straight arrow of a 6,000-year creation. Carrier noted, “It doesn’t have to be that way. Galen’s faith didn’t condemn fundamental scientific values; Galen’s creationism was science-based." He then gave numerous examples of knowledge lost or ignored by Christianity–that Eratosthenes had calculated the size of the earth (a case described in Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” series), Ptolemy’s projection cartography and system of latitude and longitude, developments in optics, hydrostatics, medicine, harmonics and acoustics, pneumatics, tidal theory, cometary theory, the precession of the stars, mathematics, robotics (cuckoo clocks, coin-operated vending machines for holy water and soap dispensing), machinery (water mills, water-powered saws and hammers, a bread-kneading machine), and so on. He described the Antikythera mechanism, an analog computer similar to WWI artillery computers, which was referred to in various ancient texts but had been dismissed by historians as impossible until this instance was actually found in 1900. Another example was the Archimedes Codex, where Christians scraped the ink from the text and wrote hymns on it, and threw the rest away. The underlying writing has now been partially recovered thanks to modern technology, revealing that Archimedes performed remarkably advanced calculations about areas, volumes, and centers of gravity. Carrier has a forthcoming book on the subject of this ancient science, called The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire. A few interesting questions came up in the Q&A. The first question was about why early Christians didn’t say anything about abortion. Carrier said it probably just wasn’t on the radar, though abortion technology already existed in the form of mechanical devices for performing abortions and abortifacients. He also observed that the ancients knew the importance of cleanliness and antiseptics in medicine, while Jesus said that washing before you eat is a pointless ritual (Mark 7:1-20). Carrier asked, if Jesus was God, shouldn’t he have known about the germ theory of disease? Another question was whether Christianity was really solely responsible for 1,000 years of stangnation. Carrier pointed out that there was a difference between Byzantine and Western Christianity, with the former preserving works like those of Ptolemy without condemning them, but without building upon them. He said there are unerlying cultural, social, and historical factors that explain the differences, so it’s not just the religion. He also pointed out that there was a lost sect of Christianity that was pro-science, but we have nothing of what they wrote, only references to them by Tertullian, criticizing them for supporting Thales, Galen, and so forth. Another questioner asked how he accounts for cases of Christians who have contributed to science, such as Kepler, Boyle, Newton, and Bacon. Carrier said “Not all Christians have to be that way–there’s no intrinsic reason Christianity has to be that way.” But, he said, if you put fact before authority, scripture will likely end up not impressing you, being contradicted by evidence you find, and unless you completely retool Christianity, you’ll likely abandon it. Opposition to scientific values is necessary to preserve Christianity as it is; putting weight on authority and scripture leads to the anti-science position as a method of preservation of the dogma. It was a wonderfully interesting and wide-ranging talk. He covered a lot more specifics than I’ve described here. If you find that Carrier is giving a talk in your area, I highly recommend that you go hear him speak. You can find more information about Richard Carrier at his web site. ...

Day one steps are closing Guantanamo Bay, ceasing and prohibiting torture, ceasing and prohibiting extraordinary rendition; steps for the first 100 days include ending warrantless spying, watch lists, the Ashcroft doctrine on FOIA requests, monitoring of activists, the Real ID Act, the abortion gag rule, the death penalty, and faith-based initiatives. At least one of Obama’s transition teams is, at the very least, reviewing Bush’s executive orders for constitutionality, which covers some elements of the above. Most, however, have been implemented by act of Congress, which will require Congressional action to repeal. ...