October 2009 Archives

I considered an alternative title to this post, which was "Pro-choice Advocates: Eternally Obscuring the Issue." But somehow "Perpetually Missing the Point" sounded a little more natural to my ear.

To get to classes at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, I park on the far side of a university parking lot and then walk for about five minutes across the parking lot and up a hill. During one walk last week I noticed a small car (liberals seem to like small cars) with a sticker on the right side of the bumper stating boldly:

FREEDOM

MEANS

CHOICE

Under this declaration was the address of some abortion-promoting organization, and of course on the opposite side of the bumper was the customary Obama '08 memorabilia.

Liberals are fond of borrowing conservative and religious terminology, beating them over peoples' heads in quick political statements, and then tossing away or completely ignoring the ideology behind the words. This would be a classic example.

Anyone who really cares about the idea called freedom understands what it means to live in a free society. In a free society, we strive to allow people to exercise freely certain fundamental rights that belong to each of us as human beings. However, we understand that we can not allow one person exercising his rights to trample over the rights of another person. From the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The fundamental reason that conservatives are opposed to abortion is that they believe the fetus or embryo in a mother's womb is a living human being, and as such, that being's most fundamental right - the right to Life - must be protected. In contrast, pro-choice advocates represent themselves as protecting a woman's right to exercise control over her own body, implying (when it is not stated outright) that the organism growing inside of her is not really human nor truly a distinct individual.

This is the heart of the debate. The "Freedom Means Choice" message, on the contrary, is a deceptive trick - a sleight of hand, if you will - meant to distract from the real issue.

The pro-choice movement needs to keep people distracted if legalized abortion is going to survive in the United States. It is a bit speculative of course, but I suspect that if every mother considering having an abortion took a serious, deep look at the question of whether or not her child is a human being, the periodic number of abortions in the country would drop to a small fraction of the original. I think that the average woman, after looking at reconstructions of the child in the womb, reading about the intricacies of each stage of development, listening to a young heartbeat, and pondering the philosophical implications of the decision, would not have the willpower needed to have her child crushed to pieces and sucked out of her womb with a vacuum pump.

Whenever I hear the word "uniformitarianism," the first image that comes to mind are layers of sedimentary rock, like those of the Grand Canyon. Doubtlessly this is because it has been pounded into my mind since grade school that each of those layers represents millions of years of earth's history.

Grand_Canyon_2.jpg - released into the public domain by Jon Sullivan, pdphoto.org The views of the author are not endorsed by Jon Sullivan.

Recently, however, I read an interesting article in the Journal of Creation by Ariel A. Roth, a biologist and student of sedimentary geology. [1] I found the article interesting not because I am an expert in geology but because the fundamental concepts appealed to my common sense as a layman. My summary of his article:

In Ariel A. Roth's article on "flat gaps," Roth indicates that the flat gaps, or paraconformities, between sedimentary sequences (layers) are a severe problem for long-age, uniformitarian geology. He argues that the large periods of time allegedly indicated by the gaps would produce evidence of erosion in the removal of "vast depths of sediment" and the production of "a highly irregular land surface," but such evidence is not present. He indicates that flat gaps "are very difficult to explain within the long-age uniformitarian paradigm and severely challenge the concept of millions of years" but that they "provide strong evidence for a young earth and are easily explained within its paradigm of the global biblical Flood."

So, a paraconformity (a type of unconformity) is a gap between parallel sedimentary layers. These gaps are supposed to represent millions of years where erosion took place or build-up did not take place. The problem, writes Roth, is that if these paraconformities really represented such long periods of time, they would not be as straight or uniform as they are. The many normal forces of erosion that are at work today, which often make our own land surfaces so complex and irregular, would also have been at work during the time represented by these gaps. And so these paraconformities would not, as a general rule, be straight or uniform but rather highly irregular in direction and shape.

Biblical creationists believe these sedimentary layers are more convincingly explained by the global flood described in Genesis. That is, when God miraculously covered the entire planet in water, that same water stirred up massive amounts of rock and minerals and then, through natural processes, laid those materials back down into the fairly even and orderly layers that are visible today.

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[1] Ariel A. Roth. "flat gaps" in sedimentary rock layers challenge long geologic ages. Journal of Creation, 23(2):76-81, 2009.

Classes and homework have kept me quite busy lately. Between that and teaching Sunday School, it has been hard to find time to put out the hardcore theology. Here is a small song from YouTube to hold you over until I am able to put something together:

Alison Krauss -- In the Palm of Your Hand: