Tag Archives: SCOTUS

Following the Science of Roe v Wade

October 20, 2021Abortion, American Founding, Bioethics, Catholic Social Teaching, Church and StateAbortion on Demand, Aristotle, Roe v Wade, SCOTUS, St. Thomas Aquinastwowingstogod@gmail.com

In a previous post, it was mentioned that emerging tyrants greatly rely upon sophistry in order to manipulate people into giving away their freedom. That particular post was focused on pointing out the manner in which “experts” use science to serve their own tyrannical aspirations. It is tempting to think that this is the first time that science has been abused on such a massive scale in our country, but we would be wrong. Before there was Covid, there was Roe v. Wade.

We have all heard the arguments for abortion from the Pro-Choice peanut gallery. Some are better than others, but all of them have been refuted. That is why it is surprising that the Supreme Court so readily caved in allowing abortion on demand. Surprising, that is, until you realize that it was the Supreme Court itself (or at least 7 of the justices) that decided they would pull the “follow the science” card and tyrannically impose their will, condemning 60 million (and counting) children to death.

The Summary of the Argument

Somehow the Justices were able to find a right to privacy implicitly within the Constitution, but no “prenatal protection” of personhood to the fetus. They decided to arbitrarily draw a line between postnatal persons and prenatal. Without first defining personhood, there is no way other than arbitrarily to decide whether the location and level of development of the child has any bearing on their rights. They simply declared that “we need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins” despite the fact that “(If the) suggestion of personhood [of the preborn] is established, the [abortion rights] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment.” It would seem that no decision could be made until that question was answered.

It is instructive then to see how they arrived at such radical skepticism regarding the personhood of the unborn. Justice Blackmum took his readers on a historical review of the examination of personhood through philosophy, theology and empirical science. His analysis goes on for 18 pages but can be summarized (like most of modern philosophy) by examining the parts with Aristotle and St. Thomas. Blackmum began with Aristotle and his theory of delayed hominization. This theory essentially says that the conceptus went through three changes before finally becoming a person with a rational soul around day 40 (or 80 for females). St. Thomas Aquinas picked up on this theory and expounded upon it by saying that the body that was first formed was vegetative in nature and later underwent a substantial change with a new body in which it was animated by an animal soul. Then another substantial change occurred, and the now-human body was infused with an intellectual soul.

Note that both supported the idea that once a human body was present, the rational soul was also present. They simply did not have the embryological knowledge of the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th Centuries which concluded that human life began at conception because a human body was present at Conception. Science discovered three things:

the conceptus is biologically distinct from either parent. Sperm and Egg (2 things) come together and make a single biological entity that is:
a unified self-integrating human organism with its own DNA such that
nothing is added to the organism from the outside such that the only thing necessary for growth and development is the same thing we all need—water, food, oxygen and a healthy interaction with its natural environment

The Science of the Court

The Court was well aware of these “well-known facts of fetal development” but instead chose to treat them as a “theory” of an otherwise open question. The question was still open because of the science of Galen (200 AD) and “new embryological data that purport to indicate that conception is a ‘process’ over time.” In other words, the “substantial problems for the precise definition of when life begins” are based upon the work of a third century biologist and the “science” of 5 law review articles and 2 “scientists” (see footnote 62).

Even the “process” argument is specious. The term is extremely vague and makes it seem like we can never be sure. But in truth when sperm and egg meet, a zygote is formed that is neither sperm nor egg. It is a new thing. Does this happen instantaneously or through some process? Yes to both. The moment of conception is when during the process of the sperm penetrating the egg a new thing is formed. There is most certainly a single instant when this happens (or else it would never actually happen) even if we cannot say precisely when that instant is. Even if you accept that it is a process, then that is not an argument for abortion on demand; only for abortion during the “process”.

As an aside, this would still be wrong as it would constitute a contraceptive act, although the moral gravity would be lessened. The point in mentioning it though is that it is really just a smokescreen for sneaking in abortion on demand. Exceptions only apply to the exceptions and can never be the basis for the rule.

The point is that the Court completely glossed over the established science and instead feigned a skeptical view in order to impose abortion upon America. But there can be no skeptical view—to allow abortion is to take the position that the child is not a person. There can be no neutrality on this question and the fact that they are “following the science” should alert us to the fact that they desire to set up a tyranny in which the unborn are only persons if someone says so.

Truth and Reality

October 6, 2021Creation, Defending the Faith, DevilsLanguage, Lying, planned parenthood, Political Correctness, SCOTUS, Sophistrytwowingstogod@gmail.com

The devil is a one-trick pony. Everything he does to mankind is simply an echo of his original temptation to Eve, “you shall be like God.” Throughout history he has dragged many souls into hell by coming up with creative ways in which he could coax men into usurping the role of God. I say creative not in the sense that the devil can create anything. He can only twist and distort what God creates by breathing lies into creation. Only God truly creates while the devil fabricates, a fact that I want to spend some time focusing on.

God creates by simply speaking something into being. He creates through His Word (c.f. Col 1:16). Reality came into being not through some evolutionary process, but through God’s “let there be…”. Mind you I am not saying that things don’t come into existence naturally, only that the different kinds of things (what we might call the different natures) and reality as a whole were spoken into being during the first six days of Creation. It should not be a surprise that this foundational truth, the same truth we profess in the Creed that “through Him all things were made” is under attack. And because it ultimately has its cause in the diabolical, it is so subtle that we might not even realize what is going on.

Lies and Reality

Human words are meant to describe reality, even if they inevitably short-change it. The words themselves are said to be true only to the extent that the ideas they convey conform to reality. To say “oranges are orange” conveys the truth about the color of oranges, but it does not fully describe what an orange is. On the other hand, to say that “oranges are blue” is a falsehood because it does not describe the reality that is an orange in any intelligible way.

Now, admittedly the orange example isn’t real (as far as I know). But it is illustrative of a larger, one might say, diabolical problem. There are two possibilities at play here. A person may be ignorant of the color of oranges or he may want oranges to be other than they are. The first man is a fool and the second is a liar. The folly of the fool can be remedied with the truth. The liar is another story.

All lies are attempts to use words to change reality simply by declaring it so. It is a poor man’s “let there be…”. I say poor man, but it is really diabolical having its roots Satan who is the “Father of lies”. He is always trying to upend Creation and make it appear to be something that it is not. It is an attempt to “be like God” and make reality whatever you want it to be. It is, to quote the diabolical Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood vs Casey, the freedom “to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” (Planned Parenthood vs Casey, 1991).

The Father of Lies in Our Times

I said at the open that the devil was always seeking to institutionalize his plan and develops unique strategies for particular ages. He has been particularly successful in our age because we have failed to recognize the mechanism by which he is shaping the spirit of the world. For most of us, Political Correctness is a minor annoyance that we do our best to avoid. But for the devil it is the tool by which he blinds men to reality.

Notice how the term itself, Political Correctness, creates the aura of an alternate reality. It creates a realm where words are correct, but not true. It does this by politicizing, that is, making public, that which is personal and private. It is made political because it must have the “power” to make other people conform to the alternate reality.

There are many other examples, but the renaming of “Mother” to “Birthing Person” comes to mind because it is relatively new. We laugh at the absurdity, but we fail to see the danger because we have grown so accustomed to it. It is simply an attempt, albeit by employing the law of gradualism, to divorce motherhood from femininity and femininity from biological sex. It is a (not-so) subtle attempt to overthrow reality by lying. We intuitively grasp this, but instead of fighting back we laugh at the absurdity. It is no longer funny.

Have you ever won an argument with a liar? Of course not. When someone is lying you do not use arguments to refute them. You simply insist on the truth. Yet many of us repeatedly resort to arguments to counter Political Correctness. They are too adept at changing meanings of words to give any room for logic. Can you deny that a mother is a “birthing person”? Instead we must insist on the truth through precision and clarity. Simply refuse to adopt any of the Politically Correct language. We must have the courage not to play the game and simply tell the truth regardless of the consequences. Words not only convey reality, but they form our ideas about it. Only the truth can set us free to roam throughout reality. If we do not stop the abuse of language that abuses reality, then we risk the eternal abuse of many souls. People end up in hell for bad ideas too, especially because it changes what they become through their actions.

Relativism, the Supreme Court and Descartes

January 22, 2020Abortion, Apologetics, Church, Culture, Defending the Faith, Politics, RelativismAquinas, Descartes, Philosophy, Scholasticism, SCOTUStwowingstogod@gmail.com

GK Chesterton once said that America was the only country built upon a creed. He thought the American Founders had united the country around certain self-evident truths. The founding credo has been replaced by a more modern one that is aptly captured by the Supreme Court in their 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood vs Casey. Writing for the majority in defense of abortion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.” Freedom to choose trumps even reality itself, and relativism in all its forms was enshrined as dogma. The only self-evident truth is that there is no objective truth. Such an exaltation of freedom gives society no foundation upon which men and women may be united. All that is left to bind the people is force, either through the coercion of political correctness or “the compulsion of the State”.

Quite obviously it is not enough to merely identify the problem. We must do something about it. But unless we are going to meet force with force, the only way to correct the problem is to correct the bad ideas that caused it. Some errors are like weeds. It is not enough to merely pluck the leaves of consequences, but we must attack the roots of the ideas that caused the consequences. Relativism is the weed that threatens society so that if we are to give society room to flower, then we must tear out its roots.

The Three Words

Three words was all it took to start the avalanche that would overthrow the Christian World Order. Unwilling to face the Scientistic Zeitgeist head on by restating the higher metaphysical truths of reality, Rene Descartes decided to play the skeptic’s game. Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am”, set the tenor for modern thought and paved the way for the coronation of Relativism.

Good intentions never cover for bad ideas, even if those ideas are “clear and distinct”. Descartes sought to defend philosophy against the full frontal attack of empirical science. When you have physics, why do you need metaphysics? But rather than fixing the problem, he created a crisis in knowledge. All this because he rejected Scholastic realism, that is, the epistemological position that all knowledge comes in and through the senses. We come to form ideas based on the perceptions we receive from our encounter with reality. Our ideas are true only insofar as they conform to reality. In short, our ideas are means by which we come to knowledge of the highest and lowest things.

Rather than being measured by reality, Descartes thought man was the measure of reality. Knowledge of reality is an impossibility. Instead we can only have knowledge of our own ideas. And not just any ideas, but only those are clear and distinct, the first of which was that he is thinking. In his own words, “I think therefore I am…In this first knowledge doubtless, there is nothing that gives me assurance of its truth except the clear and distinct perception of what I affirm…and accordingly it seems to me that I may now take as a general rule, that all that is very clearly and distinctly apprehended (conceived) is true” (Descartes,First Meditation).

The Scholastics thought that existence was self-evident and could not be proven. Our senses drew data only from those things that existed. This could not be doubted and this was the starting point for all knowledge. Descartes, rather than starting with the senses, began with the one thing he could not doubt, namely his own thought. And this formed the basis for his discovering the truth; having a clear and distinct idea. But because ideas are subjective, truth is no longer objective. Truth reveals not the outside world, but the state of the mind of the thinker.

Connecting the Dots

It may not yet be clear how Descartes connects to Casey until we trace out the consequences of Descartes’ thoughts. We encounter reality in and through our senses and then form ideas about it. Those ideas are called true which correspond to reality as it really is. Truth, then, is the correspondence of reality and idea. For Descartes and his intellectual progeny (Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Hume and so on), truth consists only in having clear ideas. Rather than measuring ideas against reality, they are measured by the mind itself and judged true if they are “clear and distinct”. True comes to mean “true for me” and “true for you.” All ideas are equally true, so long as they are sincerely held. This leads to a contradiction because if every opinion is equally true, then the following opinion is also equally true, namely that not every opinion is equally true.

We have grown accustomed to the cognitive dissonance and navigate it the best we can. We learn to “tolerate” different opinions about reality. The problem though is that if each of us is living in a world he has constructed on his own, then there is no means by which a society can be formed. There may be small pockets of “like-minded” people but no real unity. The seemingly esoteric philosophical problem becomes the source of a gigantic social problem.

That is why the solution must also be a social one. There must be a reintroduction of Medieval Philosophy. We must go back to just before the train went off the rails and set it back on the tracks. It starts by properly training the young to think clearly about reality as it really is. We cannot, like Descartes, pick up the scraps of truth on the hems of the Zeitgeist and expect to build anything solid. Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have bad consequences. We must go back to St. Thomas and learn from him truly how to think. We must teach our children to go back to St. Thomas. Catholic schools need to be true houses of intellectual formation and not merely alternatives to the public schools. St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.

Two Wings to God

"Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth"Pope St. John Paul II